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MIT lashes out at students and faculty who have exposed its deep complicity in Gaza genocide Part II

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7 January 2025

Here is the second part of the Electronic Intifada report on MIT’s two-fold scandal: for collaborating with Israel on research contributing to the genocide in Gaza, and for making a mockery of its own principles in an effort to suppress faculty and student criticism.

Exposing ties between MIT and Israel’s army

Nora Barrows-Friedman The Electronic Intifada Podcast 4 January 2025

In a new 83-page report, members of the MIT Coalition for Palestine – made up of 20 different student and faculty groups on campus – are exposing the institutional ties between the elite Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Israeli military.

With meticulous research, these students trace the money and weapons trail that winds through Israel’s genocide in Gaza, unmasking and confronting MIT’s research, as it describes itself, “to make a better world.”

MIT laboratories on campus conduct weapons and surveillance research directly sponsored by the Israeli military,” the coalition states.

“Since at least 2015, MIT laboratories have received millions of dollars from the Israeli Ministry of Defense for projects to develop algorithms that help drone swarms to better pursue escaping targets; to improve underwater surveillance technology; and support military aircraft evade missiles.”

As students and faculty respond to the global call for boycott, divestment and sanctions, and exposing these ties between their university and Israel’s killing machine in Gaza, MIT has enacted draconian tactics of repression against students and faculty.

Prahlad Iyengar, a graduate student in the electrical engineering and computer science department at MIT studying quantum information science, has been organizing with the Coalition for Palestine at MIT since October 2023.

“The world recognizes that this is a genocide,” he tells The Electronic Intifada Podcast.

“MIT even should recognize that this is a genocide. It violates MIT’s own policies to be funding, groups or to be collaborating with an entity that actually, actively is perpetrating a genocide. It’s a violation of its own audit and risk policy because it’s engaged in active human rights violations. And yet, MIT does not apply that standard to Israel.”

Iyengar said that he was suspended by the university who charged him with “harassment and intimidation” because he asked Lockheed Martin recruiters questions about their weapons program at a career fair on campus.

“I asked a lot about the ethics of working in defense and also about civilian applications. He then directed me to talk to a different recruiter, and I stood in line to talk to that recruiter. By the end of it, the career fair staff had decided that they were going to move Lockheed Martin into a private room, and they were going to move their recruiters there, and they were going to take students one at a time,” he recounts.

“So I stood outside that room, and I stood in line waiting for my chance to talk to the second recruiter, and I never got that chance. I was just waiting outside in line. They submitted video evidence against me in my discipline case, and probably 85 percent of that video evidence is just me standing outside of a room, just on my phone, or maybe talking to some people.”

He adds that the statements that came from the Lockheed Martin recruiters “indicate this idea of unsafety. … The way I see it, it’s a direct attack to sort of suppress the pro-Palestine voice.”

Because of his activism, Iyengar was banned from campus and the administration has begun the process of expulsion.

However, he says that the movement on campus to hold MIT accountable for its research ties with Israel’s military is growing.

“I think I’m fairly confident that we will continue to be able to push down this path and get MIT to stop its ties with the Israeli ministry of defense,” Iyengar says.

Michel DeGraff, who has been a professor of linguistics at MIT for 28 years and is the director of the MIT-Haiti Initiative, discussed how language can be weaponized to provide cover for settler-colonialism and genocide – and how he’s been punished for trying to teach this concept.

He was effectively censored by his department over his proposal for a course on decolonization and liberation.

Even the title of his course elicited anxiety from the administration, he says. “The first reply that I got was that such a title with words like ‘decolonization’ and ‘liberation’ caused concern.”

He was then told “that the course doesn’t fit linguistics, which to me was a shock, because here’s a course that will make linguistics relevant for one of the worst crimes against humanity – if not the worst crime against humanity – a course about the use of language to support genocide. And I was told this is not linguistics,” he says.

As members of the MIT Coalition for Genocide wrote in a recent op-ed for The Electronic Intifada, DeGraff’s “continuous advocacy for his course – and for Palestinian liberation – resulted in administrative sanctions, including a withheld pay raise and by removing him indefinitely from his department, classifying him as ‘faculty at large.’”

“They might still kick me out, although … they only kicked me out of linguistics,” DeGraff says

“But the students have so much more on the line being suspended [or] expelled.”

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