This story was originally published in Vol. 34, Issue 7 (April 2024)
Pushback against the lethal war in Palestine has come to WSU Vancouver.
A group of WSU Vancouver students put up a row of 20 signs in support of Palestine on the lawn facing the library on March 25. The display is part of an effort to call for a ceasefire and bring attention to the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza, where Israel sustains its military drive to rout Hamas.
The display also supports a petition circulating at WSU demanding that the university divest any investment holdings from firms in support of the war in Palestine. At educational institutions across the country, clashes of pro-Palestine and pro-Israel views have been volatile, notably so at Columbia and Harvard universities.
According to junior business administration major and Survivors United club President Kiara Reyes Ramirez, who participated, the students made the signs with the support of the Muslim Student Association during their Ramadan celebration.
“We originally prepared this with around 10 to 15 people,” said Reyes Ramirez. “Now we’re around 35. The Muslim Student Association is extremely on board and we’re able to use [their] club funding to have the boards go up. A lot of attendees were there, like students and families were making those signs as well.”
Reyes Ramirez said that many of the students who put up the signs are student employees who do not wish to disclose their names out of fear that their jobs could be at risk. However, Greta Leandre, a senior in human development who works as a clerical assistant in the Alumni Relations Department, feels very strongly about advocacy for Palestine and was not afraid to be identified as part of the group.
“I am of the belief that staying silent, what’s the phrase, like silence is complicity,” said Leandre. “And I hope that anyone that reads [the signs] can feel the students’ feelings through this. We’re frustrated. People are being silenced. There’s extreme injustice that we are viewing and the school is doing nothing about it.”
On two of the 20 signs are QR codes, both leading to a webpage that lists links to information on donations for humanitarian aid, a “Letters for Palestine” event for writing to government officials to call for a permanent ceasefire and the petition for WSU to divest, as well as the “wsuv.students.for.palestine” Instagram page that coordinates these efforts.
“What we’re trying to do is to get students to actually put action into calling and demanding for a permanent ceasefire,” said Reyes Ramirez. “It’s not controversial, it’s not political. These are people’s actual lives that are dying day by day, minute by minute.”
The petition for WSU to divest was made by Connor Luce, a first-year transfer student in mechanical engineering at WSU Pullman, as interim club officer for WSU’s recently-formed Young Democratic Socialists of America chapter. Luce received a list of hedge funds that the WSU Foundation, a 501(c)(3) that manages the university’s endowment, is invested in as of September 30th 2023, from the foundation’s CEO Michael Connell. Luce has since been scanning the holdings of the hedge funds, looking for companies known to do business with Israel or the Israel Defence Forces.
A mutual friend in Pullman connected Luce with Reyes Ramirez, who has since been spreading word at WSU Vancouver about the petition, whose investment claims are yet to be specifically documented.
Sead Sejfovic, a first-year transfer student studying electrical engineering who also participated in putting up the signs, visited the West Bank in 2016 with friends who had family there. His brother has also visited since October.
“I can actually attest to the fact that the Palestinians who live in West Bank and in Gaza, that they are so happy and so proud and so motivated when they see that the people around the world are supporting their cause,” said Sejfovic. “My brother is actually a journalist who was recently in Gaza, post the Oct. 7 attacks. And he said that he spoke to one of the residents in Gaza, and the man broke down into tears when he saw the Palestinian flag projected onto the buildings, in Sarajevo in this case.”
Reception of the signs from students has mostly been positive, but the group has heard little from faculty, according to Sejfovic and Reyes Ramirez.
“I think that the feedback that we got from those [signs] is very positive, much more positive than I was expecting,” said Sejfovic. “You can see a lot of the students coming out of the library and such that they stop and they stare and they contemplate for a second… It’s really unfortunate that we live in this world where people are so worried about their own financial stability.”
“If we do talk about it to faculty, they’re all like, don’t talk to me about this, I didn’t hear anything, I didn’t see anything,” said Ramirez. “You can do whatever you want, just don’t involve my name. So I think they’re also scared of losing their jobs.”
As campus regulations only allow each club to have signs up on campus grounds for a week, the group, alongside the Muslim Students Association, are seeking to rally other clubs on campus to sign on and keep the signs up for multiple weeks.