Palestine Exception at U-M

Kathleen Brown

Open letter to demand that MI Attorney General Nessel drop criminal charges against the U-M Encampment 11. TAHRIR Coalition

THE CAMPUS-BASED INTIFADA that swept college campuses during the winter and spring 2024 was an overwhelming show of solidarity with Palestine.

Demanding that universities sever economic and material connections with Israel’s genocide and apartheid in Palestine, students and workers marched, sat-in, “died-in,” disrupted military and weapons manufacturer recruitment fairs, protested graduation ceremonies, occupied buildings, and even went on strike in the case of UAW Local 4811 in California.

The intifada’s intensity and momentum temporarily knocked college administrators and powerful donors off-balance, and administrators struggled to respond to wave after wave of protest culminating in Gaza Solidarity Encampments last spring.

But if administrators were initially unprepared for the level of protest provoked by people’s anguish watching a genocide unfold on their phones, administrators spent the summer regaining their footing and rewriting their counter-insurgency playbook.

Showing that the “Palestine Exception” to be the rule at the University of Michigan, the Democratic-majority Board of Regents have taken aim at pro-Palestinian students, workers, and community members, marshalling the university’s vast resources to take down the pro-divestment movement.

The movement, spearheaded by the TAHRIR Coalition, has demanded that the Board of Regents divest its $20 billion endowment from companies involved in Israel’s subjugation of Palestinians, and called for greater financial transparency and campus democracy.

Intentionally obscured by venture capital and hedge fund middlemen and shielded by a 2004 law that denies public access to the endowment, researchers do not have a full picture of exactly how much of the university’s endowment profits from genocide-implicated corporations. Yet initial research indicates that the University is invested in venture capital firms like Advent International, a16z, 8VC, Lightspeed Venture, Accel, Eclipse, Francisco Partners, and more.

These venture capital firms in turn invest in weapon manufacturers and surveillance technology like Cobham Ultra (supplier to the UK military), Anduril (producer of drones, AI facial recognition, sentry towers), and Edgybees (AI-informed aerial/satellite photography), and much, much more.

While the University of Michigan Board of Regents has historically voted to divest its endowment from apartheid South Africa, tobacco, fossil fuels and Russia, they have insisted that they will never divest from Israel. Instead, they have engaged in an intense campaign of criminalization, spending over $4.15 million since May to go after protestors.

Firing and Blacklisting

The Regent’s current counter-insurgency repertoire has included deploying police to violently beat and arrest protestors, levying criminal charges against activists, firing and blacklisting undergraduate student workers, contracting external consultants to pursue student code violations, suspending student groups, expanding on-campus surveillance in the form of private security and thousands of surveillance cameras, and bulldozing any shred of shared governance with faculty.

They have even refused discussing the defunding of the University’s vaunted liberal showpiece, the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programming, because of its association with pro-Palestine sentiment.

The level of repression caused the Council of American Islamic Relations (CAIR) to characterize the University of Michigan “an institution of particular concern,” while on November 8, 2024, the U-M Faculty Senate members voted for the first time ever to censure the Board of Regents for pushing through policy changes without faculty input and for violently repressing activism on campus.

The Board of Regents have made their disdain for the campus community very clear: Regents have ignored numerous student and faculty votes for divestment from weapons manufacturers and have actively smeared, punished, and criminalized those who continue to press for divestment.

Democratic Regent Mark Bernstein called the former Central Student Government, President Alifa Chowdhury and Vice President Eli Atkinson, elected on a pro-divestment platform, “no better than the antisemitic mob running around campus” at the June 2024 Board of Regents meeting.

Democratic Regent Jordan Acker claimed the movement was “foreign funded” and compared protestors to “klansmen,” while Republican Regent Sarah Hubbard gloated that the University police had “taken back” the center of campus from pro-Palestine students and community members after the Regents directed university police last May to violently raid the vibrant activist-run encampment.

The Regents’ “pro-terror” and “criminal” framing of community activism, as well as their tired allegations of antisemitism, is an attempt to deflect attention away from demands from divestment. Yet it also sets a dangerous precedent of a liberal-led witch hunt against the left on the cusp of a second Trump administration.

The Board’s hatred of Palestine and the movement for Palestinian freedom even led the Regents to recruit Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat, to pursue charges against 11 encampment activists.

