The keffiyeh, a traditional Palestinian headdress, checkered the courtroom in Eastern Hampshire District Court on the morning of Feb. 8, draping the shoulders of many of the 12 defendants appearing before Judge Bruce Melikian during their first pretrial hearing. They were facing charges of criminal trespassing.
“We’ll try to get this done quickly,” Melikian said, calling the defendants to the stand one by one, converting each charge to a less severe civil infraction at the prosecution’s request. “You all need to get back to class.”
The pretrial is the first step in what may be a long judicial process for the defendants, a group of students affiliated with the anti-militarism group UMass Dissenters and UMass Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). Together, the two student organizations have demonstrated against what they see as the university’s complicity in Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, which has killed more than 29,000 Palestinians.
Taking inspiration from a history of radical organizing at UMass, the student coalition led a sit-in on Oct. 25 at the Whitmore Administration Building demanding the university sever all ties with military contractors and condemn Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. The sit-in led to the arrest of 56 UMass students and one faculty member following their refusal to leave the public building past its stated closing time. Twenty-one of these protestors have pleaded not guilty, opting to take their cases to trial. Twelve of those defendants appeared in court the morning of Feb. 8, with the remaining nine appearing on the following day.
Toby Paperno, an undergraduate student at UMass Amherst, belongs to the university’s chapter of Dissenters, a global, campus-centric organization dedicated to anti-militarist action that has allied itself with the pro-Palestinian coalition of student groups. He was arrested at the sit-in in October.
When asked how these demonstrations mirror previous student activism at his university, the similarities couldn’t be more clear to Paperno.
“Same shit, different toilet,” he said. “If you look at a lot of UMass history, the thing that leads to a lot of change, the specific tactic, is a sit-in.”
The similarities go beyond strategy. Paperno drew parallels between the anti-CIA demonstrations of the 1980s and current student activism focusing on Palestine solidarity, specifically a shared goal of removing recruiters they see as complicit in warmongering.
The university’s ties with weapons contractors such as RTX Corporation, of which Raytheon is a subsidiary, have been at the center of the recent uptick in student protests.
RTX, the world’s second-largest military company, provides a myriad of weapons technologies and explosive ordinances to the Israeli government. They regularly hold recruiting events geared towards engineering and business students on the UMass Amherst campus.
UMass Dissenters have played a key role in organizing against RTX recruiting at UMass since last year, with the recent humanitarian crisis in Gaza leading to a surge in participation in the group’s actions.
Paperno sees the coalescence of student organizations around Palestinian solidarity as carrying on a rich history of student organizing on campus.
“They were arrested for trespassing; we were arrested for trespassing,” Paperno said. “And we’re taking this to trial just like they did.”
Paperno is referring to the 1987 trial of 15 people arrested after occupying UMass Amherst’s Munson Hall in protest of on-campus CIA recruitment. The trial attracted national media attention due, in part, to the high-profile characters involved, with news articles from the time drawing comparisons to the activism of the 1960s. Yet, almost 37 years later, the saga has been, for the most part, forgotten.
The story intrigued Seth Kershner, a Ph.D. student in the UMass history department specializing in 20th-century social movements. He described the series of events that led to the trial as “a really dramatic story with national implications that hadn’t been told before.” (Kershner has previously written for The Shoestring)
What began as a localized student-led action snowballed into a star-studded legal fight and eventual victory, making headlines in national publications.
“As a history Ph.D. student, that was catnip,” said Kershner, who has extensively researched the topic and interviewed organizers involved in the protests.
The November 1986 sit-in emerged as a response to CIA recruitment events on the UMass campus. Organizers were concerned with the agency’s support of the violent right-wing Contras in Nicaragua, which had been deemed a violation of international law by the International Court of Justice earlier that year.
Kershner said the anti-CIA campaign at UMass wouldn’t have been possible without the Radical Student Union (RSU), an organization unique to the university that took on left-wing political causes dating back to the 1970s before losing steam in the early 2000s.
According to Kershner, the protests didn’t take place in a vacuum, being preceded by various demonstrations on campus in the 1980s, anti-apartheid organizing among them — actions that SJP and Dissenters members have named as inspirations.
Kershner cited conferences held by the RSU in the 1980s, where veterans of 1960s activism were invited on campus to share their wisdom with politically engaged students, setting fertile ground for the aggressive organizing that followed.
“The ’60s were talking to the ’80s,” Kershner said.
Echoes of the 1960s transcended strategy. Following a series of smaller protests and arrests during the fall semester of 1986, Abbie Hoffman, a fixture in the 1960s counterculture movement, reached out to students at the RSU.
Hoffman’s participation caused internal consternation among anti-CIA protestors. On the one hand, his organizing experience and attention-grabbing presence appealed to organizers. Others thought that Hoffman’s celebrity status could distract from the issues.
Kershner, citing conversations with organizers from the time, said the strategy “broke down along class lines,” with students from working-class backgrounds wanting the cause to be more focused and branch out to broader issues around militarism — something well known faces could have distracted from.
Roger Morey, a Munson Hall defendant who was then a junior, had cut his teeth organizing against interventionist policies in Central America as a teenager before arriving at UMass from Utah.
“Abbie was a mixed bag because you have a big personality,” Morey told The Shoestring when asked what Hoffman’s introduction to the RSU meant for the movement.
“He drew a lot of attention to himself,” Morey said. “That was his thing.”
While Morey acknowledged the concerns among some organizers around Hoffman’s involvement, his network proved invaluable when students searched for attorneys later.
