It’s been almost two months since the Liberated Zone and Popular University for Gaza at the University of Washington (UW) dissolved on May 17, but student activists and faculty members are still demanding the university administration divest from Israel.
United Front for Palestinian Liberation (UF), who organized and oversaw the encampment, released a statement on its Instagram account the day of the dissolution, announcing it reached an agreement with the university. But, the group said, demobilizing the encampment wasn’t necessarily a victory, citing that half of the demands hadn’t been met. Real Change reported on the establishment of the encampment on April 29 and interviewed organizers who explained their demands.
Parts of the agreement include a system for divestment requests to be placed, the future establishment of an Advisory Committee on Socially Responsible Investing, transparency around investments, the formation of a faculty committee in fall 2025 that will propose changes to the university’s study abroad program to be more inclusive of Arab students, and the introduction of 20 full-ride scholarships to Gazan students displaced from their homeland.
UW allegiance to Boeing
But now, UF is pressuring UW to financially divest from companies actively contributing to Israel’s ongoing attack on Gaza. The organization is directly calling out the university’s relationship with Boeing, which in 2022 signed a $927 million contract to build and provide refueling tankers to the Israeli military. UW’s long-standing ties to Boeing date to 1917, when the Washington-based company donated a wind tunnel to the school. In 2022, Boeing donated $10 million to build an engineering building on campus. KUOW and The Seattle Times previously reported UW doesn’t plan to cut its connection to Boeing.
Isaac Olson, a UW graduate student and UF member, said the university’s staunch loyalty to Boeing isn’t going to deter the movement from its overall goal of divestment.
“We as students are very aware that this is something that isn’t in line with morals or ethics of ourselves or of what the university’s own ethics should be,” Olson said. “We’re very passionate about ensuring that the way that the military industrial complex and war profiteers can be separated from university ties is addressed. That includes things like building off parts of the relationships that are now being established within the administration through the promise of a task force investigating its military industrial complex ties. It’s also through direct pressure that is going to continue the movement for Palestine, that is not going to let this issue fade away quietly.”
So far those efforts have been focused on UF members showing up and making public comments at the Board of Regents meetings. At the June 13 meeting, Olson and other activists in solidarity with Palestine made public comments urging the university to divest. In the few minutes he had to address the regents, Olson said he wanted each of them to understand divesting from Israel shouldn’t be ignored.
“We can’t allow the kind of divorced nature of the situation in the regents’ mind [where] this is an issue happening halfway across the world,” Olson said. “There is a specific complicity that UW holds in the way it maintains partnerships and potential investments with companies that are helping facilitate genocide and human rights violations. The Board of Regents has a very strong role to play in figuring out how we can make that change because they’re the ones with control of whether the investments that UW holds are actually investigated for their complicity and the corporations that are connected to human rights violations are held accountable.”
UW has previously divested from companies connected to countries that have committed human rights violations. In 1986, a 6-3 vote from the Board of Regents allowed UW to sell investments in companies profiting from apartheid South Africa. The most recent divestment was in 2006, when the Board of Regents banned future university assets from being placed with companies doing business in Sudan, where 400,000 Sudanese people were killed by militia groups funded by the country’s government.
Olson said those past actions by UW supports the coalition’s demand for a full divestment from Israel. He also explained how it took each of those movements years to get the board to finally act, and the same timeline should be afforded to their coalition.
According to Olson, in addition to public comments at Board of Regents meetings, UF is gathering signatures for a petition to have the board recognize the widespread support within UW’s community, including students, alumni and faculty.
Faculty stand in solidarity
On May 31, the Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine (FJP) announced the UW Faculty Senate passed a resolution that ethically divests from weapons and technology companies supporting Israel; the Associated Students of the University of Washington and the Graduate and Professional Student Senate previously passed similar resolutions.
Megan Ybarra, a faculty member who supports UF’s divestment goals and is a part of the FJP, said UW faculty members passing the resolution was another form of contribution to aid the student-led movement.
At the June 13 Board of Regents meeting, Ybarra delivered a public comment about how, through its connections with companies supplying weapons to the Israeli military, UW is linked to the dismantling of the education system in Gaza. In April, the United Nations published a report confirming 80% of schools in Gaza have been destroyed and 5,479 students and 261 teachers were killed as of that time.
The infringement on educational institutions in Gaza is also linked to how UW students are able to learn about Palestine, according to Ybarra.
“I gave a guest lecture in which two of the 24 slides acknowledge the existence of Palestine, and then I underwent this weird off-the-books investigation that I was not notified about for months,” Ybarra said. “I’m personally experiencing this as negatively impacting my academic freedom and ability to teach and research on issues like environmental justice, where I’m thinking deeply with my students about how does property work. How do people understand things like olive and pine trees in Palestine? Then discovering that the word ‘Palestine’ is involved, not only will the university not protect me from threats but they will also investigate me into what I believe again to be a violation of the faculty code.”
Ybarra said undergoing this intensive investigation by the university made her realize UW is not a place where students and teachers can engage in understanding what’s happening in Gaza and occupied Palestine.
While faculty members like Ybarra are taking a strong stance, not all support the students’ goal of achieving Palestinian liberation. On May 15, UW President Ana Mari Cauce released a statement claiming the Liberated Zone had signage and used chants with antisemitic language. In response, on May 31, Students United For Palestinian Equality and Return (SUPER UW) posted on its Instagram account screenshots of an email exchange between Cauce and organizers, where the president had provided images of those signs.
However, through a reverse-Google image search, the organizers found the images were from events in California and Florida that had no association with SUPER UW.
Another screenshot showed Cauce’s email response to UF, where she stated her relief in knowing the UW Liberated Zone wasn’t creating such messages, adding she’d be interested in meeting with the organizers to learn more about how they were able to fact-check the images. According to Olson, organizers have yet to receive an apology for that accusation, and Cauce has yet to retract her claim.
Ybarra said there’s a double standard within the situation that needs to be addressed.
“I am being held to a completely different standard than the president of my university is,” Ybarra said. “I teach in research based on facts, and when I share and ask questions with my students, I do it with evidence and information. I don’t present false information, and yet, I underwent a multi-week investigation, which the administration has not apologized [for] or acknowledged. If I were to have done anything like what President Cauce did, I believe that I could very likely have been terminated.”
Ybarra added she was disappointed in Cauce not demonstrating any kind of respect toward students who were a part of the coalition despite the exchange being documented and shared with the public.
FJP released its own statement denouncing Cauce’s claims and further emphasized the need to divest from weapon manufacturing companies like Boeing. Olson stressed that UF isn’t antisemitic but is anti-Zionist and anti-colonial. He also said the administration doesn’t respect UF’s demands to divest or address the human rights violation in Gaza the same way the university was focused in finding evidence of antisemitic language being used in the encampment.
“It’s indicative of the amount of struggle that we’re going to have to put into the movement to overcome the administrative barriers and even its own internal biases,” Olson said. “We can overcome it if we stay true to our principles and continue holding strong in our campaign and in our movement.”
UF plans to address the Board of Regents on July 10 and present a proposal for the establishment of an Advisory Committee on Socially Responsible Investing.
Marian Mohamed is the associate editor of Real Change. She oversees our weekly features. Contact her at [email protected].
Read more of the July 10–16, 2024 issue.