CUNY Discloses Investments in Israeli Apartheid After Years-Long Campaign

Por Shireen Akram-Boshar — Truthout

CUNY has direct investments in weapons manufacturers enabling Israel’s genocide, including Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

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On Wednesday, September 9, activists from CUNY4Palestine broadcast their findings regarding the City University of New York’s (CUNY) investment portfolio in a press conference in front of New York City Hall.

“Following years of campus organizing and after a wave of demonstrations that erupted to protest CUNY’s complicity in the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the students have won disclosure!” the student group said in a statement shared with Truthout.

CUNY has now disclosed its ties to companies profiting from Israel’s crimes – including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman.

The fight for disclosure is just a stepping stone in the larger struggle across the U.S. to compel academic institutions to divest from companies complicit in Israel’s crimes.

In mid-August, CUNY agreed to settle and disclose its stock and bond holdings by September 2, following a two-year battle with activists. The legal battle began with CUNY4Palestine and CUNY Law Students for Justice in Palestine filing a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request in 2024, which was quickly denied by the university. The activist groups then filed a lawsuit demanding that CUNY disclose its investments in companies involved in Israeli apartheid and genocide dating back to January 2020. A judge ruled in 2025 that CUNY could not withhold its records, but the university appealed the ruling. Finally, in August 2026, the university agreed to a settlement that included disclosure.

Corinna Mullin, who was among four adjunct professors fired by CUNY for speaking in solidarity with Palestine in June 2025, spoke at the Wednesday press conference. (Three of those professors have since been reinstated, including Mullin.)

“Let’s be clear – CUNY did not volunteer this information,” Mullin said. “They fought us every step of the way.”

“It took a FOIL lawsuit in the New York Supreme Court, an encampment, speakouts, protests, petitions, demonstrations at board of trustee hearings, and a relentless campaign of pressure” to get the university to disclose, she went on.

“And this campaign, although accelerated by the urgency of the genocide against the Palestinian people started in October 2023, dates back years,” she added.

CUNY4Palestine “has identified numerous investments in CUNY’s portfolio,” the organization explained in the statement, “that confirm CUNY’s direct complicity in colonization, genocide, war crimes, prison labor, border militarization, imperialist military interventions, mass incarceration and fascist attacks on our immigrant communities.”

The university has direct investments in multiple weapons manufacturers involved in Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the activists announced, including over $212,407.10 in unsecured Boeing stocks, $107,488.89 in Boeing common stocks, $141,201.34 in Raytheon stocks, and $65,302.74 in Lockheed Martin stocks.

“Boeing in particular facilitates ongoing massacres in Iran, Lebanon, and Palestine through its manufacturing of F-15 fighter jets, Apache AH-64 attack helicopters, and the notorious bunker-buster bombs,” the activists went on.

The activist group also noted that CUNY has holdings in GEO Group and CoreCivic, private contractors who operate immigration jails including Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey. These corporations “profit from prison labor, ICE detention, deportations, and surveillance,” Mullin said in her speech.

“Even as CUNY management claims to support immigrant students, it has invested the funds of our public university in terrorizing their communities and detaining them and their families,” Mullin added.

She then called for CUNY to respond to the needs of the diverse community it serves.

“We shouldn’t have had to fight for this. This is a public institution. This is the so-called ‘People’s University,’” Mullin said.

Veronica Salama of the New York Civil Liberties Union, which represented the student activists in the legal fight, noted in a press release in August that investment records disclosure “is a basic responsibility and function of a public institution.”

CUNY is the largest urban public university in the country. It now joins the only other U.S. universities that have disclosed their investments in companies complicit in Israel’s crimes – the University of Minnesota and the University of California, both of which disclosed in 2024 due to the pressure of pro-Palestinian student encampments that spring.

In May 2025, the University of San Francisco announced that it would divest from four companies that contract with the Israeli military by June 2025 – Palantir, L3Harris, GE Aerospace, and RTX Corporation, also after a persistent campaign by student activists.

In 2024, students across the country set up at least 130 encampments at colleges and universities in order to bring attention to the U.S.’s role in Israel’s genocide. One of the primary demands of the encampments was divestment.

In her speech on Wednesday, Mullin referred to the encampment as central to the fight for disclosure and divestment, and for a better university.

“When we organized against all of this – when we built that beautiful encampment at City College in solidarity with Palestinian liberation and against the genocide – we created something extraordinary,” she said. “We showed what a People’s University could actually look like.”

But the university’s response — and the response of universities across the country to the student-led encampment movement — was repression.

“They called in the [New York City Police Department Strategic Response Group], with the full support of the governor and mayor at the time, to repress our peaceful encampment. Over 100 protesters were arrested that evening,” Mullin recalled. “They attacked and punished student organizers.”

Despite the repression, activists intend for the disclosure to become a blueprint for a divestment campaign at CUNY, and a model for other universities.

The State University of New York (SUNY) BDS chapter echoed this sentiment in a statement sent to Truthout, saying, “Our goal is to develop a SUNY-wide Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement that reaches across all 64 SUNY campuses.”

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Shireen Akram-Boshar is a socialist writer, editor and Middle East/North Africa solidarity activist.

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Fonte: Truthout