Apr 28, 2024
Content Warning: Genocide
The University’s investments lie in weapon manufacturing, climate degradation, and furthering the oppression and genocide of the Palestinian People. What we have seen from the University, within its financial decisions, is the reason we would like to implement a boycott. Divestment means refusal of our money, our tax dollars, whatever we may invest in these institutions for education or otherwise, to be sent in favor of settler colonialism. We will not allow any funds to be sent to furthering the displacement and destruction of Palestinian land and its people.
Through multiple avenues, the University of Oregon sends students money from tuition and other fees to the state of Israel. UO’s entire asset pool, 2.8 billion dollars, is under management by a company called Jasper Ridge Partners, which in itself manages approximately $34 billion in assets into defense corporations.
On campus as well, and provided to faculty, is Hewlett-Packard. HP provides servers to Israel for its ‘population registry,’ in which IDs are issued based on one’s ‘level of rights’ under Israel’s exclusionary system in which Palestinians do not have the same ‘level’ of rights as citizens. Their Itanium servers are used to operate the Aviv System, the computerized database of Israel’s Population and Immigration Authority. HP represents the backbone of Israel’s racial segregation tactics under their system of apartheid. They are also the exclusive provider of computers to the Israeli military, as well as servers and technology to aid Israel’s prison system. HP plays a crucial role in Israel’s mass incarceration project to assist in the oppression, harm, and unjust imprisonment of Palestinians.
As we carry their products in the Unthank Dining Hall, you might know Sabra. Sabra is owned by the Strauss Group, an Israel-based corporation, with Headquarters and multiple factories in occupied territory. The Strauss Group is traded on the Tel Aviv 35 Index, which includes Israel’s largest public companies. They also provide financial support and supplies to the Golani and Givati brigades of the Israeli military, which were found by the United Nations to be in stark violation of human rights and international law. Sabra, alongside EDX, Dell, Amazon, and more, are all complicit in furthering the oppression inflicted upon Palestinians. In the scope of an Academic Boycott, the university also offers three (3) exchange programs to Israeli universities in Occupied Palestine. These include: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Technion Israel Institute of Technology. On top of these exchange programs, the university invests money on collaborating with Israeli researchers and grants from an Israeli-American group promoting research between the two nations.
From direct connections to the financial pool of defense companies, alongside different corporations that further the Apartheid against Palestinians. Divestment needs to happen immediately. We want our university to cut ties with genocide in three distinct ways– economic divestment, academic boycott, and institutional partnership. These are our demands, and we will continue to protest until they are met.
Photographs by Robert Scherle