BUZZ
Judges had included a poet and a ‘scholar of equity in libraries’
At the end of October, roughly 60 University of Massachusetts students and staff showed up to “present” so-called “verdicts” to university administrators “guilty” of contributing to the oppression of the Palestinians.
According to the Daily Collegian, while the “biggest targets” of the Western Massachusetts People’s Tribunal three days prior were the weapons-manufacturing defense technology companies RTX (formerly known as Raytheon) and L3Harris, far-left UMass community members accused UMass administrators of “complacency in [Palestinian] genocide.”
According to its website, the tribunal’s goal is the “permanent end of the genocide Israel is committing against Palestinians” with a “preliminary” goal of divestment via universities and local governments.
A total of 11 groups were involved with the tribunal including Jewish Voice for Peace, The Radical STEM Bloc, and the UMass Coalition for Palestine.
The tribunal’s judges included Amherst College “Writer-in-Residence” George Abraham (pictured), author of the forthcoming poem collection “When the Arab Apocalypse Comes to America,” Hannah Moushabeck, author of the picture book “Homeland: My Father Dreams of Palestine,” and “Latinx Talk” Editor Isabel Espinal, a “scholar of equity in libraries” and UMass’s academic engagement librarian for Afro American Studies, Latin American, Caribbean & Latinx Studies [and] Gender, Sexuality Studies.
UMass Coalition for Palestine Representative Eric Strong spoke out against the school’s reaction to a May 2024 anti-Israel protest, claiming he and fellow activists were “punched, kicked, knelt on, choked, slammed to the ground and beaten with batons” by police officers.
History professor Kevin Young, who studies “social movements, labor, political economy, and imperialism in Latin America and the United States” according to his faculty page, chided the university for its “institutional neutrality” and statements about why it won’t divest from Israel.
A member of the UMass Amherst Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine, Young said the university’s logic mean “divesting from genocide is a political action, [but] investing in genocide is neutral and non-political.”
On October 28, the activists joined at the UMass Student Union and then marched — “wearing keffiyehs and masks to conceal their identities” — to the Whitmore Administration Building to formally “present” the guilty verdicts.
The verdicts against university administrators included “weaponization of antisemitism against Palestinian students, faculty, staff and community members and their allies,” “complicity in weaponizing science and supporting the military-industrial complex,” and “suppression and criminalization of pro-Palestine organizing on campus.”
As “reparations” for the “crimes,” the tribunal wants
- antisemitism training using the “Curriculum on Antisemitism from a Framework of Collective Liberation”
- the “removal of war profiteers from campus”
- a “boycott of the Israeli and U.S. war machine”
- funding of “programs of solidarity” with universities and libraries in Gaza, and the creation of a Center for Decolonial Studies
- a public denunciation of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism
- a public apology to pro-Palestine organizers and activists
According to the student paper’s report, Executive Director for Environmental Health & Safety and Emergency Management Jeff Hescock and Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs and Campus Life Shelly Perdomo-Ahmed accepted the “verdicts” and reparations demands on behalf of Chancellor Javier Reyes.
The activists left soon after.
