Letter to the Editor: Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine Urges Divestment from the Military-Industrial Complex

As the U.S. and Israel continue to escalate their wars in Palestine, Lebanon, and Iran, we write as members of the Amherst College Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine collective with a call for renewed organizing and resistance.

The stakes could not be higher. President Donald Trump has threatened an outright genocidal massacre of the Iranian people. Israel has already murdered thousands in Lebanon and displaced one million people, a crime against humanity that replicates the violence and scale of the 1948 phase of the Nakba. U.S. military firms like Raytheon (now a business unit of RTX), General Dynamics, Elbit Systems, and L3 Harris provide Israel with the arms to carry out these atrocities. Further, the U.S.-Israeli wars are causing fuel and fertilizer prices to skyrocket, threatening the world with economic disaster and widespread famine. On a planetary scale, the U.S. military-industrial complex, including in Massachusetts, is a central driver of climate change and ecological collapse, threatening the future of all people on Earth.

We believe that those of us living in the center of the U.S. empire have an obligation to organize and to resist. We further believe that Amherst College has a particular obligation and ability to take action to stop the apocalyptic war machine. We must leverage the capacity, resources, and power that we have to stop U.S.-led wars of aggression. We as an institution have a specific lever available to us to oppose the U.S. military machine: our $3.9 billion endowment. Following the lead of student organizers at Smith College, we propose immediate action to divest that endowment from Israel and the U.S. military-industrial complex. 

Students and Faculty Support Divestment

Alongside the escalating genocidal violence of Israel (with U.S. support) following Oct. 7, the ruling class and media in the U.S. (and Europe) have waged intense psychological war to discourage people from speaking out for Palestine. Despite this pressure toward silence, millions spoke out and took to the streets, eventually consolidating into a mass movement that is worthy of historical memory.

Here at Amherst College, faculty and students took a stand. The Association of Amherst Students voted nearly unanimously to urge the Board of Trustees to divest the College’s endowment from Israel on May 1, 2024. Two days later, nearly two thirds of Amherst College faculty followed suit, urging the Board of Trustees to divest from corporations arming Israel’s genocide in Gaza. We have good reason to feel proud of this principled stance.

However, in June 2024, the Board of Trustees blithely dismissed the democratically expressed will of the campus community on the grounds that divesting from genocide was both impractical and somehow inconsistent with Amherst College’s principles.

Since that time, on our campus and across the country, we have seen only limited anti-war mobilizations against recent U.S.-Israeli escalations in Iran and Lebanon. While we recognize that there are many reasons for this, we do not have the sense that students and faculty at Amherst College fear that voicing opposition to the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran and Lebanon will provoke the same acute backlash that voicing opposition to genocide did in 2023 and 2024. Instead, we believe that we have collectively internalized a sense of powerlessness.

Our purpose here is to remind students, staff, and our faculty colleagues that we are not, in fact, powerless. Now more than ever, Amherst College has an obligation to divest fully from the U.S. military, from Israel, and from all firms that directly drive genocide and the xenoforming of the planet. As faculty, staff, and students, we have the power to make the college do what is right and necessary by joining our voices in this important demand.

Terras Incendant: Our Investments Bring Death to the World

The threat posed by the U.S. military-industrial complex to people and the planet has never been greater. The U.S. spends more than one trillion dollars per year on its military, more than the next nine countries combined, including China. The Pentagon is the largest consumer of oil in the world, burning 400,000 barrels a day, exceeding the consumption of more than 100 countries and outstripping any single private or public organization. The military industry is responsible for over 10% of total emissions in the U.S. 

Amherst College simultaneously maintains investments in the world’s largest military firms and claims to be committed to achieving net-zero emissions by 2030. 

Meanwhile, the U.S.’s assault on Iran has destroyed civilian infrastructure causing petroleum to rain down upon an urban population of millions. The U.S.-Israeli genocide in Gaza has killed over 75,000 people violently, caused tens of thousands of indirect deaths, displaced nearly 2 million people, and caused over 1.8 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions in 2024 alone. 

Amherst College claims to bring light to the world, but it profits from a military-industrial complex that brings death, flattens cities, and threatens planetary annihilation. 

Amherst College has a special connection to Lebanon. The American University in Beirut (AUB) was founded by Amherst alumnus Daniel Bliss 1852, and our college runs a robust Amherst-AUB exchange program between students at these schools. What does it mean to honor these deep historical obligations to the AUB while also arming the state that is bombing it?

We are raising our voices because we know we are not alone in our feelings of rage and despair at what is happening in Lebanon, Palestine, and Iran; in our knowledge of our own complicity; and in our lived sense that going about business as usual on campus while these horrors rage is maddening, confusing, and in fact impossible. 

We want the students on this campus to know they are not alone in these feelings and in the strong desire to conduct ourselves differently. We can and must take action, and have a clear mechanism for doing so. 

There are multiple ways that faculty, staff, and students can join with others to get involved now.

The Solidarity Coalition at the University of Massachusetts Amherst is hosting an all-day MayDayFest on May 1, featuring teach-ins, music, food, and art under the banner “Democratize / Decolonize / Demilitarize.” We encourage you to attend and connect with the community and the larger circle of Five College organizers.

Most importantly, we will continue to organize over the summer to ensure that the Board of Trustees complies with the will of the campus community and divests by the end of 2026. We will be back in the fall ready to escalate with commitment adequate to the scale of the unfolding calamity.

You can join us in making divestment a reality. Email us at [email protected] to get involved.

Amherst College Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine