The Students Are Right
Universities have no business investing in the war machine.
The Rift is a newsletter on the crisis of our times. It will explore the fault lines of our divided world and look for new openings in the cracks of the old system.
It’s been quite a sight. Over the past month, students have been rising up against Western support for the Gaza war and in solidarity with the Palestinian people from California to Kyoto. They’ve had enough: no longer will they allow their governments and universities to be complicit in war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The first protest camp was set up at Columbia University in mid-April, in the historic cradle of the 1968 student protests against the Vietnam War and the anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s. Since then, the demonstrations have spread across the United States. For weeks now, the same chant has been echoing through the “hallowed halls” of academia all over the country: “Disclose, divest! We will not stop, we will not rest!”
In the first week of May, the solidarity encampments crossed the Atlantic and began to spread like a wildfire through Europe as well. I was in London when the first tents went up at UCL and SOAS earlier this month. When I arrived in Cambridge for a conference a few days later, students there had just started another solidarity encampment in coordination with their peers at Oxford. Once I got back home to Amsterdam, I found students there still seething with anger over a violent police crackdown on a series of attempted encampments. Last week, students at my own university, the London School of Economics, launched an occupation as well.
The protest camps and solidarity actions have now spread to at least 247 universities worldwide. There have been demonstrations on campuses in Canada and Australia, in Mexico and Argentina, in Egypt and South Africa, in Lebanon and India, in New Zealand and Japan. What unifies them is a simple set of demands: that universities end their involvement in human rights violations by cutting ties with Israel’s system of apartheid and divesting from the military-industrial complex more generally.
For this, the students have been widely vilified. In the US, President Joe Biden sternly lectured the younger generation that “dissent must never lead to disorder”—as if a few broken windows at Columbia hurt his sensibilities more than the destruction of twelve universities, 280 government schools and 65 UNRWA-run schools in Gaza. Hillary Clinton went even further in her condescension of the students, saying that young people “don’t know very much at all about the history of the Middle East, or frankly about history in many areas of the world, including our own country.”
The situation in Europe has not been much better. In France, the regional council of Paris briefly suspended its funding to Sciences Po after accusing students there of US-style “wokisme.” In the Netherlands, far-right leader Geert Wilders interrupted the formation of his new coalition government to denounce the protesters as “antisemitic scum.” And in Britain, where university leaders have generally taken a more de-escalatory approach, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is needlessly inflaming the tensions with his repeated calls on vice-chancellors to quell the peaceful demonstrations.
Despite this widespread demonization, most students have actually been remarkably reasonable in their demands. They simply point out that Israel has been engaged in a long-standing illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories, and is now waging a campaign of collective punishment against the civilian population of Gaza. The facts are well documented and speak for themselves: Israeli troops have so far killed tens of thousands of women and children and have engaged in mass executions, torture, forced displacement and deliberate starvation—all with plausible genocidal intent.
The chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court in The Hague is now seeking arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and senior Israeli and Hamas officials for war crimes and crimes against humanity. At the same time, the International Court of Justice is looking into a case brought by South Africa that accuses Israel of violating the Genocide Convention. In this context, it makes sense that students would expect their universities to cut ties with Israel.
Yet some people still seem baffled by the students’ demands. What could universities in the West possibly have to do with Israeli war crimes in Gaza, the skeptics ask? Aren’t they simply in the business of providing education? Clearly they should be. But in recent decades many Western universities have increasingly come to resemble large corporations, with extensive foreign investments and wide-ranging international partnerships. The students are right to point out that this has implicated the higher education sector in a larger ecosystem that helps to sustain the war machine.
In fact, there are two main ways in which the day-to-day operations of Western universities have become materially interwoven with Israel’s illegal occupation and the denial of Palestinian rights and Palestinian freedom. These two dimensions have in turn shaped the students’ demands. Let’s take a quick look at both.
1) University endowments
At the big schools in the US and UK, which often have huge endowments, students have mostly focused their demands on disclosure and divestment. Simply put, they want universities to be transparent about where they invest their money, and to stop investing in companies that are—in one way or another—implicated in human rights violations. This includes arms manufacturers, but also companies providing goods to the Israeli military and police, or companies doing business in the occupied territories.
