DISCLAIMER: Riona Sheikh serves as the Executive Vice President of UMD’s student government from 2025-2026.
Over the last decade, hundreds of students on this campus have gathered to pray for Palestinian people killed by Israel and protest the University System of Maryland’s investments in weapons manufacturing companies and other institutions supporting Israel.
After almost eight years of student activism and calls for this university to play its part in the liberation of Palestinian people, UMD’s student government association (SGA) passed a long-awaited resolution calling for this university and its nonprofit foundation to divest from companies and institutions profiting off of oppression of Palestinians in October 2025.
Al-Hikmah requested bills from UMD SGA to summarize previous divestment efforts at this university. Here’s what we learned.
Fall 2017
In November 2017, a bill “to promote human rights by divesting from companies that profit from investments in Palestine” was introduced. The resolution cited SGA’s previous bill in support of sanctuary campuses and UMD students’ previous activism regarding fossil fuel divestment and divesting from the South African government during apartheid.
Over 100 students signed the petition in support of divestment that year and presented it to the legislature, according to the bill.
“Investment in these companies shows implicit support for the decisions and actions of these companies,” the bill read. “The consequences of these companies’ actions also affect the UMD community directly, including students whose families experience occupation, systematic discrimination, death, injury, and other forms of human rights violations.”
SGA bills are voted on in their primary committees before being voted on by the legislature to pass the bill as the student body’s official stance to the university’s administration. The 2017 divestment bill was killed in committee.
Spring 2019
Another divestment bill was introduced in April 2019. More than 655 people and 25 student organizations signed petitions in favor of the university divesting that year, the bill showed.
“The UMCP administration signed on to the United Nations-supported Principles for Responsible Investment, which includes guidelines stating that ‘businesses should support and respect the protection of internationally proclaimed human rights; and make sure that they are not complicit in human rights abuses,’” the bill read.
The University System of Maryland Foundation (USMF), the charitable foundation of USM, became a signatory to the United Nations Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) in 2017 and withdrew in 2020 and cited “strict requirements that were challenging to meet with the Foundation’s staff and resources,” in their reasoning.
The PRI lists three requirements on their website in order to be a signatory including having responsible policies applying to more than 50% of assets, accountability mechanisms to ensure responsible investments and ensuring internal and external staff are responsible for administering these mechanisms.
USMF did not respond to Al-Hikmah’s request for comment.
No divestment bills were reported to have been introduced in the period between 2019 and 2024.
Spring 2024
Once Israel’s ongoing genocide on Gaza began in October 2023, the campus environment became increasingly contentious for those who supported the human rights of the Palestinian peoples. In the fall 2023 and spring 2024 semesters student-led protests rippled out across the country, calling for divestment from Israel’s genocide, apartheid and occupation of Gaza and the West Bank.
“Everybody was so engaged within what was going on our campus,” said Yasmin Aouchria, a junior psychology major. “Emotions were so high because it was so close to October 7.”
Yet the divestment bill introduced in the SGA during the spring 2024 semester faced challenges.
Eliav Hamburger, SGA speaker of the 2023-2024 legislative session, assigned the divestment bill to a primary committee of student affairs. Ethan Vinodh, director of the student affairs committee, had restricted voting rights in his committee so only officers could vote.
In doing so, dozens of students who had attended committee meetings for weeks in order to gain voting rights suddenly could no longer vote on the bill. The divestment bill was killed in committee and was never voted on by the legislature.
Hershel Barnstein, a UMD alumnus who graduated in 2025, said that spring’s vote was “a cause of deep frustration” among pro-Palestinian student activists.
“We tried to get them to send the bill to a different committee,” said Barnstein, who also served as president of UMD’s Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) chapter. Pro-Palestine students were opposed to student affairs being the primary committee because of the restrictions, he said.
“We felt we’ve been disenfranchised,” he said.
Aouchria felt frustrated that the bill didn’t pass. “We had people from all over campus representing Palestine and speaking out for Palestine,” she said. It just didn’t make sense. It was like, if you were there and listening, our stories made sense, and our reasoning made sense.”
After backlash from the student body due to Vinodh’s restrictions, the SGA debated for hours and amended bylaws and committee procedures to allow students to vote in an open committee meeting if they attended at least one meeting from the same committee. Committee directors no longer had discretionary power over attendance requirements, according to The Diamondback.
Fall 2024
In October 2024, a divestment bill was reintroduced. With the SGA’s reformed policies, students could vote in committee. The speaker of the 2024-2025 legislative session Chelsea Boyer assigned the bill to a primary committee of civic engagement and governmental affairs, and the bill died with a vote of 265-343-2 in committee, according to The Diamondback.
About 940 students signed a letter in support of divestment addressed to UMD president Darryll Pines, the USM Board of Regents, and the USMF that October.
“By divesting its endowment from South African apartheid in the 1980s, the University of Maryland took a stand for the right side of history. As students, we call upon the University to do the right thing again,” the letter read. “In the words of Nelson Mandela, ‘We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.’”
Jenna Awadallah, a sophomore physiology and neurobiology major who is Palestinian, attended the committee meetings to vote. She said the bill’s failure to pass disappointed her.
Divestment is about “protecting human rights and protecting people’s basic right to exist and the right to live,” Awadallah said. “It’s just hard to see that people can still be opposed to something like this.”
2025: referendum and bill
Multiple divestment bills were killed in committee or on the floor, so pro-Palestine students decided to go a different route, introducing a referendum to be voted on in spring 2025 during SGA elections. The introduction of the referendum was supported by over 650 signatures from the student body, according to The Diamondback.
The election, which attracted around 6,000 student voters, featured a question on the ballot asking students if they demand the USMF and University of Maryland College Park Foundation (UMCPF) divest from companies knowingly or directly complicit in severe violations of international humanitarian law.
After almost a decade of activism and more than two years of genocide in Gaza, the student body voted overwhelmingly in favor of divestment with over 3,260 votes cast with a 55%-35% split.
In October 2025, SGA speaker Diego Henriquez of the 2025-2026 legislative session assigned the divestment resolution to the student affairs and diversity, equity, and inclusion committees, which voted in favor, and the legislature voted unanimously in support of divestment — marking the first successful UMD SGA divestment bill.
For Barnstein, the divestment bill’s passage was “exhilarating.”
“I’ve been fighting [for] a long time, and I could also feel the weight of the burden [from] our forebearers,” said Barnstein, who is a former president of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) at UMD. “This had been started, technically, all the way back in 2017. So we were thinking about all of the people who had fought for it those years, all of their contributions, and keeping them in mind as we tried to see it through.”
Despite UMD’s consistent statements that SGA’s bills have no bearing on their practice, many students feel hopeful about the future of divestment at this university and university system.
“It’s one step forward regardless,” Aouchria said.
And for many students on campus, including Awadallah, the fight for the Palestinian cause on campus had only just begun.
“It just opens a new road for a lot more work to come, and a lot more struggle,” she said. “We can do it for sure. I think the students have the power, and I know we have the ability to do it. We just need to organize and work hard to get it done.”
“One day,” Awadallah said, “UMD will be divested from these companies.”
Image credits: Cover photo by Amna Tariq.
Al-Hikmah 
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