VIDEO TRANSCRIPT of Lea Kayali, HLS ’24, speaking at a rally of student organizers in Belinda Hall at Harvard Law School on March 29th, 2024. A few dozen law students gathered to celebrate the passage of a nonbinding resolution to urge Harvard Management Corporation to divest from its investments entities affiliated with atrocities in Gaza. The celebration was interrupted by news of a challenge to the resolution which would later be defeated.
LEA KAYALI: Today, an absolute majority of student government representatives of Harvard Law School took bold and necessary action to urge Harvard to divest from genocide!
AUDIENCE: [Applause]
LEA KAYALI: Our Student Government acted as our representatives because it is their responsibility to embody the values of the student body and we want divestment. This is a historic win because we all have a responsibility to use whatever levers of power we have to do something about the ongoing genocide.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: That’s right. That’s right
LEA KAYALI: and while we’re here to celebrate today, I want to pause for a moment on that last word “genocide”. Seven letters I have said so many times in the last six months feel it’s almost void of meaning. But it is not. What is happening in Gaza to my people is annihilation, evaporation, elimination. Israel’s war on Palestinian life has dropped the floor of human decency out from under us.
Zionists have broadcast the outer bounds of conceivable cruelty on the backs of my people and every day for the last 175 days has upended my sense of reality. These Horrors should shock our conscience and jolt us into action because we cannot let genocide become routine. And what our student government did today was send the message that no one is immune from the moral imperative to stop a genocide that our government, our businesses, and our academic institutions like Harvard are complicit in.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: That’s right!
LEA KAYALI: This divestment bill is a critical if insufficient first step towards meeting the urgency of this moment. Divestment is critical not because we expect better from Harvard but precisely because we see Harvard for what it is–the assembly line of the status quo. Harvard is the breeding ground for profiteers of Global oppression.
AUDIENCE MEMBERS: [ mhm ]
LEA KAYALI: There are professors at this law school who have engineered the lawfare being wrought upon Palestinian bodies.
AUDIENCE: [Shame! Shame!]
LEA KAYALI: Donors to this institution are responsible for the attacks on our movement and our students.
AUDIENCE: [Shame!]
LEA KAYALI: The Harvard Management Corporation itself is nothing more than a glorified hedge fund, right it is a calcification of capitalism in its most unabashed form. The Harvard Management Corporation would like us to think that this place is nothing more than the money that runs it, but today we prove that that is not the case.
[VIDEO CUTS OUT]
at Harvard have the power and we will use it to pull this institution away from a death machine.
This is our space and our community and this institution should answer to us
AUDIENCE MEMBER: That’s right!
LEA KAYALI: we can’t expect Harvard to step away from its blood lust on its own accord because war is profitable to the power holders of this University will only come to the right side of history kicking and screaming, by sheer force of our will!
AUDIENCE: [APPLAUSE]
LEA KAYALI: Alan Barber! John Manning! John Goldberg! You are on notice!
AUDIENCE: [APPLAUSE]
LEA KAYALI: We students are dissenting we condemn your complicity and we are calling on them to immediately divest from genocide!
AUDIENCE: [APPLAUSE]
LEA KAYALI: Students are speaking and these so-called leaders of this institution would be best served to listen to what we have to say, because one day, when we win and Palestine is free, they will come crawling back. They will be begging us to rewrite history. The ilk of the ego’d men in power at Harvard will try to use us as props as they have always done. With every student movement, that progresses our community and our society. But this time, it will be too late because there is no room on the mantle of Liberation for the cowards who did not have the courage to take action when it was needed.
This is our story and we are co-authoring it with the resisting people of Palestine. Our student movement, our demand for divestment, is one thread in the ties of resistance of oppressed people all around the world. Those threads of resistance bind us to the right side of history and when we fight…We win!
LEA KAYALI: When we fight…
AUDIENCE: We win!
LEA KAYALI: When we fight…
AUDIENCE: We win!
LEA KAYALI: When we fight…
AUDIENCE: We win!
LEA KAYALI: Free Palestine!