Today marks the inauguration of a campaign at Duke to demand that the University divest from military ties to Israel. Our campaign, organized by a coalition of students, faculty and employees, joins more than 50 other divestment movements at universities across the country.
Duke University holds approximately $4.5 billion in invested assets. Unlike many other universities, Duke refuses to divulge its investments. Public schools like the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are required by law to disclose their investments, while many private universities choose to disclose such information in order to ensure a policy of transparent and ethical investment. Most schools that have revealed their investments have significant holdings in corporations such as Lockheed Martin, Honeywell and Boeing, that do large amounts of military business with the state of Israel. If Duke holds investments in corporations with military ties to Israel, we demand the immediate withdrawal of such investments.
Why should Duke divest from companies with military ties to Israel? These companies feed Israel's continued contravention of international law and human rights.
For example, U.N. Security Council Resolution 242, passed in 1967, maintains the inadmissibility of acquiring territory through war and requires the withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from occupied territories. Israel actively defies this resolution, maintaining a 35-year-old illegal occupation to this date, resulting in drastic consequences for the Palestinians. Seventy-five percent of the Palestinian population in the Occupied Territories currently lives under the poverty line ($2 per day).
U.N. Security Council Resolution 194 recognizes the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes or, if they so choose, to receive monetary compensation for seized property. Five million Palestinian refugees scattered throughout the world have not been given this choice. One third of these live under horrific conditions in refugee camps.
The Fourth Geneva Convention declares that an "occupying power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into territories it occupies." This necessitates the dismantling of all Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. In the Gaza strip, 1.2 million Palestinians subsist on 60 percent of the land, while 6,000 Israeli settlers live on 40 percent.
I remind you that the United States itself has signed each one of these resolutions and agreements and has reaffirmed their applicability numerous times. We demand their implementation. Until such implementation is achieved, we call on our university to break all military-based financial ties with an Israeli government that is breaking each of the above resolutions and agreements.
This campaign is essentially modeled after the South Africa divestment campaign, which helped bring about the end of apartheid by successfully lobbying universities across the nation-including Duke-to divest from corporations with ties to the apartheid South African government. Despite the limitations of a comparison between apartheid South Africa and Israel/Palestine, the moral equivalencies have led numerous champions of the anti-apartheid movement, such as 1984 Nobel Peace Prize recipient Archbishop Desmond Tutu, to also lend their support to the current divestiture drive.
Part of the divestment campaign here at Duke calls for the establishment of an ethical investment committee. Such committees are operating at other prestigious institutions like Yale, Harvard and Columbia. We are isolating military investment in Israel because of the grievous crimes against the Palestinians. None of Duke's endowment should go to support any illegal activities, wherever they may occur. We are saying to Duke administrators and the Board of Trustees: Divest from military ties to Israel; invest ethically across the board.
No Duke money should subsidize the illegal occupation of Palestinian lands. No Duke money should help fund the death, destruction and suffering of stateless people. No Duke money should support the illegal policies of Israel that lead to a cycle of violence that is leaving too many innocents dead. Archbishop Tutu stated, "If apartheid ended, so can the occupation, but the moral force and international pressure will have to be just as determined. The current divestment effort is the first, though certainly not the only, necessary move in that direction."
Yousuf al-Bulushi is a Trinity junior.
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