The divestment movement has a long history among US student activists, including in the overlapping movements of today

Cameron Jones first learned about fossil fuel divestment as a 15-year-old climate organizer. When he enrolled at Columbia University in 2022, he joined the campus’s chapter of the youth-led climate justice group the Sunrise Movement and began pushing the school in New York to sever financial ties with coal, oil and gas companies.

“The time for institutions like Columbia to be in the pocket of fossil fuel corporations has passed,” Jones wrote in an October 2023 op-ed in the student newspaper directed toward Columbia president Minouche Shafik.

Today, 19-year-old Jones, like many other student protesters and campus organizers, is just as focused on pushing the school to divest from another group of businesses: those profiting from Israel’s war in Gaza. He and others see the issues as firmly connected, with activists learning from tactics used in both of the often overlapping movements.

“Once we see large institutions like universities taking the steps to sever ties with harmful institutions, we will then hopefully see corporations and countries and cities follow suit,” Jones said on Monday, speaking from the student encampment of demonstrators on Columbia’s campus who are protesting the war and the university’s ties to Israel.

In particular, students are demanding the university drop its direct investments in companies doing business in or with Israel, including Amazon and Google, which are part of a $1.2bn cloud-computing contract with the state’s government; Microsoft, whose services are used by Israel’s Ministry of Defense and Israeli Civil Administration; and defense contractors profiting from the war such as Lockheed Martin, which on Tuesday reported its earnings were up 14%.

Columbia did not respond to a request for comment on the call for divestment. Last week in a campus-wide email, Shafik said that the encampment “severely disrupts campus life, and creates a harassing and intimidating environment for many of our students”.

She faced criticism for directing the NYPD to clear the encampment over the weekend. The student protesters have created a new encampment and say they will not clear the lawn until their divestment demands are met. Early on Wednesday Columbia University said it had extended a midnight Tuesday deadline by 48 hours for the encampment to disband after it reportedly said protesters had agreed to to dismantle some of the tents; student negotiators said university leaders had threatened to call in the national guard and NYPD.

Divestment movements have a long history among US student activists.

In 1965, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Students for a Democratic Society, and the Congress of Racial Equality held a New York City sit-in calling for Chase Bank to stop financing apartheid in South Africa. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, many campus organizers also successfully pressured their schools to cut financial ties with companies that supported the apartheid regime, including Columbia, which became the first Ivy League university to make such a change.

“The work we’ve done on fossil fuel divestment for years definitely took a lot of cues from those organizers,” said Matt Leonard, director of the Oil and Gas Action Network and an early advocate for fossil fuel divestment in the US.

The anti-apartheid campaign inspired another movement, too: the call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS). Co-founded by a Columbia University alum, BDS is a strategy aiming to end international support for Israel due to its treatment of Palestinians – a relationship many scholars and officials describe as another apartheid. Today, Leonard is pressuring institutions to cut ties with the oil giant Chevron because it is extracting gas claimed by Israel in the eastern Mediterranean.