Image credit: Mo C., Instagram: @mo.crone
Strategy for the Student Divestment Movement
The University of Wisconsin holds investments in numerous companies and index funds which are directly complicit in the genocide of Palestinians and almost a century of Israeli apartheid. The student movement has diligently fought for divestment from these companies to strangle funding for the genocide at its source: the United States.
On May 1st 2024, 34 protesters were brutalized and arrested by university police after staging an encampment on UW ground. The police forcefully dismantled the encampment and enacted violence on students sharing their voice. University leadership responded by claiming it did support free expression, but only within “the boundaries of law and campus policies.” We were asked the age-old question, previously answered in 1969 during the Black Student Strike: “why not try the proper channels?”
Because, time and time again, our struggle is rejected and mocked. UW leadership acts as if these students had a choice in the matter. We have tried the ‘proper channels’ and they did not lead to divestment. They did not work because proper channels are a misdirection created by those in power to distract and dispel collective power.
In order to cut the arteries that supply blood to the imperialist monstrosity responsible for this genocide, we must go beyond proper channels and directly confront the source of university complicity: the pursuit of profit.
I. Background: Settler-colonialism, imperialism, & Palestine
Israel is a settler-colonial project. The Zionists did not come peacefully or as migrants, they came as settlers who moved to the land of Palestine from across the world to inhabit land which was already home to Palestinians. They expelled Palestinians from their homes in order to expand “their own” territory. They began a regime which exploits Palestinians, treats them as legally inferior, and completely blocks their freedom of movement. They began a genocide. This is the project of Zionism, which has taken place since the 1940s.
The goal of Zionism is to build an explicitly Jewish State in the land of Palestine and the surrounding area. What they are trying to build is an ethnostate- one which oppresses and cleanses groups which do not fit into the dominant ethnicity. Israel strictly upholds the privilege and power of the dominant ethnicity by disposing of the oppressed, enforced by strict law and military might. When Zionists claim that Israel should exist because it is “the only Jewish State”, they are defending an ethnostate, the same type of state Adolf Hitler wanted to build for the “Aryan race” in Europe. This must not be allowed to continue.
To defeat Zionism, we must first understand what it isn’t. It is necessary to decouple Judaism from Zionism. While ethnic and religious Judaism are both identities which are dominant in Israel, Israel is not a Jewish project. It is the product of an ideology: Zionism. Ethnostates are ethnostates regardless of who creates them. Israel could just as easily call itself a state for any other group and our opposition to it would be identical because we do not oppose Jewish people, but an ideological foundation.
Only a fraction of Jewish people claim Israel as a state which represents them. No state can represent the entirety of an ethnic or religious group. Believing so completely disregards the individual autonomy of Jewish people. There are many anti-Zionist Jewish people worldwide fighting for the liberation of Palestine. A majority of Jewish people live outside of Israel. Many have never been to Israel and never will be. States do not act as conduits to which an entire ethnic group funnels their wants and needs, states represent a ruling class which operates in its own interest.
Tying Zionism to Judaism is disingenuous and disgusting. Opposing Zionism is opposing a fascist ideology, not Jewish people. It is ridiculous for Zionists to base their “supremacy” on religious doctrine or a past of facing oppression. These are not excuses for oppression and mass murder.
Zionist claims to supremacy are not ideas cast out into the ether, but fascist convictions meticulously enacted in the material world. To understand the self-evident evil of this regime, we must examine the conditions in Palestine.
Israel continues to expand its settlements into the West Bank pushing more and more Palestinians off of their land. Gaza has turned from an open air ghetto to an extermination camp. Prior to October 7th, Israel had already worked to guarantee unlivable conditions in Gaza. The Palestinians are prisoners to the walls and checkpoints Israel has built around them, restricting their movement. Israel completely controls the flow of trade and shipment in and out of Gaza. They maintain a selective blockade. Palestinians who work outside of this ghetto must pass through military checkpoints coming to and from work. Palestinians are subjected to an unequal and discriminatory legal system. This constitutes apartheid, which South Africa has been keen to point out for many years. These conditions are violent, oppressive, and unacceptable.
