FACT CHECK: Both Pitzer and Pomona trustees have denied that Boeing is a weapons manufacturer. Here’s what Boeing produces.

Confronted by calls for divestment, both Pitzer and Pomona Board of Trustees Chairs have disclosed likely investments in Boeing, but framed the investment as one in transportation, rather than weapons manufacturing.

“To divest from defense companies is to divest from Boeing, it’s to divest from companies that make airplanes and do all sorts of other things,” Pomona Board of Trustees Chair Sam Glick said at an April 18 town hall. “Do I think that we should profit directly from genocide, however defined? No, I don’t see any investments that are pure genocide. What I see are investments that are complex.”

Pitzer Board of Trustees Chair Don Gould made a similar when negotiating with SJP representatives on May 2. “You guys may think it’s a weapon [manufacturer], but [Boeing also makes] the plane you’re gonna take home at the end of the year,” one representative recalled Gould saying.

Fact check: from 2021 to 2023, Boeing was the top U.S. manufacturer of missiles and munitions delivered to the Zionist entity.

In that time, the U.S. supplied nearly 3,000 of Boeing’s GBU-39 Small Diameter Bombs — out of 5,214 total missiles — and an estimated 3,000 Boeing Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAM), also known as “dumb bombs,” to the Zionist entity.

An April 2024 Amnesty International report confirmed that Boeing-made bombs were used in five strikes in the past year that violated international human rights law, killing hundreds of cilivians in Gaza. Recent NYT and CNN investigations have also found Boeing GBU-39s used in Zionist massacres of refugee camps in Rafah and school complexes in Khan Younis.

Additionally, behind fellow U.S. defense contractors Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, Boeing is the third largest military company in the world. In FY 2023, Boeing made $24.93 billion in revenue from military and weapons manufacturing, comprising 32% of the company’s total revenue, according to its financial disclosures.

By the medical journal Lancet’s estimate, the Zionist entity’s siege and bombardment of Gaza has resulted in at least 186,000 civilian deaths — 9% of the population of Gaza — since Oct. 7, 2023.

The U.S. has approved at least $12.5 billion in additional military aid since Oct. 7, 2023, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.

Boeing has also profited from the Zionist entity’s occupation and apartheid against the Palestinian people since well before Oct. 7, 2023.

Boeing manufactures Apache attack helicopters and Hellfire missiles, which the U.S. has provided to the Zionist entity since 2001. In a June 2023 attack in the occupied West Bank, the Zionist regime killed five Palestinians and wounded 91 using an Apache attack helicopter. In the Zionist entity’s 2014 attack on Gaza, Hellfire missiles were used to kill 10 Palestinians sheltering in a U.N. school.

In a February referendum, 85% of Pomona students voted in favor of the college divesting from all weapons manufacturers. In response to the referendum’s release, Pomona President Gabi Starr accused Pomona’ student government of unfairly “singling out … Israel” and “[raising] the specter of antisemitism.”

In May, Pomona faculty passed a resolution in favor of the college divesting from eleven firms “complicit with war crimes and other human rights violations committed by the Israeli government.” The faculty resolution seeks a response from the Board of Trustees’ Investments Committee by October.

In May, Gould also disclosed that Pitzer held $1.6 million in defense and aerospace investments, though he did not specify what the investments were in. He told SJP representatives in April that the board would not divest, even if Pitzer’s College Council — the college’s primary legislative body, representing faculty, students and staff — voted in favor of it.