America's Academic Gulag (w/ MIT Student Activists) | The Chris Hedges Report

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

“You can't just sit there and build drones and not talk about who it's serving and who does it help,” says Richard Solomon, PhD student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and member of the Coalition for Palestine at MIT. On this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, Solomon and fellow MIT PhD student Prahlad Iyengar detail their battle against the historic institution’s active participation in the genocide in Gaza. Their story exemplifies the repression students face across the country who dare question how their work and labor are used to advance the illegal and morally reprehensible goals of the Israeli military.

“What this ultimately means is that MIT's research can enable a genocide and in fact is enabling the ongoing genocide against Palestinians,” Iyengar states plainly. The two students have found themselves in hot water recently following Iynegar’s tepid encounter at a MIT career fair as well as an op-ed authored by the student coalition.

Iyengar’s engagement with Lockheed Martin recruiters—where, after politely waiting in line at a career fair, he expressed his discomfort for their involvement in the genocide and climate crisis—resulted in him being charged with harassment and intimidation of the recruiters. The op-ed called out Daniela Rus, director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, for the laboratory’s direct collaboration with the Israeli military. Rus successfully pressured MIT’s paper, The Tech, to retract the article despite it presenting publicly available information and real ties to the Israeli military apparatus.

“By introducing these technologies and by enabling these technologies,” Iyengar tells Hedges, “what is really being enabled by MIT's research for the Israeli military is the ability for drones to engage in tracking, in facial recognition, in targeting of Palestinians.”

Solomon makes clear that the politicization of academic work is not novel and recently, MIT itself has distanced itself from projects that are tied to genocides or wars. “If MIT did it for the genocide in Darfur in 2008, if they could divest from the Draper labs, if they could, at one point, I think in 2022, they ended their relationships with a Russian university that they'd helped establish—I mean, if they can do those things over political crimes and acts and recognize them as political moves, they can also do the same for the Palestinians,” he says.

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Host:

Chris Hedges

Producer:

Max Jones

Intro:

Diego Ramos

Crew:

Diego Ramos, Sofia Menemenlis and Thomas Hedges

Transcript:

Diego Ramos

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Transcript

Chris Hedges

Public universities, private universities, colleges and junior colleges receive billions of dollars in Department of Defense research contracts. But the university that consistently tops the list of Department of Defense research contracts is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). This research for the war industry focuses on information technology, nanotechnology, biotechnology, robotics and weapons. It is not only designed to enhance the lethality of weapons systems, but to allow the Pentagon and the war industry to frame the questions at universities within the narrow confines of what C. Wright Mills calls the military definition of reality. Thus, the world outside our borders is viewed as a series of threats. It divides nations and groups into enemies and allies. It gives primacy not to diplomacy, democracy or cooperation, but to the use of force and coercion whether through militarized violence, propaganda and censorship or the use of financial measures, including sanctions, to manipulate and force other countries to comply with our demands.

MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), led by Daniela Rus, however, has gone a step further, carrying out research to assist the Israeli army’s genocide in Gaza. Rus directs the project “Coreset Compression Algorithms,” which has received $425,000 in direct sponsorship from the Israel’s Ministry of Defense since 2021, according to MIT’s 2024 Brown Books. The project she oversees develops AI algorithms for applications like “city-scale observation systems” and “surveillance and vigilance”. Many of these lightweight algorithms are ideal for teaching small unmanned vehicles, including drones, to track and pursue targets with increased autonomy. Notably, navigating human environments is central: “a human may provide the global path… and the robots will adapt their configuration automatically.” These quadrotor drones are used extensively by Israel to monitor, injure, and kill Palestinian civilians at close range, along with U.N. workers, journalists and medical staff, including doctors, nurses and medics.

Students from the Coalition for Palestine at MIT who have protested the university’s collusion with the genocide, or have questioned weapons manufacturers at MIT job fairs who come to recruit MIT graduates, have been harassed, set upon by police, censored, brought before disciplinary committees and suspended. MIT, like universities across the country, has shut down free speech in an effort to quash student discussion and dissent about the genocide. MIT sent several of students “no contact” and “no harassment” orders for Prof. Rus. It forced The Tech, the school newspaper, to retract an op-ed piece denouncing the collaboration with the Israeli military and then suspended all opinion pieces by the paper, This comes directly after the suspension and effective expulsion of MIT PhD student Prahlad Iyengar, in part due to an email he sent Professor Rus’ students “offering support” and a “safe space” to discuss her research.

Joining me to discuss the targeting of students who speak out against the genocide and the collaboration of universities such as MIT with Israel’s extermination campaign are MIT PhD students Prahlad Iyengar and Richard Soloman.

So Prahlad, let's begin with you and I want you to spell out for viewers what it is these systems are doing. What is Israel hoping to get from MIT research?