Students at the London School of Economics, for example, have made the demand for divestment the center-piece of their actions. The solidarity encampment at LSE was launched to coincide with the release of a 116-page report by the Palestine Society of the LSE Student Union. The report details the School’s extensive investments in arms manufacturers and private businesses with ties to the occupation, as well as fossil fuel companies. It finds that the “LSE has investments worth £48,515,817 in 80 holdings in 53 companies that are involved in crimes against the Palestinian people.”
These are clearly astonishing figures. Why would an institution of higher learning that prides itself on its cosmopolitan character—a leading social science university that encourages its professors to promote critical thinking among students and that leans heavily into its progressive roots for PR purposes—be so heavily invested in the arms industry and other companies that enable Western and Israeli war crimes?
The answer has everything to do with the financialization of the university. As
pointed out in a recent post for his newsletter, the student protesters at Columbia are not just making a moral argument about the reprehensible nature of specific investments. They are really developing a much broader critique of political economy that calls into question the very way in which our financialized universities—and by implication our financialized societies—are run.This critique has been particularly pronounced in the US. There, it has often been difficult for students to gain insight into the investments of their own universities. The management of US endowments tends to be very obscure: financial regulations are lax and administrators are often loath to disclose their assets for fear that it will give their “competitors” (i.e. other universities) insight into their portfolio strategies.
When students demand disclosure, they are therefore doing more than just asking for transparency. They are really challenging the operational model of the financialized university as such. By calling on administrators to disclose their assets, the student protesters are tearing the veil off the neoliberal university to reveal a profit-oriented money-making machine that—at the institutional level, at least—often cares little for critical thinking, moral principles or human rights.
We can clearly see this in the case of the University of Michigan. When students there demanded that the administration disclose its assets, officials responded by reiterating that their policy “is to shield the endowment from political pressures and to base our investment decisions solely on financial factors such as risk and return.”
This statement clearly reveals the way in which many university managers have come to hide behind the abstract logic of the market to construe their financial operations as essentially “non-political.” If investment decisions are based “solely on financial factors such as risk and return,” then there is no need to consider their societal implications. As long as the returns outweigh the risks, the investment is sound.
Of course, what this way of thinking fails to recognize is the fact that the depoliticization of university finances is in itself already a thoroughly political act. The choice to prioritize “risk and return” over respect for human rights—or even just education itself—is not a financial consideration, but a political one. Students are right to bring that political question out into the open and to raise it for public debate.
The unwillingness of some university administrators—starting with Minouche Shafik at Columbia—to even engage in a good-faith dialogue with their own students on this point is what lies behind the radicalization of the protests. But the anger that is now on display from Los Angeles to Amsterdam also has deeper roots. In a perceptive essay, written a few years ago, Max Haiven and Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou already observed that the financialization of the university was fueling rage and anxiety among students, and warned that this would soon boil over into a major eruption:
Like the buildup of tectonic force between two great continental plates, today there is a disaster brewing in the tension between, on the one hand, how a financialized society has shaped the conditions of “youth” and, on the other, the “youth” themselves. The eruptions and tremors have begun and we take it as our task to name something stirring beneath the surface.
2) Institutional partnerships
Financialization is therefore one of the main threads that connects Western universities to the war machine. But endowments and investments are not the only things that implicate our sector in the ongoing human rights violations against the Palestinian people. The other way in which Western universities have become enmeshed in Israel’s illegal occupation and its system of apartheid has to do with their partnerships with Israeli universities, businesses and research institutes.
In continental Europe, where universities are mostly publicly funded and often have much smaller endowments than their US and UK counterparts, students have tended to focus their actions mostly along this second dimension. At universities in the Netherlands, for instance, the protesters have demanded that administrators cut their ties with Israeli universities and research institutions, in the same way that Western universities once boycotted the academic institutions of apartheid South Africa.
Some of my colleagues seem to believe that this demand for an academic boycott of Israel goes too far. There is still a widespread belief, especially among an older generation of Western academics, that Israeli universities are actually a force for good in Israeli society: a bastion of academic freedom and liberalism that could pose a democratic counterweight to the belligerent nationalism of Benjamin Netanyahu and the messianic Zionism of his extremist coalition partners. Why boycott the only intellectual bulwark that could possibly offer a “safe space” for political dissent?
In reality, the situation is a bit more complicated than that. As the Israeli scholar Maya Wind demonstrates in her timely new book, Towers of Ivory and Steel, the operations of Israeli universities are in fact intricately interwoven with the political project of settler-colonialism, and the universities themselves have been active participants in the denial of freedom to the Palestinian people. This involvement has historically ranged from outright land grabs to the training of military and police units involved in the violation of human rights within the occupied territories.
“For decades,” Maya Wind writes in the book, “Israeli universities have been widely celebrated in the West as exceptionally free. European and North American academic institutions maintain research collaborations and joint degree programs with Israeli universities, which are often the only such academic partnerships in the Middle East.” But in reality, Israeli universities actually maintain “many ties to the Israeli state, including to its apparatuses of violence.” Indeed, Wind’s painstaking archival research demonstrates in great detail how academic expertise, infrastructure and technologies are actively used “to support Israeli territorial, demographic, and military projects.”
Israeli universities have also been known to impose limits on free speech and political dissent, for critical Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian scholars alike. Take the example of the leading Palestinian law scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who was recently suspended from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and later arrested by Israeli police for openly criticizing Israeli war crimes in the foreign press. In a statement, the Hebrew University explained its decision to suspend Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian by describing itself as a “proud Israeli, public and Zionist institution.”
This is precisely why Palestinian activists have long been calling on Western universities to cut ties with their Israeli counterparts. Inspired by the successful struggle against apartheid South Africa, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel asks Western scholars to stop normalizing the status quo. We need to recognize that university involvement in occupation, apartheid and crimes against humanity is not normal. On this point, too, the student protesters are right. There are reasonable grounds to support and reiterate the long-standing Palestinian demand for an academic and cultural boycott.
Towards a free Palestine—and a democratic university
The Palestine solidarity campaign is alive and well on university campuses around the world. It’s also converging in interesting ways with other struggles. Calls to divest from the occupation and the war machine are coming together with demands by the climate movement to divest from fossil fuels and by the prison abolition movement to divest from the carceral system. These various divestment campaigns are in turn linking up with student and faculty struggles for the democratization of the university.
All of this gives hope for the future. The student protesters of 2024—like those of 1968 and 1985 before them—find themselves on the right side of history. Having come of age during an age of crisis, the new generation seems to have a clearheaded view of the injustices of the world and the hypocrisies of the Western establishment. They are acutely aware of the complicity of their own governments and their own cultural and educational institutions in the oppression and dispossession of the Palestinian people.
What this points to is a seismic generational shift. For 75 years, Israeli leaders have been able to draw on the support of their enablers in the West to continue the illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories. But now the wheels of time are slowly wasting away the ranks of their Western supporters. Today, less than a quarter of Americans under the age of 30 still has a favorable view of the Israeli government, compared to half of those over the age of 50. Soon critics of the occupation will form the overwhelming majority. Israel’s system of apartheid is living on borrowed time.
In some places, the tables are already starting to turn. In recent weeks, a growing number of universities—including Brown University in the US, Goldsmiths in the UK, Trinity College in Ireland, Ghent University in Belgium and the University of Lausanne in Switzerland—have met at least some of the protesters’ demands. While there’s always the risk that some of these agreements will succumb to “death by committee,” there are early signs that change is coming. The recent recognition of the State of Palestine by Spain, Ireland and Norway is another indication of this trend.
Whether the current wave of campus protests has the capacity to actually change foreign policy outcomes in the United States and the material reality in Gaza remains to be seen. But at least the students are trying. That’s more than can be said of their coldhearted and spineless political leaders. The old establishment may vilify the young protesters for their actions, but the experience of ‘68 and ‘85 teaches us that the struggle will eventually prevail. After all, the students are right. Only when Jewish-Israelis and Palestinians are both free will there be a lasting peace in the Middle East.