Last night, a group of activists splashed red paint over the wall of Trinity College, Cambridge, to highlight the college’s complicity in the ongoing genocide of Palestinians through its investment in companies that supply the Israeli occupation with weapons and military equipment.
One member of the group said: ‘It is despicable that Trinity College makes a profit off of the murders of Palestinians. The fact that the college has divested from fossil fuels but not from these arms companies makes it clear that its priorities are staying rich and greenwashing its image. These wealthy institutions need to cut their ties with the corporations that sell the tools of occupation and genocide to the Israeli state.’
Trinity is the University of Cambridge’s wealthiest college – it holds around £1.5bn in assets. Among these assets are £61,735 invested in Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest arms company, which supplies the Israeli military with 85 percent of its drones and land-based equipment. Trinity also has around £2.5m invested in Caterpillar, a company that sells bulldozers used by the Israeli army to destroy the homes of Palestinians, as well as roughly £3m in General Electric, which produces engines and other mechanical components and systems that are used by the Israeli military to displace and kill Palestinians in the Gaza strip.
Trinity has further investments cumulatively worth over £1.5m in Rolls-Royce, L3Harris Technologies, Barclays Bank. These are companies that either produce weapons used to genocide Palestinians or that are heavily invested in companies that do so.
This action follows demands made by activist and student groups for the college and the university to divest from these corporations and to end their complicity in genocide.