FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 13, 2024
MIT Coalition for Palestine
Subject: Divestment Win over the MISTI-Israel Lockheed Martin Seed Fund
CAMBRIDGE, MA – The MIT Coalition for Palestine would like to announce a major divestment win for the Scientists Against Genocide (SAGE) movement here at MIT: the MISTI-Israel Lockheed Martin Fund has been shut-down after sustained pressure. This is the first known American-Israeli weapons manufacturer partnership to end at an American university since the war on Gaza began. Since 2019, the Lockheed Martin Seed Fund was a program administered by the MIT International Science and Technology Initiative Israel, or MISTI-Israel, to connect students and researchers on this campus to the Israeli offices of Lockheed Martin, a global arms manufacturer. Lockheed Martin has sold several billion dollars of weapons to the apartheid state of Israel and profited from the genocidal war on Gaza. In particular, Lockheed has supplied the Israeli government with Hellfire missiles, attack aircraft, and heavy artillery which they have used to destroy Palestinian society in Gaza over the past year: its schools, hospitals, universities, holy sites, and vital infrastructure – directly killing tens of thousands of Palestinians and expelling millions in the process. Lockheed has also enabled the far-right, fanatical government of Benjamin Netanyahu, an MIT alumnus, to run torture camps in Sde Teiman and impose a regime of apartheid in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. The occupation is now more than half a century old and has deprived millions of Palestinians of basic human rights on the basis of their indigeneity. Lockheed has also enabled the Israeli Occupation Forces to back a vicious, 21st century settler colonial movement in the Occupied Territories driven by a dehumanizing ideology called Zionism.
Well not with MIT labor anymore. Under pressure from students and scientists of conscience at this Institute, the MIT administration has discontinued MISTI-Israel's Lockheed Martin Seed Fund and will not renew its contract. We have recently received official confirmation of this and can share it with you (information redacted to protect the identity of the communicating parties). You will also see the Lockheed Martin Fund was removed from the MISTI-Israel website between December 2023 and February 2024. This was a major target of our divestment action. The program ends after months of protest against it last fall, including letter deliveries, sit-ins, and public information campaigns. The MIT administration has tried to paint this fund in a positive light, claiming that it aided environmental research and climate initiatives, but we see through this greenwashing. Lockheed Martin is one of the world's worst polluters today, and in April 2023, its board explicitly advised shareholders against voting for a resolution which would have forced the company to disclose its plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This was the empty environmentalism that MIT promoted, a stain on the scientific institution and a danger to our world. The MIT Coalition for Palestine includes MIT Divest, whose mission is to end MIT’s complicity not only with genocide but with ecocide and environmental destruction. This is a collective victory for the coalition, and the first among many we hope to see.
Like the recent suspension of 30 British weapons licenses, there are still many steps to go before a full arms embargo is reached. In the 1980s, the cumulative, global campaigns of boycotts, divestment, and sanctions to isolate the South African regime in Pretoria paved the way to democracy and the end of apartheid. It took years. A similar campaign is now required of us if we want to see an end to the Israeli apartheid regime in our lifetime and the formation of a free, democratic Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
Today we are gathered once again as a united MIT community, speaking in its majority voice, as we have in referendum after referendum, from the sit-ins in Lobby 7 to the Scientists Against Genocide Encampment this spring, to say that we are are FED UP and DONE with aiding and abetting the apartheid state. As Israeli forces have escalated a horrific new stage of destruction and collective punishment in the northern West Bank, MIT laboratories on campus maintain ongoing, direct research funding links to the Israeli military. The MIT administration also maintains institutional partnerships through its Industrial Liaison Program with Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer, and Maersk, which transports weapons to the apartheid state, among other corporate partners. These research ties and institutional collaborations violate MIT’s own ethical funding criteria, research ethics, and health and safety policies. They are shameful and criminal and signal in clear and offensive terms that the Institute does not care about the human life and dignity of our Palestinian colleagues here at MIT and abroad. We say no. No science for apartheid and free Palestine.
