As a thirteenth year of Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) draws to a close across campuses in over two hundred cities around the world, Visualizing Palestine shares two new data visualizations on the impact of campus activism.
Timeline of North American Campus Divestments, Then and Now
In 1959, the African National Congress (ANC) launched its call for an international boycott of apartheid South Africa. It took eighteen years for the first university, Hampshire College, to respond to the call. But ultimately, 168 North American campuses participated in the historic movement. Eleven years ago, Palestinian civil society issued a call for international boycott of Israel, and Hampshire College stepped up again, this time in just four years. Forty-two North American universities have heeded the call to date.
Which Campuses Divested?
Divestment is a powerful tool to pressure complicit entities to place human dignity above profit. Twenty-seven universities divesting from Israeli apartheid were also part of the historic movement to divest from South Africa. Check out our visual to see which universities stood up then and now.
Supporting Freedom of Expression
Whether pushing for divestment from South African apartheid, fossil fuels, the international arms trade, or Israeli apartheid, students are exercising their right to freedom of expression. Yet students pushing for divestment from Israel face unique forces of repression: In the first half of 2015, Palestine Legal reported responding to 140 incidents of “censorship, punishment, or other burdening of advocacy for Palestinian rights“ in the United States, over eighty percent of which affected students and scholars.
Collective action has resulted in some of the most dramatic and meaningful paradigm shifts in recorded human history. We are providing collective actors access to direct resources to further mobilize.
