Arizona State University Student Government Votes to Divest from Israel

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At the last Senate hearing of the year, the undergraduate student government at Arizona State University unanimously passed a bill demanding that ASU divest from and blacklist companies that continue to provide the Israeli Defense Force with weapons and militarized equipment or are complicit with the genocidal regime in Darfur.

This announcement, coming on the last day of the 2012 school year, is another victory in the global call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) on Israel as well as other global solidarity movements calling for the end to human rights violations

Arizona State University, a university with an endowment of over $735 million, aspires to be the “New American University” with globally engaged students. We, students, at ASU want our university to make socially responsible investment decisions; we also want ASU’s investments to reflect its values as an institution. The bill calls for ASU to divest from and blacklist companies such as Alliant Tech Systems, Boeing, Caterpillar, Motorola, United Technologies, Petrochina, China National Petroleum Company, Sinopec, Oil and Natural Gas Company, and Alstom.

This is not the first time ASU has divested from companies supporting human rights abuses. In 1985 Arizona public universities supported divestment from apartheid South Africa. The undergraduate student government has also supported the idea of the creation of an Advisory Committee for Socially Responsible Investing on campus in the past. This is just another step in the right direction for the New American University. The bill concludes, “that the [ASU] Undergraduate Student Government supports on-campus divestment from and blacklisting of corporations that are complicit in human rights abuses in the occupied Palestinian Territories and Sudan.”