Pro-Palestinian demonstrators have staged sit-ins this month at almost 50 college campuses across the country. Many are refusing to leave until their institutions “fully divest” from Israel.
The protests represent a new wave in the months of activism spawned by the Israel-Hamas war. Students have set up rows of tents and brought in food with plans to occupy campus property until their demands are met, inspired by a demonstration that began on April 17 at Columbia University and led to the arrests of 100 protesters. Students have since been arrested on at least 11 campuses, including Yale, Princeton, Emory, Indiana, and Ohio State Universities; the Universities of Texas at Austin, Minnesota-Twin Cities, and Southern California; California State Polytechnic University at Humboldt; and Emerson College.
Divestment from companies associated with Israel’s government and military has been one of the major goals of the pro-Palestinian movement for years, drawing from controversial boycott, divest, and sanction tactics, or BDS. Pro-Palestinian students say they have found direct and indirect links between their universities’ financial dealings and Israel. To student demonstrators, the connections mean that their colleges are contributing to violence against Palestinians and that the institutions have a moral obligation to cut them off.
So what do the protesters want colleges to do?
Demonstrators are demanding that colleges sever any institutional connections they have with Israel. That includes ending investments in Israeli-tied companies, boycotting products, and eliminating any study-abroad programs or research partnerships with Israeli institutions.
The boycott aspect of BDS would involve refusing to buy or sell Israeli goods or to participate in academic programs in Israel. Divestment would involve breaking financial ties with Israel, which BDS activists say would demonstrate that the country and its policies are not “legitimate” because of how the Palestinian people have been treated, said Daniel A. Segal, an emeritus professor of history and anthropology at Pitzer College and a member of the coordinating committee for the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.
“You shouldn’t invest in and profit from treating some people as more than and other people as less than,” Segal said. “There’s a potential and measurable economic effect of divestment, but there’s also the signal that says ‘this activity we won’t invest in.’”
Advocates of BDS hope the added financial pressure will persuade the U.S. government to then penalize or sanction Israel and protect the Palestinian people.
When did the BDS movement start, and where does it draw its inspiration from?
Boycotts and divestments have been popular demonstration tactics for years, including during the U.S. civil-rights movement and the Vietnam War and South African anti-apartheid protests. Most recently, students in the climate movement have fought for colleges to stop investing in fossil-fuel companies.
The Israel BDS movement began in the early 2000s with a call from Palestinian organizations to invoke nonviolent pressure on Israel. The movement draws inspiration largely from protests opposing South African apartheid from the 1970s and 1980s. At that time, students demanded their institutions sever their investments in companies associated with South Africa. One of the largest protests was at Columbia, where the administration eventually complied with students’ demands. Several other campuses followed suit.
Today’s students continue to draw on the precedent colleges set during the anti-apartheid movement, said Charles H.F. Davis III, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan’s Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education. While students know divestment isn’t going to happen right away, they believe it points to what they see as hypocrisy between a college’s mission and where it’s using its money. Many of them are frustrated that their colleges won’t even begin a conversation about divestment, Davis said, or consider it an option despite how administrators responded to other demonstrations in the past.
“What many folks are saying is that ‘this is not how we want our money to be spent and we don’t want to profit and benefit off of genocidal terror,’” Davis said.
Which companies are activists targeting?
Pro-Palestinian activists say many of the major defense and weaponry companies based in the U.S. are responsible for aiding Israel’s military in killing Palestinian people and destroying their homes and infrastructure.
Advocacy groups frequently target companies like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, BAE Systems, and Raytheon, which have provided the Israeli Defense Forces with airplanes, missiles, drones, and other products, according to multiple news outlets. They also call for boycotts of certain food products, such as hummus from Sabra, which is partially owned by the Strauss Group, an Israeli company. Pro-Palestinian students have called on administrators to cut ties with Caterpillar Inc., which supplies heavy equipment that is used to destroy Palestinian homes.
How do universities have ties to these companies?
Most colleges don’t directly invest in these companies. Instead, they often allocate money from their endowments to hedge and investment funds that hold shares in targeted companies.
At Rutgers University, the Endowment Justice Collective, a coalition of pro-Palestinian student groups, called on the university to cut investments in 18 companies. A portion of the university’s endowment is handled by five different fund managers that have shares in some of those companies, according to reporting from The Daily Targum. Through these funds, Rutgers has invested more than $7.7 million in Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Motorola Solutions, and General Electric, each of which have reportedly supported Israel in some way.
Some colleges don’t disclose this information, though students insist that given the size of institutions’ endowments and investment histories, there must be ties to Israel. At Yale University, students are demanding the administration reveal its endowment practices to the public, as other colleges have done through public-records requests.
“We need to know the full extent of Yale’s investments,” said Taran Samarth, one of the student protesters at Yale. “They have to be honest with us and transparent with the community who they claim to be doing these investments for the benefit of.”
