Originally named TAMID Israel Investment Group, TAMID is a business club that offers students interested in consulting and finance the chance to invest in and work directly with companies connected to Israel while at college. The organization was formed in 2011 when two University of Michigan students noticed that “Their classmates had no interest in Israel-focused campus programming” and decided to start an investment group that would connect people to the Israeli economy. The organization has since grown into a multinational organization that allows thousands of students to submit stock investment pitches each semester at Global Stock Pitch Competitions. The winners – which must be pitched for Israeli companies or companies with “demonstrable connections to Israel” – then “have their trades executed” in TAMID’s Global Portfolio, worth more than $60,000 according to F&M TAMID’s LinkedIn.
In February 2024, a staff writer for The College Reporter was contacted by a student claiming to be a former member of F&M’s TAMID chapter. The student showed the TCR staff writer two draft investment pitches, which recommended investing in Lockheed Martin and Elbit Systems. The former TAMID member suggested that these documents would eventually become the F&M chapter’s submissions to the Stock Pitch Competition.
When asked for comment regarding these documents, the F&M TAMID executive board stated, “Lockheed Martin was not pitched to nationals from [their] chapter at all,” but the board agreed that Elbit Systems had been pitched. The board emphasized that the Elbit Systems proposal was “explicitly” about Elbit’s recent contracts “to support the EU in the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine.” However, investing in a company’s stock means investing in all of the company; an outside investor can’t pick and choose which contracts to support. Furthermore, it should be noted that the original Elbit pitch marked “increasing geopolitical tensions” as a net positive for “sustained growth” in the defense market – that is to say, regardless of the stated intent for investment, Elbit Systems profits off of global conflict and violence, which is precisely what then makes it desirable to investors. There is nothing apolitical about weapons manufacturing.
Despite TAMID’s express requirement in its official Fund & Finance Handbook that students must invest in “either an Israeli company or a company with demonstrable connections to Israel,” the organization claims to be apolitical. This implies, of course, that TAMID does not consider decades of settler-colonialism and forced displacement, not to mention nearly a year of active genocide, to be particularly political.
Although F&M TAMID did not pitch Lockheed Martin, TAMID’s global investment fund, shows previous or current investments in both Elbit Systems and Lockheed Martin. Lockheed’s website proudly highlights their partnership with Israel, celebrating the “significant role” their weapons play in maintaining Israeli security. Elbit Systems has a similarly important partnership with the Israeli government: the company “provides up to 85 percent of the land-based equipment procured by the Israeli military and about 85 percent of its drones.” Not only has it been proven that Elbit and other Israeli-based ‘security’ and ‘defense’ companies use Gaza and the West Bank as proving grounds for these weapons, but their ‘successful’ prototypes are then sold to the highest bidder to perpetrate further human rights violations all over the world. Elbit’s surveillance towers, for example, are currently being used here in the United States to “funnel” undesirable immigrants “into some of the most remote and deadly regions in the U.S.”
The Israeli military’s contracts with these weapons manufacturers have been particularly important in Israel’s brutal genocide in the Gaza Strip. As of February 2024, when these pitches were written, 11,500 children had already been killed, 10,000 children under 5 years old were at risk of starvation, relentless attacks on hospitals had left Gaza’s healthcare system in shambles, and the Israeli military had killed more journalists in 10 weeks than any other army or entity has in any single year. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has repeatedly rejected any ceasefire deal, and the Israeli parliament overwhelmingly refuses to recognize any sort of Palestinian state.
This occupation is not some distant problem, either; Israel could not continue its genocidal campaign – which includes dropping bombs on densely populated areas at a rate unseen since the Vietnam War – without the complicity of companies like Lockheed, Elbit, and so many others. This genocide could not continue without money from US businesses, money from the US government, and, of course, US colleges and universities. Membership in TAMID offers an even more direct path for college students to invest in Israeli and Israel-based companies without the responsibility of having to educate themselves about the politics of the region. Although the results of last summer’s Global Pitch Competition are not available to the public, there is a precedent for TAMID investing in weapons manufacturers.
The nature of whether something is considered “political” rests mainly on how it affects the status quo, and it seems that the world we live in currently is more eager to accept genocide than peaceful protest. How can it be that the students and faculty who condemn mass murder face riot cops and tear gas, authoritarian repression of First Amendment rights, and even the firing of a tenured professor; but active monetary support of the weapons manufacturers who make this slaughter possible can be considered apolitical? What are we as a society trying to defend when we make violence – and profit from violence – the status quo?
Junior Nora/Francis Williams is a staff writer. Their email is nwillia1@fandm.edu.