On September 17, 2025, this university’s Student Government Association passed an emergency resolution calling for the university to publicly acknowledge Israel’s military offensive in Gaza as a genocide. 

The resolution — which passed almost unanimously, with 25 votes in favor, one against, and one abstention — diverged from what many anticipated to be the next action point in a now years-long pattern of anti-Israel activism on this university’s campus. Days before, Students for Justice in Palestine announced on Instagram that another vote on the issue of divestment would take place next week, scheduled during Rosh Hashanah. The final vote will take place on Yom Kippur. 

Until this emergency resolution, similar topics had been listed on the agenda two weeks in advance to allow legislators to review the texts. Soon before the Wednesday meeting when divestment was expected to be announced, it was removed from the agenda and replaced with the call to acknowledge the “ongoing genocide in Gaza.” The new legislation was passed that day. 

Eighteen Jewish groups on campus issued a joint statement in response, stating they “will not attend any student government meetings on this issue,” as to not “legitimize the efforts of any SGA members’ one-sided, anti-Israel, and antisemitic agenda.” 

The statement also refers to the emergency resolution passed on Wednesday as a “cowardly tactic” that is “antithetical to SGA’s two-week reading calendar,” which was designed to promote transparency and student-driven debate. 

That same week, the SGA stated in an interview with the Diamondback that of their five main priorities for legislative achievements in the upcoming year, ‘divestment’ ranked number two.

This past Wednesday, the SGA speaker of the legislature, Diego Henriquez, announced that he would allow proxy voting by email for legislators who are unable to attend the meeting, just ahead of the rescheduled divestment vote, which will take place on Yom Kippur. He qualified that if any substantive amendments were made to the bill during the meeting, proxy votes would become invalid. 

For many at the University of Maryland, which boasts one of the highest concentrations of Jewish students nationally, this series of events ushers in a new understanding of the SGA’s relationship to the Jewish community. 

Mitzpeh reached out to former Jewish SGA members to discuss their perceptions of broader patterns in student government activism surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Many students described a notable change in SGA’s priorities and a more rapid pace of legislative activity, beginning right after a “red-list” circulated in April of 2024. 

The list, they said, led to nine Jewish students losing their seats in the student government, and an increasingly hostile environment for Jewish students looking to participate.  

“The entire environment of SGA has really changed, and what they stand for, too. SGA is really supposed to represent the whole student body and pass bills that reflect issues we all care about here on campus,” said Meirav Solomon, a junior criminology and criminal justice major and former legislator who lost her seat after the red-list was circulated.

In Spring 2024, the Muslim Student Association, Students for Justice in Palestine and the Pakistani Student Association circulated a candidate info sheet prior to an election vote. The list included each candidate’s name alongside a color-coded recommendation system, based on whether individual candidates shared their “values in human rights”. Mitzpeh contacted each of the student groups three times, and they all declined to comment

That list was circulated to at least 1000 people, according to screenshots acquired by Mitzpeh. The sheet spread across the PSA’s GroupMe forums and “17fpj,” a club also known as 17 for peace and justice. In those group chats, students credited an SGA legislator at the time of circulation, and the author of that year’s divestment bill, as the creator of the info sheet.

The candidate info sheet encouraged students not to vote for those with names that appeared in red. Mitzpeh’s investigation confirmed the Jewish identity of ten students included on the candidate list. Of those ten, nine received the red highlight. Three non-Jewish students, Alex Pratillas, Syed Ali, and Christopher Adams were also named on the “red-list”. Every red-listed candidate that was not guaranteed a seat was not re-elected to SGA the following cycle. 

Mitzpeh reached out to the red-listed candidates to determine the process for examining their views on human rights. In interviews with red-listed students, they were asked to confirm whether or not student groups or legislators had ever asked them about their views on human rights or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in general. All ten candidates affirmed that they had never been asked their opinions on human rights, Israel/Palestine, or global conflicts in general, concluding that their inclusion among the red-listed candidates must have been solely based on their Jewish identity. 

Lucy Schneider, a junior studying communications and former SGA legislator, told Mitzpeh how she won her uncontested seat after being targeted on the red-list, but resigned after her first meeting that year. “Sitting in a room full of people who opposed my views on Israel would have been fine, but sitting in a room full of people who blatantly called for me not to be there is an environment I will not put myself in. SGA is supposed to be a representation of students at UMD. It has turned into an entity to silence Jewish voices.”

Since 2017, Divestment bills have been brought to this campus four times before finally achieving successful passage in April of 2025. These four previous resolutions failed, with a majority of representatives being against the bill. 

The April 2025 vote bore a different result for a couple of reasons. For one, it had been one year since every Jewish legislator lost their seat, and were replaced with anti-Israel activists directly aligned with the Students for Justice in Palestine’s anti-Israel agenda. Additionally, since a resolution can only be voted upon once a year, interested members of the SGA employed an emergency vote to include a ballot referendum during the upcoming SGA elections and slipped in the issue of divestment. 

The referendum called for SGA to lobby the University System Foundation and UMCP Foundation to divest from any companies linked to human rights violations in specific countries. This referendum is non-binding, meaning it has “no bearing on university policy or practice,” according to statements from this university’s administration. 

Pro-divestment students viewed the referendum as an opportunity to take a stand against the university’s involvement in defense contracting, which contributes to violence around the world. The plurality of Jewish students saw it as a veiled attempt to ostracize Jewish and Israeli students on campus.

Interest groups allegedly violated election rules to persuade students to vote a certain way, prompting an investigation by the SGA elections commission into Terps for Israel and Christians United for Israel. 

​​The relentless back and forth “underscores the true intention of the BDS campaign: to divide our campus community and exclude Jewish students from a vote that is biased and wrong,” said Einav Tsach, a senior studying journalism and business, to the Jewish Insider.