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Voices & Opinion

POV: Divesting from Companies Operating in Israel Places Universities in an “Untenable Position”

A decision to divest would create a fissure within BU deep enough to undermine its ability to fulfill its teaching and research missions

The Israel-Hamas War has prompted calls on college campuses across the country for divestment from companies that do business in or with Israel. Divestment campaigns have a rich history in academia, targeting manufacturers of tobacco, military weapons, and guns, political regimes in South Africa and South Sudan, private prisons, and most recently, companies that produce fossil fuels.

Divestment debates are complex because they involve multiple issues and value judgments that are often tacitly intertwined. Should endowments ever be used to address pressing social issues? If yes, what are the criteria and decision-making processes to determine when a threshold is reached? Is divestment feasible given the complexity of financial markets? Is divestment effective?

My perspective is informed by my participation in the discussion about divestment from fossil fuels at Boston University, which began in 2014 and culminated in 2021 when the Board of Trustees voted to begin the process of divestment from fossil fuels. This experience leads me to conclude that divestment from companies with business in Israel is fundamentally different from the fossil fuel issue. Divestment from companies with business in Israel would place universities in an untenable position regarding their educational, research, and financial responsibilities.

The phenomenon of climate change is well-defined by decades of scientific research. Temperature, precipitation, and other aspects of climate are changing; anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are the principal cause, and most of these emissions come from the combustion of fossil fuels.

The impacts of climate change are also well established by science. The planet’s natural systems that support all life are unraveling before our eyes. Higher temperatures, altered precipitation patterns, and rising seas impact the health of people and the economy. The costs of climate change are disproportionately borne by society’s most vulnerable populations. These trends will continue unless we take dramatic and rapid action.

The target of fossil fuel divestment is not Chevron or BP per se; it is the emissions from fossil fuels that cause climate change. We need energy, of course, but cost-effective, low-carbon energy sources are increasingly available. The transition to clean energy will produce winners and losers in the business world, but there’s no credible evidence that consumers or overall well-being will be harmed. The net social benefits of clean energy are positive and probably very large.

Today, the target is the economy and government of Israel, and for some protesters, the state of Israel itself. The assertion that companies inflict harm when they operate in Israel rests on the supposition that Israel’s behavior in Gaza is unjustified and bad enough to be sanctioned. Harm is a principal concern in both divestment cases, but unlike climate change, the assessment and judgment of harm in the Israel-Hamas War is highly subjective.

There is no shortage of harm and suffering in the Israel-Hamas War. Severe harm was inflicted on Israel when the armed forces of Hamas invaded Israel last October, killing approximately 1,200 people (roughly 780 of whom were civilians), committing rape, “sexualized torture,” and other cruel and inhumane treatment of women, and taking 250 hostages back to Gaza.

Severe harm is being inflicted on Palestinians living in Gaza from the ongoing operations of the Israeli military. At least 40,000 people have been killed, at least half of whom are women and children, more than one million people have been forcibly displaced, and most of the infrastructure is destroyed, depriving people of adequate food, water, and sanitation services.

Attempts to keep a tally sheet and assign judgment about dates, numbers, and borders quickly devolve into what literally is ancient history. People choose a start date to begin cataloging rights and wrongs based on a priori knowledge, beliefs, and biases. There is substantive historical evidence about many events in the region, but in the end, any attempt to make a summary judgment is subjective.

Universities should enable the civil discussion of these issues in the classroom, scholarly research, and public engagement. But how does one judge these harms in the context of a university’s deliberation about divestment from companies doing business in or with Israel? I suggest that a decision to divest lacks the objective basis of harm that exists in the fossil fuel debate and would create a fissure within the university deep enough to undermine its capacity to fulfill its teaching and research missions.

To date about 1,615 institutions of all types have announced various degrees of divestment from fossil fuels, including 263 educational institutions. This opens the door for diverse activists to make their divestment case. But here again, the Israel divestment case is very different than the fossil fuel case. Today, Israel’s social license is on the table. Divestment from Israel would put universities in an untenable position: who else should be on the list for repudiation of their social license to operate? Every country has skeletons in its closet. What about the United States itself given its land grabs and other treatment of Indigenous Peoples and Mexicans?

The question of effectiveness is less subjective, but still challenging to quantify. Conventional wisdom holds that divestment generally has little or no direct financial impact on the companies, sectors, or governments it targets. Empirical research generally substantiates this position across historical divestment campaigns. In the case of fossil fuels, major companies are obviously not cash-strapped, as evidenced by oil and gas production remaining near historic maximums. But divestment was a key accelerant in the reduction of new investment in coal-fired power plants, and the high profile of the divestment debate demonstrates how shaming, persuasion, and empowerment can catalyze economic and political change.

Many financial analysts conclude that the practical details of divestment from Israel are much more complex due to issues such as defining “doing business with Israel,” a growing number of laws and regulations that prohibit public support of Boycotts, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS), and the challenge of divesting in assets that involve behemoths like Alphabet, Microsoft, and Google.

Universities should support individuals and organizations who speak and write about these issues from a range of perspectives and do so without fear of being shouted down, trolled, physically threatened, or otherwise censored. Divestment would make this prime directive difficult or impossible to follow.

Cutler Cleveland is a professor of earth and environment at the College of Arts & Sciences; he can be reached at cutler@bu.edu.

“POV” is an opinion page that provides timely commentaries from students, faculty, and staff on a variety of issues: on-campus, local, state, national, or international. Anyone interested in submitting a piece, which should be about 700 words long, should contact John O’Rourke at orourkej@bu.edu. BU Today reserves the right to reject or edit submissions. The views expressed are solely those of the author and are not intended to represent the views of Boston University.