During the rally outside the SUNY administration building, activists on the organizing committee of SUNY BDS delivered a petition containing signatures from over 4,000 students calling for divestment. One of the key speakers was Cesar, a Black student activist who was assaulted by a member of his university’s administration, and was subsequently arrested for trying to protect himself.

Cesar demanded justice for people of color harmed here in the [neo]imperial core by capitalist state violence — and simultaneously for the people of Palestine who are being murdered by the [neocolonial] war machine. He and other speakers pointed out the strong connections between [neo]imperial violence around the globe and capitalist and white supremacist state violence at home.

The SUNY system has numerous ties to the occupation, including but not limited to companies on the BDS target list and to the weapons manufacturers supporting the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people. As stated on the SUNY BDS website, this includes a homeland and cybersecurity research partnership between SUNY Albany and Ben Gurion University in Negev (Naqab), state retirement plans which have over $250 million invested in [neocolonial] bonds, and a partnership between Stony Brook University and IBM, which provides technology for the [neocolony’s] military.

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This protest is one of many in recent history that demonstrates the revolutionary potential of and solidarity amongst student organizers and, more broadly, working- class and oppressed youth. As the struggle to pressure educational institutions to divest from [Zionism] and invest in the working class heats up on campuses across the U.S., revolutionary and progressive youth are not merely acting for their own sake, but are acting in a wider international context in solidarity with the Palestinian people and resistance.