FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
25 October 2002

Faculty Demand that Columbia University Divest from Firms that Manufacture or Sell Arms to Israel

Deeply concerned about the brutality of Israeli military rule over Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, a group of over seventy-five Columbia and Barnard faculty members have launched a petition campaign demanding that Columbia University divest from all firms that produce or sell arms or military hardware to be used by the state of Israel. Members of the Columbia/Barnard community are invited to sign the petition at this Divestment website.

Specifically, the faculty petition calls on Columbia University (1) to use its political and financial influence to encourage the United States government to suspend its military aid and arms sales to Israel, and (2) to divest from all companies that manufacture arms and other military hardware sold to Israel, as well from companies that sell such arms and military hardware to Israel, until Israel complies with all the relevant UN resolutions and Geneva conventions, and ends its military occupation of the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip seized since 1967.

The Columbia/Barnard faculty petition is part of a growing campus divestment movement against Israel's military occupation and Israeli armed forces. The Columbia effort is aligned with similar campaigns by faculty and students at Princeton, Harvard, MIT, Cornell, the University of California, and elsewhere.

With the hope that moral pressure from the international community can be an effective means of encouraging political change, this new divestment movement takes as its model the anti-Apartheid campaigns of boycott and divestment that played a critical role in dismantling the former South African regime.

The Columbia faculty believe that a similar, if more targeted, strategy of divestment vis-a-vis the Israeli state is called for at this historical juncture. In limiting their divestment campaign to companies that manufacture and sell arms and military hardware to Israel, they have focused on a fundamental problem in the conflict today: the use of Israeli military force to perpetrate human rights abuses against a civilian population. Israel's pursuit of a military solution to what is, at heart, a political problem, the petition's signatories contend, will only serve to escalate the conflict and create more human suffering for all involved.