“We are over 6 months into the genocide in Gaza.”

We have let life go on, let business go on as usual, while a genocide has been broadcast to us for months. Meanwhile, MIT has received OVER $11 MILLION in research funding from the Ministry of Defense of Israel since 2015. Multiple labs on this campus are performing sponsored research for the material benefit of the Israeli Occupation Forces. As recently as March 2024, such funding has been renewed.

It is unconscionable. It is immoral. It reflects a gross disdain for human life and human dignity that this institution, MIT, has chosen to embody.

To MIT, we charge you in the brutal genocide of the Palestinian people for your explicit role in providing scientific and technological support for the Israeli Occupation Forces' and their crimes. The students and workers of this campus have made our demands CLEAR. In the last month, undergraduates in the Undergraduate Association and grad workers in the Graduate Students Union PASSED referendums demanding that MIT stop accepting blood money from the Ministry of Defense of Israel, the same entity enacting the genocide in Gaza. We have shown that we are with the Palestinian people, and now is the time to act.

Statement by student organizers of SAGE @ MIT at the initiation of the protest:

We are what make MIT the place that it is. They use our labor to advance their prestige. They use our student culture to improve their image. We are so much stronger as a community, and if you have ever wondered what YOU can do, this is it. The students of Columbia, Yale, Rutgers, and countless other schools, with the resilience of their Gaza solidarity encampments, have shown us what it means to resist the powers of our complicit institutions and fight collectively. Come support the encampment. Come now.

Ask yourself what it would take to compel us to act. Then ask yourself if the tens of thousands of Palestinians killed in this genocide are enough for us to act. Ask yourself what business this institution has to maintain ties with a genocidal state after six months.

Today, we say that we refuse to give our labor to genocide. We refuse to make space on this campus for genocide. We will not rest until MIT cuts research ties with the Israeli military.

Our people at MIT have shown that we stand in solidarity with our steadfast siblings in Palestine. We rebuke the complicity of our institution, and today, we take the next step together in fighting for what we believe in.