Prahlad Iyengar

Thanks for that question, Chris. The research projects at MIT primarily go toward drone research for the Israeli Ministry of Defense. So one of the projects is called heterogeneous autonomous drone swarms. So they're interested in figuring out how to create networks of drone swarms that can coordinate together to track targets. This project is led by Professor Eytan Modiano in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems. This project basically allows a drone swarm to be able to track moving targets. The explicit application includes vehicles in traffic, it could also include protesters in a demonstration. And it could include individuals, individuals going about their daily lives in Gaza. There's other projects, including the coreset compression algorithms, like you mentioned, which, although they seem to have only to do with mathematics and algorithmic work, are actually primed to work for machine learning deployed on drones. So the issue with deploying machine learning algorithms on drones is that drones don't have that much capacity, don't have that much computational capacity on board. So they have to communicate back to a home drone. Coreset compression is a method to reduce significantly the amount of computation that needs to be done to allow drones to perform machine learning assisted tasks. And these tasks include facial recognition. That is an explicit application cited in the paper by Daniela Rus. So, you know, by introducing these technologies and by enabling these technologies, what is really being enabled by MIT's research for the Israeli military is the ability for drones to engage in tracking, in facial recognition, in targeting of Palestinians. And that's something that has been exposed over the last year, but even before then, as a very faulty system that the Israeli military uses to target Palestinians on a widespread basis, including civilian targets, mischaracterization and misidentification of civilians as combatants, including children as combatants. This also includes the targeting of children. I mean, these quadcopters mounted with machine guns have been known to target children in their chest areas and in the head areas, clearly aiming for lethal wounds. A lot of people who argue for these ties and for this kind of research, claim that this kind of research helps make things more safe, helps make attacks more precise. But what we've actually seen in practice is that the Israeli military uses these to pick targets, and then they've actually escalated their threshold for what is considered a casualty, a civilian casualty. They allow for 20 or even up to 100 casualties per attack. And in practice, what actually ends up happening is a lot more civilian casualties per attack without any guarantee of actually attacking any combatant. Of course, what this ultimately means is that MIT's research can enable a genocide and in fact is enabling the ongoing genocide against Palestinians. So this is the type of research that's being done at MIT. I'm sure that there's plenty of other research going on at other universities and throughout the Israeli military industrial complex. But this research in particular kind of leverages MIT's expertise and MIT researchers' expertise in machine learning, in artificial intelligence deployed in lightweight algorithms for genocidal purposes.

Chris Hedges

And the magazine in Israel, +972, talked about how many of these targets are picked by AI. Are these drones essentially responding to human controllers or are they being directed by algorithms?

Prahlad Iyengar

So it's actually possible to do both with these technologies. It's possible to set a human control path. For example, for a drone swarm, it's possible to sort of coordinate them so that they follow a human-defined path. But then it's also possible for them to follow their own dynamically developed path based on interruptions to the initial human-controlled path. What that ultimately means is drones are given much more autonomy to be able to carry out their killing spree. So it no longer necessitates a human to be watching over them all the time. They can make resilient decisions, decisions that allow them to stay in the air and stay on target without any human oversight. This is an extremely dangerous development. Of course, it has been, the use of drone technology in warfare has been escalating since well before the current genocide, even through the Obama administration, even before then.

But these new capabilities, augmented by artificial intelligence, essentially allow humans to stop giving any oversight. And the limited oversight that is brought forth is basically a superficial check, right? A superficial checkbox that isn't really taking into account the devastation that these drones are wreaking upon Palestinians. And of course, it's not like the Israeli military is going to stop, even if they know that this is going to have massive humanitarian consequences. We've seen them—despite all of the warnings, despite all of the outcry from the international community—continue their genocidal onslaught against Palestinians. So this is definitely dangerous technology in dangerous hands.

Chris Hedges

Well, we know from the drone papers that were leaked by Daniel Hale and published in The Intercept that in fact most of the casualties, or most of the dead even, inflicted by drones in places like Afghanistan where they had kind of remote drone operators in air bases in Nevada, were civilian casualties.

Prahlad Iyengar

Yes, that's definitely the case. And I think that speaks to the fact that handing this over to AI is not going to solve things, right? It's only going to make things much worse. But Richard, go ahead.

Richard Solomon

Yeah, and I was going to say, I think this is part of a broader pattern in the history of warfare in capitalism and under Western empires is to try to remove as much as possible a sense of human guilt and direct complicity. You know, it used to be that you'd have to send in large armies and sit in trenches and fight each other. And now people in Nevada can be on a computer screen and shooting and killing civilians in Yemen. And it doesn't have the same impact. And I think of AI and the kind of research that MIT is engaged in is a process of shifting the risks and the pain and the blood and the violence artificially to the war zone and away from the actual people who are calling the decisions and the shots. And this, I think, is a very scary development. And it means that people can tolerate even higher levels of organized violence against entire societies without feeling like they're the ones actually doing it.

Chris Hedges

Richard, I want to ask you, you speak Arabic, you were in the US State Department. Like me, you spent a significant amount of time in the Muslim world, which I think gives you a perspective about what's happening that a lot of people don't have. I've spent quite a bit of time since October 7th—twice been to Egypt and Jordan this summer in the West Bank, two trips to Qatar. And I think what oftentimes is lost is how this genocide is playing out, especially among Muslims, but not just Muslims, I mean, anybody within the Arab world. And I wondered if you could just talk about that, because the rage and sense of impotence, and these were all something that I encountered no matter where I went, in Qatar, Egypt, or anywhere else, and you were in Saudi Arabia, of course. Just talk about that from what it looks like from outside the United States.

Richard Solomon

Well, I'm an American citizen. I grew up here. I'm not Muslim. I'm Christian. I can't speak to that kind of rage. But I can say that the American diplomatic corps is a group of people who are completely segregated from the societies that they are oppressing. When they go to Cairo or to Lebanon or even to Saudi Arabia, they are living in armed garrisons, right? And even those of us like myself who will interview hundreds of people a day in the consular section are not engaging with people on a level playing field. I mean you are the person in my case who is conferring on someone the privilege to move across borders, something that we all have as citizens in the global north, but they do not. Especially in a place like the Gulf, where in many countries the majority of the population is not even a citizen of that country, and are from diverse backgrounds in the Global South. They're the ones that face this kind global apartheid regime. And so when the US government, propelled by all the different partisan party competition politics and the needs of empire and of resource extraction in a place like the Middle East, when we go over and we launch drone strikes into Yemen and create massive humanitarian catastrophes, those people don't get to leave the same way we do. And I think it was that dissonance between my position as someone who holds a black passport, diplomatic passport, can travel anywhere, is not subject to the same laws as everyone else, that diplomatic immunity. It's the dissonance between that and the consequences and the life opportunities that people face who are on… they're on the other end of our violence. That is what kind of propelled me to leave the State Department.

And I think most Americans don't see that every day, even the ones that go to the Middle East. I mean, they live in compounds. They have nice cafes. They are served by people from minoritized backgrounds. They don't speak Arabic. They live in a bubble and in America it's almost more the case. So as soon as an attack like September 11th happens, people see it as coming out of nowhere, but it's part of a broader pattern of, I think, war and violence and authoritarianism in the Middle East that the U.S. government actively supports. And I don't think people often realize that the reason the U.S. government supports the monarchy in Jordan and the dictatorship in Egypt is related to Palestine. I mean, if those governments became democratic governments, there would be much more pressure on the regime to do something about the genocide of Palestinians and about the apartheid state. And so the US has an interest in the suppression of democratic voices abroad.

And that's an important part of the story. Oftentimes people will point to Israel as some sort of democracy in the Middle East and they'll compare it to Egypt or Lebanon or Jordan but if you adopt a more anti-imperial perspective, you'll see that the suppression of the democratic voice in Egypt is part of why the state of Israel continues as an apartheid state. And that's not as much related to MIT in particular, but MIT definitely takes part in that with its very unique and illegal and unpopular and unprecedented relationships with Israeli military.

Chris Hedges

So let's talk a little bit about the Lockheed Martin job fair and your experience there and what happened and the trajectory. I mean, you're in a pretty serious situation. I mean, you can explain all that, but one year suspension, which essentially is, I've heard you say, is, at this point, probably tantamount to expulsion. Explain what happened because I read what you're charged with and it's just so tepid. I mean, frankly, I'm not in any way, I think what you did is great, I mean, it's, you know, compared to the kind of radicalism of the 1960s, you seem to me incredibly respectful, polite. But talk about what happened.

Prahlad Iyengar

Sure, no, I mean, I think you're exactly correct there. I mean basically what happened was, I and many other people went to the career fair that MIT hosts every year in the fall semester. It's a career fair where obviously students are looking for employment, internships, that sort of thing. And so for us, it's a very odious thing for Lockheed Martin, which is definitely a weapons manufacturing company, whose main mission in the world is to produce weapons of destruction that end lives and participate in these sorts of active genocides across the world.

Chris Hedges

Well, they make Hellfire missiles.

Prahlad Iyengar

Exactly, they make the Hellfire missiles that rain on Gaza right now. And so for me, you know, and for many other people, it brings to mind the question, why are they here at MIT recruiting student labor for their mission? So, you know, I mean, the actual bare bones of what I and many other people did is we came into the lines, waiting for a chance to speak to Lockheed Martin. I personally spoke to one recruiter at length and we talked about my background, my interests, but then we started talking about the company and what the company's involved in and expressed basically discomfort that it's involved in the current genocide against Palestinians, it contributes to the climate disaster by manufacturing weapons of destruction that produce significant emissions that affect our environment and asking about why they wanted to recruit labor for these kinds of projects. At that point, the first recruiter, because he wasn't really much of an expert in civilian technologies, he didn't really know anything about my field either, he actually directed me to speak with his colleague who is another recruiter at the career fair. So I went back in line and I stood in line to speak with that recruiter. And right as I was first in line to speak to that recruiter, the career fair staff at MIT decided to move the Lockheed Martin recruiters into a private room and take students one at a time to speak with them.

And so I moved along with them and moved, you know, waited right outside in line, right outside of the room. And, you know, the video evidence that was submitted against me in my discipline case, probably like 80% of the video is just me standing outside of a door on my phone or talking to some friends or something like that. And there's no indication of any sort of, I didn't even get the chance to interact with any more Lockheed Martin recruiters because at some point later they decided to leave the fair. But fast forward a few weeks later and I got a disciplinary notice that said that I was charged with harassment and intimidation of the Lockheed Martin recruiters, creating an environment that was so unsafe for them that they had to leave via an Uber Black, right? The most expensive Uber option for some reason. So, you know, I mean, this sort of manufacturing of the narrative here makes it seem like we're a threat when in reality all we did was ask them questions, right? I mean, the way that I participated in the career fair is the way that I expect anybody to be able to participate in a career fair. Asking recruiters questions, having a resume, wanting them to read the resume or to take it, speaking with them about ethical concerns. These are things that I expect people to do at career fairs in general. The fact that I was specifically targeted and others were specifically targeted for doing that with Lockheed Martin indicates this sort of bias against the organizing body at MIT. And then a few weeks later, in November, actually, at the beginning of November, I received another charge and this charge was regarding an essay that I had written for one of our students zines called “The Written Revolution.” My essay was about pacifism, and it was about a kind of a critical analysis of the role of pacifism within liberation movements and leftist movements. And for writing that essay, I was charged with harassment and intimidation. It had no, I mean, the essay was submitted to a student-run zine. I am one of the folks who runs the zine. Nobody in the club said that there was harassment or intimidation. It was people who decided to pick up our magazine and read it and found the content so odious that they decided to report it for harassment and intimidation.

But on the basis of that article and the email that you mentioned, I was banned from campus and I'm still banned from campus to this day. Later on, because of the pressure that we had put against MIT for this violation of free speech, MIT decided to split my discipline cases into two separate cases. So instead of grouping them all together and trying to paint me as a repeat offender, they didn't like the fact that there was so much scrutiny over the magazine article. So they split it up, suspended me for the interaction with the Lockheed Martin recruiters. And they told me that if I get charged with harassment or intimidation again, then it is likely going to result in expulsion. What did I receive after that? Immediately after receiving the decision about the suspension, a few weeks later, I actually received another notice that I'm going to be put in front of the disciplinary committee for harassment and intimidation for my article. In other words, they're basically setting it up for expulsion. There's no other way to put it. There's no kind of way to sugarcoat that. They clearly have an agenda. I think that agenda has been set by right-wing pressure on MIT, including in last December, was a subpoena or there was an appearance of the MIT president to Congress, and she was questioned about anti-Semitism with regard to the Palestine movement. I mean, anti-Semitism is something that we should all condemn, but of course, what they're talking about when they say anti-Semitism is really political anti-Zionism, which has nothing to do with anti-Semitism.

But at the end of the day, what they're really doing is caving into these pressures and setting things up so that I will be expelled from the Institute for voicing my political opinion and for participating in protest activity in general. And of course, this is all targeted behavior because they know that I'm someone who's active in the pro-Palestine community and they're hoping to sort of decapitate the movement by targeting leaders that they can recognize.

Chris Hedges

Yeah, and you have a grant that allows you to study for your doctorate, which you can explain the details of that, that you're now in jeopardy of losing. Is that correct?

Prahlad Iyengar

That's correct. I received the National Science Foundation Fellowship, which is a fellowship that lasts five years. It funds three out of five years and you can kind of choose which three of those years. But if you are not registered as a student during any time in that period of five years, the remainder of the grant will be forfeit. So by forcibly suspending me, they are actually basically getting rid of my funding. And you know, I think it's a tragedy, not just for my own research, but of course, this is a very prestigious fellowship. It's something that, it's a case where I've been recognized for my own scientific achievements. But MIT of course wants to target me and wants to get rid of this funding so that the path to an expulsion could be smoother for them. And I think there's no question of the fact that they've calculated that into their move.

Chris Hedges

And the committee has said, if you do, you have to go back to the same disciplinary committee in order to be, in essence, readmitted to the university. I'm going to sum it up, you probably know the exact words, but basically you have to grovel and promise to completely be obsequious to the centers of power in order for that suspension to be lifted. Is that correct?

Prahlad Iyengar

That is correct. They specifically said that I'll have to convince them that my political expression can be within institute expectations. That's something that to me is very chilling. The fact that they can set expectations for how political expression ought to be done is a very chilling thing. And it's something that I have to convince the committee of before being readmitted, which is another reason I think that they've effectively expelled me.

Chris Hedges

Let me, before I go to Richard, I just want to ask you what it is that brought you to the Palestine question. All of us in the humanities never think of you like brilliant STEM people as kind of walking into those areas. I hold both of you, of course, in great admiration. But what is it that brought you to stand up?

Prahlad Iyengar

I would say, I learned of Palestine from a friend of mine in undergrad when I went to Georgia Tech and her family is Palestinian, they're from Ramallah, and I learned about the ongoing settler occupation, experience of apartheid, the experience of genocide that her ancestors had felt in Palestine. I think… learning all of that had a profound effect on me because I, up to that point hadn't realized that there was this much history behind an area that, you know, I'd only had ever heard of things like peace in the Middle East and jokes made about that and these kind of like large themes that people were talking about. The more I learned about it, the more I realized that when they say peace in the Middle East, what they're specifically talking about is Palestine. And they're talking about the subjugation of Palestinians to the point where they can force peace.

And that didn't sit right with me, right? The idea that this narrative of Palestinians is being entirely squashed by American empire. So since then and since the Sheikh Jarrah evictions which were going on during my undergraduate time, which is another example, of course, of ethnic cleansing against Palestinians, I've paid attention to the Palestinian cause. I've tried to use my voice to uplift it. And obviously since October 7th, that has required heightened action.

Chris Hedges

Go ahead, Richard.

Richard Solomon

Yeah, I was just going to say that what Prahlad's experienced and what many of us have experienced being suspended and banned from campus, I mean, dozens of people, right? I see it as a broader pattern in the weaponization of narratives of harassment and the elevation of feelings of Zionist faculty and students over the lives of Palestinians and over any opportunity for them to be held accountable. You know, other people who have spoken out against Daniela Rus who have written on public chalkboards, who have asked her questions during Q&A sessions at the many events and award events that she goes to. They've also been given no contact orders. The student newspaper, as you pointed out, which published our opinion piece calling on Daniela Rus to step up and show some moral backbone and end her connections with the Israeli military, that was taken down under the assumption that it was fueling harassment.

And I see this kind of as part of a winning formula. I mean we know the schools, not just MIT, but they've gathered over the summer and they've shared their wisdom and experience about how best to suppress dissent to what they're doing. And I think they've figured out that if they can frame political speech as a form of harassment, it will work. And in some ways this is kind of ironic because it's, and I think you pointed this out really well, when compared to the ‘60s and ‘70s, when Noam Chomsky was here at MIT, the students would riot. I mean, they barricaded buildings. They built a battering ram and rammed down the office of the president to speak with him. I think at Columbia, the president was taken hostage for a day. Like, this was part of that political culture. And whereas now, when we are, I think extremely deferential to norms of politeness, we are still kind of given the short end and the bat. And I think it's because they're very scared. I mean, they know that the movement at MIT is very popular. A lot of us might be very outspoken, but we asked the students themselves in a series of referenda across the entire campus: Do you support ending these ties with the Israeli military? And the super majorities came back, yes, we want this ended. If MIT did it for the genocide in Darfur in 2008, if they could divest from the Draper labs, if they could, at one point, I think in 2022, they ended their relationships with a Russian university that they'd helped establish. I mean, if they can do those things over political crimes and acts and recognize them as political moves, they can also do the same for the Palestinians. That's my personal opinion, but I'll let you ask a question.

Chris Hedges

So Richard, talk a little bit about, I didn't ask Prahlad about this, the ties with Elbit Systems and with, [inaudible] Feldman, there's a professor and I don't know where they are, Tel Aviv or somewhere, but talk a little bit about the direct ties with Israel.

Richard Solomon

Right, so back in March and April, when we had published our findings about MIT's direct research ties to the Israeli military, they came back and told us that this is a form of academic freedom. We cannot tell faculty what to do and so on. It's not an institutional collaboration. And all the other examples we had cited for divestment were institutional collaborations as well. MIT has a direct tie with Elbit Systems.

Chris Hedges

You should just explain what Elbit Systems is. Go ahead, just for people who don't know.

Richard Solomon

Elbit, for those who don't know, is Israel's largest defense contractor. They build killer drones, surveillance drones and technology. This is used within the occupation in the West Bank and Gaza. It's also exported abroad. For instance, to Azerbaijan when they committed ethnic cleansing of Artsakh in September of 2023. I think the Indian military is a significant purchaser of these drones and technologies. Well, MIT has kind of a direct institutional collaboration with Elbit through what they call the Industrial Liaison Program. This program gives Elbit privileged access to the campus, to MIT faculty and expertise. Typically—and Prahlad you can correct me if I'm wrong—there's a grant that Elbit gives to a faculty member, and they negotiate over some sort of research opportunity. This also allows Elbit to recruit MIT graduates or students who are graduating into its company.

And then as we pointed out with Dan Feldman, who is an Israeli researcher with ties to Elbit at the University of Haifa, he and Daniela Rus have been working on this corset compression algorithms project for a while. Daniela Rus has also authored, co-authored papers with top AI engineers at Elbit Systems. We know that from public information, this does not require any sort of hacking. You simply look them up on LinkedIn, you read their papers, you find who they're co-authoring with, you see who they're thanking as sponsors. It's very clear and it's very out in the open. When we publish these findings, of course, it's considered harassment. But they're very proud of it when they boast about it to their own circles. It's only when it's cast in a critical light in the mass media, in the student media, in campus politics, that they begin to see it as a threat.

Chris Hedges

Richard, just tell me about, because you're a political science PhD student. A lot of people probably don't know MIT has a political science program and you had mentioned before we went on the air, war games. I mean just talk a little bit about how deep the roots of the war industry go into even the humanities.

Richard Solomon

Right, well, you know, I don't want to get in too much trouble with my faculty advisors and all that, I'm kind of on thin ice. But I will say that the security studies program at MIT, which is part of the political science department, they have a number of military fellows that come every year. They literally sit in offices on Saturday mornings and pretend like they're at war with each other in different rooms on their computers. For the faculty and for researchers and scientists, this is seen as like useful in understanding how wars unfold and so on.

My concern with all of this, and it's a long-standing theme in MIT's relationships with the Pentagon, is that they're trying to help the U.S. military perfect the tools of industrialized, organized violence against people. These are not tools that are designed to help a country defending itself against an invasion. That's not the United States, right? And I don't know enough about the programs in particular, but I would say that these are often so-called conventional wars, like between countries when they sit there on their war games, but there are also these insurgencies. There are also things like how to best, you know, dismantle Hezbollah or some other non-state group. And that's a political question too, it's not just a military one. And I think if we don't reflect on the political nature of what we're doing, and also the moral one, those kinds of activities I think are bound to only increase the capacity of the world's largest superpower, a nuclear armed state with military bases across the entire world, right? That's not like a neutral scientific question.

And I think a lot of what Prahlad and I and our colleagues who represent the majority of the voice on campus are trying to do is to politicize people into thinking of their research not as morally neutral. You can't just sit there and build drones and not talk about who it's serving and who does it help. I mean, a lot of us are here because we believe that our science has an emancipatory power to repair, to heal, to help with human flourishing. And unfortunately, that's not really what we see in the kinds of research that's being done. And I think that's related to who is sponsoring the research, right? I mean, everybody recognizes by now that when the tobacco industry is sponsoring studies on lung cancer, it's bound to be biased, right? The same applies to the pharmaceutical industry or to sugar or to the oil industry and climate research, which is another…

Chris Hedges

Right, BP sponsoring climate science programs.

Richard Solomon

Right? And so the same principle should apply to militaries when they're sponsoring research at academic institutions. And unfortunately, the leadership of MIT has been ignoring the kind of collective voice of the campus and of the country and of the world in saying that we want to distance ourselves from the military and we want our research to affirm human life and not human death and organized violence.

Chris Hedges

You were going to say something Prahlad and then I had a question. Go ahead.

Prahlad Iyengar

Yeah, I was just going to add maybe two more notes about Elbit Systems and Daniela Rus’ complicity there. One more thing to note about Elbit Systems and the way that Daniela Rus has engaged with them is, you know, she has tried in her, the pressure that she put on The Tech, which is the newspaper at MIT, when she kind of put pressure to force them to retract the article that the coalition had published about her ties, she tried to make it seem that her research is purely mathematical, that it has no military application, that it could not be applied in the military context in the way that we had published about. But in reality, a presentation of the exact title of her project, which is called Coreset Compression Algorithms, so a presentation exactly about these Coreset Compression Algorithms, was given by Dan Feldman, her collaborator and former postdoc, who's now a professor at the University of Haifa. He gave a presentation about coreset compression algorithms to Elbit Systems. Elbit Systems is not a conglomerate of multiple different types of research and avenues of human productivity. It is purely a defense contractor. That is purely its job. So to present those algorithms in front of Elbit Systems means that researchers at Elbit think that they're interesting for their own uses and researchers at University of Haifa and at MIT see an opportunity in working with Elbit Systems. And as Richard mentioned, Elbit Systems is complicit not only in the genocide in Gaza but also in the ongoing occupation in Kashmir. Also, technology from Elbit Systems is used along the border between the US and Mexico for surveillance. So there's a lot of complicity to be found there. The last thing I'll mention is, Richard mentioned this very important and destructive narrative that's coming from these universities about harassment. And that's the narrative that, of course, Daniela Rus has used to claim that these criticisms of her research practices and her research partnerships are harassing her as a private member of the MIT Institute, right? As somebody who is a private citizen of MIT and not a public official or somebody in a public role like the president or the chancellor.

Well, Daniela Rus actually happened to spend some of her time in the last five years on the Defence Innovation Board briefing the Pentagon. She has served in government roles in a capacity for the government, right? I mean, these are roles that directly brief the Pentagon, right? She's been in calls with multiple military leaders who report directly to the Pentagon. So I mean, I think it's absolutely ridiculous for anyone to try to claim, especially the MIT disciplinary process, to try to claim that this constitutes harassment of a private individual. She certainly takes every opportunity she can to be as public facing, as she possibly can when she promotes her startup, when she engages with the DOD, when she tries to seek these opportunities for increasing her own image and self-importance.

