My brother, Mohammed, was killed in an Israeli airstrike
It is time for MIT’s faculty to enter the fight and say no to abetting crimes against humanity and apartheid in the Holy Land
In my two columns for The Tech, I mentioned Mohammed Masbah, my host brother from Gaza. He stayed with my family for several months to get fitted for a prosthetic limb. Israeli snipers shot off his leg as a child during the 2018 Great March of Return protests, and we were happy to get him out of Gaza and give him the chance to walk again. Mohammed was a sweetheart and jokester – he loved his hairspray, photography and riding bikes. We stayed close even after his return to Gaza. Two years ago, he even sent my mom a WhatsApp message: ‘Mama I am getting married. No matter how far I am from you, you will be my second mother.’
On August 17, Mohammed was killed in an Israeli airstrike with his mom, dad, and brother in the place they were sheltering. He is survived by an infant daughter Hala. The air strikes that killed Mohammed and tens of thousands of other Palestinians likely relied on ballistics positioning systems and AI targeting algorithms developed in American academic institutions like MIT. An Israeli weapons company Elbit which supplies the drones that may have killed Mohammed is still a member of MIT’s Industrial Liaison Program, as are Lockheed Martin and Maersk, which make and transport weapons to the apartheid state. Three MIT laboratory groups still take research funding from the Israeli military, which operates torture camps and covers for a 21st century settler colonial project in the Occupied Territories. This occupation also denies millions of Palestinians under its rule habeas corpus rights and the right to vote, worship, move from city to city, and marry other kinds of Palestinians.
It is time for MIT’s faculty to enter the fight and say no to abetting crimes against humanity and apartheid in the Holy Land. These collaborations break MIT’s own ethical funding criteria and health and safety policies. I invite faculty to immediately suspend all collaborations with Elbit, Lockheed Martin, Maersk, and the Israeli military and use all available means to force MIT to sever institutional ties with the state of Israel. In the 1980s, the cumulative campaigns to globally boycott and isolate the South African regime paved the way to democracy and the end to apartheid. A similar campaign is required of us today.
---
Richard Solomon is a PhD student in the MIT Department of Political Science where he studies Middle East politics and the political economy of trade. He is a member of the MIT Coalition for Palestine and the MIT Grads for Palestine. Before MIT, he worked as a consular diplomat with the U.S. Department of State in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The views expressed above are his alone and do not represent the views of the U.S. government or any MIT affiliated organization.