STANFORD SIT-IN TO STOP GENOCIDE

Abstract

The Stanford Sit-In to Stop Genocide is a collective of Stanford University undergrads, graduate students, alumni, post docs, faculty, and community members standing in solidarity with Palestinians against Israeli occupation, apartheid, and genocide. We sustained the longest demonstration in Stanford history, a 120-day overnight protest in White Plaza calling on the university to divest from Israel. Our paper begins with an overview of Israeli settler colonialism, occupation, apartheid, and the current genocide in Gaza. A crucial component of Israel’s occupation is the US-backed Israeli military-industrial-technology complex. We criticize the unethical use of AI biometric surveillance, brutal AI-equipped weapons systems, and cyberwarfare against human rights activists as well as censorship of Palestinian rights activists. Given the deep complicity of tech industries in the genocide of Palestinians, Stanford’s foundational role in Silicon Valley, and the historical successes of worker- and student-led divestment movements, we argue that tech workers and Stanford community members have a crucial role to play in ending our institutions’ support for genocide. We support the global divestment movement, draw parallels to the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, and advocate for economic and political pressures as mechanisms for securing Palestinian liberation. We call on readers to join the movement for Stanford to divest from companies supporting Israeli apartheid and push for an ethics of engineering that refuses complicity in all state and settler colonial violence.