College Protesters Make Divestment From Israel a Rallying Cry

As they gathered near the guarded gates of Columbia University in upper Manhattan on Tuesday, a hundred or so protesters began to chant: “Disclose, divest, we will not stop, we will not rest.”

“Divest” is a demand that has been repeated, on banners, in editorials in student newspapers and during rallies that are sweeping across campuses now gripped by a wave of pro-Palestinian activism.

What it actually means has varied in scope, and level of detail. At Yale and Cornell, students have called on the universities to stop investing in weapons manufacturers. Columbia students are demanding the sale of holdings in funds and businesses that activists say are profiting from Israel’s invasion of the Gaza Strip, and the longer-term occupation of Palestinian lands — including Google, which has a large contract with the Israeli government, and Airbnb, which allows listings in Israeli settlements on the occupied West Bank.

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Researchers say the impact of any divestment would ultimately be negligible on the businesses and on Israel. They add that if universities give up votes as shareholders at the companies, divestment could even be counterproductive in pressuring companies to change their practices.

Universities have so far rebuffed exhortations to divest. Defenders of Israel say these calls are unfair to a country that is under threat of attack, and antisemitic because they target the only Jewish-majority nation in the world. That’s a long-running accusation against the “boycott, divestment, sanctions” movement targeting the country.

But the pro-Palestinian activists, many of whom are Jewish, see divestment as a clear and achievable way to force colleges to take action on the issue, an important symbolic victory and one that would raise awareness of their concerns. They cite the success of past efforts, including how students in the 1980s lobbied their universities to divest from companies that did business in apartheid South Africa, as well as from fossil fuel companies.

“First and foremost, we want the effect to be for Columbia, because that’s what we have power over,” said Ray Guerrero, a graduate student at Columbia’s School of Public Health who is an organizer with Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a student-led movement. “But we hope this expands, so these companies understand what the ramifications are.”

South Africa is a precedent.

The universities facing these calls have enormous endowments, in the billions of dollars, that are invested across financial markets, in stocks, real estate and large investment funds.

Divesting, simply put, means selling holdings, often those that are objectionable.

One often-cited example took place in the 1980s, targeting companies that did business with South Africa, which was under apartheid rule. Columbia made headlines when it sold $39 million of stock it held in companies including Coca-Cola, Ford Motor and Mobil Oil following weeks of sit-in protests from students on its campus.

Other schools followed suit. In total, more than 150 universities divested from companies doing business in South Africa, part of a tapestry of penalties levied against the country.

Students today see parallels in the actions of the Israeli government in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.Ariela Rosenzweig, a senior at Brown University who has called for the school to divest from companies tied to Israel, said she hoped the movement would lead to a cascading effect of not just universities but other parts of society withdrawing support for Israel.

“I’m a member of this community, and I don’t want this particular community to be profiting from apartheid, from war, from genocide,” she said, referring to Brown.

But compared with the 1980s, universities have less direct control over their investments, opting instead for asset managers to oversee portfolios, which are increasingly invested in private equity and hedge funds. Some university administrators have also made the point that very little — if any — of their endowments is actively invested in companies that could be linked to Israel.

“We are not going to actively or directly invest in any weapons manufacturers, arms manufacturers or defense contractors,” Jane Dietze, the chief investment officer of Brown, said at a November town hall, as reported by The Brown Daily Herald.

A wide range of companies are being targeted.

Last week The Cornell Daily Sun endorsed calls for the university to divest from arms manufacturers directly involved in Israel’s campaign.

“Cornell should in no way support a war that has been waged with callous disregard for civilian lives,” the paper wrote.

At Columbia, by comparison, students are calling for divestment of stakes in a number of companies that aren’t so directly involved in warfare, including Caterpillar, Google and Airbnb.

Caterpillar’s ties to Israel have been scrutinized for decades, and were heightened after 2003, when an armored bulldozer manufactured by the company for the Israeli military ran over American pro-Palestinian activist Rachel Corrie, crushing her to death, as she sought to stop the demolition of Palestinian homes in Gaza.

Google has faced fierce protests from some of its own employees over a contract with the Israeli government for cloud services, while Airbnb is on the list because it has offered listings to visitors in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, which are deemed illegal by many nations.

The amount of money being targeted isn’t a large share of what is publicly known about these endowments. The investments listed by Columbia University Apartheid Divest as objectionable amount to less than one-tenth of 1% of Columbia’s $13.6 billion endowment. The students are also demanding greater transparency from the university on its private holdings to get a better sense of its overall investment in Israel.

Also on the list is an investor whose holdings are more transparent: BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, which owns shares of virtually every publicly traded company through its exchange-traded funds.

Activists at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as those at Columbia have pointed to the asset manager’s holdings in weapons manufacturers as reasons to divest from its funds.

According to the website Weapon Free Funds, which calls on investors to get money out of weapons stocks, only around 3% of BlackRock’s Core S&P 500 ETF is invested in “military contractors,” including Raytheon and Boeing.

Caterpillar, Google and Airbnb did not respond to requests for comment. BlackRock declined to comment.

Does divestment work?

The answer depends on how you define success.

Witold Henisz, vice dean and faculty head of the environmental, social and governance initiative at Wharton Business School, said that if the goal of divestment is to achieve a particular social goal through changing company behavior, it is likely to fail.

Henisz pointed to research that has found little to no impact of university divestments on firm behavior. He added that if an organization like a university was selling its stake in a company against its values, the buyer would likely care less about the issue than the university would. In turn, that means the new stakeholder will exert less pressure on the company to change its practices on an issue like selling arms to Israel.

But he added that if the goal of divestment was more broadly defined as part of a coalition of efforts to change hearts and minds, then it could be successful.

“If the goal is to mobilize a movement, to demonstrate moral outrage, campaigns sometimes are effective,” Henisz said.

Nonetheless, pro-Palestinian activists say the movement to divest has as much to do with ending their institutions’ complicity in atrocities as it does with changing the behavior of companies.

“If Columbia’s investments are so small as to not make a material impact, then why do we have them at all?” said Vayne Ong, a second-year doctoral student in history at the university. “There should be zero dollars, period, invested in any kind of genocide.”

Colleges aren’t budging yet.

So far, universities have flatly refused to adjust their holdings in response to student agitation. Some administrators have met with students demanding divestment, but the overarching message has been that they will not alter their portfolios or sell assets linked to Israel.

In a statement released last week, Yale said that it would not be divesting from weapons manufacturing because it did not “meet the threshold of grave social injury” that was necessary for divestment, according to the school’s Corporation Committee on Investor Responsibility, or CCIR. The school said it had offered to provide students an avenue to speak with trustees, but those talks fell through Sunday.

Other universities that have refused to divest from Israel include Michigan State — whose Board of Trustees said it would not consider divestment “of any kind" earlier this month — as well as the University of Michigan and American University.

Student protesters have submitted proposals of divestment to organizations like Yale’s CCIR, which seeks to ensure that the school’s investments are made in an ethical way. But the decision ultimately falls to university boards and presidents. At Brown, such a committee recommended in 2020 that the university divest from certain companies that “profit from human rights abuses in Palestine,” but the university president, Christina Paxson, refused to move the proposal forward.

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