Israel-Palestine war: Hunter College alum threaten to withhold donations unless school divests from Israel
More than 250 alumni of Hunter College have threatened to hold back financial contributions to the school unless it divests from companies with ties to Israel and expresses more support for Palestinians.
The letter marks a unique reversal in the battle that has emerged on campuses between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel groups.
At Ivy League Universities, many big-pocketed donors have threatened to withhold funds to their alma maters, over what they say are the universities’ bias against Israeli and Jewish students.
The Hunter College alumni, however, called on the school to “divest” from what they labelled “Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid”.
They have demanded that the public university with around 25,000 students “endorse the Palestinian-led call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel”, according to the letter.
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The BDS movement is a Palestinian-led nonviolent initiative that seeks to challenge Israel's occupation and abuses of Palestinian human rights through economic, cultural and academic boycotts similar to the successful boycott campaigns of apartheid South Africa.
The authors said Hunter had displayed a “lack of empathy and concern regarding the ongoing genocide in Gaza” and accused it of taking a “one-sided stand” on the conflict.
They added that the school was taking “inadequate security measures” for Palestinian, Muslim, Arab, and Pro-Palestinian students while cracking down on expressions of support for Palestine on the grounds it was “supporting terrorism”.
One of the alumni’s main complaints was Hunter College's hiring of an adjunct faculty professor who produced a Hamas parody video that they say belittled and mocked Palestinians.
The authors called for an investigation into how Tamy Ben-Tor was hired, and new practices to “ensure that our faculty are more representative of the demographic diversity of the student body and respectful of diverse political perspectives”.
“We call on Hunter president Ann Kirschner to condemn the actions of Ben-Tor and to acknowledge that Israel has massacred many thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, including children,” the authors added.
The letter turns the debate between universities and donors over the Israel-Palestine war on its head.
Powerful alumni from elite schools like Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania have called on their schools to take a more pro-Israel position amid the fighting in Gaza.
The presidents of Harvard and MIT both had to resign after they evaded answering a US lawmaker’s question at a Congressional hearing, whether calls by students for the death of Jews would violate their schools’ code of conduct.
But pro-Palestinian students have told Middle East Eye that universities are clamping down on their free speech.
MEE reported how a Palestinian-American student at Harvard University was hounded and intimidated by the wife of a school professor and former aide to Barack Obama just days before she was caught on camera harassing another student for wearing a Palestinian scarf known as the kefiyyeh.
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