A hunger striker at Brown University visited by a member of the striker support team. Courtesy of Brown University’s Jews for Ceasefire Now

By Camillo Barone February 5, 2024

A group of 19 Brown University students are on a hunger strike to push the university to divest in companies that they say profit from human rights abuses in Gaza.

The group, which calls itself “Hunger Strike for Palestine,” includes Palestinian, Jewish, Black and Native Hawaiian students. They began the strike on Friday, and plan to gather daily in the Providence, Rhode Island, school’s student activities building. They say they will not eat until the Brown University Corporation, which oversees the school, considers a divestment resolution. The board is next scheduled to meet on Feb. 8.

“If I have the physical capability to do this and if I have the mental capability to do this,” Jewish hunger striker Maize Cline told The Brown Daily Herald, the school’s student newspaper, “I have to do this for the people of Palestine and the people of Gaza who are seeing so much violence and destruction every day.”

University responds

University President Christina H. Paxson said on Friday she will not introduce a divestment resolution at the board’s meeting. “The bar for divestment is high,” said Paxson, and those who advocate for it must show how it would alleviate harm.

“It is not appropriate for the University to use its financial assets — which are there to support our entire community — to ‘take a side’ on issues on which thoughtful people vehemently disagree,” she said.

Brown students, like thousands of others on college campuses across the nation, have been protesting Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, which began nearly four months ago and has killed more than 26,000 Palestinians according to the Gaza health ministry. It was prompted by Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, in which militants killed 1,200 and took 240 hostage.

Police arrested 41 Brown students in December during a sit-in for divestment, and 20 members of Jews for Ceasefire Now during a November protest.

In 1986 Brown disenrolled four students who went on a hunger strike to push the university to fully divest from companies doing business with South Africa’s apartheid regime. Those students later reenrolled, the Daily reported.

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