Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine formed at Detroit’s Wayne State University
On June 4, hundreds of students, faculty, alumni and community members rallied on the campus of Wayne State University located in the Midtown District of Detroit.
The purpose of the gathering was to send a clear message to the recently appointed President Kimberly Andrews Espy who ordered a Palestine solidarity encampment raided and destroyed by campus police on May 30.
Metropolitan Detroit embodies the largest population of people of Arab and Middle Eastern descent in the United States. Consequently, many people within this community have direct familial and linguistic ties to the people most impacted by the settler-colonial regime occupying Palestine.
WSU’s chapter of the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) has taken a leadership role at the higher educational institution by demanding the full disclosure and divestment of all financial and other ties between the University and the State of Israel. The movement for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) has spread rapidly across hundreds of colleges and universities in the U.S.
This movement in solidarity with the Palestinian people has been met with repression resulting in the arrest of over 3,000 people. In Detroit at WSU on May 30, 12 people were arrested when the police stormed the encampment at 6:00am.
If the University administration believed that they had finished off the Palestine solidarity movement on campus, they were grossly mistaken. Later that same day on May 30, a press conference was held where the president of the faculty union spoke in support of the right of the students to protest.
Later that evening a tribunal was held near Eastern Market where testimony from the students involved in the BDS movement from the University of Michigan and Wayne State University exposed the links these institutions have with the genocide taking place in Gaza. At WSU, the Palestine solidarity encampment was labelled “Popular University for Gaza.” It was also designated as a “liberated zone.” (more...)
Free Palestine! Hands Off Our Students!
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