![]() ![]() Rachel Corrie, a pro-Palestine activist from Olympia, Washington, travelled to Historic Palestine that year as a senior in college in order to peacefully protest the mass demolition of Palestinian homes. Worse yet, just the previous year, in 2003, Caterpillar machinery was used in the murder of a 23-year-old American activist named Rachel Corrie. These homes represented but a few of the approximately 18,000 Palestinian homes that have been demolished by the State of Israel since 1967. In 2004, during the peak of the Second Intifada, Human Rights Watch reported that Caterpillar D9 bulldozers had been used in the demolition of over 250 Palestinian homes in the city of Rafah in the Gaza Strip. How are these Caterpillar bulldozers used by Israel? Well, let’s take a look. As recently as 2001, court documents revealed that Caterpillar sold 50 of its D9 bulldozers to the state of Israel for the not-so-insignificant sum of $32.7 million. ![]() In fact, Caterpillar has made a handsome profit from their sales of D9 bulldozers to the Israeli government. Caterpillar machinery has been used frequently in Historic Palestine and Israel. ![]() Their annual sales in 2021 topped nearly $25 billion and their machinery is regularly sold around the globe. Caterpillar Inc., an American company whose headquarters are only half an hour away from my hometown in Illinois, is the largest construction-equipment manufacturing company in the world. You might recognize Caterpillar by their obnoxiously loud machines strewn across campus, their trademark yellow CAT logo, or by the above picture of President Eisgruber and other administrators jauntily breaking ground on the new Lake Campus development project with a massive Caterpillar machine sitting right behind them.īut there is more to Caterpillar than meets the eye. The referendum is very simple: I am calling on the University to immediately halt usage of all Caterpillar construction machinery in ongoing and future campus construction projects. Last Sunday I stood in front of the Undergraduate Student Government Senate and asked them to approve the language of a referendum I am proposing for the spring USG election. ![]()
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