Students, faculty and community members held a pro-Palestine rally on the Main Quad on Monday afternoon. Sponsored by a coalition of RSOs and community organizations, the demonstration served as the beginning of Israeli Apartheid Week.
Demonstrators assembled at the Illini Union around 11:45 a.m., and the rally began with speeches at 12:10 p.m.
Israeli Apartheid Week — a Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions-affiliated international movement— calls for grassroots support for Palestinian liberation and opposition to the state of Israel. UIUC Students for Justice in Palestine will be hosting events throughout the week to commemorate the movement.
Terri Barnes, professor in LAS and a representative of Faculty for Justice in Palestine, discussed her reasons for rallying.
“We organized, along with our many partners on campus and in the community, this demonstration to show our solidarity with the student who was arrested at Columbia, Mahmoud Khalil, to protest the ways that universities are being targeted, to urge our University to take a stand to protect its faculty and students in general,” Barnes said.
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Barnes said another goal of the demonstration was divestment. This sentiment was echoed throughout the rally, with speakers referencing the recent divestment referendum that passed with 73% of the vote in February’s student elections.
A billboard truck parked across the street from protestors on South Mathews Avenue displayed the message, “Israel is NOT an Apartheid State,” along the top, also cycling through various statistics about the country.
The truck’s operator — Ezra Landman-Feigelson, junior in FAA, — disagreed with the demonstrators’ characterization of Israel. He emphasized his desire to create a dialogue and combat what he sees as misinformation.
“I wanted to make my message clear that the state of Israel is in fact not an apartheid state,” Landman-Feigelson said. “I wanted to make sure that people aren’t just seeing one side of a story; that they should see what opportunities Arabs and other minorities in Israel have.”
Representatives from the various organizations co-sponsoring the rally gave speeches, opening with a speech on a letter sent to the University by allied faculty. The letter was written following the arrest and detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist at Columbia University in New York.
Demonstrators chanted “Break the fear, break the silence, don’t let ICE enforce state violence!” and “Free, free, free Palestine!” after several speeches.
Nina Stepaniants, senior in LAS and president of Amnesty International at UIUC, gave a speech about what she viewed as increased surveillance of students and free speech restrictions implemented by the University following last year’s encampment.
Gavin Volker, senior in ACES and co-chair of UIUC Young Democratic Socialists of America, echoed these talking points, particularly the free speech policies. He cited YDSA’s free speech protest last semester, which was met with a presence from the University’s I-Team and UIPD.
Another speaker from UC Jews for Ceasefire criticized what they viewed as a conflation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism both by the University and the federal government. They went on to express concern that these changes, made under the guise of safety, represented a potential danger to free expression and protest.
Sana Saboowala, a graduate student studying trauma and representative of the CU Muslim Action Committee, commented on the diverse range of issues addressed at the rally.
“As we keep saying, no one is free until we’re all free,” Saboowala said. “And it’s becoming more and more apparent in our political situation that’s the case to groups who maybe wouldn’t have worked together before.”
The speeches concluded around 12:50 p.m. with a reading of a letter written by Mahmoud Khalil while in ICE detention in Louisiana. Following this, the rally broke up, with the bulk of demonstrators holding a brief march through the Main Quad before meeting at the Channing Murray Foundation for a debrief and social.
The rally was co-sponsored by Students for Justice in Palestine, Faculty for Justice in Palestine, UC Jews for Ceasefire, UIUC Young Democratic Socialists of America, UIUC Amnesty International, Graduate Employees Organization, the Party for Socialism and Liberation Central Illinois, UIUC Students for Socialism and the CU Muslim Action Committee.
