Students at the Johns Hopkins University launched a protest encampment Monday afternoon to pressure the university to divest from Israel.
“We stand in solidarity with students across the country who face escalating police violence and administrative repression for their peaceful protest of the war crimes committed daily by [Israel]. None of us are free until Palestine is free,” the Hopkins Justice Collective, a group of students and university affiliates, said in a news release.
The students are demanding Hopkins divest its endowment from companies that support Israel, including Elbit, Blackrock, Northrop Grumman, Palantir, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, and Google, as well as reveal all financial ties to Israel, lobbying efforts to increase militarized spending, and a “detailed accounting of the use of weapons and military technology developed at Hopkins for the international slaughter and surveillance of human being.”
The students are also demanding the university disband a cooperative degree program with Tel Aviv University, stop accepting United States Department of Defense funding to develop weapons through its applied physics lab and publicly acknowledge “the current genocide and ongoing occupation of Palestine since 1948.”
The release cites a 1980s protest and nine-day sit in that led to divestment from apartheid South Africa and past trustee votes to divest from tobacco companies and coal producers as examples of student activism on campus.
The protest arrives in Baltimore following a nationwide movement of student demonstrations following Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7 that killed roughly 1,200 people and Israel’s subsequent retaliation on Gaza that killed more than 34,000 people, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health. Around 1,000 people have been arrested at similar protests since New York police arrested over 100 demonstrators at Columbia University on April 18, according to the Associated Press.
At the University of Texas-Austin, officers made 34 arrests last week while police in riot gear cleared an encampment at Boston’s Northeastern University on Saturday and arrested around 100 people.
