Into uncharted territory: The Coalition for Palestine and the challenges of a student movement entering its sophomore year
This fall will be a test of endurance for both the pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli sects of the campus community, as a war-weary world trudges into its second year of an escalating conflict.
As the fourth week of fall semester approaches and students have begun to lock in their calendars and schedules over the coming months, an unexpected calm takes hold. Coming from the heels of the most chaotic spring semester in recent history—as the ongoing Israel-Hamas war continues to shake up communities nationwide—many had expected the fall semester to have begun the same way the previous one ended: conflict and pandemonium.
Instead, students were greeted with a normal start to the semester—for the most part.
The most striking event this semester thus far came in the form of a flyering incident during First-Year Orientation on August 26, where a group of pro-Palestinian protestors handed out flyers commenting on the Israeli-Palestine conflict that President Sally Kornbluth derided as antisemitic in a message to the Institute community just days later.
The campus also saw a small street-side protest in front of Lobby 7 that numbered below 100 in attendance, held on September 13, which ultimately did not attract the numbers and anti-administrative energy that some student organizers had expected it to generate.
(The movement’s biggest win so far, they said at last week’s protest, is the cancellation of the MISTI-Israel Lockheed Martin Seed Fund, a fellowship initiative between the Institute and the aerospace company that funds research work abroad for students. MIT spokespeople maintain that the program, which began in 2019, came to its planned stopping point after the end of its cycle of funding.)
The pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli sects of campus continue to assert their right to free expression on campus, although in significantly more muted ways compared to last spring. Both groups were observed rallying new students over Orientation week in outreach-centered events, and an amplified presence of keffiyeh-wearing community members aligned with the Palestinian cause could be seen through that week. They hold speaker series and community gatherings among their communities, though with little disruption.
Part of the dampening in disruptive demonstrations may be due to changing administrative policies that have cracked down on “unregulated” acts of expression. The administration, last month, announced significant revisions to campus free expression policies, as per an August 29 email to the community from Vice Chancellor for Student Life Suzy Nelson, in a move that mirrors—but is still much more lax than—many other universities’ start-of-semester attempts to avoid triggering another months-long campus-wide schism. It seems to have worked, for now.
As of now, no significant, controversy-stirring protest has broken ground on a war-weary Institute tending to its wounds. The Class of 2028 has not yet been party to the discord that headlined the end of last semester, although most sent in their enrollment decisions to the admissions office just days before perhaps one of the most tumultuous weeks in recent Institute history.
Recapping the events of a historic spring
The spring saw the rise and fall of the occupation protests, a new wave of escalated pro-Palestinian action sparked by Columbia University’s so-called Gaza Solidarity Encampment, which was first established on April 17. MIT’s own tent city, the Scientists Against Genocide Encampment (SAGE), was put up on Kresge Oval just four days later on the 21st of that month, alongside a campus-wide walkout reportedly orchestrated in solidarity with the dozens of Columbia protestors who were quickly detained in mass arrests authorized by then-Columbia president Minouche Shafik.
Shafik, who was being investigated by a congressional house committee on charges of allowing antisemitism to suppurate on her campus, stepped down from her post early last month. She joined Harvard University’s Claudine Gay and the University of Pennsylvania’s Liz Magill in stepping down as their respective campuses’ chief executives due to the fallout of the past fall and spring’s protests.
MIT is also being investigated by the committee: Kornbluth first testified before the group—alongside Gay and Magill—in a December 2023 hearing that in the coming months predicated increasingly vocal calls for the presidents’ ousters. Kornbluth has, so far, overcome the calls of her detractors and maintained her hold on the Institute’s administration.
But back in the spring, Kornbluth’s future as MIT’s chief executive was much less certain.
The few weeks that followed SAGE’s creation were frenzied: the fledgling settlement’s presence escalated the pro-Palestinian student movement’s clashes with Institute administrators, city and state (and national) leaders, and their pro-Israeli peers; numerous failed attempts at negotiations between the encampment’s leaders and Kornbluth’s administration that only furthered each side’s conviction of the other’s “bad-faith” intentions; protests and counter-protests that only increased in size, frequency, and intensity; and a swarm of media coverage that put the Institute on national and international spotlight.
Monday, May 6 was the moment that finally erupted the burgeoning tensions: a sudden evacuation order by the administration against the encampment kicked campus into high gear, and hundreds of demonstrators, counter-demonstrators, and spectators swarmed the Student Center plaza that day as immediate retaliations by the encampment group that would later be condemned as “violent” temporarily repelled the Institute from further action.
The uneasy peace was not to last.
On Tuesday, Jewish and Israeli community members went ahead with a celebration on Kresge Oval of Yom Ha'atzmaut, the Israeli Day of Independence, that was originally postponed due to the encampment’s presence. The two sects’ attempts to concurrently co-opt the space for political activity in the past weeks led to clashes that included tense but nonviolent pro-Israeli skirmishes into the encampment, pro-Palestinian demonstrators painting bloody hands on nearby Israeli flags, and unsubstantiated reports of a supposed counter-encampment that ultimately never materialized.
