The mass protest movement currently engulfing dozens of U.S. college campuses has included calls for university endowments to divest from Israel, a demand that some activist organizations are broadening to U.S. companies that do business in Israel or are otherwise connected to the Israeli economy.
The demand that U.S. institutions withdraw their financial support from Israel is not a new one. It has been a central plank of an established protest movement known as "BDS," for Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions, for nearly two decades.
However, the public reaction to Israel’s response to an October 7 attack on its citizens by militants of the Palestinian organization Hamas, which killed more than 1,200 people and resulted in hundreds more being taken as hostages into the Gaza Strip, has amplified those calls, particularly among college students.
In the wake of the October 7 attack, Israel pummeled Gaza with artillery, missiles and an eventual ground invasion. Those operations have killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, including many women and children, destroyed much of the region’s infrastructure, and left more than a million people without adequate access to food and water.
Decentralized movement
The protests that have erupted on U.S. college campuses appear to have arisen independently of each other and without significant coordination. That has made it difficult to identify a single specific set of demands common to all of them.
Demands for divestment, though, are commonly heard from protesters, as are accusations that Israel is an "apartheid state" in which citizens of Palestinian descent are discriminated against.
For example, a group calling itself Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) has published demands including, "Divest all of Columbia’s finances, including the endowment, from companies and institutions that profit from Israeli apartheid, genocide and occupation in Palestine. Ensure accountability by increasing transparency around financial investments."
Another organization, the University of California Berkeley BDS Coalition, demanded among other things, "the total divestment of the UC Berkeley Foundation and the UC General Endowment Pool from the Israeli state and from all companies profiting from the colonization of Palestine."
Universities push back
Many universities subject to ongoing protests have called in law enforcement officials to remove activists’ encampments. Others have publicly refused calls to divest from Israel, often noting that many BDS divestment demands are coupled with calls to sever ties to Israeli universities and academics.
"The University of California has consistently opposed calls for boycott against and divestment from Israel," that school said in a statement. "While the University affirms the right of our community members to express diverse viewpoints, a boycott of this sort impinges on the academic freedom of our students and faculty and the unfettered exchange of ideas on our campuses."
Columbia, seen by many as the epicenter of the protest movement in the U.S., denied divestment demands but offered to begin a dialogue with protesters.
"While the University will not divest from Israel, the University offered to develop an expedited timeline for review of new proposals from the students by the Advisory Committee for Socially Responsible Investing, the body that considers divestment matters," Columbia’s president said in a statement. "The University also offered to publish a process for students to access a list of Columbia’s direct investment holdings, and to increase the frequency of updates to that list of holdings."
In a rare moment of compromise, students at Brown University in Rhode Island agreed to remove their protest encampment from campus after striking a deal with the administration under which the school’s board will schedule a vote on the question of divestment later this year.
Past success cited
Supporters of divestment from Israel point to past instances in which divestment has helped effect change, most notably the global divestment from South Africa beginning in the 1980s, in protest of that country’s racially discriminatory laws. Many universities, they point out, joined in the divestment movement at the time.
However, the funds that protesters are targeting are, in many cases, enormous investment portfolios with interests spanning the globe. According to the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, the combined market value of the 20 largest university endowments in the country totaled more than $927 billion at the end of 2021.
The management of college endowments has also changed profoundly in recent decades. Universities hire investment professionals to manage the growth of their endowments, often placing funds with large investment managers and hedge funds, which are often empowered to buy and sell stocks independently. This is particularly true of the largest endowments.
According to a February 2024 study of university endowments by the National Association of College and University Business Officers, "Larger endowments had smaller allocations to the public equity markets and were more heavily weighted to private investment strategies with investment strategies that tend to be much less transparent.”
Effect on Israel likely minimal
In an analysis published by the Brookings Institution in 2018, senior fellows Dany Bahar and Natan Sachs analyzed the effect of the BDS movement on the Israeli economy and found that the impact had been, at most, minor.
Israel’s exports include a large amount of high-tech goods that are often difficult to find substitutes for. Additionally, a large share of those exports are what are known as "intermediate goods," or items that are incorporated into more complex final products in other countries, making them difficult to identify and track.
In the first dozen years of the BDS movement’s existence, the Israeli economy enjoyed sustained growth, seemingly little affected by divestment, they found.
"The data suggests that economically, anything short of official sanctions by important economic partners such as the United States or European Union would be unlikely to produce anything near the kind of economic pressure BDS supporters envision," Bahar and Sachs concluded.
However, the BDS movement has claimed a number of what it calls "major successes" over the years. These include the announcement by the French multinational Veolia in 2015 that it would stop participating in the construction of a controversial light rail system in Israel, and the more recent announcement by various countries, including Kuwait and Chile, that they would limit trade with Israel.
