Western students hammered out demands in support of Palestine in a 2024 encampment. Here’s where things stand.
Two years after Western Washington University students occupied campus to protest the university’s economic connections to Israel, Western has partially met its commitments to ethically review its investments and policy. Some key promises remain unfulfilled.
In late May 2024, Western Washington University signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Divest Apartheid Coalition, who had protested through a lived-in encampment on campus for two weeks, joining students around the country demanding divestment from university administrators. The coalition advocated for Western to disclose and divest from all potential ties and relationships to entities engaged with the state of Israel and its occupation of Palestine, which included genocide, according to a United Nations report. In response, Western pledged goals intended to ethically shape university policy.
The memorandum was released on May 29, 2024, and outlined the goals that Western and the Divest Apartheid Coalition — student groups and individuals led by Western’s Arab Student Association, Jewish Voices for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine — had agreed upon. Western pledged to create multiple committees dedicated to reviewing elements of its study abroad programs, investments and business relationships, and internal policy, as well as making commitments to future investment transparency and condemnation of genocide and related acts.
Among the pledges not yet fulfilled by the university are items related to ethical investing and study abroad programs.
Western did not respond to a request for comment on the implementation status of their pledges.
Of the completed goals from the memorandum, the Advisory Committee on Socially Responsible Investing — composed of representatives from the faculty, student body and associated organizations — was created. The ACSRI oversees proposed reviews of university investments, as opposed to automatically and continuously reviewing policy. The process of submitting a proposal is student-driven, then requiring a two-thirds majority vote from the ACSRI to pass the proposal to the Board of Trustees, where it is ultimately subject to their approval.
While this system has seen success, conditions remain complex. On April 11, 2025, the ACSRI passed a Socially Responsible Investment Policy dictating that Western will not invest in fossil fuel extraction, tobacco production and manufacturing, weapons production and adaptations and human rights violations. However, this only applies to the approximate $78 million that Western directly manages, and not the roughly $144.2 million controlled by the Foundation for WWU & Alumni, a nonprofit that secures and manages private funds for the university. Originally intended to apply to both funds, the foundation removed itself from the agreement.
Where the demands originated
Western alumna Fraol Debele thought back to her time as a student, recounting the negotiations that she and her fellow advocates had with Western’s administration.
“They wanted it to go as soon as possible, right?” Debele said. “They didn’t want it to pick up press. They didn’t want more students to join.” Thus, the negotiations carried on.
“We said, ‘Unless our demands are met, we have no plans of shutting down the encampment,’” she said.
In the early morning hours of May 14, 2024, the Old Main lawn was transformed — rows of tents stood side by side and informational signs hung from trees and sat propped up against tables. This encampment echoed similar encampments at universities across the globe as the Popular University for Gaza movement began.
Following the Israel Defense Force’s occupation and subsequent controlled demolition of Israa University in January 2024 — widely considered to mark the destruction of the last remaining university in the Gaza Strip — the Popular University for Gaza movement was kick-started. On April 17, 2024, student activists took to Columbia University’s campus in New York City and erected the Gaza Solidarity Encampment. From there, they advocated for Columbia University’s economic divestment from Israel and hosted teach-ins and community workshops through the encampment that centered education on Palestine. Western eventually joined the growing list of college campuses that were home to protests taking the form of decentralized, autonomous educational spaces, otherwise known as a Popular University.
“I think that collective struggle requires collective liberation,” Debele said. Part of her role as a core leader was leading teach-ins at the camp. “Something that I really tried to reinstate while I was a part of that leadership was that what we see happening in Palestine specifically is a variation of a lot of things that are happening across the globe. That level of oppression and eradication that the people were being subjected to were things that we were seeing in Sudan, in Congo, in Ethiopia, in Western Africa, in Burkina Faso.”
Debele became what she described as a core leader shortly after the encampment’s creation. In her teach-ins, Debele explored the connections that the history of Israel’s violence toward Palestine shares with a global history of colonialism and imperialism.
“If you’re advocating for Palestine, if you’re advocating for Sudan, if you’re advocating for Congo, if you’re advocating for Yemen, you’re fighting against one thing, and that is capitalism,” Debele said. “It is the extraction of resources, it is the silencing of indigenous voices and the censorship of people in a position of power to help.”
Seven students — among them, board members of Western’s Arab Student Association and Jewish Voices for Peace — met with Western’s president Sabah Randhawa and Chief Diversity Officer Jacqueline Hughes on May 9, 2024, to discuss the demands that had been delivered to Randhawa six days prior. As outlined in a statement by the Divest Apartheid Coalition:
- For Western to acknowledge the harm it inflicted upon Arab and Arab-American students through “lack of support, silence during the genocide of Palestinian people, and demonization of the Arab and Arab-American students.”
- To fully disclose all “investments, agreements, and contracts with companies and institutions complicit in Israel’s illegal settler-colonial occupation of Palestine.”
- To fully divest from all potential aforementioned connections.
- To “ensure the success of the Ethnic Studies Department launch in 2024 by creating three additional visiting positions for the 2024-2025 academic year with the possibility of renewal.”
