From Columbia University in New York, to the University of Southern California and now on Georgia campuses, pro-Palestinian demonstrators have called on their colleges to divest from and cut ties with Israel amid the ongoing war with Hamas in Gaza.
Protesters at public schools like the University of Georgia to private ones like Emory have made varying demands, including ending university investments in weapons makers, Israeli corporations or other companies that do business with the country. Others have called on colleges to halt study-abroad programs with Israeli universities and cut ties to an international law enforcement partnership initially created ahead of Atlanta’s 1996 Centennial Olympic Games.
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But experts say disentangling from Israel or companies that do business there would be very difficult in a globally connected economy with many major U.S. and foreign companies doing business in Israel or with Israeli companies. Check Point Software, for example, is listed in the portfolios of more than 80 exchange-traded funds, according to Swing Trade, which tracks the markets.
Exchange-traded funds, which bundle securities into single funds that trade like stocks, are commonly held and found within the endowments of universities and the retirement accounts of many protesters’ parents. Similar investments are also in the education savings accounts known as 529s that make college possible for many students.
In Georgia, the highest-profile divestment calls have come from protesters at Emory, which has an endowment of more than $10 billion, the 17th-largest in the country, according to the National Association of College and University Business Officers.
However, university endowments typically don’t disclose individual investments and the universities themselves don’t always have the ability to extricate funds from financial instruments that have tentacles stretching into the stocks of multinational corporations that also don’t fully disclose their many clients and investments, experts noted.
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