Documents Show Indiana University's Financial Support For Genocide

Financial documents show that IU is invested in Israeli Government bonds while Israel slaughtered Gazans

This column was initially published in the Indiana Daily Student

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IU Holds Israeli Bonds

The IU Divestment Coalition has obtained a snapshot of IU’s investments in 2022 and 2023. The documents are not IU Foundation documents; instead, the university or an entity within it has held bonds issued by the State of Israel. This means that as the country was committing some of the worst atrocities this century and being condemned by international institutions, IU was lending its financial backing to Israel’s project.

After weeks of inquiries, IU has refused to offer any clarification about how much money was involved, what part of the university was doing the investing or whether or not anything has changed. Perhaps this is unsurprising given the IU administration’s disdain for the concerns of the IU community but it is still a deeply troubling connection.

Israel’s destruction of Gaza

After months of rejecting and undermining ceasefire offers from Hamas, the Israeli government finally agreed to halt its attack on Gaza on Jan. 19 with an agreement nearly identical to one accepted by Hamas in May 2024. However Israeli planners made it clear that they intended to sabotage the ceasefire and continue the war. Last month, Israel resumed its bombardment while falsely blaming Hamas for the restart of hostilities.

The toll has been staggering. According to the Gaza Ministry of Health, at least 50,983 people have been killed by the Israeli assault, but this is almost certainly an undercount of the true toll.

The prestigious British medical journal The Lancet earlier published a study that estimated that based on the June 2024 death toll of 37,396 the conflict would result in 186,000 deaths from war, malnutrition, disease, chronic illness and other stresses brought on by war if violence were to cease immediately; as we know, the violence continued.

More troubling still is that The Lancet recently found that the June 2024 death toll had been severely undercounted by 41% and that the death toll then was actually 64,300. Assuming the same undercount applies to more up-to-date numbers, the same methodology to calculate indirect deaths in the earlier study would then put the estimated eventual death toll from Israel’s attack at over 340,000 — a number consistent with earlier projections by public health professionals. A recent study published by The Lancet found that as a result of Israel’s assault, life expectancy in Gaza has dropped by over 46%, bringing the life expectancy lower than any country on the planet.

When IU buys or holds Israeli bonds, they are financially supporting the Israeli government. When that government is committing acts of genocide, it means that IU is knowingly and deliberately helping to fund that genocide.

IU’s Support

As IU was actively supporting Israel during the mass murder, pro-Palestine organizers demonstrated against the university’s connections to these crimes. We challenged IU’s investments in companies targeted by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement as part of a global push to put economic pressure on Israel to dismantle its apartheid system and end its slaughter of Gazans. In response to these calls, the university unleashed military levels of violence against student activists.

In addition to the bonds from the government, IU also invests in a number of companies targeted under BDS that we were already aware of: Teva, an Israeli pharmaceutical company criticized by the UN for continued business in Israel’s illegal settlements; Caterpillar Financial, a division of the construction machinery company that contracts with Israel to support its mass Palestinian home demolition policy; and Hewlett Packard, which provides computers and data solutions for Israeli occupation forces to process the population and bolster the apartheid system.

There were investments in other companies that support Israel’s war machine like Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet, the parent company of Google, all of which rushed to provide the Israeli military AI tools in its assault on Gaza. Israel’s AI arsenal includes the Gospel system which is used to explicitly target civilian infrastructure – known within the IDF as "power targets” – in order to “shock” the civilian population. Israel also uses the Lavender AI to target individuals, alongside the error-prone AI system dubbed “Where’s Daddy?” which is specifically designed to target the homes and families of people merely suspected of being affiliated with Hamas.

Along with these investments, organizers have also criticized and called for the cancellation of IU’s $111 million partnership with Naval Surface Warfare Center Crane at the NSA Crane base. Along with NSWC, NSA Crane also hosts the Crane Army Ammunition Activity which houses, refurbishes and distributes the same 2000 lb bombs that America sends to Israel to then be used to flatten neighborhoods and erase entire bloodlines.

We also called attention to our study abroad programs to Israel, which, while temporarily halted, are targets of international calls for an academic boycott of Israel as part of a wider refusal to normalize oppression of Palestinians. We also denounced Whitten’s direct relationship with organizations like the Israel On Campus Coalition, which is dedicated to opposing pro-Palestinian activism while justifying and cultivating support for Israel.

Israel’s genocide

While many non-experts and pro-Israel partisans object to the use of the term “genocide” to describe what Israel is doing in Gaza, the leading experts and international authorities on the subject have come to the opposite conclusion. Many Holocaust and genocide scholars identified Israel’s genocidal plans in the first weeks of the assault. Amnesty International concluded that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, writing that “Israel committed multiple war crimes and other crimes under international law for which there can be no justification based on Hamas’ actions.” Human Rights Watch accused Israel of committing the “crime of extermination” though numerous “acts of genocide.” The HRW report found that Israel “intentionally deprived Palestinians in Gaza of access to safe water for drinking and sanitation needed for basic human survival.”

With Israel’s unilateral nullification of the ceasefire, these acts of genocide continue. Every day, more Palestinians are bombed, crushed or burned to death. The attacks on journalists and hospitals continue unabated. To exacerbate the situation, Israel has tightened its grip on the strip, preventing crucial food, water and other aid from entering since early March.

That IU is financially supporting the government doing all of this should deeply trouble the IU community, and mobilize us to action.