On Wednesday, pro-Palestinian protestors began to receive notices of suspension from the administration. Earlier that day, a group of protestors clashed with MIT Police as the group attempted to blockade the driveway of the Stata Center garage on Vassar Street. They would attempt to do so again the following day.
On Thursday, a second attempt at a blockade of the garage driveway led to eight arrests of MIT students. (Initial reporting described nine arrests, mistakenly including the arrest of a Wellesley student in the tally.)
And on Friday, the inevitable end of the encampment came as a Kornbluth-authorized 4 a.m. police raid swept up the Kresge Oval space and made ten additional arrests.
The tally of arrests by the end of the week was up at 23. (Five students were also arrested in late April during the crackdown on Emerson College’s encampment.)
Though Kornbluth’s administration was fully and unquestioningly supported by the Institute’s governing board, the MIT Corporation, all throughout last year, any and all of her efforts were under relentless public fire on the ground. Protests and strife—between and amongst students, faculty, alumni, and administrators—continued to headline the rest of the month. Two closed-door faculty meetings held in the middle of May mulled over what was to become of the numerous students suspended by Kornbluth’s order.
23 students, undergraduate and graduate, were suspended from MIT—all pro-Palestinian, and all in connection with the May 6 incident. The administration eventually pulled back 21 of the 23 suspensions by the time of commencement. Over the summer, the remaining two suspensions were also lifted. Relevant campus bans for the suspended protestors who were ultimately permitted to graduate last spring continue to be in force; the Graduate Student Union (GSU) has engaged in a months-long back and forth in securing the dismissal of these bans for the handful of current graduate students the action continues to affect (including two chief stewards for the union).
Amidst all of this, the Coalition for Palestine (C4P), the figurehead of the campus protest movement, has only continued to swell in numbers and notoriety.
The Coalition for Palestine
The coalition, which has upheld a strongly anti-Zionist stance since its founding in October of last year—in its inception, thrown together by an emergency meeting between the Coalition Against Apartheid (CAA) and several aligned student organizations in response to the Hamas-led October 7 attacks that gave rise to this newest stage in the long-running conflict between Gaza and Israel—has taken to championing a complete divestment of the Institute from all of its current Israeli ties, both financial and academic.
The group is an alliance of 18 member organizations at the Institute: MIT Alumni for Palestine, Asian American Initiative (AAI), Arab Student Organization (ASO), Black Graduate Student Association (BGSA), Black Students Union (BSU), CAA, The Disability Justice Collective, MIT Divest, MIT DUSP Students for Palestine Liberation, Faculty & Staff For Palestine, Graduates for Palestine (G4P), Globally Indigenous Students For Justice (IS4J), Jews for Collective Liberation (JCL), Muslims for Justice, Palestine@MIT, MIT Taara, Reading for Revolution, and Written Revolution.
(JCL was previously known as the Jews for Ceasefire, but has since rebranded to represent the broader formation of a so-called non-Zionist community of Jews and Israelis at the Institute.)
These coalition-forming groups, a mix of students, affiliated employees, faculty and staff, and alumni, are in various stages of official recognition by the Institute.
Other campus groups and student leaders have also variously come forward in support of the coalition and its mission, although remain organizationally distanced from it.
The campus movement is part of a nationwide student movement entering its second year, and is frequently in collaboration with other area student organizations (such as Harvard’s Palestine Solidarity Committee and Students for Justice in Palestine at Tufts University) and local chapters of larger regional groups (such as the Boston Coalition for Palestine, Party for Socialism & Liberation, BDS Boston, and the Palestinian Youth Movement).
Student support for the Palestinian cause has long been present in campuses but has never seen a level of such widespread zeal, community support, and public scrutiny until this past year. The nationwide student movement has since been compared to movements such as the anti-Vietnam War protests and the anti-South African Apartheid protests. (At MIT, specifically, much comparison has been placed between last spring’s pro-Palestinian encampment and CAA’s so-called “Shantytown” of 1987.)
C4P’s founding principle, the Scientists Against Apartheid pledge, calls on signees to reject working for an identified list of companies and organizations that protestors say have ties with the Israeli occupation of Palestine. (The pledge currently has over a thousand publicly identified signees as per its page on the CAA website, largely undergraduate and graduate students.) The coalition continues to table the pledge’s platform at booths across campus, at times the limited booth allocations fronted by other member organizations.
At times, the lines between coalition members become blurred, as rotating groups act as the faces of assorted protest-aligned actions to cover up substantial involvement in outlawed types of disruptions that the administration may flag — causing public confusion in how the various groups actually work alongside one another.
Over the spring, for example, and especially during the height of administrative scrutiny of the embattled advocacy group, the CAA kept its efforts as off the radar as possible. The group continued to help plan and attend protest actions but relied on the Coalition for Palestine moniker to present various protests as coming from different sects of the movement.