Palestinians have pursued the “proper channels” of change for almost a century and their calls fall of deaf ears. When they initiated the great march of return, a peaceful mass protest with the goal of crossing the walls of their enclosure, they were gunned down by Israel without hesitation. A peaceful protest became a massacre.
When Palestinians resist militarily in an uprising, it is depicted as terrorism and undue violence rather than a necessity in the decolonial struggle, the only way to shatter the chains the colonizer imposed. It is called terrorism rather than defensive action when taking up the gun to disarm the aggressor. Let us recall the holocaust and its own Warsaw ghetto uprising and we will see the historical double standard which denounces Palestinian resistance but not that of the prisoners of the Warsaw ghetto.
Israel and the Israeli Occupying Force have conducted a genocide against the Palestinian people, killing by any means. After the Oct. 7 uprising, Israel quickly bombed many hospitals in Gaza. Israel immediately cut off food, water, and electricity– ignoring the most basic of human rights to collectively punish Palestinians. Now, the IOF has killed over 75,000 people. A massive portion of these are women and children. Pre-war, the population of Gaza was ~2,260,000. That is about one of every 30 people killed. Israel does not have a “right to defend itself.” It is a settler-colonial ethnostate committing genocide. Nothing it has ever done to the Palestinian people can be classified as “self defense.” Likewise, no foreign arms sent to Israel can be classified as “allied defense” because there is nothing defensive in any motivation for alliance with Israel. The extensive collaboration of the United States in this genocidal project is direct evidence.
Every massacre we witness would be impossible without full bipartisan involvement from the US. It is an active participant because of the profit and strategic benefits Israel provides. The primary interest of the US government on the world stage is domination, exploitation, and profit. As a capitalist state obediently follows the profit motive, it seeks to expand and oppress outside of the bounds of its own territory. Capitalism becomes imperialism: violently oppressing foreigners, outsourcing manufacturing and resource extraction which directly serve US companies, and minimizing the wages paid to workers. US companies and government are one in the same.
Liberal democracy exclusively represents the interests of the owning class because officials work for their donors, not their constituents. Officials and political parties rule by their own interest because they too profit from maintaining the current systems of oppression. Hundreds of times, the US government initiated war and regime change worldwide to ensure access to cheap resources and labor.
The United States wants Israel to exist in the Middle East to exert its will and pressure, maintaining a claim on oil. Oil is extremely valuable to all industries and it is so plentiful in the Middle East that the US had fought for control over the region for decades. The result is death, destruction, and imperial blowback. Israel is more than just an ally to the US, it is an imperial outpost.
From Israel, the US demonstrates its military dominance. About 70% of Israel’s weaponry comes from the United States. Much of this is not purchased but given directly to Israel. Over $20 billion of military aid had been provided to Israel by the US since Oct 7, 2023. Our taxes are funding this genocide, which would be impossible without US support. Both entrenched political parties have demonstrated their full commitment to Israel and its actions. For most US politicians of either party, the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC and war profiteering companies are generous donors. The United States is the pinnacle of imperialism, and it leaps to support its genocidal compatriot without hesitation.
Gaza has become an open testing ground for surveillance and military technology which the United States builds and supplies. US weapons manufacturers endlessly profit from this genocide and decades of militarized apartheid. These war profiteers are contracted by the US and Israeli governments to provide guns, bombs, drones, tracking and data processing. When states engage in conflict, involved companies and their investors profit profusely. War profiteers are active participants in this genocide. Finally, we have arrived at UW-Madison’s connection to the genocide of Palestinians. The University of Wisconsin profits from genocide with large investments in index funds, containing the aforementioned war profiteers. When these companies profit, the UW Board of Regents profit. They refuse to divest from Israel for this reason.
