Credit: GS4P
In 2023 UBC invested $521,816 Boeing, a company widely known as an aircraft manufacturer (including the infamously unreliable Boeing 737).[1] Less known is that Boeing is one of the largest war profiteers globally.
According to Who Profits Research Center:
“Boeing aircrafts have been used by the Israeli military since 1948. Since 1990, the Apache helicopters have been used by the Israeli Air Force in military attacks and in Israel’s targeted killings in the besieged Gaza, and in military trainings in the occupied West Bank and Syrian Golan. Boeing Harpoon anti-ship missiles are in use in the Israeli Navy Sa’ar ships, used to enforce the illegal naval siege of Gaza.”[2]
This year, UBC was the host of Boeing sponsored Invictus Games where the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) were welcomed on campus as part of the competition. As a weapons manufacturer, Boeing has a clear interest in sponsoring Invictus Games, but its less clear why UBC’s administration wants to entangle the university name with military and war.
Let’s dig a little deeper into Boeing and their relationship with colonialism
The Zionist colonial project has always been clear in it’s plan for the land of Palestine. In the Iron Wall (1923)[3] Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky writes:
“Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonised. That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of ‘Palestine’ into the ‘Land of Israel.’”
He adds,
“Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population. Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population – behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach” (Emphasis in original).
While the idea of an Iron Wall lives on as a metaphor for keeping Palestinians out of their land, it’s also a very real military reality. The most recent use of the phrase in a military operation came two days after the ceasefire announcement when the Israeli military launched the “Iron Wall offensive” in Jenin, killing over ten Palestinians, including a child, and forcing numerous civilians out of their homes.[4] Weapons manufacturers like Boeing have a very intimate and longstanding relationship with the Zionist settler-colonial project.
Breaking down Boeing weapons and their use
Boeing has consistently supplied Israel in its attacks on Gaza with AH-64 Apache helicopters, F-15 fighter jets, Hellfire missiles, MK-84 bombs and MK-82 bombs. Boeing also manufactures the JDAM (Joint Direct Attack Munition), a so-called ‘low-cost’ guidance system that turns unguided bombs into precision-guided bombs. JDAM-equipped bombs have been used by the IOF in indiscriminate airstrikes on Gaza since 2014, as identified by the UN Human Rights Council and Amnesty International.[5]
On Feb 16, 2025, Israel received a new shipment of MK-84 bombs from the U.S. after Trump lifted the export block. MK-84 bombs are typically equipped with JDAM to make it laser and/or GPS-guided. Trump also approved sending tens of thousands of JDAM kits among other bombs and missiles, totalling $8.56 billion, to Israel.[6]
On Oct 10 and 22, 2023, the IOF struck two family homes in Deir al-Balah (the Al-Najjar family & Abu Mu’eileq family) with JDAM-equipped bombs. The bombs, weighing 2,000 lbs for one airstrike and 1,000 lbs for another, killed 43 people, including 19 children. Amnesty found JDAM fragments near the two destroyed homes.[7] The IOF has also used JDAM to strike a kindergarten, a safe house, and a refugee camp, all as part of its ongoing project of ethnic cleansing and land grab.
On January 23, 2024, the IOF deliberately struck a safe house in Gaza designated for sheltering medics with a JDAM-equipped missile.[8] The GPS coordinates of the safe house had been repeatedly shared with the IOF prior to the attack with the hope that they would not target the shelter. British surgeon Amer Shoaib, one of the medics in the safe house targeted by the missile, recalled:
“We trusted the deconfliction process and believed that carrying a British passport and being a doctor would afford us some protection. It turns out that this was a naive belief. The IDF had our GPS coordinates. The UN investigation advised us that this was a GPS guided weapon. This means that it was a deliberate attack. The house was isolated, and there were no tunnels or military targets nearby. This attack was clearly targeted and a violation of International Humanitarian Law.”
On Oct 31, 2023, the IOF struck houses and a kindergarten in the Abu Eida residential square with between 6 and 8 JDAM-equipped bombs.[9] On July 13, 2024, the IOF struck the Al-Mawasi Refugee Camp with 8 JDAM-equipped bombs, killing at least 90 displaced Palestinians and injuring at least 300.[10]
These attacks represent a small fraction of the destruction in Gaza. In April 2024, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor estimated that “Israel has dropped more than 70,000 tons of explosives on the Gaza Strip.”[11] To put this in perspective, this exceeds World War II bombing in Dresden, Hamburg, London combined.
In 2023, Boeing derived 32% of its revenue from the sales of military aircraft and weapons systems for strike, surveillance, and mobility.[12]
As a publicly traded company, Boeing relies on individual and institutional shareholders, like UBC, to continue investing in its stock. In 2023, UBC’s estimated investment in Boeing totalled $521,816. When responding to calls for divestment, UBC President Benoit-Antoine Bacon parrots the following statement:
“As signatories to the United Nations-supported Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI), the university’s investment managers are continuously adjusting their strategies based on the integration of environmental, social and governance (ESG) considerations.”[13][14]
President Bacon and other members of the UBC administration have yet to demonstrate what this continuous adjustment in strategy looks like in action. An honest integration of any environmental and social considerations is incompatible with investments in companies like Boeing and other weapons manufacturers.
Universities have no business investing in a manufacturer of military aircrafts and missile systems. Sign the divestment petition to call on UBC to invest in a just future for all.
Vladimir (later Ze’ev) Jabotinsky, “The Iron Wall: We and the Arabs,” first published in Russian under the title “Ozheleznoi Stene” in Rassvyet, November 4, 1923 ↩︎
Iron Wall: How Israel is using old Zionist strategy to expand occupation ↩︎
Sanders Files Joint Resolutions of Disapproval to Block Trump Arms Sales to Israel ↩︎
US-made munitions killed 43 civilians in two documented Israeli air strikes in Gaza ↩︎
British surgeon targeted in Gaza by guided missile: a firsthand account of survival and injustice ↩︎
Euro-Med Monitor investigates Israel’s massacre of 120 Palestinians, most of them from one family ↩︎
Israeli forces bombed al-Mawasi camp using US-made JDAM bombs: Maariv ↩︎
200 days of military attack on Gaza: A horrific death toll amid intl. failure to stop Israel’s genocide of Palestinians ↩︎