Christian HaesemeyerUCLA Mathematics DepartmentBox 951555Los Angeles, CA 90095-1555

February 23, 2014

I write this letter in support of the Resolution to Divest from Companies that Violate PalestinianHuman Rights. On one level, supporting this resolution is a no-brainer, and that it is even necessaryto demand this from UCLA, a scandal. Why would UCLA students want their tuition moneysinvested in companies that build walls around communities, whose products are designed to beused in actions of collective punishment, or whose electronics are used to surveil and control anoccupied popuation? Why would I, as a faculty member, want my pension moneys invested in suchcompanies, making me - if indirectly - a profiteur of these violations of human rights?

And yet such a resolution is what in standard discourse is called ”controversial”. Given the no-brainer status of the resolution’s goal - to avoid financial complicity of the UCLA community inviolations of the collective and individual rights of the Palestinian people - what’s this ”controversy”about then? It is, of course, about the political context - the violations of human rights that theresolution aims to address are perpetrated in the context of the Israeli occupation of Palestinianlands, and it is understood that this occupation cannot be sustained without its infrastructureof walls, checkpoints, raids and constant surveillance. This then is what, in the US in 2014, is”controversial”: whether or not one should ignore massive violations of human rights in order toprotect the oppression of indigeneous peoples whose lands are being colonized.

One more argument against a divestment resolution needs addressing: the claim that those runningthe investment funds have a ”fiduciary duty” and therefore must be guided solely by financialconcerns in their decisions, and never by political ones. Such an argument does not survive evensuperficial scrutiny. Not only has UCLA voted in the past to divest from numerous enterprises forvarious political reasons; not only will even proponents of this argument admit when pressed thatit is of course not absolute; but the whole reasoning relies on a faulty assumption: that investingin a company violating human rights is not political, while not investing is. If we step back fromour opinions on the particular case at hand it is readily apparent that this assumption is absurd.Of course, as USAC recently recognized, investing in private prisons is a political act supportive ofthe privatization and expansion of the US prison state. Of course, as was widely accepted in the80ies, investing in banks extending loans to the government of apartheid South Africa is a politicalact helping sustain the apartheid system. And of course investing in a company facilitating theviolation of the rights of Palestinians is a political act providing support for such violations.

So when you vote on the Resolution to Divest from Companies that Violate Palestinian HumanRights, you are deciding what is more important to you: the individual and collective rights of thePalestinian people, derived from universal human rights we all claim; or the sustainment of themiitary occupation and coontrol of the occupied Palestinian territories by Israel, and the violencethatgoes along with it. No matter where you stand on the broader questions of the Palestinian-

Israeli conflict, this is an easy decision to make: for human rights, and against profiteering fromtheir violation.

With best regards,

Christian Haesemeyer

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