In the 1840s, a million people in Ireland died of starvation in a famine called the An Gorta Mór aggravated by British colonial policies and a providential ideology that preached the poor deserved their fate. Nearly a million others fled to the United States, forming the ancestral taproot of a diaspora that encompasses some 31 million Americans.

Now starvation haunts Gaza: over a third of Palestinians there go days without food. In August, the UN-backed IPC declared famine in Gaza City and its periphery, covering some half a million people. At least 440 people in Gaza have died of starvation since the start of the war. Over 20,000 children were admitted to hospitals for acute malnutrition between April and mid-July. Aid trucks sit on the Egyptian border, spoiling with maggots in the baking sun.

Palestinians and scholars of mass violence call it a genocide, and we should heed their warnings. For months, Israel has prevented the world from moving food and medicine into Gaza, creating pervasive shortages. Israeli forces corral Palestinians into smaller and smaller areas destroying their homes to leave nothing to return to.

By July, 88% of Gaza fell under forced displacement orders or closed zones according to the World Health Organization where anyone can be labeled a terrorist and killed. As an Israeli soldier once admitted, “it’s permissible to shoot everyone, a young girl, an old woman.” Another source in the military’s Southern Command clarified that air strikes are “carried out to ensure that rescue efforts do not take place. First aid providers, rescuers – kill them. Attack again, on them. This is the procedure.”

The Prime Minister advocates depopulating Gaza under the pretext of “voluntary migration”, as if any departure from Gaza can be considered voluntary under current conditions. The Israeli Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi put it more vividly: “voluntary is at times a state you impose until they give their consent.” According to a grim poll by Israeli researchers, 82% of the Israeli Jewish populace support such “transfer” measures.

These atrocities are enabled by the U.S. government, which arms Israel with heavy weapons and pays 70% of war costs, at taxpayer expense.

Ireland has charted a different policy. This fall, Irish lawmakers are considering a bill to restrict trade with Israeli settlements. Ireland joined South Africa’s genocide case against Israel, and Sinn Féin and other left-wing parties are calling for a fuller embargo. In August, the Irish president urged the UN Secretary-General to invoke powers under the UN Charter to authorize military action to break the siege, and the Irish central bank has confirmed it will no longer approve sale of Israeli ‘war bonds’.

As students, we’re often told divestment is an impossible taboo. But in June, Ireland’s Trinity College Dublin and Queen’s University Belfast ended all Israeli investments and severed institutional ties to Israel after mass protests.

If Ireland can do it, why can’t Americans? The United States has divested before. One example is Massachusetts, the heart of Irish America: in 1982, it became the first state to divest pension funds from South African apartheid. In 1984, Boston became the first major city to divest municipally, and Massachusetts schools like Amherst were also first movers on divestment.

That legacy inspires us. This fall, Massachusetts lawmakers are considering bills to divest state pension funds from Israel and adopt an investment policy that excludes arms makers. In Somerville, activists are fielding a municipal ballot question on divestment. On August 7, Medford’s City Council voted 5-1 on a sweeping divestment measure. In Congress, some Massachusetts representatives are sponsoring the Block the Bombs Act.

Students are also saying enough. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where I study, the Israeli military sponsors laboratory research. The majority of students demand MIT end it, as confirmed by three separate votes in our Undergraduate Association, Graduate Student Council, and Graduate Student Union. We know MIT has ended recent engagements over human rights concerns in Saudi Arabia and Ukraine; it can do it again.

Let’s throw our weight behind these efforts and reinvest public funds away from apartheid and towards our communities as we brace from the impact of Trump’s trade wars, austerity, and tax cuts for the 1%.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. Palestinians are under grave attack, but they’re not so different from us. “I was born just like you” wrote the poet Mahmoud Darwish: “I have a mother and a home with many windows. I have brothers, friends and a prison with one cold window. A wave stolen by seagulls…”

Divestment is a concrete way for people of conscience to work together to end the occupation so Palestinians can live with dignity, in a state that values all human life.