What other ties are protesters targeting?
Some pro-Palestinian students are demanding administrators refuse to sell certain products or end partnerships with companies associated with Israel.
Cornell University’s Coalition for Mutual Liberation is targeting corporate partnerships that allow full-time employees to receive master’s degrees from its engineering college. The university’s corporate partners include BAE Systems, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine called on the administration to remove Sabra hummus from university stores, stop using Hewlett-Packard products, and remove Caterpillar construction equipment from campus.
What is an academic boycott?
Many pro-Palestinian student groups have called for a full academic boycott, which includes ending study-abroad programs in Israel or at Israeli universities as well as research partnerships.
Shut It Down NYU, a coalition of pro-Palestinian students, faculty and staff members, and other organizers, have been calling for a “universitywide noncooperation” with NYU Tel Aviv, a study-abroad program in Israel. Students in the group Columbia University Apartheid Divest are also calling for Columbia to end its relationship with Israeli universities, including an academic center in Tel Aviv as well as a dual-degree program with Tel Aviv University.
Academic boycotts in Israel are focused on institutional partnerships like study-abroad programs and research connections, Segal said. It does not infringe on academic freedom, such as a professor’s right to connect with an Israeli academic, he said.
Pro-Palestinian activists argue that Israeli universities are also responsible for harming Palestinian people. Palestinian students who attend the universities often don’t have the same rights as Israeli students and aren’t protected from harassment, Segal said. Some universities also provide support to the Israeli military, according to their websites.
“We shouldn’t have study-abroad programs anywhere if they are causing harm and particularly causing harm to the most vulnerable people in our society,” Segal said. “The most vulnerable people under Israeli rule are Palestinians. And if Palestinians tell us that our study-abroad program in Israel is harming them, then we should take that seriously.”
Is it easy for colleges to divest?
Most administrators have ignored students’ demands or argued that they do not meet the criteria for withdrawing investments. Some colleges have ethical-investment committees often made up of trustees, faculty members, and students that set moral standards for how endowment money should be spent.
Pomona College is one institution that could divest. The police arrested 20 students and the university suspended and banned seven of those involved from campus on April 5 over a multiday encampment protesting the college’s investments in companies associated with Israel. Pomona’s Board of Trustees is now considering setting up a committee to evaluate the standards for investing the college’s endowments, said Kenneth Baxter Wolf, chair of the faculty at Pomona. Members of the committee would consider the best way to update the college’s investment strategy to be more ethical, he said.
That process would take time, though, Wolf said, especially given the nature of how university endowments are invested. Since students began demanding colleges divest from companies associated with fossil fuels, many investment funds have adjusted to offer portfolios that are more ethically sound, he said. The pro-Palestinian movement could have a similar effect, and colleges may begin looking for funds that don’t include major arms and weaponry companies, he said.
“Administration is not really the enemy, right?” Wolf said. “It is in some ways a capitalist system that we have where people invest and then they hand the power of investment over to a middleman, and the middleman invests and you start to lose sight of what’s the connection between what you’re investing and what’s actually happening in the world.”
What do people who are against the BDS movement think?
To Adam Lehman, president and chief executive of Hillel International, the BDS movement’s goal is only to place Israel in a negative light. The movement’s tactics have made campuses more divided and dangerous, he said. Boycotting Israeli universities prevents students from learning about other cultures, going against one of the main purposes of higher education, Lehman said.
“The only thing BDS produces is more division, more hate, more polarization and more targeted harassment and intimidation towards Jewish and Israeli students,” he said. “It has not and will not lead to universities taking the kinds of actions that are demanded because those actions are not only completely inconsistent with the way universities have approached other political conflicts in the world, they are also anti-learning and anti-academic.”
How successful has the BDS movement been so far?
It appears that no known college has completely divested yet, according to a Chronicle analysis of media reports. Still, there has been some movement toward student demands through faculty councils and student governments, which have voted on resolutions calling on colleges to divest.
At Pitzer College, the College Council, which is made up of students, faculty, and staff members, adopted a resolution calling on the college to cut all ties with Israeli universities. Strom C. Thacker, president of the college, vetoed the measure, saying it violated Pitzer’s commitment to academic freedom. The college also closed its study-abroad program with the University of Haifa in Israel, but maintained that it wasn’t in reaction to student protests.
Students at the University of Rochester began their encampment on April 23. Two days later, student protesters announced that the Faculty Senate had agreed to evaluate the university’s ties to Israel as well as any institutional partners that do not align with its ethical standards. Several hours later, the university refuted the protesters, saying administrators didn’t make a commitment to the demonstrators’ demands for a ceasefire call or divestment from Israeli universities.
“University administrators made clear that neither demand was on the table,” the statement said. “There has not and will not be any commitments about future academic divestment of university programs in Israel.”
