Nationwide student protests are continuing to call for a cease-fire in Gaza, and Texas A&M students are making their voices heard. ‘Aggies Against Apartheid,’ the unofficial student organization that organized two protests earlier this year, planned a third from 4:30 to 6 p.m. on Monday, Aug. 26 at Rudder Plaza calling for similar demands: full divestment from companies linked to Israel and the war.

Despite heavy rain, students gathered in front of Rudder Plaza Monday afternoon to create signs before making a brief circle around the Academic Plaza and chanting slogans like, “Biden, Biden you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide,” among other calls.

One member of Aggies Against Apartheid and the Young Democratic Socialists of America, Madi M., requested only the first initial of their last name be used, as protest organizers encouraged students not to talk to the media.

“We’re out here demanding denouncement from A&M from their investments in Boeing and Lockheed [Martin] principally,” Madi said. “We also want a denouncing of the ongoing almost 360 days of genocide that have taken place in Gaza from the university.”

Over 40,000 Palestinians have been killed since Oct. 7, 2023, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, with over a fourth of those killed being children. Around 85% of Gaza’s population is currently displaced.

The protest, organized by Noor Sheikh, a graduate non-degree-seeking research student, was intended to raise funds for Aggies with families actively stuck in Gaza. The participants gathered to bring awareness to A&M and other companies’ investments in Israel, Sheikh said.

“We’re trying to follow the Boycott, Divestment [and] Sanctions route of activism,” Sheikh said. “It is something that the common person can do, especially students.”

The BDS route of activism includes withdrawing support from complicit Israeli institutions, urging banks and other local institutions such as universities to withdraw investments from the State of Israel, and pressuring governments to fulfill their legal obligation in ending apartheid, according to the official BDS website.

Sheikh said Israel has met at least three of the United Nations criteria for genocide, furthering the importance of Israeli divestment.

“We’re not trying to minimize any Israeli suffering,” Sheikh said. “Hamas did commit crimes against humanity on Oct. 7, [2023], but Israel’s response is both unequal and disproportionate and a form of collective punishment. Not all Israelis are to blame for what Israel is doing to Palestine in the same way all Palestinians are not to blame for what Hamas did on Oct. 7.”

The protest included returning protesters, like senior environmental studies major Victoria Rosales, who has been to all three pro-Palestine protests on campus.

“We’re trying to get the university to defund from all the companies that support Israel,” Rosales said.

Being a military-centric school, A&M has ties and contracts with multiple military contractor companies involved in the war in Gaza, including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, RTX and Northrop Grumman.

The movement has no roots in antisemitism, Madi said. Specifically, she said Zionists — the name for Jewish people involved in the movement to create a Jewish state — try to equate Semitism and Zionism as one thing.

“To say that being anti-Zionist and against the apartheid State of Israel is antisemitic is to kind of conflate the two,” Madi said. “Fundamentally, we are against racism, and we are against the apartheid system that is taking place in Israel and the system of legalized discrimination and legalized disenfranchisement that native Palestinians face.”

Being anti-genocide does not mean being antisemitic, Madi said, and the term is often used as a tool to discredit the motives of the pro-Palestinian movement.

“The idea that antisemitism and anti-Zionism can be conflated in any sense is just disingenuous, and it’s just used to shut down conversation and shut people’s brains off,” Madi said. “We’re essentially just…trying to show that Aggies are against apartheid and racism is not to be invested in.”

The wind and rain disrupted the original march schedule, but protesters altered the route to accommodate.

“We’re still fighting for Palestine,” Rosales said.

GoFundMe links to help students’ families can be found at https://linktr.ee/aggiesagainstapartheid, with more information about their movement to boycott Israel. Other resources are included on the website to provide context on the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict.