School’s student government postponed the vote, originally set to be held during Passover, after pushback from Jewish groups
Georgetown University is set to vote later this month on a school-wide referendum to boycott Israeli businesses and academic institutions after initially scheduling the vote during the Jewish holiday of Passover. The referendum’s sponsor is a student at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service (SFS), Meriam Ahmad, who has referenced “Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza” in news coverage for Georgetown’s student news magazine.
The non-binding referendum, which will be open to student voting from April 26-28, will need to win majority support with at least 25 percent student body participation to pass. The resolution itself makes unsubstantiated claims about the Israeli military targeting civilians and calls on the school to cut off investments in Alphabet, Amazon, and other companies that have worked with the Israel Defense Forces.
Two student senators, Ahmad and Sienna Lipton, introduced the referendum. Ahmad is a student at Georgetown’s prestigious SFS, one of the top institutions for students entering foreign policy roles in the government and diplomatic corps. She is also a writer for the student magazine the Georgetown Voice, where she provided news coverage of a January 2024 “vigil” at which Georgetown students “honored those killed by Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza and echoed calls for an immediate ceasefire.”
The news comes as Georgetown faces criticism over a surge in anti-Semitism and terrorist support on campus. Days after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks, a coalition of student groups signed a letter that defended the terrorist massacre. “Nothing about the resistance of October 7 is ‘unprovoked,'” it said.
The vote also comes as the Trump administration takes steps to crack down on anti-Semitism and pro-Hamas activism at universities across the country, including by cutting off billions in federal funding to prominent higher education institutions like Harvard and Columbia.
Georgetown’s Student Government Association greenlit the referendum earlier this month in a secret vote that bypassed the Policy and Advocacy Committee, breaking precedent.
The ballot measure was initially scheduled for a campus-wide vote on April 14-16. Student government leaders rescheduled it to later this month after objections from the Georgetown Jewish community, which noted that the vote fell during the Passover holiday and would thus prevent some Jewish students from participating.
SFS has faced accusations of enabling “pervasive anti-Semitism” in the aftermath of Oct. 7. A recent graduate of the school, Henrik Schildt, wrote in the Washington Free Beacon:
Outside the School of Foreign Service building, students arranged vigils—not for the murdered or kidnapped Jewish victims, but for Palestinian “martyrs.” The walls were covered in posters proclaiming “Glory to our Martyrs” and “Support Liberation.” Georgetown’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, a radical group that has endorsed Hamas, held “Keffiyeh Thursdays” where students wore the checkered headdress that Palestinian terrorists use to conceal their faces.
Schildt also recounted that faculty declined to take action against a student who posted anti-Semitic memes in classroom chats, including a cartoon of former President Joe Biden as a devil with Stars of David for eyes. Just weeks after the attacks, the school hired faculty member Aneesa Johnson, who has used slurs such as “Zio bitches” and retweeted a photo of a young Orthodox Jewish boy with the caption: “When the world hates you bc you a thief and grew up looking like a shaytan [devil].” Johnson was later put on administrative leave.
In addition to her work in student government and for the Georgetown Voice, Ahmad opposed a plan to rename SFS after former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, citing Albright’s support of sanctions against Saddam Hussein’s regime in 1991. Ahmad, who described herself as a child of Iraqi immigrants, said the renaming was a “direct challenge to my place in the school, and I felt unheard, sidelined.”
Campus Jewish groups, including the Jewish Student Association and Chabad, said the anti-Israel referendum “singles out and demonizes Israel,” and urged students to vote against it.
“This targeting of the world’s only Jewish state falls under the International Holocaust Remembrance Association working definition of anti-Semitism which is recognized by the United States and other world governments,” said the groups.
