Divestment Request Submission and President Holloway’s Email about the RUSA referenda, April 2, 2024
April 2nd, 2024
Divestment Request Submission and President Holloway’s Email about the RUSA referenda
We are proud to announce that this morning we submitted a divestment request to the Rutgers University Joint Committee on Investments (JCOI). Through our extensive research into the University’s endowment fund, we have identified that Rutgers holds considerable investment in corporations materially participating in and/or benefiting from Israel’s settler colonialism, apartheid, and genocide against Palestinians. This includes weapons companies directly supplying Israel’s murderous campaign such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, RTX Co, Northrop Grunman, and L3Harris. In the request, we detail the impacts of these investments on Palestinians as well as the harm that our University’s partnership with Tel Aviv University brings to Palestinians both at Rutgers and on their indigenous land. We demand nothing less than complete divestment from these egregious investments which drown our endowment fund and University facilities in blood. We present a vision toward a more just endowment, one that can genuinely serve the needs of the Rutgers community rather than fueling destruction and human rights abuses abroad.
While we celebrate this massive achievement, it is not lost on us that the Rutgers administration is actively working to repress student consensus in support of Palestine. Just yesterday, President Holloway released a statement condemning BDS strategies and affirming his support for Rutgers University’s HELIX partnership with Tel Aviv University (TAU). He also touted his 2021 visit to TAU, which is built upon the ethnically cleansed Palestinian village of al-Sheikh Muwannis and – in violation of international law – holds the bodies of more than 73 Palestinians murdered by Israel.
The statement comes on the heels of a historic New Brunswick undergraduate referendum vote, and on the first day of a Newark undergraduate referendum vote, concerning divestment from Israeli human rights violations and partnership with TAU. This is a blatant attempt to interfere in student democracy and infringe on students’ right to political freedom revealing Holloway as cowering in the face of Zionist pressure. But while he may ignore it, Holloway is the president of a public University comprised of multiple campuses and a diverse student body which includes Palestinians. In the six and a half months since the beginning of this genocide, Holloway has failed to acknowledge the Palestinian people and the atrocities they have been subjected to, or the significant impact felt by Palestinian members of the Rutgers community. We will never forget his complete failure to respect student democracy or support our Palestinian community members during this incredibly difficult time.
As students of history, we know justice always prevails. Rutgers University will divest from Israeli apartheid – the only question is when. Like Rutgers divested from South African apartheid in 1985, we will soon divest from Israeli apartheid and genocide as well. Our achievement today places us closer to a just and ethical endowment fund than we have ever been.
