Harvard Out NOW!
On January 31, after morning prayer, Israeli police forced their way into the Al-Aqsa mosque, an Islamic holy site, and shot rubber-coated metal bullets at Palestinian worshippers. This was the third consecutive week that Israeli police stormed and attacked the mosque. The violence at Al-Aqsa is just one example of the destruction and devastation done unto Palestinian life, culture, and infrastructure under Israeli occupation.
Brought together by the shared belief that Palestinian life is equally deserving of dignity and respect as any other human being, students from many of Harvard University’s schools have formed Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine (HOOP). HOOP is a campaign centered around the actualization of Palestinian liberation. To this end, we demand the University disclose its direct and indirect investments in companies complicit in human rights abuses towards Palestinians, divest such holdings, and reinvest in Palestinian history, culture, and communities.
In Israel, Palestinians are treated as second-class citizens. Presently, there are at least sixty-five laws that discriminate against Palestinians within the Israeli legal system. The 1950 Law of Return grants automatic citizenship rights to Jewish people from anywhere in the world upon request. However, it denies that same right to Palestinians who were forcibly dispossessed of their homes in 1948, when Israel’s borders were first redrawn to subsume Palestinian land. Since then, even more Palestinians have been displaced as the result of settlements that are illegal under international law.
Our physical distance from Israeli apartheid cannot excuse our complicity as students at an institution with financial ties to these human rights abuses. For example, the Israeli police force, that same force that shot at worshippers at the Al-Aqsa mosque, is trained by G4S, a security company which Harvard continues to invest in.* Moreover, G4S has security contracts with Israeli prisons in which political prisoners, including children, are kept and tortured. Further, G4S provides equipment to the Israeli Defence Forces and to illegal Israeli settlements. Harvard also profits from the destruction of Palestinian homes; it has investments in Caterpillar Inc., which manufactures the bulldozers which destroy Palestinian homes in order to build illegal settlements. Harvard also invests in Motorola which provides ‘virtual fences’ for illegal Israeli settlements that surveil the movements of Palestinians living outside the settlements. We do not know the full extent of Harvard’s investments in these atrocities. But just from these few examples, we know that Harvard is directly tied to a military that extrajudicially murders protestors, to illegal settlements in the West Bank, and to the very same prison that illegally incarcerated 16-year old Ahed Tamimi.
Palestinians and supporters of their struggle are continually working to find new strategies to end Israeli occupation. One strategy, previously successful in ending South African apartheid, is Palestinian civil society’s call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS). BDS has a simple strategy: putting apartheid out of business. BDS is a nonviolent movement in response to state oppression and unimaginable violence, targeting the very tools of oppression: money, technology and legitimacy. The call for BDS emerged from the people of Palestine, and continues to center the victims of injustice themselves.
Inspired by BDS, HOOP is committed to holding Harvard accountable for its investments in the oppression the Palestinian people. As the Trump administration tries to shut down Palestinian advocacy on college campuses, we recognize we have an obligation to stand in solidarity with other students advocating for Palestinian rights. Which is why we are joining in the call students are making across the country, that our university divest from companies complicit in Israeli apartheid. In pursuing Palestinian liberation, HOOP is also dedicated to fighting the culture of complicity in the oppression of the Palestinian people here at Harvard, including the exclusion of Palestinian narratives in scholarship and conversations on campus. Broadly, HOOP is dedicated to dismantling all systems of oppression against Palestinian people.
We must hold our institution accountable for its investments in the countless Israeli crimes towards some of the world’s most defenseless people. We reject the university’s claim that Harvard’s endowment is apolitical, an argument it has used to justify its investments in South African apartheid, the prison-industrial complex, neo-colonial Puerto Rican debt holdings, and fossil fuels. We see this project as connected to other movements for divestment on this campus. As long as Harvard’s financial holdings are tied to companies profiting off of injustice from prisons to Puerto Rico to Palestine, Harvard students will continue to fight for justice.
Support Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine, support the right side of history.
*Information on Harvard’s investments is from research shared with HOOP by Harvard Prison Divestment Campaign.