Asa Winstanley
The Electronic Intifada / August 3, 2020
The University of Manchester has divested more than $5 million from Caterpillar and the parent company of travel site Booking.com.
Activists on Monday said it was “a colossal win for the Palestine solidarity movement in Britain” and a “watershed moment.”
The university has been a focus for campaigners since 2016 due to its investments in firms complicit in the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land.
Last year students crashed a board meeting to demand divestment from Caterpillar.
Caterpillar supplies bulldozers to the Israeli army which are weaponized to destroy Palestinian homes and carry out extrajudicial killings.
Booking Holdings Inc. is in the United Nations database of companies involved in Israel’s settlements in the occupied West Bank which was published earlier this year.
The parent firm and Booking.com are both on the blacklist due to their listings of rental properties in Israeli settlements built on stolen Palestinian land in violation of international law.
Campaign continues
Data seen by The Electronic Intifada, released by the university in response to freedom of information requests, confirms the divestment took place sometime between April 2019 and 31 March 2020.
In a 23 July 2020 email replying to the request by campaigners, the university’s information officer released its latest investments listing.
She said that the university’s ethical investment guidelines now exclude companies based on a variety of factors, including supply of “controversial weapons.”
In a statement sent immediately after publication of this article, a University of Manchester spokesperson denied that the divestment had any connection to the BDS campaign. “The decisions taken on our specific equity holdings are made by our investment managers with the aim of delivering our overall investment goals,” they said.
But activists are defiant. “The investments in companies upholding Israel’s apartheid regime should have never existed in the first place,” said activist Huda Ammori. “University of Manchester divesting from complicit companies shows the power of the grassroots student movement to hold our institutions to account.”
Ammori founded the BDS campaign at University of Manchester when she was a student at there in 2016.
In a statement on Monday activists from Apartheid off Campus, a new student network, said that “The divestment victory at Manchester, the largest university in Europe, is expected to be a watershed moment for the BDS movement on campuses in the UK.”
But activists said they would continue to target Manchester university for BDS campaigns.
According to Apartheid off Campus the university “still has many ties with Israel’s apartheid regime, including its exchange program with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem which sends students to study on occupied and stolen Palestinian land.”
Leeds became the first English university to divest from Israeli apartheid in 2018, when it pulled more than $1.2 million from several firms involved in the arms trade with Israel.
Updated with University of Manchester statement.
Asa Winstanley is an investigative journalist and associate editor with The Electronic Intifada
