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By Travis Wayne
Cambridge, MA – On April 24, 2025, the MIT Coalition for Palestine and BDS Boston held a press conference outside campaign target MIT Museum announcing that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) had sent a formal letter cutting its ties with the Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems.
The Industrial Liaison Program at MIT (MIT-ILP) is a program designed to facilitate the relations between MIT campus communities and large corporations with US$500 million or more. That includes strategic recruitment of students into businesses that hold these lucrative ILP contracts with the Institute, one of which was Elbit Systems.
The termination of Elbit Systems’ contract with MIT is the second victory for what the movement began calling the “People’s Arms Embargo” in late November 2024. Earlier that year, Elbit Systems terminated its Central Square office location a year early after waves of disruptions led by BDS Boston. A coalition of Palestine organizations launched the People’s Arms Embargo with a direct action at Travis Air Force Base in California after the federal government failed to end weapons shipments after a year of continued genocide in Palestine: “if the U.S. government won’t stop shipping arms to Israel, then we will establish a People’s Arms Embargo to stop it ourselves.”
The organizers and press were not alone on April 24. The Cambridge Police Department had assigned an entire squad of ten visible security guards to barricade the press conference. Two organized counterprotesters also showed up, unfurled a Zionist flag, and proceeded to bellow slogans to disrupt the press conference. One filmed while another screamed to drown out the speaker. Three security guards stood between counterprotesters and a Palestine organizer when they began heatedly exchanging words.
One representative from BDS Boston echoed the same words the organization released after the successful removal of Elbit Systems from Central Square: “We have collective power and we will use it.”
The Palestine Youth Movement was also invited to deliver a statement:
This is the moment. This is the moment where people of conscience must take matters into our own hands… this is our community’s time to escalate against this merchant of death and all war profiteers.
The movement coalition also identified a new target: Maersk. The US$55 million shipping company, located in the strategic logistics industry, has been identified as a targeted by Palestine organizers worldwide. In Tangier, Morocco, 1500 dockworkers and supporters at the Maersk-owned APM Terminals 2 organized to refuse to accept a Maersk shipment of US fighter jet parts to Israel – entering a showdown with management. PYM’s Mask Off Maersk campaign posted that Maersk added dockworkers in Morocco to special lists as a repressive response to their organizing on the same day that BDS Boston announced its own Maersk campaign.
“This is only the beginning,” said one MIT Coalition for Palestine member.
Travis Wayne is the deputy managing editor of Working Mass and the co-chair of the Somerville branch of Boston DSA.
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