LETTER TO THE EDITOR BY LUCAS BENT
In North Berwick, Maine, just 20 minutes from my house, Pratt & Whitney manufactures engines for F-35 warplanes. Those warplanes are sold to the Israeli military, which is right now indiscriminately bombing Palestinian families in Gaza. According to a peer-reviewed report published in The Lancet, around 60% of those killed have been women, children and the elderly.
Pratt & Whitney is owned by RTX, the war corporation formerly known as Raytheon. Right now, our University of Maine has money invested in RTX, and RTX’s stock price has gone up over 40% in the past year.
There’s no other way to put it. Using students’ tuition money, UMaine is right now profiting off of genocide.
And it’s not just RTX. In Bath, Maine, for example, General Dynamics Bath Iron Works makes artillery shells and bomb parts which are sold to Israel. On March 1, 2024, UMaine announced their participation in a new Maine Defense Industry Alliance which, among other things, “will provide talent pipelines for defense, aerospace and other manufacturing employers in the state, including Bath Iron Works.”
In other words, our administrators have heavily, happily entrenched our school in the military industrial complex.
On March 10 of this year, just over a year after the announcement of the Maine Defense Industry Alliance, I and many other students stood up in front of the UMaine Board of Trustees meeting to tell our administrators that enough is enough. UMaine must divest from Israel’s genocide. They ignored us.
This wasn’t the first time, either. March 10 was only the latest of months of fighting, months of meetings testifying before the board and demanding that they stop using our tuition money to profit from genocide. For example, on December 17 2024, the Executive Committee of the Board of Trustees summarily rejected all of UMaine Jewish Voice for Peace’s demands for divestment, at once, without a formal vote. Our administrators refuse to budge.
At the time of the most recent board meeting I spoke at, a tentative “ceasefire” was in place in Gaza. Since then, Israel predictably shattered that “ceasefire” and returned full-tilt to its bloody slaughter of Palestinian civilians. This slaughter, referred to by all credible human rights organizations as a genocide (see Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, etc.), includes a complete blockade of all electricity into Gaza and a complete blockade of all humanitarian aid into Gaza, including all food. On April 25, the United Nations World Food Programme announced that it officially ran out of all food stocks for Gaza following Israel’s unprecedented 7-week blockade.
The life expectancy of a person in Gaza in 2023 was 75.5 years old. Today, it is just 40. Once again, a reminder that our administrators, right now, are profiting from this genocide. Are you okay with that?
If you’re not, keep this in mind: the next Board of Trustees meeting will be on May 19 at UMaine Presque Isle. I will be there. We will be there. Protests are happening across Maine and across the world and will continue to happen. If you care about human life at all, do something to help stop this madness because while you’re reading this, more children are being killed with our bombs – and our own school’s administrators are twiddling their thumbs.
If you would like more information about how to get involved, please feel free to email me at lucas.bent@maine.edu.
