Exclusive: Cambridge’s wealthiest college to divest from arms companies
Trinity College Cambridge, the University of Cambridge’s wealthiest constituent college, has decided to divest from all arms companies, Middle East Eye can reveal.This came after MEE revealed in February that Trinity had £61,735 ($78,089) invested in Israel’s largest arms company, Elbit Systems, which produces 85 percent of the drones and land-based equipment used by the Israeli army.
MEE also reported that the college had millions of dollars invested in other companies arming, supporting and profiting from Israel’s war on Gaza.
In response to this report, on 28 February the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP), a UK-based rights group, issued a legal notice to Trinity College warning that its investments could make it potentially complicit in Israeli war crimes.
The ICJP indicated in its legal notice that “officers, directors and shareholders at the college may be individually criminally liable if they maintain their investments in arms companies that are potentially complicit in Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity”.
MEE has learnt from three well-informed sources close to Trinity’s student union that the college council, responsible for major financial and other decisions, voted to remove Trinity’s investments from arms companies in early March. According to these sources, the college decided not to announce that it would divest from arms companies after an activist defaced a 1914 portrait of Lord Arthur Balfour - who authored the infamous Balfour Declaration - inside the college on 8 March.
