Welcome to the Bobby Sands Cafe: Yale Graduate Students for Palestine plans Friday hunger strike over school’s investments in arms manufacturer doing business with Israel.

Yale Graduate Students for Palestine (GSP) plans to commence a hunger strike if Yale University president Peter Salovey refuses or ignores the group’s demands that Yale divest its pension funds from arms manufacturers that do business with Israel. In a Tuesday night email to members of the press, GSP announced that 48 hours after an unsatisfactory or no response is received from Salovey, “around 12 members of the Graduate Students for Palestine will begin a hunger strike.”

According to the Yale Daily News, the dozen hunger strikers will be drawn from both undergraduate and graduate students.

The hunger strike is timed to “coincide with Bulldog Days, when prospective undergraduate students come to visit Yale,” according to GSP. The time and location of the hunger strike, the GSP message message concludes, “will hopefully bring even more attention to the strikers, and to the ongoing genocide being perpetrated by the Israeli military.”

Abraham Wyner, Professor of Statistics and Data Science at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and Faculty Co-Director of the Wharton Sports Analytics and Business Initiative, casts considerable doubt on the frequently cited claims by the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry that 30,000 civilians have been killed during the six months of war. He writes, “The total civilian casualty count is likely to be extremely overstated. Israel estimates that at least 12,000 fighters have been killed. If that number proves to be even reasonably accurate, then the ratio of noncombatant casualties to combatants is remarkably low: at most 1.4 to 1 and perhaps as low as 1 to 1.”

Wyner explained his analysis on the April 10th episode of Dan Senor’s essential Call Me Back podcast.

American university campuses have seen an explosion of anti-Israeli and antisemitic protests against Israel’s right to defend itself since the October 7th Hamas attack on Israel that killed 1,200 people in southern Israel. Hamas continues to hold more than 100 hostages, though the number who have died while in captivity is uncertain.

A February hunger strike by 17 Brown University students also seeking a change in investment policies ended after eight days. More than 30 Harvard students went on a 12 hour fast to show their support for the Brown University students.

Published April 11, 2024.