For more than a decade, activists at Columbia University have tried to make the school a proving ground for the campaign to isolate Israel. There have been petitions, referendums, faculty campaigns, encampments, arrests, an occupied academic building, congressional hearings, and federal investigations. Through it all, one objective remained constant: pressure Columbia to divest from Israel and companies connected to the Jewish state.
Now, one of the movement’s most consequential institutional players has removed that demand from the bargaining table.
During contract negotiations on July 28, Student Workers of Columbia-UAW Local 2710, which represents more than 3,000 student workers, withdrew a proposed provision seeking university divestment from companies and state actors it accused of violating international law.
The union has not renounced the movement behind the demand; leaders just concluded that continuing to pursue divestment through collective bargaining was not worth jeopardizing their broader contract goals.
“You start off a campaign with one thing, and then as you bargain, you have to face the realities of where you are,” union president Grant Miner said.
Those realities reveal the limits of the anti-Israel movement at Columbia.
Calls for Columbia to divest from companies connected to Israel date back at least to a faculty campaign in 2002. The modern student effort took clearer form in 2016 with Columbia University Apartheid Divest, or CUAD.
The movement borrowed the language of campaigns targeting apartheid-era South Africa. Israel’s supporters reject that comparison, arguing that it erases the terrorism, wars, security threats, and competing national claims at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict while placing the world’s only Jewish state into a framework designed to delegitimize it.
In 2020, Columbia College students approved a divestment referendum by a vote of 1,081 to 485, with 205 abstentions. Then-University President Lee Bollinger rejected it as a basis for policy, saying Columbia should not change its investments based on one side’s position in a deeply contested conflict without a university-wide consensus. He also called the singling out of Israel “unfair and inaccurate.”
The referendum succeeded politically but failed institutionally. Columbia did not divest.
The Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, transformed Columbia from a campus with a long-running Israel debate into the center of a national confrontation.
In the months that followed, Columbia became one of the most visible centers of the protest movement against Israel’s military response in Gaza.
In December 2023, CUAD submitted another formal divestment proposal and backed an academic boycott of Israeli universities.
By April 2024, protesters had established the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment.” Similar encampments soon appeared nationwide. The confrontation escalated when demonstrators occupied Hamilton Hall, barricaded entrances, and damaged university property. Columbia called in the NYPD, which cleared the building and arrested protesters.
Jewish and Israeli students described harassment, verbal abuse, ostracism, and, in some cases, physical aggression. Columbia’s Task Force on Antisemitism later concluded that the university had failed to consistently provide them with the civility, respect, and fairness expected elsewhere on campus.
Columbia had become a test case for whether a university could protect Jewish students and resist sustained political pressure over Israel.
The growth of academic-worker unions gave campus movements a new route into university governance.
Student Workers of Columbia traditionally negotiates over wages, healthcare, benefits, workplace protections, and discipline. Divestment from Israel is fundamentally different.
Under federal labor law, employers and unions must bargain over wages, hours, and other terms and conditions of employment. University endowment policy does not fit neatly into that category. Columbia could voluntarily discuss divestment, but the union could not make investment policy a mandatory bargaining subject simply by placing it in a contract proposal.
That created a practical problem. Political movements can maintain broad demands indefinitely; contract negotiations require priorities and tradeoffs.
As bargaining progressed, union leaders narrowed their proposals. Miner’s acknowledgment that negotiators had to “face the realities” showed that divestment could not remain insulated from the compromises needed to secure a contract.
The underlying question is how far a labor union should move beyond wages, benefits, and workplace protections when adopting international political causes. Columbia’s reversal shows one possible boundary: Political ideology may shape union activism without surviving an actual labor negotiation.
The retreat comes after Columbia faced congressional investigations, leadership upheaval, lawsuits, federal scrutiny, and sustained criticism over its handling of antisemitism and campus disorder.
In 2025, the Trump administration canceled hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding, citing Columbia’s response to antisemitism. A later federal settlement included payments and changes to discipline, protest rules, security, and oversight. The pressure made campus governance a legal, financial, and reputational liability—not merely an internal dispute.
Years of activism have also exposed the gap between symbolic victories and actual endowment decisions. Student governments can pass resolutions and protesters can dominate headlines, but investments are controlled by trustees, fiduciary obligations, and institutional procedures that are far more resistant to political pressure.
At Columbia, a successful referendum, an internationally watched encampment, the occupation of Hamilton Hall, faculty activism, and union pressure all generated attention. None persuaded the university to divest.
The union’s decision is not a repudiation of BDS. Its leaders have not said the campaign was wrong, and anti-Israel activism at Columbia will not disappear.
What matters is what happened when political goals came into direct competition with the practical interests of the workers the union represents.
For years, divestment was presented as a moral imperative. At the bargaining table, leaders dropped it.
That choice matters beyond one negotiation because Columbia has repeatedly shaped American campus activism. Its anti-apartheid movement helped establish the template invoked by today’s activists, and its 2024 Gaza encampment inspired demonstrations across the country.
The anti-Israel movement remains active and vocal. But years of protests, resolutions, occupations, and political pressure have not produced the institutional breakthrough BDS activists sought.
By Shabsie Saphirstein
