AMHERST — Administrators and trustees at the University of Massachusetts are being called on to boycott and divest from Israel, remove war profiteers from campus and pursue a training in antisemitism grounded in justice and dignity for all people.
“UMass, your hands are red,” shouted about 50 members of the UMass Students for Justice in Palestine, as they marched from the Student Union to the Whitmore Administration Building Tuesday afternoon, where they delivered a series of reparations requests directly to the office of Chancellor Javier Reyes.
The action, in which the mostly masked and keffiyeh-wearing protesters created a disturbance inside the building after chanting while passing several academic buildings, came three days after members of the group joined with more than 150 area residents at the Western Massachusetts People’s Tribunal.
At that tribunal, or symbolic trial, held at the Unitarian Meetinghouse in Amherst though not affiliated with the church, UMass, Hampshire College, Smith College, L3 Harris and the city of Northampton were all found complicit in what participants, acting as the jurors, contend is the genocide of Palestine.
At the close of that nearly three-hour event, in which 11 organizations presented the charges, one of the judges, Palestinian-American author Hannah Moushabeck of Amherst, remarked that the people have spoken.
“These guilty institutions pay lip service to the progressive politics they believe people want to hear while empowering warmongers and profiting from a genocide,” Moushabeck said. “When people say that, ‘oh, Palestine is not a local issue,’ I would beg them to listen to the arguments made today, because I think we heard and proved that it should be a concern of every single one of us.”
None of the five institutions put on “trial” by the group responded to requests for comment on Wednesday.
For UMass, the administration and trustees faced the following four charges: the weaponization of antisemitism against Palestinian students, faculty, staff and community members and their allies; complicity in weaponizing science and supporting the military-industrial complex; complicity in the Israeli genocide in Palestine through its direct and long standing relationship with Raytheon and other war profiteers on campus; and the suppression and criminalization of pro-Palestine organizing on campus.
For Smith, the administration and trustees faced the following three charges: complicity in the act of genocide and ethnic cleansing occurring in Palestine; surveilling and silencing its students for expressing solidarity and allyship with the Palestine liberation movement; and failure to uphold its purported values and mission.
For Hampshire, the administration and trustees faced the following three charges: complicity in the genocide of Palestine through its financial investments; institutional censorship regarding Israel’s genocide against Palestine; and failure to uphold its purported values and mission as an alternative institution of higher-learning, including the failure to abide by its own Ethical and Social Government Policy.
Moushabeck described experiencing anti-Palestinian racism and queer phobia in Amherst and praised the students from UMass and Smith and Hampshire colleges for speaking out.
“Historically, student protesters have never been on the wrong side of history,” she said.
As Tuesday’s protest began outside the Student Union, the participants, all of whom remained anonymous, called out the administration whose “cowardice knows no bounds” and that UMass was founded on land stolen from Indigenous tribes and represents part of the violent settlers who built the United States on blood money and “violence, brutality and hypocrisy.”
In delivering the appeals, the students referenced what had taken place at the tribunal, where George Abraham, a Palestinian-American poet, suggested UMass help create a Five College Refaat Alareer Center for Decolonial Studies and fund programs of solidarity with students, faculty and administrators of universities and libraries in Gaza.
Isabel Espinal, a librarian at UMass who acted as the third judge, advocated for a public apology from UMass for destroying the Gaza Solidarity Encampment in spring 2024 and arresting around 130 participants.
A scholar and co-editor at Latinx Talk, Espinal called the encampment a “pinnacle of protest” that featured wellness, dialogue and even yoga, and that she was heartbroken and others were in grief when it was torn down. Espinal said UMass should “invite students to rebuild the destroyed encampment in a ceremony of apology and reparations” and that all of the named schools should create and fund “programs of solidarity with our colleagues who are students, faculty, and administrators of universities and libraries in Gaza that were completely destroyed.”
Among others bringing the charges at the tribunal were Jewish Voices for Peace and StopL3 Harris. Guest speakers that day included Palestinian-American legal scholar Noura Erakat and Palestinian-American lawyer and activist Huwaida Arraf.