Tag: Yalies4Palestine

Peace Activists Attend Yale Commencement 2025

by Susan Klein and Henry Lowendorf, New Haven peace activists

On Monday, May 19, Yale University’s commencement procession filled several blocks of Elm Street with over 4000 graduates in caps and gowns, while their happy families and friends in colorful spring attire lined the sidewalks. Led by a marching band and black-gowned dignitaries of the Yale administration and Yale Corporation, students from each of Yale’s colleges streamed from Cross Campus on High Street to the upper Green on College Street before entering Old Campus through Phelps Gate for the commencement ceremony.

Everyone had to pass half-dozen keffiyah-clad community activists from the Greater New Haven Peace Council, Veterans for Peace, and Jewish Voice for Peace, along with one Yale student, standing at the intersection of College and Elm.

We held posters reading “Celebrate Yale Grads with Moral Clarity to Demand Ceasefire and Divestment,” “Yale Divest from War” with QR codes linking to the Hunger Strikers, and “I Stand Against Genocide.” The response was overwhelmingly positive, many of the students also wearing keffiyehs, with resounding cheers, call and response chants and thumbs up from both graduates and families.

On the previous day, five seniors chosen by their fellow students on the Class Day Committee had highlighted campus free speech and activism, according to this article in the Yale Daily News: https://tinyurl.com/2drctn84.

After the undergraduates had passed, we moved up Elm Street to greet the postgraduate degree recipients from the Yale School of the Environment, many wearing keffiyehs and whimsically decorated caps as they entered Old Campus through Battell Chapel. Their response was equally enthusiastic.

Some of us had stood at commencement in 2024, just after university police violently dismantled Yalies4Palestine’s encampments. This year’s graduates may have been even more responsive to us, after Yale’s continued repression of pro-Palestine student activism and of caving to the Trump regime’s suppression of free speech and academic freedom. The repression led to a group of pro-Palestine Yale students entering a hunger strike on May 10. The QR code links to their demands on Instagram.

The Palestinian Exception to Free Speech

by Noor Kareem and Craig Birkhead-Morton, Yale Daily News
Feb. 7, 2023

Although Yale claims to be a bastion of free speech that provides a forum for addressing all political and cultural issues, the one exception to this is the issue of Palestinian liberation.

The discourse around Palestine at Yale is surrounded by fear and restraint. Discussion is often prefaced with the familiar acknowledgment of how complicated the topic is, immediately obscuring the power relations between a Western-backed occupying power and a population subjected to life under occupation…

Many incorrectly frame Zionism — the political project seeking to establish Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people — as synonymous with Jewish identity. This conflation of the Jewish people with the Zionist state makes any criticism of the occupation immediately deemed “antisemitic.”

In reality, Zionism is an ideology and a political movement that, in the words of its founders, necessitates the erasure of Palestinians and the violent seizure of their land in the pursuit of creating a modern nation-state.

If we have learned one thing from the last couple of years, it is that silence kills. The lack of discussion on the systemic nature of Israeli war crimes has given total impunity to a state that murders civilians, massacres refugees and bombs a city already under siege. Since the assassination of American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh by Israeli forces in May 2022, the Biden administration has failed to hold Israel accountable. The number of murders is showing no signs of slowing down so far, as 2022 was the deadliest year for Palestinians since the Second Palestinian Intifada. And as of Feb. 6, 2023, 36 Palestinians have already been killed…

In December 2022, Yalies4Palestine launched the first-ever BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) campaign at Yale. Prior to this, Yale was the only university in the Ivy League not involved in the BDS movement, largely due to this campus’s pro-Zionist climate. This is despite public institutional condemnations of human rights violations in Iran and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. We must overcome this culture of hypocrisy and call on Yale to take a stand against the Israeli occupation… As students at one of the most elite academic institutions in the world, we have an obligation to illuminate truth and honor light over darkness. Join us in fulfilling this obligation by signing and sharing our petition demanding that Yale cancel its contract with G4S — a security company involved in some of the world’s worst human rights abuses, including those in Israel — and by taking the initiative to learn more about the BDS movement.

[Article can be read in its entirety at yaledailynews.com/blog/2023/02/06/kareem-birckhead-morton-the-palestinian-exception-to-free-speech. To find out more about the BDS Committee for Yalies4Palestine, email noor.kareem@yale.edu or craig.birckhead-morton@yale.edu]