But when it comes to criticism against her, she tries to retreat behind the MIT name and pretend that she's not a public figure. Again, she's the director of an entire laboratory, the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, which houses multiple professors and many different projects at MIT. She is clearly a public figure and is subject and should be and ought to be subject to criticism for her research practices and for who she chooses to engage with in her research partnerships.

Chris Hedges

So I have to ask you, Prahlad, you're clearly the poster child. The MITs, what they've done to you, you're the message. You stand up the way [inaudible] stands up, and you lose your grant. You are expelled. Your career is in jeopardy. You can't get a job with Lockheed Martin. I don't think you want one. So where do we go from here? I mean, I find this moment very frightening because they're not going back in terms of the imposition of these draconian measures. The genocide, we have Israeli officials in the last week talking about months, years more of genocide, which of course is just bringing the extermination process to fruition. You're right about the ‘60s. I was a boy. My father was an anti-war activist, a civil rights activist. Daniel, the great radical Catholic priest, Daniel Berrigan, who was a friend, baptized my daughter, my youngest daughter. I mean, they broke into weapon systems, poured blood over missiles, burned draft records. Thinking about this moment, we have to stand up.

I've got to believe that to a certain extent there's also a kind of catering on the part of these administrations to the incoming Trump administration. I'll ask you first and then I'll ask Richard, you know, what that great line from Lenin, what must be done?

Prahlad Iyengar

I mean, it's a grand question. And I think, you know, I, as one individual can't necessarily claim to answer what must be done in its totality. But from my perspective, as much as they try to attack us, like when their repression is the harshest and when their repression is reaching this contradictory point, that is the moment where they are the most vulnerable. I think MIT is extremely vulnerable because at this point we have exposed MIT as the weakest chain in the Zionist armor. It's one thing for many universities and many SJPs [

Students for Justice in Palestine] at universities to demand divestment from the Israeli entity, by divestment from these corporate partnerships, et cetera. But it's a whole different story, it's a whole different ballgame when you start to realize that these universities are directly doing research for the Israeli Ministry of Defense. And as we were talking about just before we started recording, other universities have reached out to us, contacting us about the possibility of doing this type of research in their own universities, right? Trying to find out where are we complicit? Are we doing research with the Israeli Ministry of Defense? Is it more than just divestment? And across the board, I think the answer is yes.

You'll find that a lot of places have this type of complicity, are not just partnering with companies like Lockheed Martin, but are directly doing research with the Israeli Ministry of Defense either through corporate ties or directly through their own research. And this is the case at several of the universities which have now popped up finding this research because they saw the research that we had done at MIT. So for me, this is the moment where we strike hardest. We continue to persevere and to make sure that we speak truth to power. The repression that they hand down is definitely not the end of the story. I mean it can be scary at certain times, but there's been a lot of people who have faced repression and can continue to speak out. And of course, many of those folks from the ‘60s faced significant repression from the state and from their own institutions and today are not just doing just fine, but have laid out the roadmap for how to survive under that level of scrutiny and how to make a living under that level of scrutiny.

I think it's important for people to recognize that we must do what we can to support the people of Gaza, to support the people of Lebanon, to support the people of Yemen, of Sudan, and of course of the DRC, of the Congo, and rise up and make sure that the globally oppressed do not go voiceless in these systems of empire, right? That they get represented and that they get their voices heard. And sometimes their voices, yes, call for the dismantling. In fact, pretty much in all times, their voices call for the dismantling of these imperial systems. You know, as far as where we go next specifically, I think that that requires a diversity of tactics. People need to be ready to embrace more hardline tactics, but also broad public education and awareness tactics to make sure that people that we can create the popular cradle for the change that is necessary to end this genocide. And I think that requires us to be bold. It requires us to face this repression head on to create mutual aid networks to make sure that we can take care of the people who are facing this level of oppression and also make sure that we don't end up shooting ourselves in the foot by making ourselves reliant upon these institutions that don't actually value us for our opinion, but only for our labor, such as MIT. So I think establishing those networks, making sure that we can create that popular cradle will be really important so that we can diversify our tactics going forward and really take it to the war machine.

Chris Hedges

What you've done, what so few students in elite institutions have been willing to do, which is jeopardize your own degree, I mean your own advancement within that institution, what would you say to them and how does it feel to be in your situation?

Prahlad Iyengar

I've reflected on this quite a bit about how it feels to be in this situation. I mean, in the large part, it feels surreal, but I will say a few weeks ago, a friend of mine sent me a video of these Palestinian school children who were handed a pair of headphones, much like the one I'm wearing. And over that pair of headphones, they heard the sound of the school bell. And it's a sound that they hadn't heard in over a year and it brought tears to their eyes. They started breaking down and crying, remembering the joy of being in school, the joy of being with their peers and their teachers and their classmates, many of whom have probably been killed by these airstrikes by the Israeli military, probably all of whom have been displaced from their homes. This might be the second or third or fourth displacement in their family across the generations since the Nakba of 1948.

