SOOP or Stanford Out of Occupied Palestine has targeted some companies for divestment but Elliot Kaufman of the Stanford Review has reported that Stanford is invested in none of them.

The Hidden Agenda Behind SOOP’s False Divestment Claims

Stanford Out of Occupied Palestine (SOOP) regularly denies it wants Stanford to delegitimize or divest from Israel. In its 68-pages of materials urging the ASSU to divest from corporations that profit from alleged Israeli human rights abuses in the Palestinian territories, SOOP repeatedly claims “…our university endowment is currently invested in companies that inflict substantial social injury upon students of Palestinian origin”. SOOP uses this claim to call for divestment from those specific companies.

However, an analysis of the Stanford endowment’s quarterly SEC filings from the past decade shows no evidence that Stanford’s endowment is currently invested in any of the companies cited in the divestment materials. The filings also show no evidence that Stanford has been invested in any of these companies over the last ten years, with the exception of Raytheon for just one filing period. Moreover, in light of the significant proof that SOOP associates with the radical Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement and disseminates materials calling Israel a “Jewish supremacist state”, it is clear SOOP is using this empty divestment proposal to delegitimize Israel and to implement BDS on campus.

SOOP cites three companies, Veolia Transdev, Caterpillar, and Combined Tactical Systems; however, Stanford has not invested in any of them during the past decade. First, SOOP criticizes Veolia Transdev for offering rail service from Jerusalem to settlements in the Palestinian territories. Stanford has no holdings in Transdev, but SOOP is wrong to target the company for another reason: its light rail serves both Israelis and Palestinians. Shutting down Transdev’s rail service would only impair the Palestinians’ already-limited freedom of mobility — something SOOP wants to fix.