Brown hunger strikers say they will not stop advocating for divestment
PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WLNE) — The Brown students who held a hunger strike for divestment from Israel said they will not stop advocating.
The Brown students protesting for divestment from Israel ended their hunger strike Friday.
A spokesperson for the university said that faculty heard students had ended their protest earlier in the day.
The group striking consisted of Palestinian students, Jewish students, as well as students from several allied student groups.
In a statement released by the Brown Divest Coalition, the striking students said that after the Brown Corporation meetings on Feb. 8 and Feb. 9 ended without meeting the strike’s demands, the students ended the strike due to the current demands being “obsolete.”
“The end of the strike does not mean the end of the fight for the strikers or the community that has coalesced around them,” the statement read. “As a Palestinian student ending his eight-day hunger strike said: ‘I know that we will keep pushing, keep pressuring this immoral institution until Brown divests, and until Palestine, and the rest of the oppressed world, is free.'”
Brown’s president released the following statement after the end of the protest:
We learned Friday evening that the student activists announced the end of their protest advocating for a Corporation vote this week on divestment. Throughout the protest, the students’ health and well-being was our primary focus, as well as ensuring they understand the mechanisms available to all members of the Brown community to request that the University consider divesting its endowment from the assets of specific companies. We also made clear that the bar for divestment is very high — the University consistently rejects calls to use the endowment as a tool for political advocacy on contested issues.Members of the Brown Corporation during meetings this week acknowledged the activism on campus by students advocating for divestment, including the group of students engaged in the days-long protest that ended Friday evening. The Corporation members discussed education efforts to ensure the community is aware of the long-established mechanisms to formally request that the University consider divestment proposals. No new proposals for divestment had gone through this process for consideration at the February meetings. Students were advocating for a 2020 proposal that I previously found did not meet the requirements for consideration to bring to the Corporation.
The Divest Coalition said that it had released a “critical edition” of the 2020 report which can be read here.
