Harvard Endowment Reinvests $150M in Company Tied to Israeli Settlements in Palestine

The Harvard Management Company reinvested $150 million in Booking Holdings Inc., a company under fire for its operation in Israeli settlements in the West Bank, according to the HMC’s 2024 third quarter filings.

The move marked HMC’s first investment in the company in more than five years — making it the third-largest holding in its public portfolio behind Meta and Alphabet.

Booking Holdings — the parent company of several travel-related businesses including Booking.com, Kayak, and OpenTable — was included in a 2023 United Nations list of 17 parent companies involved in business activity in Israeli settlements in the West Bank, one of just seven not based in Israel.

The HMC’s investments in Bookings have been at the center of extensive debate about Harvard’s ties to Israel and calls to divest. In December 2019, the University had $194 million directly invested in the company, but had sold the entirety of its shares by March the next year.

In 2018, Human Rights Watch found that Booking.com connects travelers to rental properties in the Palestinian territories and alleged the company is complicit in human rights abuses against Palestinians. The company added warnings to rental properties located in Israeli settlements in 2022.

After the reinvestment, Booking Holdings is one of 14 companies that HMC holds direct public investments in.

HMC spokesperson Patrick S. McKiernan declined to comment on the decision, citing a policy against commenting on individual investments.

Harvard’s direct reinvestment follows a year of heightened pro-Palestine activism and growing divestment calls amid Israel’s war in Gaza.

The student governments of at least three graduate schools — Harvard Law School, Harvard Divinity School, and the Harvard Graduate School of Design — passed resolutions urging the HMC to divest from institutions and companies that “aid the ongoing illegal occupation of Palestine.”

And last spring, pro-Palestine protest campus organizers staged a 20-day encampment in Harvard Yard to demand divestment. The action attracted significant national attention, but the key demands — investment transparency and divestment from Israel – went unmet.

The encampment ended on May 14, after the University offered protesters a meeting with members of the University’s governing boards about divestment in September.

Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 later rejected the protesters’ proposal to review all investments for links to human rights violations, telling the group in an email that he would not direct HMC to “use its endowment funds to endorse a contested view on a complex issue that deeply divides our community.”

Despite the extensive campaigns, activist groups have relied on very limited information about the true extent of Harvard’s investments in Israel.

Garber has repeatedly defended the University’s position not to entertain calls for divestment, but in an April 2024 interview with The Crimson, he also said he did not know how much Harvard had invested in the country.

Rutgers Business School professor John M. Longo said this reinvestment was likely connected to expectations of future company growth.

“Travel tends to pick up during a good economy, the U.S. dollar is strong, and jet fuel prices are expected to fall, so perhaps HMC’s managers expect an increase in travel plans for Booking’s customers,” Longo wrote in a statement.

The current value of HMC’s reported position in Booking Holdings is $172.5 million.

The SEC requires portfolios with over $100 million in investments to disclose their direct public holdings every quarter. The data released by the SEC during the third quarter of 2024 reflects the changes in HMC’s direct ownership in publicly traded companies.

According to HMC’s 13F filings, technology dominates its few remaining public holdings. Meta leads the portfolio, with a valuation of $681.4 million, while Alphabet is the second-largest investment at $198.2 million.

“These companies are a bet on the growth of technology in the future,” University of Maryland business school professor Russell Wermers said. “So it doesn’t seem that unusual to me for them to be tilting toward these high growth technology companies.”

This hyper-concentration in technology stocks is largely a result of HMC’s exit from the healthcare and biotechnology sector. As recently as 2022, HMC held a diverse array of healthcare investments, representing 67 percent of its portfolio in 2020. By late 2024, however, most of its healthcare shares had been sold.

“HMC’s sale of most of its biotech holdings may reflect specific views on the companies or perhaps a macro view that the space will be more challenging going forward,” Longo wrote.

“For example, healthcare is one of the largest components of federal spending and unfavorable legislation towards pharmaceutical companies on pricing may be one source of reducing the federal debt,” Longo added.

—Staff writer Avani B. Rai can be reached at avani.rai@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @avaniiiirai.

—Staff writer Saketh Sundar can be reached at saketh.sundar@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @saketh_sundar.