Workers for Palestine Rally at UC Santa Barbara

Chants of “Workers have the power” and “Engineering, you can’t hide; you are building genocide” could be heard across UC Santa Barbara’s engineering concourse as more than 100 students, faculty, and community members held a walkout on Wednesday in support of Palestine and university divestment from military contractors.

Student groups UCSB Divest and UCSB Students for Justice in Palestine promoted the walkout and rally, held on International Workers’ Day, also known as May Day. The rally was billed as “UCSB Workers for Palestine.”

From Davidson Library, the group marched to the greens near the engineering buildings, where students and faculty spoke, chanted, and danced the dabke, a traditional dance from the Levantine region, where Palestine is located. Many attendees held signs and Palestinian flags and donned keffiyehs, a head scarf that has become associated with support for the Palestinian cause.

Speakers at the rally called for a cease-fire in the war between Israel and Gaza, and for UC Santa Barbara, as well as the UC system overall, to cut ties with military contracted investors such as Northrop Grumman, Black Rock, and Raytheon, as well as the U.S. Department of Defense itself. According to UCSB’s Office of Research, the university received $47 million in research funding from the Department of Defense for the 2023 fiscal year.

Jane Ward, the department chair of UCSB’s feminist studies department and member of the organization Academics for Justice in Palestine, spoke about the history and core demands of Students for Justice in Palestine, the role of faculty collaboration, and the history of the boycott, divestment, sanctions (BDS) movement.

“We follow the call from Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, who in 2005 called on people of conscience to take up boycott, divestment and sanctions to oppose a settler colonial regime that relies on apartheid, military occupation and a siege to sustain itself,” Ward said. She called for a cease-fire and spoke about working with student groups to advocate for Palestine.

“Every single Palestinian university is in rubble. Archives, publishing houses, bookstores, libraries are destroyed,” Ward said. “This is scholasticide. Our role as Academics for Justice in Palestine is to fight this form of targeting knowledge.”

Other speakers included graduate students, a member of the group Veterans for Peace, a student dining hall worker, and undergraduate students.

In a graphic posted to its Instagram account, UCSB Divest, a coalition created to advocate for university divestment from military funding, stated, “This May Day, we, UCSB academic workers and researchers against war, call on all academic workers at UCSB to heed the call of the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions to stand in solidarity with Palestine.” 

“On this May Day, we fight back,” said a student speaker, who did not give their name. Chants of “fight back” echoed from the crowd.

No counter-protesters were present at the large rally, which remained boisterously peaceful.

The Office of the Chancellor addressed the rally in an email campus update on May 2, emphasizing the need for campus safety and acknowledging the history of student activism at UCSB.

“Yesterday afternoon, an unpermitted rally took place, which caused some disturbance due mostly to noise. Yesterday morning, an unauthorized ‘encampment’ was set up near North Hall, adjacent to classrooms and academic office buildings. These events followed a day of teach-in and protest activities in the Student Resource Building last Thursday,” the statement read in part.

Also on May 1, student protestors set up a tent encampment between Davidson Library and North Hall to show solidarity with Palestinians and to bring attention to their demands. The group that has set up the encampment is not affiliated with UCSB’s Students for Justice in Palestine or Divest groups.

No counter protests were noted on Wednesday, but on Thursday, a tabling session was held by Students Supporting Israel in front of the library.

Organizers at the rally closed out by highlighting a planned conversation on ethics in engineering, scheduled for May 6 at UC Santa Barbara’s MultiCultural Center.