On Feb. 19, Dartmouth Divest for Palestine — a coalition of Dartmouth students, faculty, staff and alumni — submitted a formal proposal for Dartmouth’s divestment from “companies complicit in Israel’s violations of international law.” DD4P delivered its filing to the College’s Board of Trustees, College President Sian Leah Beilock and the Advisory Committee on Investor Responsibility — the administrative body tasked with reviewing investment-related proxy resolutions relating to important social issues. Endorsed by over 25 organizations across campus, the 55-page proposal meticulously lays out a myriad of specific human rights and international law violations — most notably genocide, apartheid and the ongoing illegal occupation and Israeli settlement of Palestinian land — that must trigger Dartmouth’s responsibility to take action. Namely, the proposal recommends prohibiting any investment in corporations complicit to these violations.
I argue that ACIR must formally review the proposal and recommend its provisions to the Board of Trustees. More broadly, DD4P’s formal proposal must be a stepping stone for achieving Dartmouth’s full divestment from all human rights violations throughout Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory.
As laid out by the proposal, it is beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Israeli government is committing egregious, unjustifiable acts of violence against Palestinians as a people.Dartmouth has ties to the corporations allowing these violations to be carried out.
Various organizations with the highest authority and credibility on human rights issues have all independently found that Israel is actively engaged in a variety of war crimes and crimes against humanity against the Palestinian population, including genocide and apartheid. These include the world’s preeminent authority on international law, the International Court of Justice, leading international human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, various United Nations experts and special committees and leading Israeli human rights organizations such as B’Tselem. Furthermore, the proposal lays out in detail how Dartmouth’s endowment is connected to these crimes through its investments in weapons manufacturers — including Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Boeing — that supply Israel with the equipment necessary to carry out such acts.
In light of these findings, DD4P’s proposal recommends that the College should “divest its endowment from companies that are involved in Israel’s violations of international law, including its apartheid practices, illegal occupations and acts of genocide.” It is now up to ACIR whether or not the proposal will move forward.
In my view, not only must ACIR review the proposal, but it has a moral imperative to recommend its provisions to the College. The facts about Dartmouth’s investment in companies supporting Israeli violations of international law cannot be ignored any longer. Thus, the College has a responsibility to its students and the broader community to cut ties with these companies.
What are the criteria for ACIR to accept a proposal for review? Under the College’s rules, the submission must satisfy two criteria: (1) that the proposal describes in writing and with sufficient detail how divestment is warranted under College policy and (2) that the proposal describes in sufficient detail how the Dartmouth community as a whole has come to a consensus to support the proposal.
The first consideration is answered in the proposal in-depth, as I have already described. On the second criterion, regarding community consensus, the proposal rightly points out that “ACIR’s current requirement for consensus does not have any historical precedent.”
Past examples of divestment at the College illustrate this fact. None of Dartmouth’s past divestment resolutions — from South African apartheid in 1989, the James Bay HydroQuebec dam project in 1993, genocide in Sudan in 2005, the tobacco industry in 2012 or the fossil fuel industry in 2021 — ever achieved demonstrable community consensus before their adoption. In the case of Dartmouth’s famous and controversial divestment from South African apartheid, only 45% of students supported the move at the time. In the case of the Hydro-Quebec dam project — which garnered over 2,300 signatures of support from community members across various petitions but fell well short of “consensus” — divestment was achieved with the official justification being popular community support.
To echo the words of the proposal, “we see the principle of consensus applied at best unevenly and in most cases not at all. … Consensus is a subjective, ill-defined requirement at best.”
The fact that “a broad coalition of Dartmouth students, alumni, faculty, staff and community members believe it is imperative to divest from companies that facilitate Israeli apartheid, genocide and war crimes” should be enough for ACIR to engage in good faith with the proposal, as it has done in the past. A further 26 campus and student organizations have formally endorsed it. To do otherwise would amount to the selective application of College policy based on whatever is most convenient for the administration’s business interests — which, given the risk Dartmouth runs of being complicit in apartheid and genocide in the 21st century, is unacceptable.
To be sure, there are a million minute technical arguments the College could make to reject or ignore the proposal. At the end of the day, Beilock has made it very clear that her administration cares very little about the voices of students, and that the administration is willing to do whatever it takes to shut down calls for divestment from Israel, including allowing police to forcibly silence peaceful protests and brutalize faculty. As Edel Galgon ’22 has pointed out before, the divestment process seems to be intentionally set up “to mire divestment discussions in administrative lingo and to provide administrators with a talking point for their lack of action and accountability to the Dartmouth community.”
Yet, might does not make right. While those with power on campus may have the power to delay and complicate the divestment process, this power does not absolve them of their responsibility as Dartmouth leaders to listen and respond to the concerns of the community and to comply with Dartmouth’s obligations for ethical investment when it comes to Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory.
DD4P’s formal proposal for divestment from Israeli human rights violations is a landmark step towards that end. It must be given the due diligence and attention it deserves by ACIR, the College administration and the Dartmouth community at large.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