- To fund an annual faculty teach-in centering “a decolonialist approach to academia,” and a quarterly workshop focused on “movement building and solidarity among various student groups, facilitated by an individual approved by the Ethnic Studies Department.”
The final request was for the administration to schedule an emergency meeting with Western’s board of trustees to implement these demands by May 6, 2024. When the university did not agree to meet the student’s demands as listed, the encampment was created.
At the camp’s inception, an estimated 60 activists got to work at creating the educational environment of a Popular University: bargaining with the administration, maintaining a peaceful disruption of everyday campus life, and coordinating with fellow student groups and other organizations.
Inside the camp, activists worked to curate press releases and social media statements, make protest signs, educate fellow students through teach-ins and ceremonies and organize the donations of food and supplies they received from the greater Bellingham community. Frequent onboarding sessions took place, where students who were interested in participating in the camp were briefed on the community guidelines and expectations, as well as the potential risks associated with their involvement, such as the possibility of facing academic disciplinary actions or encountering a police presence.
“We were able to benefit from the incredible education that we received from so many people in camp, both in formal teachings, but also through every aspect of just being in a community together,” said Andy Jennings, a member of the coalition. “We were following the traditions of many encampments across the country in sharing that knowledge with each other.”
According to the coalition, the teach-ins aimed to connect the events in Palestine to critiques of larger international systems and to point out the ways organizations across the world, like Western, were complicit.
For instance, Western maintains a partnership with Boeing that has taken the form of student participation in Boeing-sponsored activities, a corporate partnership with Western’s College of Business and Economics, a donation of 50 computer servers to Western’s Computer Information Security Systems program and a recognized pipeline of Western graduates to Boeing’s workforce.
Boeing also manufactures munitions. These include joint direct attack munitions, which are guidance kits that transform free-falling bombs into highly accurate “smart weapons.” Organizations like Amnesty International have reported that these weapons have been used in attacks on civilians in Gaza, after examining the components left in the aftermath.
“What is happening in Palestine: colonialism, genocide. These are not unique experiences,” said Farouk el-Zaatari, another member of the coalition. “Colonialism is a global phenomenon that has caused an immense amount of unjust suffering that is hard to comprehend. Now, with us being able to create a social movement and being able to use it to create a space for other voices to be amplified — and I speak as an Arab, as someone with family in Palestine and Lebanon, and as someone who has had family directly impacted by the state of Israel — it is more important now than ever that we incentivize the point of this not being a unique phenomenon.”
The university’s response
By May 29, 2024, the coalition announced on Instagram that within 24 hours, over 300 Western alumni had signed their pledge to withhold all donations until Western divested.
In the late-night hours of May 28, 2024, Western and representatives of the coalition, including Debele, signed the memorandum solidifying their agreements. Among them, Western promised to form a faculty committee dedicated to ensuring that the study aboard programs that Western offers are in alignment with their principles and values including condemnation of genocide; to form the Advisory Committee on Socially Responsible Investing; to form a Committee on Ethical Contracts to address action on ACSRI decisions, and to inform and engage the campus community in “dialogue around the interpretation and use of terms, including but not limited to anti-Arab racism, sexism, anti-Blackness, anti-trans sentiment, antisemitism, etc., and how various interpretations impact our community.”
Within the memorandum, Western also stated that as an institution, it “opposes and condemns all acts of genocide, ethnic cleansing and other activities that violate safety, security and fundamental human rights.”
To many, these agreements were seen as a huge success. According to the organizers, the encampment at Western was among the first to achieve an explicit mention of the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions list within their agreement. Randhawa made a personal assurance that Sabra Dipping Company products — a company mentioned on the list due to their partial ownership by The Strauss Group, which has directly funded the Israeli military — would be actively removed from campus and not restocked the following quarter.
“I believe in education. I see the value in education. I want to be an educator. I want to be educated,” said Clarissa Mansfield, who is an active Palestinian advocate outside of working as Western’s library communications manager. However, she said, “There are flaws in our current system that are really evident when you juxtapose the reality of our response to the scholasticide in Gaza, and the lack of response to supporting our colleagues there.”
“The student movement was pointing that out,” Mansfield said. “They were drawing attention to it. They were demanding change in a way that resonated with me.”
Furthermore, Western’s promises of increased ethical considerations and transparency marked a milestone for campus movements across the U.S.
“The language that was fought for in the memorandum — that we got words like genocide, words like ethnic cleansing, the mention of BDS — was fought really hard for, and it is unprecedented in this country,” said coalition member Masie Rose Shaw.
Concerning the university’s pledges, there is still work to be done.
Western has updated its standards on ethical purchasing, though it lacks the intentional language used in the MOU surrounding complicity in human rights violations. In addition, Western has yet to form a faculty committee to review its study abroad programs, create full-tuition scholarships for students displaced from universities in Gaza by spring of 2026 and create a specific process to submit ethical concerns regarding dining service products, which was planned for fall of 2024.
“During the encampment, we saw a huge part of the student body show up in support,” said Lyli Dei Marcos, another member of the coalition. “But at the same time, the university really relies on that dissipating, and it’s our responsibility as students who care about this to continue to show up and hold them accountable. They promised us these things.”
—By Jae Ranney