A student walks past a Palestinian flag drawn in chalk on the Cornell University campus, Nov. 5, 2023. Photo: USA TODAY NETWORK via Reuters Connect
Anti-Israel students at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York occupied a campus building and held a “mock trial” in which they convicted school president Martha Pollack of complicity in “apartheid” and “genocide against Palestinian civilians” due to the university’s links to Israeli institutions and companies that do business with the Jewish state.
The Cornell Coalition for Mutual Liberation (CML) occupied an administrative building from Friday until Sunday, by which time the administration had acceded to their call for a meeting with the university’s chief financial officer to discuss their demands, according to the Cornell Daily Sun, a campus newspaper.
Among the demands were adopting a controversial definition of antisemitism with restrictive standards around when anti-Israel speech and activity are antisemitic and divesting from companies linked to and supportive of the Jewish state.
The group promoted their demonstration with a flyer that read, “Martha Pollack on trial for Cornell’s investment in the genocide of Palestinians…We need a crowd!”
During the “trial,” in which speakers said they were “prosecuting” Pollack, CML denounced the university’s collaboration with the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and investments in Tata Motors, Hewlett Packard, and Raytheon, alleging those connections make Cornell complicit in what they falsely described as Israeli “genocide” and “war crimes” against the Palestinians.
“Cornell is complicit in genocide! Martha is complicit in genocide” the students chanted. After “convicting” Pollack, they chanted “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” — a slogan widely interpreted as a call for the destruction of Israel, which is located between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
One speaker told the crowd that all global resistance movements are connected.
“I think the sea is narrow, and I think our blood is near,” the student said. “The waterway that connects Southeast Asia, that connects South Asia, that connects the [Middle East and North Africa] region — that connects us to Europe — are deeply, deeply tied. We are not far from each other.”
Eventually, CML met with Ryan Lombardi, Cornell’s vice president of student campus life, who agreed to contact the school’s chief financial officer Christopher Cowen for a meeting about their demands. However, he was reluctant to agree to their demands about adopting the Jerusalem Declaration of Antisemitism, which has been much less widely accepted by experts, governments, and civic institutions around the world than the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism.
“The institution is not typically in the practice of adopting outside definitions that aren’t ours, and I am trying to stay out of that. But that’s something that would require an additional discussion,” Lombardi was quoted as saying. “I don’t know what the process would look like and I would need a lot of time to think about that and talk with others [in the administration] to see what that might look like.”
By Sunday, after refusing to end their occupation until a date and time for a meeting with Cowen was announced, the students claimed victory. Lombardi confirmed they would have a meeting and that eight members of CML would be allowed to attend it. Cheering the outcome, they chanted “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and “Martha, Martha, you can’t hide, you’re silent on genocide.”
Cornell has made headlines for the community’s response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel. After the atrocities, history professor Russell Rickford called the terror group’s invasion of Israel “exhilarating” and “energizing” at a pro-Palestinian rally. He has since taken a leave of absence for the remainder of the semester. Later, several posts calling for murdering Jews and raping Jewish women emerged on a popular social media forum used by Cornell students.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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