By Barty Roberts, SOAS News Editor
At the end of 2023, Palestine Solidarity UK reported that SOAS had invested more than £2 million in companies which they describe as complicit in Israeli apartheid.
The SOAS Spirit asked SOAS to confirm if this was true and if so, what their justification was for doing so. They provided us with the following statement:
”We are committed to maintaining a university investment portfolio that is one of the most ethical in the UK. The SOAS community is rightly concerned about the arms trade and abuses of human rights, and these concerns are enshrined in our ethical investments policy. We welcome questions about our investments to help us maintain our high ethical standards. The committee regularly reviews our portfolio to ensure investments meet our principle-based approach to ethical investing.”
This refusal to deny these reported investments is as good as a confirmation. SOAS’ investment policy is available to read online and outlines various ethical commitments, including that, “SOAS follows a principle-based approach to ethical investing and the policy reflects SOAS’ concerns with human rights, armaments, gambling and tobacco.” These “concerns” are somewhat facile, considering how easily they have been ignored. The policy was last revised in June 2015 – despite the fact that the committee “regularly reviews” its portfolio.
The SOAS Palestine Society is one of the most well-supported societies within the Students’ Union and regularly expresses its opposition to the Israeli regime. These investments seem directly at odds with the values of the SOAS community. At the start of 2024, several SOAS staff were involved in a trade-union-led protest blockading an Arms Producer that supplies the Israeli Defence Forces – another demonstration of the SOAS community and its values being ignored by SOAS management and its investment behaviour.