In Solidarity,
MIT Coalition for Palestine
Possible Questions:
1) Is this the result of protest activity?
Yes, we held several disruptive protest actions on these steps, in Lobby 7, and the MISTI office itself to shame and publicize the Lockheed Martin Seed Fund. The Institute might say unconvincingly that they simply let the fund expire, but the reality is that MIT and Lockheed Martin felt the heat and backed down. We know it's specifically about Israel because MISTI-Germany, for instance, still has a Lockheed Martin Seed Fund. MIT actively chose not to renew the MISTI-Israel contract in particular under our pressure and scrutiny.
2) What is MIT’s response?
We invite you to ask them. We can't say that MIT has taken an official stance; they have sought to remove the fund quietly. What we can say is that after a strong campaign against the program, the program has been terminated without renewal. MIT will always try to spin a narrative around this, but we know it was the steadfastness of protest that achieved this victory.
3) Can we speak about negotiations with MIT and how they turned out?
The MIT administration walked away from the negotiating table in early May and chose to inflict violence on us in the name of campus safety. They have not since extended an olive branch.
4) Is this just the end of the program or a victory for protesters?
It is both. We forced MIT to shut down a relationship with a global arms company that is aiding and abetting a genocide and involving our MIT colleagues in those crimes.
5) What remains for the protesters demands?
We remain focused on 1) shutting down MIT’s ongoing, well-documented research ties to the Israeli government for weapons and surveillance research; 2) ending MIT’s institutional collaborations with the Israeli drone manufacturer Elbit through the Industrial Liaison Program as well as other complicit corporate partners. There is immediate precedent for this. On February 25, 2022 — the day after the Russian invasion of Ukraine — MIT admin unilaterally ended funding ties with the Moscow-based Skolkovo Institute mid-stream without Principal Investigator (PI) input and offered transitional funding. Similarly, in 2020 MIT ended lucrative Saudi Aramco research funding despite faculty opposition and publicly condemned the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi. MIT has done it before. It can do it now.
6) Are we currently in discussion with MIT?
No.
7) Do we have another encampment or other actions planned?
We will continue to agitate and resist by all available means to disrupt business as usual and force the Institute to recognize the dignity of our Palestinian colleagues and concede to the demands of its conscience, the law, and the majority will of its students. More actions are planned. Due to the hostility of MIT’s repressive apparatus and surveillance against us, we cannot divulge those plans at this time.
8) What has been MIT’s communications so far about Palestine?
MIT has continued to demonstrate very little empathy toward Palestinians here at MIT and abroad. We saw this in the president Sally Kornbluth’s recent letter about flyering on campus. She refuses to acknowledge the specificity and scale of the suffering in Palestine and refuses to even say the word ‘Palestine’ by name, referring in oblique and denalist terms to ‘the conflict in the Middle East.’ This is to be expected of an MIT administration that constantly manipulates us, which says for instance that it stand against hate but won’t stand against genocide. Their actions speak louder than words. If they want to commit to genuine scientific ethics and solidarity for our Palestinian colleagues, the MIT admin needs to not only shift their rhetoric and acknowledge Palestinian humanity and rights to free speech but also put their money where their mouth is and end MIT’s ties to an apartheid state.
9) On the subject of the flyer, the MIT president alleged it had a link to the Mapping Project. Were you involved and do you condemn it as antisemitic?
Our colleagues in MIT Jews for Collective Liberation published a letter about that a few weeks ago, which the Coalition has signed and supports. I invite you to look at it on their website.
10) Have MIT changes to policy affected protest plans?
No. We will keep agitating in the fall of 2024 despite their threats, suspensions, their physical bans, illegal evictions, and institutional gaslighting. We will keep agitating because we recognize there is no alternative. They can ban some of us, but they cannot ban the movement. They can crush the flowers, but they cannot delay the springtime.