CALIFORNIA (Dispatches) – California’s San Francisco State University has begun the process of divesting from four weapons manufacturers currently involved in the Zionist regime’s war on Gaza, in a move activists are describing as a “major victory” for Palestinian rights advocacy in the United States.
The announcement by Students for Gaza SFSU comes at a crucial time for the student movement for Palestine, as several universities across the country look to punish and deter students from restarting pro-Palestinian advocacy on campuses, and social media companies like Meta look to censor pro-Palestine activism by student groups on their platforms.
Earlier this week, New York University (NYU) included criticism of Zionism on its list of hate speech, a move that is expected to have a chilling effect on activism targeting the Zionist regime. At the University of Michigan, several students were violently arrested as they conducted a sit-in on campus.
Activists say the move to divest from Palantir Technologies, a U.S.-based data analysis firm, arms manufacturer Lockheed Martin, Leonardo, an Italian multinational defense company, as well as construction equipment manufacturer, Caterpillar - corporations described by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) as “profiting from Gaza the genocide” - came following months of protest and advocacy calling on the university to withdraw investments in portfolios that profit from harming Palestinians.
The demands were part of a nationwide student movement that called for universities to disclose and divest from companies profiting from the Zionist regime’s occupation of Palestinian land and its current war on Gaza.
The U.S. arm of Israel’s largest arms company and primary manufacturer of the regime’ land-based equipment and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has also announced that it has ended its lease of office space at a building in Cambridge after months of demonstrations by pro-Palestinian protesters.
An Elbit subsidiary, KMC Systems, moved into the building at 130 Bishop Allen Drive in December 2021, and the lease was expected to last into next year.
The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) Boston, the organization that led the protests, stated that the end of Elbit’s lease “is a testament to our collective power,” crediting “varied community efforts” for disrupting the operations of Elbit and its landlord, Intercontinental Management Corp., and “forcing the early termination of the lease.”
The anti-Israel group vowed to keep fighting to “prevent Elbit from moving to another nearby location.”
It also said it will continue efforts to “sever Elbit’s ties with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and other actors in the Boston area.”