C4P, headed by a new group of committee heads that took up the mantle over the summer, held its first member-wide meeting of this semester on September 9, a step forward in the systematization of a swelling community.
Organizers from the coalition say that the group’s current efforts lie in the cutting of all Institute research funded by and otherwise affiliated with the Israeli Ministry of Defense, and with the removal of Israeli-aligned companies from the Industrial Liaison Program.
A quiet campus within a so-called “summer of rage”
Several organizers from C4P say they have no current plans to return to an encampment-style action in the near future, but declined to elaborate on the specifics of ongoing efforts in pushing their cause.
Still, it is evident that their efforts have become more pronounced and aggressive in promoting a strongly anti-Zionist stance, although continuing to be publicly disengaged from direct warfare with groups such as Israel Alliance and MIT Hillel.
Novel actions well outside the scope of a "traditional" protest or march, in an attempt to draw out more support from undecided or disengaged community members rather than centering efforts on those already committed to their cause, have pressed forward an undercurrent of growing public sympathy.
Over the summer, most of the coalition’s at-home efforts were directed to strategizing and long-term planning, as well as community gatherings and the more civil aspects of their would-be community. The campus was quiet and free from the spectacle that had clutched the spring semester.
The most vocal actions, themselves subdued in comparison to many of the coalition’s other ventures, that took place on campus occurred in mid-July, during a greater city-wide “week of action” headed by BDS Boston.
At MIT, coalition organizers planned a July 15 pop-up at the Stata Center that claimed a portion of the seating areas between Rooms 124 and 144 as the “Sufyan Tayeh Classroom.” (The group previously set up a similar exhibit with the same name and in the same area in mid-May.) The exhibit was meant to push against MIT’s affiliations with Elbit Systems, a defense company, with a second pop-up against Maersk, an affiliated shipping and logistics company, being planned for the following day.
On-campus were not likely to attract much attention at the time, so instead the coalition had set its sights to stronger engagement across greater Boston. Mutual aid campaigns, support for various underserved communities, participation in leftist actions highlighted the efforts of a community that sought to use its resources to assist other groups outside of MIT.
Coalition members participated in other types of protests, both at MIT and beyond, such as the Bangladeshi support protests co-organized by area student cultural groups (including MIT BSA, the Institute’s network for Bangladeshi students). They also travelled out of Boston to support in larger-scale and larger-impact actions, such as the Washington D.C. protests on June 8 and July 24.
The coalition continues to provide support well outside of MIT grounds, even as it restarts its operations on campus. And as the coalition continues its work, so does the administration.
A watchful administration
One such campus event held during orientation week drew the attention of President Sally Kornbluth, whose neutral public tones belied the tenseness of an administration more ready to stamp out kindling flames.
Kornbluth, who is Jewish, has become increasingly vocal regarding her disapproval of the coalition's actions since the end of the fall semester. Her administration's criticisms and responses became less reserved over time — empty threats and warnings eventually snowballed to suspensions and bans and authorized arrests.
Also underscoring a more readied police force, squads of MIT Police officers at times materialize in different parts of campus to events, or sometimes even to just spots of known protestors gathering (regardless of reason); metal fencing and other blockade methods are extensively set up in advance of protest action, and rapid responses of Cambridge Police and state police officers who quickly arrive on-site as needed highlight greater coordination than was seen in the spring.
A watchful and wary administration has had hawk eyes sighted on the coalition and its most vocal members; pro-Palestinian students say they have been at times followed by police officers, dispatched to scenes of what most times appear to be usual student activities. Administrators and MITPD detectives seem to be significantly less discreet about recording and photographing students, particularly during protests, as observed by The Tech in varying circumstances.
Over the summer, the coalition’s Stata Center exhibit on July 15 was flagged by a group of administrators and police officers, who confronted coalition organizers about the roughly two dozen-person group. The administrators made reference to a violation of the postering policy that the event, which was unregistered as the seating area is not a bookable space on its own, had to be taken down. Two weeks later, on July 31, emails popped up in several of the student attendees’ inboxes from the Office of Student Conduct and Community Standards—similar to the letters that many of them had received last spring for protest activity—that they had violated Institute use of facilities and free expression policies.
Reportedly, all of those cases were resolved without issue. And then a month later, another unprompted, this time from the Committee on Discipline, was reportedly circulated through executive committees of many of the Coalition for Palestine’s member organizations: the organizations, for their participation and enabling of protest activity, were under investigation. (As of now, no developments regarding the investigation are known to have occurred.)
The administration has yet to comprehensively respond to the two actions that have taken place this fall.
In the midst of all of this, coalition organizers say they have no active channels of communication with the administration. Major organization-level communications seem to have ceased since the breakdown of encampment-related negotiations last May and also on a more individual level as the various interim suspension cases were sporadically resolved.
Conflicting interpretations of what "free expression" means for an Institute fractured along political lines has long been a source of opposition between the coalition and the administration. It can only be expected to worsen as the campus pro-Palestinian movement continues to struggle against the administration’s tightening fist.