“The zip ties hurt or whatever, and you’re kind of uncomfortable… and then you get out of it and you [think] ‘but I’m not dead,’ you know? You get to go home. My children didn’t get hit by a bomb… I slept in my own bed that night,” reflects Josh Stuckey, senior nursing student.
Stuckey was a part of the 17 EMU students involved in a protest on Sept. 9, 2025, that was organized by Mennonite Action. The protest was a display of civil disobedience targeted at Mark Warner, a Democrat senator representing Virginia, calling for action on the ongoing genocide in Palestine. 61 people were arrested as a result of the peaceful display, according to a press release from Mennonite Action.
Ciela Acosta, a junior at EMU who was recently recognized as Mennonite Church USA’s Young Peacemaker, says the protesters made three specific demands centered around public action. Acosta mentions they “wanted a public statement calling for an arms embargo on Israel, a public statement calling for a ceasefire… and to publicly call to allow humanitarian aid to enter into Gaza.” Acosta went on to explain that the protest was “a sit-in civil disobedience direct action protest,” where they “sat in the hallways around [Warner’s] office and sang hymns until we were given three warnings to leave, or we would be arrested, and we sat there until we all got arrested.”
Acosta points out the value of this specific form of protesting, saying, “I think it’s an effective form of protest because just regular protests are built into the system… we’re allowed to do that, right? That’s not quite as disruptive as when we go and sit in, we’re disrupting a system that is in place because we’re not supposed to be there.” She also adds that this form of protesting tends to make it into the media more often because of its disruptive nature, which helps grow Mennonite Action and the movement.
Tim Seidel, associate professor of peacebuilding, development, and global studies, explains the amount of planning that went into this protest, with every detail being intentional. Mark Warner was selected as the focus of this protest for several reasons. Seidel said, “We specifically wanted to focus on a Democrat… because the Democratic Party right now is so distanced from their base on this issue.” Senator Warner represents this distance between the party and its base with Seidel explaining, “When Bernie Sanders presented his joint resolutions [in] late summer, Kaine voted in favor of it, and Warner did not.”
When the protesters arrived at Senator Warner’s office, they were met with two realities they had not planned for. As the group filed into his office and the halls just outside, there was a group of Palestinian Americans who happened to be leaving the office at the same time. Seidel explains the significance of this moment by saying, “At first, there was this… confusion, like, who are these people? But then we had pulled out banners and all that stuff, and when they saw the banners, when they heard [what] we were talking about, they just [said] ‘Free Palestine.’ And they gave a little speech and just shared their feelings.” After their brief but impactful exchange with the delegation of Palestinian Americans, the Mennonite protesters were faced with the second reality: Senator Warner was not in his office.
The group didn’t let this deter them. After all, the protest didn’t start or end on Sept. 9. There has been an active calling campaign targeting Senator Warner and his peers for the past two months. The significance of this protest also expands beyond the demands they made of Mark Warner. Stuckey explains the personal significance the protest had to him: “Going into it, and even still, I’d say… I feel so numb to so much [of] what’s going on in the world right now. It’s just constant, you know?”
Seidel expands further on the significance of this protest, saying that there were outcomes in mind beyond just impacting policy positions. Seidel said, “Another goal was to disrupt consciousness publicly and invite more people into this movement of organizing and building power for change.” He continued, saying, “We do this [so] that we can be formed and transformed into a community of steadfastness, that doesn’t normalize this genocide, formed and transformed into a community where we steadfastly and publicly keep faith. Because it’s really hard to do that right now with all that’s going on… we did this to let our Palestinian loved ones know that we’ve not forgotten them, because they feel forgotten.”
With the importance of the protest not being dependent on Warner’s presence, the protesters carried out their plan. They read their list of demands to the employees present in the building and began singing hymns until they were arrested. Stuckey explained how the experience of getting arrested elicited an array of emotions from those involved: “That experience brought up a lot of different feelings for a lot of different people. For me, I think it was just kind of joyful to sing with a bunch of cool people for a really good cause, and I just really view joy as a form of resistance.”
For these EMU community members, this protest was just the latest battle in an ongoing fight for action from our government. Seidel believes that there is particular significance which should encourage EMU students, and college students broadly, to join in on this fight. Seidel said, “Universities around the world, including the U.S., have been… a site of Palestinian solidarity, and a site of struggle against genocide, and there’s a long history to that. Whether it’s different anti-war movements or social justice movements… and we see how that’s played out over the last year on college campuses around the country, where students have given leadership and have experienced, also on many campuses, repression from university administrators.” Seidel reiterated that this is an ongoing movement and that there continue to be opportunities for students to get involved.