And they still persevere. So for the schoolchildren of Gaza, they don't even have the opportunity to mourn not being in class or not seeing their friends at school. They have to survive a genocide. Seeing that video reminded me that regardless of what we face here, it is nowhere close to having to face an active genocide against your people. And in many ways, it is our duty to put ourselves on the line in this way regardless of the repression that we face, to make sure that those voices are heard and to make sure that at some point in the future, Palestinian children can return to school, that the Palestinian society can come to fruition, that the Palestinians get the state that they deserve and are able to end the ongoing settler occupation of their lands. I think it's really important for us to keep that focus when we think about the actions that we take here.

Chris Hedges

Richard.

Richard Solomon

Yeah, I would agree with Prahlad that our role as students at these universities is twofold. The first is to raise the costs of war until its masters end it. That's a quote from Mike Albert, was a kind of 1960s era student activist and leader who was expelled from MIT and continued to have these relationships with Noam Chomsky. And I think that the other thing that we can do as students is, one, to signal to the world that these projects of Zionism, of apartheid, of occupation, they're losing their legitimacy and their support by educated generations of people. And that requires perseverance.

It's taken maybe 12, 13 months for Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International to declare formally that what's happening in Gaza is a genocide, an intent, an effect. It took time for that, but there's a consensus growing, I think, a moral consensus that this can't continue. And as a student of politics, when I look back and I derive great inspiration from the struggle of the Irish for unification and for the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. And in both cases, I mean, it took years and years and years for their struggle to bear fruit. I mean, Ireland's a story of centuries of struggle against settler colonialism. And what happens isn't necessarily that they definitively beat the forces of the state on the battlefield, right? But they do fatigue their enemy and they persevere long enough that the public's, you know, whether within the country, for instance, within the British Empire or in South Africa, the global public decides that we can't support this any longer. And with Israel in particular, I think it's a political formation that is much more fragile than we think. And that's due to, one, its very unique dependence on American public finance, weapons, state aid, philanthropy. These are connections that can be cut fairly quickly.

And the second is its demographic fragility. I think, I mean, the Israeli productive economy, to use that phrase in quotes, is relying on a very thin base of educated people. And if those people decide that it's not in their interest to raise families in a war zone anymore, if the Palestinians can raise the costs of general life under occupation to be so extreme that nobody wants to live there anymore and they'd rather emigrate to Europe or the United States. Then a lot of that economy is going to collapse. And so I think it's in our interest and it's part of our vision to see a future for the Holy Land that's more just and equal and democratic. And to that end, we just continue. I mean, at MIT, despite all the oppression, we're continuing to grow. I mean, we're adding more student groups. We had the Latino Cultural Center and Trans at MIT both join our coalition. We passed a resolution in the Graduate Student Council to sever all ties with Israeli military.

There's some rumors that MIT could reschedule some of these research funding contracts it has with Israeli military. That would be a great win for us in the public theater. So I think for me, when I'm tempted to give up, I think like Prahlad did about the Palestinians I know. I mean, my own host brother in Gaza, Mohammed Musbah, stayed at my family's house in Georgia for several months to get a prosthetic limb. He lost his leg during the Great March of Return protests in 2018-2019 when an Israeli sniper shot off his leg. We were happy to give him a chance to walk again through the PCRF [Palestine Children's Relief Fund]. He went back to Gaza. He got married. He had a small child and in August he and many of his family members, his parents and his brother were killed in Israeli airstrikes. And when I think about giving up, I think about his child who is still alive, she's two years old. I don't think that I have any excuse to give up or say, you know, this is too hot, this is too risky for my career. I mean, I don't, for me as a Christian, I think that the point of living is to love people and to strive for a world that's better. And I think for me in this particular moment in world history, that's the Palestinian struggle for liberation.

And it will likely evolve and branch out. But I think for all people in the world right now, I mean, this is our Vietnam War. This is our anti-apartheid struggle. Generations of people are going to look back at those who were alive and ask them, what did you do to stop a genocide? Did you just stay quiet? Did you side with the forces of violence and death or did you speak up? And I think that can be very difficult and it can cost you your reputation, but in the end you'll find that your soul is much more free and you're much more at peace with yourself because you know you're on the right side of history and of humanity.

Chris Hedges

Well, amen to that. When you confront radical evil, it always has a cost, even at times the cost of your life. They can take away your MIT PhDs, but they can't take away your moral courage and your integrity, both of which you have and which I admire. Thank you very much. I want to thank Sofia [Menemenlis], Diego [Ramos], Max [Jones], and Thomas [Hedges] who produced the show, can find me at ChrisHedges.Substack.com.