HARVARD AND MIT COMMUNITIES LAUNCH SUCCESSFUL ANTI-DIVESTMENT CAMPAIGN IN RESPONSE TO PRESSURE BY ANTI-ISRAEL GROUP

On May 6th, Harvard-MIT Divestment campaign, led by Noam Chomsky, organized a teach-in on the MIT campus to urge the schools to extricate themselves from all companies conducting business in Israel. The 400-plus signatories of the petition presented at the teach-in, and available online (http://harvardmitdivest.org) are demanding that the two universities take the lead in a nationwide effort to encourage universities to pull their investments from companies like Lucent Technologies, McDonalds, General Motors and Hewlett Packard, which own portions of Israeli companies, do business in Israel, and/or engage in research efforts with Israeli companies. The campaign in Cambridge, MA where the two schools are located, and elsewhere across the country including Princeton, Brown and California-Berekely, echoes the protests that convinced many universities to divest from apartheid-era South Africa.

In response to the campaign, another group of professors, student, staff and alumni have formed an anti-divestment group calling for the University to publicly state that it will not divest from Israel. The Harvard-MIT Justice Petition to Oppose Divestment from Israel states that the group has diverse opinions on how peace in the Middle East may be achieved and the government’s current policies. "We are unanimous, however, in our condemnation" of the pro-divestment petition "as a one-sided attempt to de-legitimize Israel". The Anti-Divestment petition (http://www.harvardmitjustice.org) was posted on Friday, May 10, and has already received over 5000 signatures. By comparison, the Divestment petition has been signed by over 400 members of the Harvard and MIT communities. "If this were a referendum," James Taranto wrote in the May 14 issue of the Wall Street Journal, "the pro-Israel side would win with 88% of the vote."

While no particular group sponsored the Anti-Divestment petition, Harvard Hillel has endorsed it and Hillel Executive Director Bernard Steinberg has promoted the petition by email. An editorial in the MIT "Tech-Talk" paper slammed the pro-divestment campaign not only for its exaggerated claims ("…companies such as McDonald’s simply operate franchises in Israel – these are global corporations with operations in a highly developed economy,") but also for seeing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as one-sided.

Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers issued a statement that Harvard has "no intention" of divesting from Israel. "Harvard is first and foremost a center of learning, not an institutional organ for advocacy on such a complex and controversial international conflict. On that proposition I hope we can all agree."