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Follow Us on TwitterThousands of students ‘evicted’ in pro-Palestine solidarity campaign 13Dec13 December 13, 2013
Ma’an News Agency - 12 December 2013
BETHLEHEM (Ma’an) — Thousands of University of Michigan students woke up Tuesday morning to faux eviction notices slipped underneath their dorm room doors.
“If you do not vacate the premises by 13 DEC 6PM, we reserve the right to demolish your premises without delay,” the notices read.
“We cannot be held responsible for property or persons remaining inside. Charges for demolition will by applied to your student account.”
The mock eviction was orchestrated by the student organization Students Allied for Freedom and Equality to raise awareness about the actual Israeli-directed evictions that are carried out on a regular basis in the Palestinian West Bank and East Jerusalem, in addition to the Negev.
“When Palestinians lose their homes to unjust and illegal demolition/eviction notices, they are also robbed of their dignity, human worth, and livelihood,” SAFE said in a statement.
Michigan students carry some responsibility for Israel’s “unjust” actions, the statement said, as portions of the university’s hefty endowment fund are invested in “companies that profit from housing demolitions and all other aspects of the illegal Israeli occupation.”
Among such companies are Caterpillar, Inc, Northrup Grumman, Corp. and Hewlett-Packard, according to coverage of the “evictions” in the campus student newspaper The Michigan Daily.
The “dorm room demolition” scare, which the Daily said caused a “stir” on the Ann Arbor-based campus Tuesday, also encouraged student support for a university-wide boycott of Israel.
The “end goal of this campaign is to shame the university for its complicity in human rights violations in Palestine and thus have it successfully divest its funds from these companies and invest them elsewhere in socially responsible companies,” SAFE’s statement said.
Tuesday’s mock eviction campaign came six days after a historic landmark for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement in the United States – the American Studies Association’s decision to boycott Israeli institutions of higher education.
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