UC-Berkeley’s new divestment approach

By Steve Horn
Tuesday, April 20, 2010 12:01 a.m.


(snip)

Many on the right, like they do for any criticism of Israel, call divestment “anti-Semitic,” as it singles out only Israel, a Jewish state, for human rights violations, and leaves out many other abhorrent human rights violating countries all around the world. Ironically, these are often the same people who tout that Israel isn’t solely a Jewish state, but a democracy that grants equal rights to all, including to its minority indigenous Arab population. How the call for divestment can simultaneously be coined anti-Semitic despite these claims is anyone’s guess, but no one ever said political rhetoric had to be coherent or logical.

Others, liberals included, criticize divestment because it makes Jews feel uncomfortable, particularly on college campuses. These people are missing the point, though. Calls for divestment should make Jews feel uncomfortable, for it challenges many notions they have about Israel as a human rights loving democracy and “Light Upon the Nations.” It’s never comforting to learn things contrary to what you’ve been taught all your life — as a fellow Jew, it hasn’t been for me.

But it’s crucial to compare the merits of the discomforts on both sides of the coin.

On the other side of the coin, you have the discomfort of knowing your home has been turned into rubble, either by a bomb or a bulldozer, or even worse, the discomfort of knowing that your brothers and sisters have been wounded or killed while in their home. The discomfort Jews feel as it relates to calls for divestment pales in comparison.

Divestment isn’t anti-Semitic because it has absolutely nothing to do with Judaism and everything to do with calling on Israel as a state to respect international law and human rights. The occupation does exist because both UN Resolution 242 and the Fourth Geneva Convention, among scores of other legal dictates, say that the occupation is illegal. And it makes sense to single out Israel, if for no other reason than our own government does, in the tune of over $3 billion per year in tax-payer funded military aid, which is more aid than we give any other country in the world — other than Iraq and Afghanistan, including more than we give to the entire continent of Africa.

In reality, divestment is one of the few ways student human rights supporters can make a difference in the Israel-Palestine conflict on a micro-level. The more specific and targeted the call for divestment, the better. Calling on “divestment from Israel” as a whole is far too broad and indiscriminate. The UC-Berkeley model is ideal in that its call for divestment hones in narrowly on only two corporations.

The Berkeley Student Senate bill calling for the divestment from these two corporations has garnered wide-ranging support, including from 40 student organizations and numerous Jewish groups and individuals on an international-level, such as Jewish Voice for Peace, Rabbi Brant Rosen, Holocaust survivor Hedy Epstein, eight Israeli peace groups and Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu’s sister-in-law, among numerous others.

It’s intellectually dishonest to say that if one is for selective divestment, one is against Israel or a rabid anti-Semite. Divestment is purely a human rights issue. In reality, divestment, whether it fails or prospers, is meaningless if the United States, Israel’s number one enabler, doesn’t alter its relationship with Israel. Slowly but surely, at least rhetorically, that relationship is changing thanks to the Obama Administration and it’s up to college political activists to keep pressuring them, through calls of divestment like Berkeley’s that, indeed, the U.S.’s overt favoritism of Israel is unfair and unjust.

Financial support of repetitive human rights violations will no longer be tolerated. Not in our name.

read it all:
http://badgerherald.com/oped/2010/04/20/uc-berkeleys_new_div.php

bout Israel as a human rights loving democracy and “Light Upon the Nations.”

because we see them as an act of war against Israel's existence, given the persistent demand for RoR, which is inconsistent with Israel's existence as a Jewish state, and the constant Palestinian refusal to accept any responsibility for this conflict.

Come on now.

I do think the "cycle of abuse" model is applicable to this situation.

It's why there is no peace. It's why the Palestinians are in camps.

they fled.

Has nothing to do with the Yishuv and everything to do with Arab armies going to war by invading Israel in 1948.

There wouldn't exist one refugee today if the Partition plan of 1947 were accepted. Not one Arab or Jew would have been displaced or uprooted.

Your use of the phrase "European colonialists" is not accurate. The commonality that can be identified is not that they were European, but rather that they were Jewish.

The movement to create a Jewish homeland and the movement to create an independent Palestinian state could have happened concurrently were it not for a variety of mitigating factors that led to the eventual war.

More broadly, it can be said that World War II had numerous consequences for many people all over the world. Had there not been an attempt to exterminate European Jewry, and had there not been a near universal rejection of the accepting of fleeing Jewish refugees, the desperation with which so many Jewish people attempted to make their way to Palestine would not have been so acute.

Your statement that began "There wouldn't be one refugee if..." could be completed in a variety of ways.

if the refugees from somewhere (europe) else didn't go somewhere (palestine)?

Um... OK. And there would never have been Sabra or Shatila if the Palestinians hadn't invaded Lebanon in 1948.

:sarcasm:

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You speak for yourself Sir and while there may be others that share your opinion to make the claim you have is beyond arrogant

I actually think that I have a pretty good handle on the views of Jews who reject the BDS movement. Obviously less so those who are in favor. In any event, I would think that you would be just as upset about PM claiming that Jews were uncomfortable about BDS because it was a just cause. She certainly has no claim to know what Jews think.

<snip>

"When a bill calling for divestment from some companies doing business with Israel surfaced at a mid-March student government committee hearing at the University of California, Berkeley, local Jewish communal watchdogs were taken by surprise. When the divestment measure was overwhelmingly approved at a student senate debate days later, some students affiliated with Hillel left the meeting in tears.

Even when the student senate president vetoed the measure, those against divestment hardly saw it as a victory; they knew that the veto could be easily undone, since the bill was passed with more votes than would be needed to overturn the veto.

And so a campaign was launched. The debate on the veto was scheduled for the night of April 14. In the two weeks prior, Berkeley Hillel coordinated a comprehensive national lobbying campaign consisting of a teach-in, face-to-face meetings with student senators and an intervention by a Nobel laureate, all aimed at robbing the divestment supporters of three senate votes.

Adam Naftalin-Kelman, the Hillel’s newly installed executive director, said that the strategy for countering divestment efforts was devised at a roundtable meeting convened by Hillel and attended by representatives of local branches of the Anti-Defamation League, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the Jewish Community Relations Council, J Street, Israel’s consul general in San Francisco and local rabbis.

Outmaneuvering the pro-divestment supporters, this organizing coup appears to have worked: After a marathon debate that lasted well into the next morning, two senators changed their minds and one abstained, and the veto was upheld.

"Three votes changed,” Akiva Tor, the consul general, told the Forward. “So something happened."

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