On Nov. 24, after strategizing with Hoffman, students occupied Munson Hall while others demonstrated outside. Massachusetts State Police arrived with canine units, clad in riot gear. Munson Hall was cleared, with some protestors facing violence, according to Morey.
“I wasn’t planning on getting arrested that day,” Morey said, recalling the spontaneity of the protest and its aftermath. “Many people weren’t.”
Amy Carter, the daughter of former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, was present for the protests, having come from Brown University, where she was then a sophomore, to support the activists. She had previously been involved with anti-apartheid activism. Police arrested Carter outside of Munson Hall for disorderly conduct.
A total of 60 protestors were arrested, including many students and supporters from the community. Fifteen of those arrested took their case to trial, including Hoffman and Carter.
Attorney Leonard Weinglass, another 1960s character who notably defended the anti-Vietnam War “Chicago Eight” protesters, represented the 15 activists pro bono. The addition of another famous face garnered nationwide coverage of the trial.
“It wasn’t just Abbie Hoffman, it was Lenny Weinglass,” Kershner said, characterizing the trial as “a reunion of ‘60s icons.”
Weinglass and his team of attorneys opted to use a little-known Massachusetts law to argue that criminality on the part of the CIA justified the occupation of Munson Hall.
The necessity defense, which other activists used in preceding cases to mixed success, was crucial to the Munson Hall protestors’ case.
Weinglass saw the trial as an evolution of the work he did in the 1960s.
“In the ‘60s, we were defending cases like this,” Weinglass told the press following the Munson Hall protestor’s first pretrial date. “In the ‘80s, we’re going on the offensive: we’re putting the CIA on trial.”
The idea was that in proving that the CIA acted criminally, Weinglass could argue that the student’s actions were necessary, in the same way that one who runs into a burning building to save a life wouldn’t be held responsible for trespassing.
The organizers and their defense saw the trial as a public forum to discuss the issues their protests were tackling.
“They decided to make their justification for getting arrested the centerpiece of the trial,” Jeremy Smith, an archivist at the UMass’ W.E.B. Du Bois Library’s Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, told The Shoestring.
Weinglass brought in several high-profile expert witnesses, like Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers whistleblower, who testified on the impact civil disobedience could have on policy.
Other witnesses included Édgar Chamorro, a former Contra member who detailed the crimes he witnessed in Nicaragua, conduct he said the CIA was not only aware of but encouraged.
Former CIA officers and scholars of international law also testified on behalf of the defense.
The jury found the defendants not guilty, ruling that the CIA’s conduct warranted action.
With sizable media coverage and a non-guilty verdict, many considered the trial to be a resounding success, raising awareness of the CIA’s crimes.
While Kershner acknowledges the win, he remains skeptical of the movement’s focus, citing a fall in engagement following the trial, something he thinks SJP and Dissenters can learn from.
Kershner pointed to an unsuccessful post-trial demonstration at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, after which the movement began to lose momentum.
“They came away somewhat dejected,” Kershner said.
Members of the pro-Palestinian coalition say they’re pulling from UMass’s entire history of organizing, not just the 1987 trial.
“We are inspired by the student coalition groups who advocated for and succeeded in getting UMass to divest from apartheid South Africa in the ‘70s and the ‘80s,” Maysoun Batley, co-chair of the UMass chapter of SJP, said during a press conference following the pretrial hearing.
When asked how their coalition is learning from the successes of 1987, Batley told The Shoestring that the Munson Hall protestors “did not admit guilt at any point throughout the process, and that’s exactly what we’re trying to emulate.”
Malia Cole, a UMass undergraduate student and SJP member characterized the upcoming judicial process as a “people’s trial.”
Cole hopes the process can “provide political education to the public about Palestine, about the history of the Israeli apartheid and occupation, and about the war profiteers,” describing the public forum element of the 1987 trial as inspirational.
“We believe that our actions were completely necessary,” Cole said of the sit-in.
Other pro-Palestinian student organizers who spoke to The Shoestring mentioned 2016 sit-ins demanding fossil-fuel divestment that were met with concessions by the university, and no academic discipline for the students, as precedents for their actions.
Recent decisions by UMass administrators to discipline arrested students under the university’s code of conduct represent differences in how administrators are choosing to respond to these types of protests today, according to the protesters and their advocates. Several students arrested during the October sit-in were informed in December that they were barred from studying abroad in the spring, with some alleging that they’re facing thousands of dollars in non-refundable fees.
With their charges converted to civil infractions, the Whitmore Building protestors will have an easier time introducing evidence compared to a typical criminal trial, according to Rachel Weber, an attorney representing the 21 defendants.
During the press conference, Weber spoke to the importance of the necessity defense and their plans to “bring in people who can speak to why there was a necessity to participate in civil disobedience.”
Weber told the press that connecting what she and her clients see as a genocide in Gaza to UMass as an institution, given their relationship with RTX, will be at the heart of their legal defense.
Organizers alluded to the recent International Court of Justice ruling that Israel is at probable risk of committing genocide as a potential element of their necessity defense.
Morey says he’s proud of the students who are following in his footsteps, with a new surge of pro-Palestinian activism giving him hope.
“I feared the cause was disappearing behind the wall for 2 million people,” Morey said, referring to the sophisticated border fence erected around the Gaza Strip in the mid-’90s.
Dan McGlynn is an independent reporter studying journalism at UMass Amherst. He can be reached at dmcglynn@umass.edu.
The Shoestring is committed to bringing you ad-free content. We rely on readers to support our work! You can support independent news for Western Mass by visiting our Donate page.