Oh no: One striker is suffering from ‘aching joints, muscle cramps, lightheadedness’
Like their peers at Yale, students at various California universities have been on hunger strikes for as long as a week and a half to protest the alleged “starvation” of Gazans by Israel.
The Guardian reports the participating students are enrolled at San Jose State, Sacramento State, San Francisco State and CSU Long Beach.
Students and faculty from Stanford joined in on May 12, according to The Stanford Daily.
Similar to last year, the strikers’ demands include divestment from Israel, “severance of study abroad programs with Israeli universities,” and adoption of SFSU’s Human Rights IPS Screening.
The hunger strikes “draw inspiration” from the coordinated fasts of Palestinian political prisoners, the 1981 H-Block strike in Northern Ireland and other hunger strikes throughout history,” according to a Stanford SJP social media post.
San Francisco State student activist Max Flynt (pictured) said Israel’s blockade of aid to Gaza was “a decisive factor” in starting the hunger strike.
Flynt noted, however, that since “many forms” of protesting Israel have become “effectively illegal” in the U.S., he and his fellow SFSU hunger strikers go home at night.
MORE: Yale students go on pro-Hamas hunger strike; administrators refuse meeting
Flynt said President Trump is “scared” of pro-Hamas college students after seeing what they did last year at various campuses.
Sacramento State professor Jaime Jackson, who “explore[s] the dynamics of violent and nonviolent resistance movements,” agreed, saying it was a “really big thing” that Israel has been “blocking of humanitarian aid.”
Cal State Long Beach hunger striker Marcus Bode, who said he is suffering “aching joints, muscle cramps and lightheadedness” from not eating, claimed tuition and fee increases aren’t “being reinvested into our campus and into our student body.” Instead, they “fund war and genocide.”
Stanford hunger striker Arwa Faruk said “My body will be a site of protest, because of the conditions that have been imposed on my brothers and sisters that necessitate that we do something.”
Activist author Hilton Obenzinger, a 1997 PhD graduate of Stanford, attended the opening of that university’s strike (not as a participant) and “drew a parallel” between Nazi Germany’s Holocaust and the “modern Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
“The students today who are taking a stand to hunger strike are going to be remembered as people who stood up and spoke out and did the right thing in the face of genocide,” Obenzinger, whose parents died in Holocaust, told the crowd.
Stanford professor David Palumbo-Liu also spoke to those assembled, saying “When all other means fail… you put your bodies on the line.” Palumbo-Liu, also not a participant in the strike, is a member of the Stanford Faculty & Staff for Justice in Palestine and co-founder of the Campus Antifascist Network.
MORE: Princeton anti-Israel hunger strikers: University ‘forced’ us to do this
IMAGE CAPTION & CREDIT: A fed-up gent rolls his eyes; leungchopan/Shutterstock.com. INTERIOR IMAGE: BreakThrough News/YouTube
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