Empowerment, sadness and joy swept over Niyanta Nepal when Brown University’s administration announced their intention to deliberate and vote on divesting from companies connected to Israel’s military actions in Gaza.

“We have the power to really create pressure and propel change right now and I’m hopeful about that,” said Nepal, 21, who graduated from Concord High three years ago. “I also have this deep-seated sadness that these atrocities in Gaza have to occur to this extreme level to get this attention.”

Nepal, a junior, has been at the forefront of many demonstrations, from hunger strikes to protesting in encampments on the university’s Main Green, a central park for students, where she and fellow students have spent days chanting slogans and standing in solidarity for Palestinians in Gaza.

Their goal is to pressure the university into withdrawing funds from corporations linked to Israel, in a bid to address the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Palestine.

Similar rallies have been held on college campuses across the country, which have sparked controversy and police response.

Nepal says her goal is peace.

“Jewish and Palestinian identities are very much intertwined and the liberation of one is entirely tied to the liberation of the other,” she said. “We had a lot of moments where we could kind of work together and be in community in a very joyous sense, while also centering the loss of Palestinian lives, and being very, very reflective of that as we took these like intentional actions.”

Nepal’s journey towards justice didn’t begin on the manicured lawns of Brown; it started in the hallways of Concord High School, where among the Black Lives Matter movement, she first felt the call to action, to speak out, to amplify the voices of the marginalized and the silenced.

She wanted to represent and speak out for the school’s diverse student population.

“My love for student advocacy, more so than student activism, I think was born at Concord High,” explained Nepal, as her voice cracked from recent days of chanting in the Palestine protests. “I always wanted to use my voice to shift the narrative away from those who have been heard and towards those who had been oppressed and suppressed and shielded away from the narrative that we have typically been hearing.”

From her days as the student body president at Concord High School to now being a student body president-elect at Brown, Nepal has remained steadfast in activism.

In February, Nepal, who leads the activist coalition on campus, joined 19 other students in an eight-day hunger strike at the university campus. As the days passed, she felt her body growing increasingly tired and drained.

They ensured they drank two liters of water each day and supplemented themselves with electrolytes to avoid being forced to halt their demonstrations due to health concerns.

“I was positioned in a way where we were all thinking about the ongoing famine in Gaza. So the hunger strike was feeling like the bare minimum that we could do to kind of draw light to it,” said Nepal.

To end the recent protests that lasted for seven days, during which the students pitched tents on the main lawn, administrators agreed to bring a divestment proposal to a vote at the Brown Corporation Board’s October meeting on the condition that the tents would be removed by 5 p.m. on Tuesday and the students pledged not to participate in any unauthorized protests for the remainder of the semester.

Nepal said the agreement achieved a major step towards their goals.

“We were screaming, crying and happy beyond what we felt in so long because it had been so disheartening to not even be heard,” said Nepal. “This is just simply one step towards trying to stop our university’s complicity.”

During the days spent on the lawn, members of the community gathered with the students to engage in discussions about the liberation of Palestine, emphasizing the deep intertwined history of Jews and Palestinians. 

But beneath the surface of solidarity, a palpable fear lingered of how the protests might be met. While it wasn’t as severe as the crackdown at Columbia University, the presence of police on campus, checking student IDs twice a day, cast a shadow of unease.

“It is threatening to be to be a person of color and see the police anytime on campus, ” said Nepal. “I think for all of us the fear that we had more so than the police presence was the fact that our university was actively investing in this ongoing genocide and apartheid that’s happening in Palestine.”

Despite the tension, there was a feeling of inclusivity within the group they established, welcoming others to participate and learn, irrespective of their backgrounds, even extending to those who weren’t supportive of Palestine.

Once the tents were dismantled, they found a new purpose, donated to homeless shelters and other organizations, a small gesture of community support to those in need.

While securing a vote on divestment was a significant victory, Nepal stressed that the fight was far from over.

“I think we’re seeing this revolutionary change in pressure point where the university finally has to give in and they have to realize that their financial gains are not over the needs of the students in the community and are not over the needs of Palestinians,” said Nepal. “We finally are getting to be heard. I’m not going to stop and neither are any of the student organizers here in terms of putting pressure on the university to ensure that they meet our demands of divestment.”