There’s a saying in journalism — “If one source says it’s raining and the other source says it isn’t, it’s not a journalist’s responsibility to quote them both. It’s their responsibility to look out the window and report the truth.”

And the truth is that it is raining hard. Israel, with the United States’s full blessing, is raining bombs, missiles and bullets on the people of Palestine, especially the people of Gaza.

This is as clear-cut of a genocide as it gets, yet the Associated Press and most institutions — including De Anza College, Foothill College and the Foothill-De Anza District leadership — refuse to acknowledge it as such.

What’s worse is that on top of this, higher education institutions are outright funding Israel through their investments and partnerships.

According to a resolution from the De Anza Student Body Government, the Foothill-De Anza district in particular holds ties with Israel, from its long-standing partnership with Hewlett-Packard Enterprise — which provides surveillance technology to Israel, which then uses it to conduct mass surveillance and policing of Palestinians — to Lockheed Martin, which manufactures the very planes and bombs that Israel uses to conduct its airstrikes and level entire city blocks in Gaza.

The De Anza Student Government has already called these ties out in 2017 and 2021, with resolutions calling for divestment and standing with the people of Palestine — resolutions which administration and district leadership have conveniently ignored.

Additionally, the district manages its assets and investments through the Vanguard Group — an investment firm with large stakes in Israel’s state-owned holding company, as well as weapons manufacturers like Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics — and there is no clear disclosure as to where its money is going or what it holds stakes in.

The student movement — whether it comes in the form of encampments, people’s universities or mass rallies — aims to call attention to ties such as these, as well as calling out those who ignore the genocide but are in an uproar over the protests.

After all, if those people can ignore the genocide of Palestinians in real time for half a year, they can also ignore the encampments and the student movement in solidarity with Palestine. When the student movement bothers people more than the genocide that the student movement is meant to call attention to, those people don’t want peace — they want silence.

The movement has faced police repression and violence, from tear gas and misleadingly named “rubber bullets” to assault and battery with batons, mace and tasers — yet the encampments stand. The actions continue and won’t back down.

Zionists argue that these actions inherently threaten the safety of Jewish students on campus, despite Jewish students with organizations including Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow taking part in encampments across the nation and hosting seder dinners over the first two nights of Passover, from Yale to Berkeley.

Meanwhile, our colleagues in Gaza — students, workers, educators, doctors, journalists — are either lying dead or awaiting the massacre in Rafah, and it seems to not bother them at all since there is an underground Hamas base under the entire Gaza strip, and that somehow justifies Israel’s policy of poisoning the ground with saltwater by flooding tunnels, bombing the strip into rubble and shooting everything that moves — including the very hostages that Israel is using as justification to prolong the genocide, despite Hamas agreeing to several conditions to ceasefire.

As Israel moves into Rafah with bombs and on foot, there is nowhere for the 1.4 million Palestinians trapped in the city to go.

After all, what good is an evacuation order when there is literally nowhere to evacuate to, after Israel has bombed everything else into rubble?

Calling for a ceasefire and calling what’s happening right now what it is — a genocide — is the bare minimum.

Our district has shown it can divest, like it did from fossil fuel corporations in 2013; the district can do it again. Students at University of California, Riverside and California State University, Sacramento have shown that they have the collective power to make demands of their administration; it’s time for De Anza and Foothill’s students to demand that the district and administration call the Palestinian genocide what it is, then divest from corporations that directly arm and fund the genocide.