II. We have tried
For years, we have attempted to bring the University of Wisconsin to divest from companies which bring apartheid and genocide against Palestinians. We have fought for even one soul on the Board of Regents to see the reality caused by their investment in war profiteers, surveillance tech, and border walls. The Regents, the Chancellor, and the Dean of Students have rejected our pleas for sensible divestment and reinvestment of funds in companies that do not bathe in blood. We have given maximum lenience in that while exploitation is the direct aim and result of capitalism, we have sought out to indicate only the most violent targets for divestment. The university does not listen.
We have tried the proper channels.
We have sent our letters and held our protests respecting the university’s restrictive guidelines on speech. We have had our teach-ins, our vigils, and our marches. We have stood outside in the blistering heat and the freezing cold. We have requested divestment at ASM Open Forums and stood by at Board of Regents meetings, begging for any change in course. We have been ignored, berated, and brutalized all the while.
Only when we were pushed into a corner did we disrupt order. We shouted loudly so that the campus could no longer feign ignorance to the brutality. We held an encampment on Library Mall. We later addressed the Board of Regents directly, demanding they hear our voices.
Again, and again, and again, we are ignored and brushed away.
Chancellor Mnookin gave us excuses, shallow lies to hide her inaction and her complicity. She told us that we did not understand, that she had no power over the Board of Regents Trust Fund or the UW Foundation. She shifted blame and ignored the power of her own voice. She refused to exert any pressure. She refused to facilitate any discussion.
The university commits itself to “maintaining neutrality” but the neutral stance between liberation and genocide is complicity in that genocide. The university remains idle while sending money to heartless mass murderers. They act as if we can’t see them patting those mass murderers on the back, telling them “good job” every time they shoot a Palestinian child. To Mnookin, to our incoming Chancellor Eric Wilcots, and to the Board of Regents: you have the power to stop at least part of the killing. The power to TRY – but you choose the opposite of love. You choose indifference.
In response to our calls, the Board of Regents and the Chancellor have sicced UWPD on us, reacting in violence to our demands for peace and divestment.
As of yet, we have been unable to enact change. We have not cleared the threshold at which the song of the masses overcomes the malice of those in power.
The university administration’s greed and class interest are too overwhelming. Each child massacred in Gaza is another golden coin tossed atop the Regents’ vast riches. Each gun in the hand of settler-colonialist occupying forces adds to the market value of war profiteers, and finds its way back to the administration through their myriad entangled investments.
The “Proper Channels” are glorified forms of begging. They are pursued in hope that a large enough or loud enough group of students might change administration’s minds, enacting justice through words alone. This is a fantasy, not a path to change. UW administration won’t divest if we “just ask politely.” Money made from the suffering of Palestinians speaks far louder than we can because that profit is the primary motivator for administrators. It is what they seek to gain from their position. Nothing we do can overwrite that. A group with a class interest opposed to justice and strictly built on exploitation will not heed our begging.
III “Proper Channels”: an Establishment Lie
The “proper channels” were created by those in power to serve their own interest. They were not meant to be a valid path to change, but a diversion.
To the university, the “proper channels” are adherence to their expressive activity policy and exercising our voice via student council and “shared governance.” The expressive activity policy is written to excessively limit where, when, and how students can protest. The policy has been altered several times to further restrict student speech, a move which disgusts us and has drawn the ire of the ACLU. It prevents us from having large signs or speaking out within 25 feet of a university building. It prevents us from expressing ourselves indoors and from speaking too loudly.
It explicitly bans anything disruptive because disruption means we cannot be ignored. Disruption means the university’s principal functions – those which bring it profit and status – are briefly blocked. Any protest which is effective at exerting pressure must be disruptive, because as long as university administration can turn a blind eye and receive no consequences, that is the path they will always take.
Student government acts as another diversion. On paper, it was created “to give students a voice” but functionally it cannot. ASM has very little structural power, and what little power it did have was significantly limited by Scott Walker. Today ASM is nothing but an advisory body other than the SSFC, which manages Segregated Fees and, due to Act 55, SSFC only manages a tiny portion of those fees which are deemed “allocable.” The rest must be approved by the university.
