A group of Princeton faculty members joined with hunger striking students for a 24-hour fast to demand that the university stop economic ties with Israel.
One associate professor said “the students have simply done what they were told to do.”
“Our students are putting their bodies on the line to try to affect change, and teaching them how to affect change is what we do as educators,” another professor in the English department said.
“They are eating nothing and drinking water very sparingly,” a professor said of the hunger strike that has been going on since May 3.
“This hunger strike is part of their life as students,” he said, “and so we support them.”
“The reason that I’m here today is because our students are doing what they were told to do, which is to exercise the democratic right to protest nonviolently and to take up civil disobedience. They have exhausted all the available and procedural channels of communication in the face of extreme injustice and oppression. They are not, or rather it is not lost on them that what they are seeing in Palestine is apartheid and occupation. It is a violation of international law and human rights,” one associate professor from the history department said.
“In recognition of that the students have simply done what they were told to do. And instead they have been met with canards. They have been met with mischaracterizations and they have been met with gaslighting,” she continued.