Seven of these are felony-level charges related to the police’s brutal clearing of the encampment, which sent four people to the hospital. Nessel’s decision to charge activists overrides the authority of local prosecutor Eli Savit and is designed to specifically target and punish pro-Palestine protestors, essentially weaponizing the criminal justice system against the left, which Trump and Republicans will most certainly expand upon in the new year.

These charges represent an acute betrayal of Nessel’s political base, which included labor unions, civil rights organizations, LGBT groups (Nessel herself is gay), and even the
Arab American News in Dearborn, Michigan, all of whom carried her to re-election in 2022. Nessel’s commitment to protecting Zionism smashed that coalition to pieces.

While Nessel’s prosecution unfolds in the court system, University police have found a more effective tactic to keep activists off campus by issuing trespassing bans.

To date, University police have unilaterally banned over 60 individuals from parts or all of campus. Trespassing bans essentially “warn” an individual that they are barred from campus and if they return, they will be arrested by police.

The bans do not require any proof of having committed a crime, and that lack of due process has given police unlimited ability to bar students, graduate workers and community members from accessing a public campus. Stickering on campus? You’ll receive a ban. Using a megaphone? Arrest and ban. Holding a “sign on a stick”? Ban. Protesting an event? Ban. This has resulted in students being barred from attending classes or even their own graduation.

Weaponized Discipline

Simultaneously, University administrators have weaponized internal student disciplinary processes via the Office of Student Conflict Resolution (OSCR) and Student Organization Advancement and Recognition (SOAR).

In an unprecedented move, the University hired external consultants Omar Torres from Grand River Solutions and Stephanie Jackson from InCompliance, contracting both companies for a total of $1.5 million.

Both Torres and Jackson were recruited to act as “complainants” in student disciplinary hearings, even though neither were on campus nor even employed by the University when the alleged infractions occurred. This is a wild perversion of the student conflict resolution process, which normally seeks to resolve harm through restorative justice.

Indeed, the Board of Regents even changed the rules of the Student Statement of Rights and Responsibilities to make it harder for students to appeal disciplinary outcomes, positioning Vice President of Student Life Martino Harmon (salary $397,000) as the ultimate arbiter. In short, the Board of Regents have removed any semblance of due process.

Nor are the assaults on civil liberties limited to pro-Palestine groups on campus. At a recent rally decrying job cuts in Graduate Student Instructor positions within the University’s College of Literature, Sciences, and the Arts, University police forced members of the Graduate Employees Organization, AFT Local 3550, at risk of arrest and campus bans, to drop their picket signs and megaphones.

In addition to the spectacular shows of repression in police violence and public denunciations is the more mundane repression experienced by workers who show any connection or solidarity to Palestine.

Graduate workers have been threatened with discipline for having a pro-Palestine email signature; Residential Advisors have been reprimanded for displaying Palestinian flags in their dorm rooms; police have harassed faculty and staff for sitting with chairs and tables on the Diag over the summer without a permit, and undergraduate workers have been fired and blacklisted for participating in protest.

This level of repression points to the importance of labor organizing to resist and reverse these quotidian battles over freedom of expression and academic freedom. In this way, fighting for Palestine has enlarged the struggle for freedom on campus and heightened the contradiction between authoritarian administrators and workers, leading to cross-union collaboration against repression.

Frequent police attacks have forced activists to take up more creative forms of protest: students organized silent “study-ins” at the library where protestors tape signs condemning genocide on the back of their laptops; workers have organized lunch hour “Work-Ins” for employees to gather to show opposition to repression.

At a recent walkout in November, protestors stayed on the public streets of Ann Arbor so that University police would not arrest them; activists have held events off-campus to evade University surveillance, which now includes private University-contracted surveillance personnel, a sort of modern-day Pinkerton (AmeriShield Protection Group, $851,000), thousands of new surveillance cameras, and police-controlled drones.

And while the Regents’ offensive continues, so does the movement for Palestinian liberation, propelled onward by the horror of genocide and a commitment to the people of Palestine, their right to resist subjugation and the right to return to their homeland.

University administrators may try to smash the movement using millions of dollars at their disposal, but no threat of punishment will ever make people unsee the horrors of genocide.

The Regents represent a minority on campus, evident by their deep unpopularity and inability to step foot on campus without protest. After the ICC’s arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant and the first-ever vote in the U.S. Senate on halting arms sales to Israel, there are cracks forming in the United States’ support for Israel.

At the base of the foundation, chipping away, are the campus movements for divestment; they are nuclei of democratic, people’s movements contesting power at every turn.

January-February 2025, ATC 234