Any resolution passed by ASM can be brushed away as easily as a bread crumb. The university has repeatedly demonstrated their disregard for ASM, and while many members of ASM are fighting for divestment from within, ultimately university administration has the final say.
On Wednesday, March 25th 2026, a collective of student organizations and ASM representatives presented the case for divestment before the student council. This resolution passed with immense support, demanding the university divest from discriminatory practices such as apartheid, genocide, and militarized violence, from fossil fule corporations, from border walls and surveillance. When our resolution passed, it was dismissed, degraded, and ignored by the university.
Nowhere else are the contradictions of reform from within a rigged system so clear as in student government. Corporations and lobbyists render systemic change from within liberal democracy impossible, but there is still room for band-aids to the horrors of capitalism and imperialism. “Surface modifications of the old society” are still possible even if revolution is not. Even surface modifications are impossible in student government. Here, the scale of power weighs completely towards the oppressor. Students have no power for band-aids, let alone real solutions. Administration offers us a “proper channel” which cannot be considered a channel at all. It is a dead end.
The situation we are presented with leaves us no room to dwell on student government. For that matter, the actions of our university leave us no room to consider any of the “proper channels” we are so often told to use. A brief list of these actions is more than enough proof:
- The University of Wisconsin pours money into entities that directly profit from and propagate the genocide of Palestinians via the UW System Trust Fund, making the university complicit in genocide.
- The University of Wisconsin accepts donations from the UW Foundation, which gave $456 million to the UW in 2024, and refuses to publicly disclose its investments.
- UW-Madison has repeatedly altered its expressive activity and chalking policies to limit students’ free speech and expression, regardless of constitutionality.
- During the Spring 2024 encampment, Chancellor Mnookin authorized a violent police raid of peaceful student protestors.
- After the encampment, student organizers met with university administration to ask questions regarding divestment and issue demands. The university brushed the demands off and offered no answers.
- During a Board of Regents meeting last semester, some organizers interrupted proceedings to plead their case. Once again, UWPD reacted with violence.
- When confronted directly about divestment during the ASM Open Forum on October 8th 2025, Chancellor Mnookin told concerned attendees that the university was not looking to divest and that she, the top authority at UW-Madison besides the Regents, held no power over what the university does and does not invest in. When it was offered that she could speak up, use her voice, or refuse to take money from the Trust Fund or UW Foundation, she left the room.
- On March 25th, 2026, ASM passed a resolution calling for divestment. The university disregarded the resolution despite strong community support and legal basis.
Therefore, we reject institutionalist insistence on use of “proper channels”, or working from within a system which is rigged against us. We reject the mentality that we must limit our voices against genocide, humanity’s most horrific crime. The liberal political framework relies on existing institutions as the beginning and end of political action. This framework reinforces the view that working within the “rules,” arbitrary restrictions meant to suppress speech, is the only acceptable method of change. This is the viewpoint of university administration, which positions them fundamentally against social change.
However, with our work in ASM and community organizing, we can gain wide support, teach the community and build solidarity. When university administrators ignore ASM and when they ignore the growing community, they practically insist we, the entire campus community, take up a disruptive approach.
In order for us to come to the conclusion that “proper channels” must be bypassed, we spent years exhausting each and every one, keeping hope that we might be mistaken and that someone might have the decency to enact divestment. Our hope has betrayed us.
IV. Beyond “Proper Channels”
When we diminish our organizational capacity to what the owning class refer to as the “proper channels,” the confined and bureaucratic methods of change, we are giving in to them. We are taking the bait. “Institutional change” is a fantasy. “Proper channels” are not designed for change, they are designed to divert our attention.
Our support for Palestinians must not be superficial. When we call for liberation without substantive action, we disrespect the corpses of thousands of Palestinians killed day by day. It is our duty in the imperial core to work just as diligently, just as militantly, as the Palestinians who now directly face genocide. The safety we feel in our own homes is built on the great imperial lie. Our “success” and “development” are built on the suffering of others abroad just as the profits of the owning class are built on our suffering as workers.
