Roughly 60 community members gathered on the steps of Chapin Hall yesterday at a “Vigil for Palestine” organized by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP).
“This vigil is to commemorate the anniversary, October 8, of Israel invading Gaza and escalating this genocide,” the SJP organizers wrote in a statement to the Record. “On average, more than a hundred Palestinians have been killed every day over this past year. We wanted to provide a space for students to specifically grieve the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian lives destroyed in the past year of genocide.” They cited statistics from a dataset by Tech for Palestine, a coalition of tech innovators “working towards Palestinian freedom,” according to its website, as well as a peer-reviewed journal article in The Lancet.
The Record granted the organizers of the vigil anonymity due to concerns they expressed about their safety.
The vigil commenced with SJP organizers reading the names of the 3,285 people between the ages of 18 to 22 who were killed in Gaza over the past year, also sourced from Tech for Palestine.
Following the event, participants moved to Paresky Center to post the names of those honored during the vigil on the building’s front window. The display states, “These are the names of the known 18-22 year olds martyred in Gaza. 3,285 people murdered by Israel.”
The SJP vigil was the latest organizing effort since the group, which has existed at the College intermittently over the last decade, announced its revival last October. SJP held several protests throughout the fall and spring semesters.
Last May, amid a proliferation of encampments on college campuses around the country, SJP and Jews for Justice (J4J) established an encampment of their own on Sawyer Quad and published demands calling for the College to increase transparency around its investments and divest from weapons manufacturers supplying Israel. The student groups ended their encampment 13 days later when President Maud S. Mandel and leaders of the Board of Trustees agreed to two meetings between student organizers and the board.
At the second of the two meetings, held on Sept. 26, SJP and J4J presented the board with updated requests that revised their calls from divestment from weapons manufacturers supplying Israel to broader environmental, social, governance (ESG) standards, such as divestment from companies that receive 30 percent or more of their revenue from weapons manufacturing and sale.
SJP and J4J hosted a rally outside of Wachenheim during the meeting and emphasized in interviews with the Record that they planned to continue organizing despite the board’s decision not to divest in the spring.
On Monday night, the chaplains’ office hosted another vigil on the steps of Chapin Hall, which marked one year since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel and the ongoing violence in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon.
