VOA News | Thursday, May 2, 2024 
Divestment demands expanding to US businesses

The mass protest movement currently engulfing dozens of U.S. college campuses has included calls for university endowments to divest from Israel, a demand that some activist organizations are broadening to U.S. companies that do business in Israel or are otherwise connected to the Israeli economy. The demand that U.S. institutions withdraw their financial support from Israel is not a new one. It has been a central plank of an established protest movement known as “BDS,” for Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions, for nearly two decades. However, the public reaction to Israel’s response to an October 7 attack on its citizens by militants of the Palestinian organization Hamas, which killed more than 1,200 people and resulted in hundreds more being taken as hostages into the Gaza Strip, has amplified those calls, particularly among college students. In the wake of the October 7 attack, Israel pummeled Gaza with artillery, missiles and an eventual ground invasion. Those operations have killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, including many women and children, destroyed much of the region’s infrastructure, and left more than a million people without adequate access to food and water. – Decentralized movement – The protests that have erupted on U.S. college campuses appear to have arisen independently of each other and without significant coordination. That has made it difficult to identify a single specific set of demands common to all of them…Read more