MIT students renew calls for divestment from Israel amid Gaza massacre
The pro-Palestine activists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have once again called for an end to the Israeli massacre of Palestinians in Gaza forcing the university to end cooperation with US weapons manufacturer, Lockheed Martin.
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The activists announced the triumph on Saturday, putting it down to the demonstrations that they have been holding against the cooperation since October 7, when the Israeli regime began a genocidal war on the Gaza Strip with enormous political and military support on the part of the United States.
“As of today, and due to pressure from students and scientists at MIT, the university has discontinued the Lockheed Martin Seed Fund and does not plan to renew it,” they said.
Explaining the reason for their sustained pressure that led to the fund’s closure, the activists mentioned that the company, which is one of the world’s largest weapon makers, had sold several billion dollars of weapons to the “apartheid” regime and “profited from the genocidal war on Gaza.”
As a case in point, they cited its having supplied the regime with Hellfire precision missiles, warplanes, and heavy artillery.
The regime has used the weapons towards “destroying the Palestinian society in Gaza over the past year: Its schools, hospitals, universities, holy sites, and vital infrastructure – directly killing tens of thousands of Palestinians and expelling millions in the process,” the campaigners noted.
Lockheed Martin has also enabled, what they denounced as, the “far-right, fanatical” regime of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to run “torture camps” for Palestinians at the regime’s notorious Sde Teiman detention facility, and “impose a regime of apartheid” in the occupied West Bank.
The students and scientists vowed to keep up the pressure until the university ended its other types of research collaboration with the Israeli military too, including its partnerships with Elbit Systems, the regime’s largest weapons manufacturer, and Maersk, the Danish shipping company that transports weapons for the military.
