The letter

To the UNM administration, in particular the Board of Regents and President Stokes,

This letter is a response to the student protests that demand that UNM divest from Israel in response to the war in Gaza.

Before we say anything else, let us state the obvious that the death and destruction happening in Gaza is a horrible tragedy. Far too many civilians in Gaza are suffering terribly and dying through no fault of their own. Just as much as anyone else, we want to see the violence in Gaza end. This letter is not a call for or against any proposed solution to the conflict in Gaza, and it is not a call against student protestors' right to freely express their opinions on campus. It is a statement against proposed actions that will not help end the suffering in Gaza, but instead will only serve to increase division and hatred at UNM.

Using university resources to single out Israel as a target for condemnation will not help Palestinians' cause. Instead it will be harmful for the following reasons.

• The protests around campus calling for divestment from Israel are not limited to only calling for specific actions against Israel, but rather those demands are heavily intertwined with frightening calls for violence against Jews that UNM would legitimize if they accepted the protestors' demands. While criticism of Israel on its own does not imply antisemitism, in the case of protests on campus criticism of Israel is heavily intertwined with calls for violence against Jews. They are chanted by the same crowd one after another, and UNM must not consider them separately when planning their response.

  Taken seriously, their chants call for violence that is magnitudes worse than what is happening in Gaza today. In the immediate aftermath of the October 7th attacks in which over 1000 innocent Israeli civilians were intentionally killed, protestors at UNM shouted "resistance is justified". Now they can be heard shouting "Israel out of the middle east" among other chants that explicitly deny Israel's right to exist. We are inclined to interpret our fellow students' statements charitably, so we like to think that they do not literally want to uproot the 7 million Jews in Israel from their homes and cause mass forced displacement and death of Jews on a scale not seen since the Holocaust, as a literal reading of their statements would suggest. Rather, we take the generous interpretation that they do not seriously think through the meaning of the words they say, that they latch onto catchphrases without critically thinking about what they are saying.

  Still, it is imperative that UNM not give any credence to these dangerous, antisemitic statements that overshadow any legitimate criticisms of Israel the protestors are trying to get across, even if these statements are likely nonserious. Doing so would send a loud and clear message to Jewish and Israeli students, faculty, and staff at UNM, that they are not safe and not welcome here. This would be an especially dangerous message to send, as always, but especially now that antisemitic incidents are on the rise in Albuquerque since the October 7th attacks.

  Condemnation of the violent demands of the protestors should not be taken as undermining the significance of the violence that is happening in Gaza. The death and suffering that Palestinians are experiencing every day is real and inescapable, unlike the destruction of Israel that protestors are calling for, which is thankfully just a disturbing fantasy, albeit one that many bad actors around the world sincerely and deeply desire. We can and should strongly condemn both the violent, antisemitic demands of protestors and the violence in Gaza.

• A central purpose of UNM, and of universities in general, is to provide an environment where people from diverse backgrounds, both within the US and internationally, can come together and learn from each other and participate in scholarly activities as equals. It should bring us all great pride to be a part of a diverse institution like UNM where Jewish and Israeli students, and Muslim students and those from Muslim-majority countries, can be collaborators, coworkers, and friends, without politically charged and divisive actions by UNM administration looming over their day-to-day interactions.

  In fact, fostering such a safe, welcoming environment where scholars from diverse international backgrounds can come together does far more to promote global peace than putting financial pressure on one side of any not-black-and-white conflict. When international scholars come together and work with each other at UNM, it shows everyone that the vast majority of people from any "enemy" country are regular people just like them, interested in science, art, learning, and peacefully coexisting with their neighbors, not harming anyone. If they go back to their home countries, their skills and high-quality education can put them in influential positions in society where their mindset can go a long ways to promote peace.

  UNM should not jeopardize its most effective method to promote peace in the Middle East—bringing people from the region together as equals and as friends—by openly condemning and divesting from Israel. Instead it should strive to provide an environment where Jewish and Muslim students feel safe and welcome and able to work together.

• Divesting UNM resources from only Israel as UNM's response to this conflict paints an unrealistic and harmful picture of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a black-and-white, good-versus-evil conflict. Reality is much more complicated than this simplified picture, and promoting this picture will not bring both sides closer to peaceful coexistence.

  Divesting from Israel is far from the only action UNM could do to distance itself from bad actors involved in this war, and doing so would fail to promote both sides making the kinds of hard sacrifices that will need to be made to have long-term peace. For example, one of the many funds that UNM's endowment invests in is BlackRock's iShares MSCI ACWI ex U.S. exchange-traded fund. This fund has 0.46% of its assets invested in Israeli companies. It also has 0.22% of its assets invested in companies from Qatar. The government of Qatar is well-known to fund and empower Hamas, which is responsible for enormous amounts of death and suffering of Palestinians and Jews during this conflict. Do the students that advocate for divestment from Israel also advocate that UNM divest from Qatar? No, they do not. That's because their demands are not about taking actions that promote peaceful coexistence nor have concrete positive effects on Palestinians' lives. They are, charitably, about latching on to popular but misguided movements without fully understanding their undertones and consequences, and realistically, at least somewhat about antisemitism too.

• UNM researchers enjoy fruitful and productive collaborations with Israeli researchers. In fact UNM and Israeli researchers are joint recipients of many research grants in subjects as diverse as plasma physics, neuroscience, and nanotechnology. Full divestment from Israel would necessarily mean cutting off these research programs, as they entail transferring grant money for research between UNM and Israeli institutions. Cutting off these important research collaborations would be a disservice to students, faculty, and any other researchers whose careers depend on being able to participate in scientific research that is the product of UNM-Israeli collaboration. It would also be a disservice to the public in New Mexico and beyond that benefits from the results of this research, and it would harm UNM's status as an institute where world-class scientific research takes place.

Don't listen to these students' harmful demands. Reject the calls for divestment from Israel and reject antisemitism.

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