The War Profiteers Who Are Quashing Gaza Dissent on Campus

More than a year into the genocide in Gaza, many universities and cultural institutions in the United States remain silent on the Israeli attacks that have killed more than 40,000 Palestinians and are now escalating the conflict into a regional war. While many students, staff, and faculty have demanded their institutions condemn the slaughter of civilians and the desecration of education infrastructure in Palestine and divest from the violence, several universities have responded to those demands with violent repression.

As always, it’s prudent to heed the call to “follow the money.” A research initiative recently launched by the Adalah Justice Project, or AJP; the Action Center on Race and the Economy, or ACRE; and Little Sis offers a compelling case for why so many of these institutions have refused to speak out against the slaughter of Palestinians and been so quick to suppress antiwar voices. Called the Genocide Gentry, the research initiative offers a dataset with over 500 entries, an interactive map, and case studies featuring board members and executives at major defense companies who also serve in leading administrative or advisory roles at universities and cultural institutions nationwide.

“There’s a whole system in place of people profiting from what’s happening [in Palestine],” said Ramah Kudaimi, a campaign director at ACRE. “The weapons industry has a wide reach and influence beyond the industry itself, and that reach and influence means that the institutions that they have connections to are tepid in their responses to genocide.”

Since Israel began its assault on Gaza last year, the Israeli weapons industry has boomed. Its largest weapons companies, Elbit Systems, Israel Aerospace Industries, and Rafael, have seen their profits jump as much as 80 percent over last year’s totals. The combined order backlog at these companies exceeds $59 billion, according to Israeli tech magazine CTech. The shares of U.S.-based weapons suppliers to Israel, including Lockheed Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon), and L3Harris, have risen 30 to 60 percent over the past year.

The companies in the new dataset have profited from this boom in arms sales, and their executives have a vested interest in those sales continuing. The Genocide Gentry dataset invites users to consider how these executives may be exercising influence at universities, including shaping these institutions’ responses to demands for divestment, advocating for tightening rules governing protests on campus, or pressuring certain administrators to resign. “I think it’s safe to say that conversations happening in university boardrooms include executives from these companies and people that have investments in them and have a lot to lose if those ties are severed,” said Sandra Tamari, executive director at AJP.

Some cases of influential executives and donors with ties to Israel shaping on-campus decisions have already come to light. One high-profile case is that of Marc Rowan, a billionaire donor to the pro-Israel lobbying group the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, and a member of the board of advisors at Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania. Rowan led a campaign to oust Penn’s president, Liz Magill, and board chair, Scott Bok, in response to the university hosting the Palestine Writes Literature Festival in late September 2023. The pair resigned under pressure last December. Soon after, Rowan contacted the university’s governing board of trustees to recommend changing hiring practices, eliminating some academic departments, and reevaluating university free speech policies. This June, Penn issued new restrictions on on-campus demonstrations.

Dozens of other universities also issued new restrictions on campus speech this year, and they are already being wielded against students. At Cornell University, the case of Ph.D. candidate and graduate student worker Momodou Taal garnered headlines as he faced down the threat of deportation after a pro-Palestine action on campus. (Late last week, Cornell backed down on these threats.)

Taal, whose right to reside in the United States is tied to his enrollment at Cornell, was briefly suspended from the university following his presence at a student-led action that disrupted a career fair where L3Harris and other Israel-backing arms companies were tabling. The university may have publicly called it a “temporary suspension,” but its decision kicked off very real immigration procedures that could have forced Taal to leave the country, effectively chilling the free speech rights of other international students nationwide. “A temporary suspension might sound benign, but fundamentally, it has drastic effects, especially on international students,” Taal told The New Republic.

Those named in the Genocide Gentry dataset are operating behind the scenes at universities such as Cornell and could be affecting these kinds of decisions to target vulnerable international students to chill dissent. “We can assume that the Cornell administration is consulting with the board of trustees and taking actions that reflect the desires, perhaps instructions, of the board of trustees as well as powerful donors,” said Risa Lieberwitz, a professor of labor and employment law at Cornell.

One of the actors named in the dataset is Kraig Kayser, a Cornell alum and chair of the university’s board of trustees. Kayser is also a board director and major shareholder of weapons company Moog, which maintains sales offices in Israel. Last year, Kayser took home over $200,000 in combined cash and stock awards from Moog for his role on its board. He also holds about 30,000 shares in Moog stock, valued at almost $6 million as of October 2024, according to his most recent Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

A former member of the Cornell board of trustees, who spoke to The New Republic on condition of anonymity, confirmed that in their experience, the board chair has the most candid conversations with senior university leadership and maintains the closest ties to major donors (many of whom are also on the board).

Cornell also maintains a lucrative partnership with Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, whose research and development are instrumental to the occupation of Palestine, “whether that’s automated bulldozers, or drones, or the surveillance wall,” according to Eric Cheyfitz, Ernest I. White professor of American studies and humane letters at Cornell. The two schools have a shared institute, the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute, in New York City, to which another name on the Genocide Gentry dataset, president and CEO of Elbit Systems Bezalel Machlis, is a major donor. Cheyfitz told The New Republic that the shared institution “is a manifestation of the fact that Cornell has a serious investment in Israel.”

Academics, including Cheyfitz, are sounding the alarm about potential conflicts of interest in such relationships. “Universities, these supposed-to-be educational leaders around the country, who condemn racism, who condemn misogyny, who condemn homophobia, and yet they have been uniformly silent on the issue of genocide,” he said. “The reason everybody’s quiet about this is there’s a tremendous amount of donor support for Israel, for whatever Israel does.”

Some warn that these conflicts threaten to upend collective leadership structures at universities, which are meant to ensure that faculty have governance power over curricula and academic freedom in their classrooms and research. When Magill and Bok were forced out of Penn last year and Rowan sent his long list of questions to the board, the American Association of University Professors-Penn Executive Committee issued a statement condemning the “hostile takeover of the core academic functions of the University of Pennsylvania” by “unelected trustees with no academic expertise.”

Lieberwitz, who also cited the Penn case, said, “There are serious concerns about conflicts of interest when universities have powerful boards of trustees, where those trustees have economic interests due to their positions with large corporations and the interest they have in maintaining that power and intruding into universities.”

The Genocide Gentry dataset offers organizers starting points for counteracting these forces. Researchers behind the project conceive of the list of universities and cultural institutions as a roster of secondary targets that can be pressured to change their behavior because of the threat of lost prestige or legitimacy, whereas putting social pressure on a weapons manufacturer is less likely to be effective. “Directly engaging a weapons company may not give you that same leverage,” explained Kudaimi of ACRE. “But if you’re at a university, if you’re a student there or a professor there, that gives us other points of being able to change behavior and interrupt the continuous flow of weapons [to Israel].”

Lieberwitz said that building alliances around such campaigns is the best way to disrupt threats to freedom of expression and policies that suppress demands for divestment on college campuses. “The most powerful response to the university administration’s actions is the collective power of organizations opposing the university’s actions,” she said. “When we act collectively to push back, then the university is in a position to have to respond to us. That kind of collective solidarity is essential to assert academic freedom, freedom of expression, rights of job security, [and] respect for governance.”