Apartheid South Africa to Israel: Protests for divestment then and now

In April 1985, University of California Berkeley’s campus was alight with protests over the university’s continued South African investments in the endowment’s portfolio. Long a hub of protest activity, Sproul Plaza saw thousands of students hanging banners, dragging in mattresses, and erecting shanty towns designed to symbolically represent apartheid townships. Students had pressured Berkeley for years to divest from South Africa, but that April, the university announced their decision to decline to divest. In response, students, inspired by uprisings in South Africa and outraged by apartheid, held daily rallies and sit-ins, and began a temporary occupation of Sproul Plaza. 

The Berkeley administration instituted rules banning mattresses, banners, and the mock shanty towns. They backed up their new rules against protest encampments with threats of police retribution. Campus police were chomping at the bit to disperse the students. In an oral history interview conducted in 1985, campus police Patrol Lieutenant Commander Ellen Stetson commented: 

“The price, [of clearing the camps early] however, would have been that the University, a land of free speech, political ideas being espoused, would have been in direct conflict with the police action and the administration’s “gestapo tactics” would have been severely criticized. But we wouldn’t have had the problem go on either.”

The students made a strategic decision to partially comply with the rules, but largely continued to protest in the square. Negotiations with university administrators were ongoing, and by continuing to disrupt campus life, students sought to move the needle towards divestment. As negotiations hit dead ends, campus leadership called in the cops. On April 16, police beat students with batons and arrested 156 protesters engaged in a sit-in. By the police’s own admission, “there were some conflicts between what the administration wanted to do and what could legally be done.” Outraged, students flooded the square in even greater numbers, trying to get the police to back down. Students tried to de-arrest protesters and doubled down on their blockade of access to key college buildings. 

In many ways, the scene at Columbia University of students occupying campus to protest Israel’s war in Gaza was reminiscent of the South African divestment campaigns of the 1970s and 1980s. At Columbia University, following threats of increased policing combined with a university failure to meet protest demands, students doubled down on protest, even after police in riot gear descended on the protest and made 108 arrests. The encampment swelled and students took over Hamilton Hall – the very hall they had similarly occupied during the South Africa divestment campaign. As in the apartheid divestment era, students at colleges across the country took up the call to engage in highly visible, disruptive protest to pressure college administrators to reconsider their complicity in egregious human rights violations. 

And, in the very same rhetoric parroted now, police and politicians alleged that campus campaigns were masterminded by outside agitators and hijacked by anarchists. The 1985 police characterizations could be ripped from today’s statements: police alleged that people with “a real political mission – professional, if you will – were over there and came to Berkeley,” and that anarchists were “very strong in swaying the students” to “throw a monkey wrench” in negotiations with administrators. In the present moment, as college campuses have become loci for protests connecting the local to the global, providing specific, tangible demands for change in the institutions they are most connected to. 

Rhetoric about outside agitators is among the most noxious anti-protest tropes. In the case of the encampments, politicians attempted to create a chasm between campuses and community in a direct attack on the autonomy and initiative of student protesters. But campuses inextricably impact their surrounding communities, both in politics and discourse, and in material realities. Columbia University is the largest private landowner in New York City; across the country, the communities surrounding universities are directly impacted by and involved in what happens on campus. Especially as police violently dispersed encampments, students put out a call to the community beyond campus to support the rising student movement. But when others responded to the call – back during apartheid protests and today – the media denigrated them as outside agitators. At Columbia, grandmother Nahla Al-Arian turned out to support the students and witness the protests. New York City Mayor Eric Adams called her presence a “tipping point” in the decision to call in a heavily militarized NYPD presence to disperse protests. In her own words, she said of the students, “they are the ones who taught me…They are the conscience of America.” 

On some campuses, in addition to forcing continued attention to Israel’s war in Gaza, students entered negotiations over divestment. Brown University committed to holding a board vote over whether to divest. Northwestern University took tentative steps towards exploring divestment; the University of Minnesota agreed to transparency measures. Depending on your perspective, the measures are either first steps or attempts to kill protests by bureaucracy. The movement is further complicated by the spectrum of demands around divestment. Transparency alone is a demanding hurdle. Unlike in the era of apartheid protests, when colleges generally managed their own funds, today’s endowments are managed by private investment managers reluctant to turn over the details of college portfolios. The demands are further complicated by what divestment entails. Some student groups have demanded relatively narrow divestment from weapons manufacturers, while others made sweeping demands for divestment from any company doing business with Israel, which includes such giants as Google and Amazon. 

The anti-apartheid protests both give reason for hope, and remind us that divestment often came only after years of sustained pressure against the university. Hampshire College broke ground by fully divesting from South Africa in 1976. A full decade later, Berkeley (and the University of California system) finally divested $3 billion in endowment funds from South Africa. In the UC system, divestment was a graduated process starting with divestment from South African banks and eventually reaching full divestment. Thanks to student protesters, by the end of the 1980s, 155 universities had partially divested from South Africa, and five fully divested. 

The success of anti-apartheid divestment campaigns, and in recent years, fossil fuel divestment campaigns, show us that protest works; that students can force the changes they want to see on campus. Student protest may yet tangibly work to force campuses to divest from genocide. 

And so far, student campaigns have undeniably forced Palestine back into the news, making it clear that students and surrounding communities would not stay silent during a genocide, even in the face of police retribution. In the narrative game, then and now, protests forced reckonings even before divestment began.