Which are the behemoths in the crosshairs of students protesting Gaza war?

Students protesting against Israel's war on Gaza are demanding of their universities to divest from companies contributing to the seven-month-long military offensive which has killed over 34,000 Palestinians, more than seventy percent of them children and women.

At its epicentre is New York City’s Columbia University — the Ivy League institution where the Gaza Solidarity Encampment began and sparked a wave of similar protests across the country after university president Minouche Shafik called on police to suppress the peaceful demonstrations that resulted in the arrest of more than 100 students.

Protesters, who have since rebuilt the encampment, are urging the university to divest from companies with ties to Israel, accused of genocide as its war on Gaza enters its 206th day.

The students are taking a page from Columbia’s own history books. In 1968, students then took a similar stand against the Vietnam War and demanded the withdrawal of the US Army in what is one of the largest mass detentions in New York City history. In 1985, Columbia students won their first major successful protest in favour of divestiture after they protested the university’s investments in corporations that operated in apartheid South Africa.

‘No tech for apartheid’

The university has investments in some of the better-known companies doing business with Israel, namely Alphabet Inc, the parent company of Google, Jeff Bezos-owned Amazon, and Microsoft.

Amazon and Google are part of a $1.2 billion cloud-computing contract with the Israeli government called the Nimbus Project. Workers from both companies have protested against their respective company’s dealings with Israel through the No Tech for Apartheid movement.

Meanwhile, Microsoft’s cloud computing service Azure is used in the Al Munaseq app by the Israeli Ministry of Defense to issue permits to Palestinians for work, family visits, and medical or legal needs in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, according to Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a coalition of 116 student organisations urging Columbia to divest all economic and academic stakes in Israel.

The students have noted Columbia also invests in funds that hold shares in a variety of lesser-known companies they say are complicit in Tel Aviv’s war on Gaza, from defence contractors to those that provide services to Israeli police and prison service.

How do these companies enable settler colonialism and the war on Gaza?

Defence contractors

According to American weapons maker Lockheed Martin, it has been providing the Israeli Air Force with fighter aircrafts for several decades now, including the F-16 variant, which is frequently used in major assaults on Gaza.

It has been used to drop bombs on refugee camps — like the Jenin refugee camp in 2002, an incident also known as the Battle of Jenin — and residential buildings and offices, including the notable 2021 destruction of two media offices, Al Jazeera and Associated Press in Gaza.

In 2016, Israel became the first country other than the US to acquire F-35 fighter jets, Business Insider reported, after signing a letter of agreement to select the aircraft through the US government's Foreign Military Sales process.

"We are flying the F-35 all over the Middle East and have already attacked twice on two different fronts," then-Israeli Air Force chief Major-General Amikam Norkin said in 2018, Reuters reported.

Lockheed Martin also supplies the Israeli military with its Longbow Hellfire missiles and surveillance technology, which other Palestinian solidarity groups have said is “actively used in its ongoing air and ground assault on Gaza.” Lockheed Martin ranks 60 on the Fortune 500 List, and on April 23, reported that its earnings were up 14 percent.

Other defence contractors students are asking Columbia to divest from include Raytheon, which supplies Israel with bombs and missiles; Boeing, which provides Israel with a range of military attack aircrafts and missiles, as well as maintenance for Apache helicopters and Pegasus military transport aircrafts; and General Dynamics, which supplies bombs, weapons used on Lockheed Martin's F-16 and F-35 fighter jets, and engines used in Israel's main battle tank, the Merkava IV.

Heavy machinery makers

Students are calling on Columbia to drop investments from several firms that provide heavy machinery to Israel. US multinational manufacturer and provider of civil and military engineering machinery, Caterpillar Inc, which has supplied machinery used by Israel to demolish Palestinian homes, is among them.

As far back as 2004, Human Rights Watch urged Caterpillar to stop selling bulldozers to Israel, which uses the firm’s D9 model, “as its primary weapon to raze Palestinian homes, destroy agriculture and shred roads in violation of the laws of war.” The D9 bulldozer was used by an Israeli soldier to kill American activist Rachel Corrie in Gaza in 2003.

A Fortune 500 company, Caterpillar has appeared in Fortune’s World’s Most Admired Companies list for several years, as recently as 2020.

Students also want Columbia to disinvest funds from Doosan Corp, a South Korean multinational conglomerate that owns Bobcat Company, and Japanese firm Hitachi, both of which produce construction equipment used in the creation of illegal separation walls and settlements in Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Profiting from Israel's illegal occupation

Based in Shanghai, China, JA Solar Technology Co Ltd, a publicly traded company on the NASDAQ stock market, designs, develops, manufactures, and sells solar products.

Protestors are urging for university divestment from it, citing its solar farms installed in industrial zones of illegal settlements located in the occupied West Bank.

According to the Who Profits research centre, Siemens Israel received 122,936 solar panels from the Chinese company for five projects, including three in the Arava Desert and two in the Naqab.

There is also Dutch online travel agency Booking.com, owned by parent company Booking Holdings Inc., which hosts listings in illegal settlements in places like the occupied West Bank.

“At the very core, the companies are operating on land that belongs to Palestinians and which has been unlawfully appropriated from them – criminal acts which amount to grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, and war crimes and crimes against humanity within the purview of the International Criminal Court,” the head of legal research and advocacy for Palestinian rights group al-Haq, Susan Power, told Al Jazeera.

Meanwhile, students say that the Indian multinational automotive company Tata Motors Ltd, with subsidiaries such as Jaguar and Land Rover, and Japan's Mitsubishi Corporation, are both on the list of companies Columbia should divest from because they provide vehicles to Israeli police and military.

For more on Columbia’s investments, the full list by Columbia University Apartheid Divest is available here.