A California University Reveals Its Ties to Israel’s Genocide in Gaza

At long last, on May 20, 2024, the University of California at Santa Barbara, in response to a 2021 California Public Records Act request, finally released copies of its 2016-2021 military contracts with weapons manufacturers. Amid campus “Let Gaza Live” worker walkouts and encampments, UCSB revealed contracts with Israel’s weapons suppliers General Dynamics and Boeing, as well as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman–companies ensconced in nearby Goleta’s “infra-red valley” where engineers design the military eyeballs of fighter jets and night-vision goggles for soldiers to see darkness as daylight for nighttime surveillance.

The release of previously withheld UCSB military contracts constitutes a win for the the Central Coast Antiwar Coalition and the UCSB Liberated Zone encampment, whose supporters confronted administrators at UCSB’s Cheadle Hall to demand the university fulfill its legal obligation to comply with CPRA, as well as disclose UCSB’s financial portfolio, divest from holdings in military contractors and companies profiting from Israel’s occupation and genocide, and sever UCSB military contracts for weapons research and development.

The UCSB Liberated Zone, an autonomous 100-tent encampment amid the campus fig and Eecalyptus trees, features a library or education station, a daily schedule of events that included a teach-in “From Chiapas to Palestine,” 24-hour security teams working three-hour shifts, community meals and concerts, and signs and banners that shout, “WE JUST WANT PEACE” and “END ISRAELI TERROR. NO WAR ON GAZA.”

Students from the UCSB Liberated Zone quoted the military contracts as evidence in a mock trial they conducted in front of the campus library, where the “prosecutor” charged university administrators with complicity in Israel’s genocide.

In a long-delayed response to the CPRA request, marked by the university’s multiple emails for clarifications and deadline extensions, the UCSB Public Records Act office released 24 PDFs for contract awards, contract amendments, and purchase orders worth millions of dollars.

The contract products were described either in an unintelligible string of numbers and letters, like Northrop Grumman’s (SOW-M297-DII-001) or in engineering jargon, such as Boeing’s “Heterogeneous Integration” or Lockheed’s “cell architecture development” or General Dynamics “Agile High Dimensional Locomotion and Full-body Manipulation” with scant upfront reference to the likely purpose or end product: robotic soldiers to weaponize space and laser-guided bombs for “warfighting” aircraft.

The tail end of one near $6-million campus contract with General Dynamics, a subcontractor for the Army Research Laboratory’s “warfighting experimentation” in “unmanned vehicles,” extols the benefits to both private industry and the Department of Defense (DOD) in “exploiting technology and expertise where it exists” to promote “soldier trust and confidence” in semi-autonomous weapons with “biological limbs” perfected for “manipulation and mobility” and artificial intelligence to interpret non-verbal cues in “high tempo environments.”

The contract—in a brazen dismissal of lost lives and toxic ecological footprint—states in its rationale, “Operations Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan) and Iraqi Freedom have demonstrated the value of robotic platforms both aerial and on ground.”

Another agreement, a $2 million 2016 contract with Lockheed Martin, references “sensor cell development and testing” for a company that describes itself as the “most advanced sensor family” for “precision targeting, navigation, threat detection, and next generation intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities.”

Students from the UCSB Liberated Zone quoted the military contracts as evidence in a mock trial they conducted in front of the campus library, where the “prosecutor” charged university administrators with complicity in Israel’s genocide.

Staff at the UCSB Office of Technology and Industry Alliances (“Our friends call us TIA”) signed the now public military contracts for the office that manages intellectual property contracts, laboratory rentals, and non-disclosure agreements for military industry partners.

Under CPRA, enacted in 1968 and modeled on the Freedom of Information Act, public agencies are required to promptly comply with requests for public documents, unless the documents are exempt due to concerns over lack of privacy or risk to the public.

The released contracts represent a fraction of what the PRA office wrote in 2021 was the university’s 398 DOD-related contracts. Moreover, the office’s assertion that it has no records on current UCSB contracts with Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, or Northrop Grumman strains credulity because all three contractors are listed as Capstone Engineering (CAP) UCSB corporate affiliates on the campus website.

Other UCSB corporate affiliates include Teledyne-Flir, manufacturer of thermal weapons for long-range targeting; the Naval Sea Systems Command, specialist in underwater warfare; and Microsoft, host of research and development centers in Israel to provide the Israeli military with cloud computing services for checkpoints in the occupied West Bank.

Why UCSB Must Divorce Its Deadly Corporate Affiliates

The American Friends Service Committee, in its report “The Companies Profiting from Israel’s 2023-2024 Attacks on Gaza,” documents how Raytheon, with an office on Hollister and 1,500 employees in Goleta, supplies the Israel Defense Forces—or more appropriately named Israeli Occupation Forces—with air-to-surface missiles for F-16 fighter jets, as well as 1,000-pound bunker-buster bombs to annihilate Palestinian neighborhoods on the narrow coastal strip now struggling under Israel’s death sentence of mass starvation. Northrop Grumman, with an office tucked away at the end of a sleepy street in Old Town, Goleta, furnishes Israel with Longbow missile delivery systems, while Lockheed Martin, its local office in a cul-de-sac not far from the teeming Goleta Marketplace, supplies Israel with Hellfire missiles and F-16 and F-35 fighter jets for its assault on Gaza.

Shifting the Narrative

UCSB pro-Palestine activists and their nationwide campus cohort in what has become known as “The Popular University of Gaza” are driving change on two levels: first, rethinking the university as a military research outpost and, second, shifting the narrative to expose Israel as a settler-colonial state rather than a safe refuge for victims of antisemitism. This shift in narrative—supported by anti-Zionist Jews and descendants of Holocaust survivors—cannot be underestimated in its potential to build consensus for ending university complicity in Israel’s occupation and ethnic cleansing.

The New McCarthyism—congressional excoriation of college presidents, Israel lobby lawsuits against universities (including UCSB), a House resolution backed by Rep. Salud Carbajal (D-Calif.) to conflate antisemitism with anti-Zionism—reflects institutional panic over a generation of youth unmasking the colonizer to link liberatory struggles from Palestine to Tigray to Congo.

Free Palestine!