Christina Lee, Head Photography Editor

The Sumud Coalition rallied 200 students on Beinecke Plaza on Wednesday to launch a petition to hold a student referendum on three pro-Palestine demands.

The “Books, Not Bombs” petition, endorsed by at least 25 other student groups, calls for Yale to disclose and divest from its holdings in military weapons manufacturers and invest in Palestinian scholars and students, in line with Yalies4Palestine’s recently launched Sustain Our Scholars campaign. 

“The referendum represents an opportunity for students to have a sense of institutional voice,” AJ Tapia-Wylie ’26, an attendee of the rally, told the News. “I think what we saw today was a lot of organizations coming together and finding ways to build coalition and broad support for that referendum. If this is able to continue throughout all corners of Yale’s campus, I think it’s a very winnable thing.”

According to the Yale College Council’s constitution, after a student action group registers a referendum petition, if the petition garners signatures from at least 10 percent of Yale undergraduates within two months, the Yale College Council Senate will hold a simple-majority vote on whether to hold the referendum. 

If the petition does not win a YCC vote but garners signatures from at least 20 percent of the student body — including the original 10 percent — the YCC vote can be overturned, and the petition automatically wins the right to a referendum. 

“The YCC is a neutral facilitator in the referendum process,” YCC President Mimi Papathanasopoulos ’26 and YCC Vice President Esha Garg ’26 wrote in a joint statement to the News. “The Sumud Coalition sent a letter with the referendum proposal to us, which registered their petition with the YCC.”

The Sumud Coalition registered its petition with the YCC on Oct. 31, per Papathanasopoulos and Garg. The coalition declined to disclose how many signatures the petition has garnered so far; however, an organizer in the coalition, who requested anonymity due to doxxing concerns, wrote to the News that they intend to hit their signature goal “well within the two month deadline.” 

During the rally, organizers said they aimed to obtain signatures from 20 percent of Yale College students in the next 10 days.

According to Papathanasopoulos and Garg, in the case that the petition is put to a YCC Senate vote, the YCC may conduct the vote anonymously “in order to protect the safety of its members.”

In the referendum petition, Sumud Coalition organizers cited the Yale Investments Office’s 2021 disclosure of its investments in fossil fuels as precedent for their demand for Yale to disclose its holdings in military weapons manufacturers. However, Marcella Rooney, head of business affairs and administration at the Yale Investments Office, clarified that this disclosure is not standard.

“The fossil fuels estimate was an exception to our long-held policy not to disclose endowment investments given Yale’s broader efforts on climate change,” Rooney wrote to the News.

Other administrators, including Yale College Dean Pericles Lewis and the University spokesperson, have previously explained that the University does not disclose its investments due to contractual obligations barring disclosure and because of the strategic benefits that nondisclosure confers on Yale’s institutional investments. 

Yale’s disclosure of its fossil fuels investments also came at a time when the Yale Corporation had newly approved a set of ethical investment principles that barred investments from the Yale endowment into fossil fuel companies that generate high emissions intensity.  

In a press release regarding the petition, Sumud Coalition organizers also highlighted the 2013 YCC referendum on fossil fuel divestment and the 2023 referendum on the democratization of Yale Board of Trustee elections.

“These successes elevated discourse about divestment and democratization, strengthened student organizing, and provided administrators, trustees, and the campus community with concrete confirmation of students’ stances on crucial issues,” the coalition wrote in the press release. “The Coalition believes these new referendum questions will apply a similar level of pressure on Yale to support education from New Haven to Palestine.”

The Yale Corporation established standards that disqualified investment in certain fossil fuel companies in the spring 2021, more than eight years after the 2013 fossil fuels referendum. So far, the Yale Corporation has not implemented the results of the 2023 democratization referendum, in which students voted overwhelmingly to allow students, faculty and staff to elect members of the Corporation.

The next YCC Senate meeting will take place on Sunday, Nov. 10.

Karla Cortes contributed reporting.