UPDATE: April 28, 10:20 p.m.
**This interview has been edited for length and clarity.**
The Daily Illini: Could you give us a little bit of an update about what’s going on right now?
Spokesperson for SJP: Our encampment was going strong. We had negotiators talking to admins about updates regarding our demands of divestment and there were some issues with that. They wanted us to know there are conditions for a meeting with the president and chancellor. It is that we take down our tent, which obviously we did not want to agree to because it was just them taking the only form of leverage we had in this negotiation. And immediately after we disagreed, we respectfully declined the offer. We got a Massmail — it was basically smearing our name, accusing us of being hard to negotiate with and us denying this offer without any context really.
The meeting with the vice chancellor on Monday that we were promised was threatened to be canceled. We’re not sure about updates regarding that. However, we wanted to continue engaging in discourse. The president and Chancellor Jones told the people we were talking to, like our middle man, that they are free to go home and they took that as their opportunity to leave us.
When we vocalize that we need some form of communication with them because our worry is that they were going to send out police officers on us, they basically said you guys just have to stick through it. It just felt like we were left in such a hard situation. We were just blindsided and it felt like they were just leaving us to fend for ourselves. I tried to find out if arrests were going to happen or anything like that — I didn’t get a straight answer. So yeah, we were kind of just left blindsided.
DI: What are the plans for tonight?
Spokesperson for SJP: Our plans for tonight are just to stick it out. We want to keep going strong, we are going strong. We want to encourage community activities. We also want to encourage discourse around this topic of Palestine. We want this to be an educational encampment where the correct knowledge is being put out.
DI: In the statement from the chancellor, it states that you guys cannot have your tents up and you guys cannot be encamping on campus grounds. How will you react to that if in the middle of the night, something happens?
Spokesperson for SJP: We obviously are keeping our guard up 24/7. In terms of them telling us we can’t keep our tents up, we’re keeping them up until we meet our demands. A divestment from Zionist weapon manufacturers and institutions. We think it’s pretty normal to want our school to not invest in the killing of people. And we think it’s bizarre that they care more about us having tents up than where their money is going. I think it’s just disgusting and it shows how evil the administration is regarding this topic.
