Disclaimer: SGA president Dhruvak Mirani is a former Diamondback opinion columnist.
CLARIFICATION: This story has been updated to include a statement from SGA executive vice president Riona Sheikh.
The University of Maryland SGA passed a boycott, divestment and sanctions resolution Wednesday that urges this university and its charitable foundation to disassociate from companies, institutions and academic entities that “support or profit from Israel’s regime of apartheid and occupation.”
The Student Government Association is now set to call on this university and the University of Maryland College Park Foundation to implement boycott, divestment and sanctions policies against all companies that supply weapons, surveillance technologies or infrastructure “supporting Israeli occupation, apartheid, and settler-colonialism.”
The final vote, which passed 29-0-1, on the resolution took place on the night of the Jewish holiday Yom Kippur. Many Jewish community members said the scheduling restricted them from participating in the SGA’s democratic process.
“Holding a vote that seeks to demonize the Jewish homeland on a day when Jewish students will not be able to participate is exclusionary, biased and flat-out wrong,” read a statement from Ari Israel, executive director of Maryland Hillel, posted on the Campus for All Instagram page ahead of the vote.
[UMD SGA to consider boycott, divestment and sanctions resolution]
Under the resolution, SGA will also demand that the university create a student oversight committee to prevent complicity in human rights violations.
The resolution was originally scheduled to be introduced at the Sept. 17 SGA meeting and voted on last week, during the Jewish holiday Rosh Hashanah. SGA held two committee meetings on Monday and Tuesday where students could voice their concerns.
More than a dozen Jewish student organizations at this university posted a joint statement on Instagram on Sept. 18 that said they would boycott all future SGA meetings on the issue.
This week, Jewish Insider, a news publication, and advocacy organization Jewish on Campus posted on social media about the significance of the date of Wednesday’s vote.
The social media account Stop Antisemitism also made a post on Tuesday night telling future employers to take note of four SGA members they claimed enabled the choice to hold the votes on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. The post included the names and photos of president Dhruvak Mirani, executive vice president Riona Sheikh and the diversity, equity and inclusion committee directors.
After seeing the post, Mirani said he feared for the members’ safety. He added that none of the members, including himself, had any direct involvement in the resolution.
Mirani and speaker of the legislature Diego Henriquez supported tabling the resolution so voting would occur next week.
“I think the bill should have been tabled until after the Jewish holidays,” Mirani said.
But, he continued, he doesn’t think tabling the resolution would’ve impacted the outcome of the vote.
A legislator motioned to table the resolution at Wednesday’s meeting. The motion failed with only two legislators voting in favor.
Sheikh wrote in a statement to The Diamondback that she has no power over when bills are voted on and that SGA provided numerous accommodations for legislators practicing Yom Kippur to vote. The association has voted on divestment resolutions during Muslim holidays multiple times, Sheikh added.
“The unsettling amount of scrutiny put on this SGA’s administration is a clear act of racism and Islamophobia towards what is probably the most people of color and Muslims the SGA has ever seen,” Sheikh wrote. “To misconstrue the SGA’s actions as antisemitism is obviously a desperate attempt to discredit a bill that simply condemns massacring innocent people.”
[SGA resolution demands UMD recognize Israel’s offensive in Gaza as genocide]
Resolution sponsor Zyad Khan said proxy voting and an online student concern form provided opportunities for students and legislators not able to attend the meeting to have their voices heard.
“The priority for us was to make sure that there was accommodations, and I believe SGA did provide them,” the representative for the computer, mathematical and natural sciences college said.
Abel Amene, a senior economics and physics major, testified in favor of the resolution at the beginning of the meeting.
“I know some Zionists and Jewish exceptionalists have claimed that today is not the day to bring this resolution to a vote,” Amene said. “But I ask you this simple question, if the genocide is occurring on a Jewish holiday … should we wait until tomorrow or the next day to do the little work we can do in our power to stop that genocide?”
Last April, students voted in favor of divestment in a campuswide referendum. This is the first time SGA has voted on a resolution with divestment since the referendum. Similar resolutions failed to pass in 2017, 2019 and 2024.
University president Darryll Pines said in an interview with The Diamondback last week that the university supports student dialogue on the issue as long as the process is “open and fair and has dialogue from all parties of our broad student body.”
This university did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday’s vote before publication. The University of Maryland College Park Foundation directed all comments to the university.
Khan said the passage of the resolution was the bare minimum. He added that the SGA has a responsibility to tell the university they do not want partnerships with “corporations that just are profiting off the suffering of other individuals in the name of security or defense.”
“The [people of Gaza] have gone through two years … of genocide,” the senior computer science major said. “And the fact that this took so long, when this bill was introduced back in 2017 is a shame.”
Assistant news editor and administration reporter Sam Gauntt interviewed university president Darryll Pines for this story. Staff writer Sanya Wason contributed reporting.
This story has been updated.