We can’t ignore that those in power are also using Palestine as a testing ground for their tactics of oppression here. What we see across the globe will come back to us, and if we do not fight now, we will be wholly unprepared when we see the final form of violence enacted upon us.
Understand the suffering of our comrades overseas and let it guide our work here. Have empathy. Let us direct our efforts to collective power which cannot only topple those who oppress us, but those who oppress the rest of the world as well.
We need a path to change which is both effective and independent of reliance on ineffective institutions. We advocate for politics of the people and for the people. Power that grows from organized communities with a collective goal who are not afraid to take change into their own hands, rejecting false representation in favor of direct participation.
Free from the chains of “proper channels,” we may explore an array of avenues for change. We may vote 1 day of the year but we must organize direct action, disruption, and strikes to enact our collective power for the other 364.
“They have withdrawn their power as wealth producers… and they are going to coerce you by this withdrawal of their power into granting their demands… [accomplishing] what tears and pleadings never could have accomplished”
This is the nature of a strike. Withdraw production so an employer cannot profit, as workers produce all wealth. Similarly, student strikes and extended disruptions force the university’s functions to cease. The university makes its profits by tuition, donations, and investments. When the university fears a loss of student recruitment, alumni donations, academic reputation, and when classes and administrative meetings are halted, the Board of Regents will be forced to divest from genocide or lose some form of profit. When students and alumni can’t be recruited for their money, when the university can’t fulfil its basic purpose, to sell classes and manufactured community, administrators will look for a path to reclaim it. The only path we will leave for them is giving in to our demands.
However, there are some strategies we must avoid. Individual acts will not lead to divestment. Destroying imperial infrastructure is not an individual act, but a collective one. Even if one artery of the imperial heart is severed, it takes far more to completely shut it down. It takes far more to build a community that will last beyond one struggle to fight for the liberation of all people, that won’t allow one form of oppression to be replaced by another. We want to build lasting, genuinely democratic social power.
“The total collapse of this society would provide no guarantee about what replaced it. Unless a majority of people had the ideas and organization sufficient for the creation of an alternative society, we would see the old world reassert itself because it is what people would be used to.”
You can’t blow up a social relationship, by Libertarian Socialist Organisation
UW-Madison’s contributions to genocide will only be thwarted by a mass movement. Therefore, we must engage in organizing so that we can form a community with the ability to engage in collective action. Advocacy and mobilizing existing members are helpful, but alone they are ineffective. We must make a constant effort to outreach to the Madison community, hear their thoughts, and build them into active participants in the fight, growing the movement. A small group of us may be targeted, doxxed and expelled. A mass movement renders this impossible. The university can’t get rid of a large part of their student body without losing more than it would from divestment.
Together we must pursue action which cuts the flow of wealth from students and faculty to administrators, breaking down imperial infrastructure from within. When we do this, the profiteers will come to us begging: because their class motive relies on the continuation of our labor, our tuition, and a positive image to attract new students and donations which we implicitly provide. When community power prevents this, the university must answer to that community.
None of us can make this happen alone. We need to gather our friends, classmates, and co-workers together. We need to discuss and determine the best path to change- be that an encampment, a student strike or something else entirely. We must examine the history of divestment efforts including the successful divestment from South African apartheid and divestment of other campuses to determine what has and hasn’t worked. We must explore all avenues of change and implement them until one is effective.
“Power won’t move unless we strike fear into the heart of the ruling class and pose a threat to their reproduction of capital.”
There is no wrong way to protest against genocide.
There is no wrong way to protest against apartheid.
There is no wrong way to protest against civilians being bombed.
There is no wrong way to protest against cities turned to dust.
There is no wrong way to protest the legislated subservience of one group to another.
There is no wrong way to protest the usage of taxpayer dollars or university funds for this brutality.
There is no wrong way to protest the UN’s inaction and betrayal of the maxim “never again.”
This article was inspired by a flier created by the Wisconsin Student Association in support of the 1969 Black Student Strike.