At Stanford, a Growing Pro-Palestinian Hunger Strike Gets Silence From the University

In the center of Stanford’s campus on Monday evening, students biked to and from class, lounged outside the coffeehouse and passed through in white dresses and red sashes, taking pictures to commemorate graduation in a few short weeks.

Among them, 100 or so students, faculty, staff and community members wrapped in keffiyehs gathered to support a growing group of protesters on a hunger strike in solidarity with Palestinians at risk of starving in Gaza.

The movement started with 15 students, faculty and staff members who pledged May 12 to stop eating until Stanford’s administration meets their demands, following a hunger strike that spread across the California State University system the week prior. A dozen more joined the Stanford strike this week, pushing the university to divest from companies that they say are supporting Israel’s war in Gaza and take actions to ensure campus free speech.

So far, the university has said it does not plan to negotiate with the strikers. In the fall, it declined to meet students’ divestment demands, and it said it keeps specific investments and endowment strategies private to ensure “continued and robust financial support.”

The protesters gather nightly on the grassy White Plaza, which has become the de facto home base for pro-Palestinian campus demonstrations since October 2023. This escalation from the protests that Stanford students have held since the war began comes at the tail end of a school year that many told KQED has been wrought with increasing hostility from the university’s administration.

Enforcement of new protest guidelines, the Santa Clara County district attorney’s felony charges against Stanford protesters and a lack of movement on their divestment demands have pushed hunger strikers to this point of desperation, they said.

“The university seems to think that they can put their fingers in their ears and ignore us, but we’re here to show them that they can’t do that,” said Owen Martin, a first-year student who has been part of the strike since last week. “Clearly, Stanford doesn’t seem to care that the companies they’re investing in are causing the mass starvation and death of thousands upon thousands of people, but maybe they’ll care that students are starving on their campus.”

Martin said he felt called to join the hunger strike because of its parallel to Israel’s 11-week blockade of food and aid to Gaza. Israeli officials announced Monday amid mounting international pressure that they had allowed five aid trucks into Gaza to prevent starvation, but the United Nations said it would only be a “drop in [the] ocean.”

“I sort of think of my own ancestors,” said Martin, who is Irish American. “We came here during the most severe man-made famine in history at the time, the Great Irish Famine, and now the same thing is happening to our brothers and sisters in Gaza.”

Since last week, Martin said he has lost more than 10% of his body weight and experienced extreme dips in his blood glucose levels. On Monday, medical staffers supplied him and other strikers with a plastic bag full of vitamins and a 10-gram glucose tablet, with instructions to take it in an emergency situation.

“I don’t want to have to do any permanent damage to my body … but I’m prepared to stand for my brothers and sisters,” Martin told KQED.

Last spring, Stanford was among more than 130 schools across the country whose students built nests of tents, tarps, blankets, Palestinian flags and large banners and spent weeks camped out on their campuses, bringing attention to U.S. support for Israel and pressuring their universities to pull financial investments from companies that supply weapons or surveillance technology to the country.

After a group of protesters occupied the university president’s office in June and refused to leave until they were arrested, administrators shut down Stanford’s encampment and later updated “freedom of expression” policies with a new policy requiring demonstrators to remove face coverings when asked a clarification of the camping policy, requiring that tents and structures be removed overnight regardless of whether people are present.

Now, 12 protesters face felony charges for the occupation of the president’s office, and other student activists have rallied around them.

Martin said that since he arrived on campus in the fall, there’s been a feeling of hostility between protesters and the administration.

“We’ve had one major rally where we marched here from White Plaza around the main quad and back, and within five minutes, you saw administrators swarming, asking us to disperse, threatening to send the police to come and disperse us,” he said.

Brian Liu, a graduate student studying computational and mathematical engineering, has also felt a shift.

“I’ve felt more of a double standard,” he told KQED on Monday.

While Liu said he’s often seen party details or advocacy messages chalked by fraternities and clubs stay on campus bike paths for weeks, “whenever [it’s] something that we talk about Palestine and bringing attention to the people whom Israel kills in Palestine, there’s immediate suspicion if there’s any university agent who walks over.”

“And even if no one asks immediately, [the messages] usually get washed away or erased within just a few days,” Liu said.

On Monday evening, students kneeled on the sidewalks surrounding White Plaza, drawing Palestinian flags and writing messages in colorful chalk. One student wrote “There is no clean water in Gaza” in block letters.

Liu, who has also been a part of the strike since last week, said that as a member of Stanford’s Graduate Student Council, he’s been invited to have discussions with administrators about the ongoing conflict, and has been told repeatedly that they welcome engagement from students. Now, he said, they’re refusing.

“So far, they’ve been taking a completely opposite stance, and that’s very hypocritical,” Liu said. “We want them to apply the same standards to us and allow us to engage with them as well.”

Liu said Stanford has a history of sit-ins against the Vietnam War and apartheid South Africa that led to campus policy changes — and added that choosing not to see the June action as the same is shortsighted.

“Today, we celebrate those protests of the past,” he said. “We hope that the university can learn its lessons from the past, and not wait until decades later to celebrate things that happened like last year’s occupation of the president’s office, but really take action now.”

On Monday, another dozen students joined Liu, Martin and others who are continuing their action into a second week. Some of the original participants have had to end their strikes because of medical reasons.

“I’ve been really galvanized by seeing so many people make that sacrifice for their bodies to really call [administration] to the forefront,” Max Allen Cu, a third-year student joining the strike this week, told KQED.

Cu said the university can feel very insulated, and students often don’t see all of the issues happening outside of their inner world on campus.

“There is such an important reason to bring this fight to campus because I really do believe that Gaza and Palestine are our campus,” he said. “We really want everyone here at Stanford’s campus to understand that Gaza and Palestine are the center of not only our education, but also the ways that we look at life and politics.”

He and other strikers plan to continue to meet at White Plaza just before sunset each day that the strike continues. As of now, there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight.

“We all want to end the hunger strike, but we know that our hunger for justice for our siblings in Palestine is greater than the hunger we are feeling physically,” Liu said. “Looking back, you don’t want to say that you were silent in the face of a genocide.”