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Just Like South Africa? Print
Written by Daniela Gerson   
Sunday, 17 November 2002

"Divest from Israel" movement heats up Image
On campuses across the country pro-Palestinian activists have adopted a new slogan: "Just like South Africa." These activists draw an analogy between Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians under occupation and the white South African government’s treatment of blacks under apartheid. During the 1980s, a divestment campaign—where students and professors demanded the withdrawl of their university’s financial assets from South Africa or companies that did business in South Africa—contributed to the dismantling of the South African apartheid system. Now, pro-Palestinian activists are hoping similar pressure on Israel will force it to make political concessions to the Palestinians.

The campaign, which has taken on the name Divest from Israel, started in November of 2000, two months into the current intifada. Francis Boyle, a University of Illinois law professor specializing in civil resistance and international law, proposed that pro-Palestinian activists adopt divestment as a tactic. According to Boyle, "A worldwide divestment/disinvestment campaign against Israel will play a critical role in dismantling its criminal apartheid regime against the Palestinian people living in occupied Palestine as well as in Israel itself."

Boyle posted his call to divest on the Internet, and Students for Justice in Palestine, a group at the University of California at Berkeley, responded. They created an electronic petition calling on the University of California system to divest from Israel and from U.S. companies that sell arms to Israel until four conditions are met: Israeli armed forces withdraw from the Occupied Territories; Israel ends its use of legal torture; Israel dismantles Jewish settlements in the Territories; and Palestinian refugees either be allowed "to return to their former lands or else be compensated for their losses, as agreed by the Palestinians and Israelis in bilateral negotiations."

Organizers across the country, most prominently at Princeton, Harvard, M.I.T., and the University of Michigan, quickly followed suit, taking the demands of the Berkeley petition as their unified base. In the two years since Boyle’s original speech, the Divest from Israel campaign has evolved as a grassroots movement, with petitions circulating on over 40 campuses nationwide, two national conferences, sit-ins, and extensive letter-writing campaigns. But unlike the movement to divest from South Africa, the current campaign has generated more controversy than support.

In the 1980s, a worldwide campaign of teach-ins, demonstrations, and petitions convinced over 180 universities to divest billions of dollars from companies that did business in South Africa. The public awareness raised by the divestment movement helped secure the political isolation of South Africa’s government and speed the demise of its apartheid system. Renowned South African anti-apartheid activist and Nobel Prize winner Desmond Tutu wrote last spring, "There is no greater testament to the basic dignity of ordinary people everywhere than the divestment movement of the 1980s."

Pro-Palestinian activists have adopted the rhetoric, as well as the tactics, of the anti-apartheid movement, branding Israel an apartheid state and a racist colonizer. In October, University of Michigan senior Fadi Kiblawi told The Washington Post, "If you look at a map of the Occupied Territories, it looks like apartheid South Africa. Palestinians can’t travel from one place to another without heavy restrictions. And all the laws they face are predicated on the fact they are not the correct religion."

Eric Hirshberg, who was a student activist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison during the height of the South Africa divestment campaign, thinks the new movement is right on target. "The analogy with the South African case is absolutely strong," he says. "I thought so [in the 1980s] in fact. Some of us were quite clear that South Africa was not the only apartheid regime in which American multi-nationals were engaged with the active support and encouragement of the American imperialist state."

But Israel’s supporters have flatly rejected the analogy. Alan Dershowitz, a professor at Harvard University Law School, wrote last May in the Forward, "There is no justification for the comparison between [South Africa and Israel], and the divestment effort should be opposed by anyone who supports human rights." He argues that Israel "is a functioning democracy that guarantees full equality before the law to all its citizens, regardless of race, ethnicity or religion."

Michael Din-Cohen, co-chair of the Tikkun Community New York, a Jewish group dedicated to promoting social change, believes apartheid is a fallacious analogy because it ignores the complexities of the conflict and places the blame only on one-side. "When divestment was waged against the regime in South Africa, there was no basis to defend the existence of the privileged state in which whites enjoyed what blacks could not," says Din-Cohen. "Tikkun Community is strongly against the divestment movement in that it potentially undermines Israel and its existence as a whole."

Din-Cohen raises a criticism of the comparison that has had great resonance in progressive circles—treating Israel as an international pariah not only has its basis in an innacurate representation, it is less effective than working with Israel to end the Occupation. Instead of penalizing the entire nation, Din-Cohen instead advocates "focusing on Israeli policy vis a vis the Palestinians and the Territories" to promote Palestinian human rights.

Despite controversy over the analogy to South Africa, the Divest from Israel campaign has taken off. While many of its core proponents are Arab-Americans, left-wing activists are beginning to flock to the cause. Supporters also include a vocal minority of Jewish students and faculty members, most notably Noam Chomsky, the M.I.T. linguist and radical left activist.

"We’ve collected thousands of signatures at Berkeley—something nobody thought we’d be able to do—in favor of divestment," says graduate student Snehal Shingavi, a key organizer who authored a report on the University of California system’s financial holdings with ties to Israel. "We’ve gotten faculty to sign onto this petition as well—something that we’re quite excited and pleased by—without a real concerted effort yet on our part to really try to measure the support there is for divestment."

Divestment supporters are united in the belief that any company doing business with Israel, such as General Electric, IBM, and Texas Instruments, is complicit in its policies. Students at Berkeley, for example, claim that $6.2 billion of the university’s endowment has gone to such companies. Campaign supporters take particular umbrage with companies directly linked to Israeli military operations, such as Caterpillar, which provides demolition equipment used in the Occupied Territories, and Lockheed Martin, which sells fighter jets to Israel.

While Berkeley activists take a particularly hard line, stressing the comparison of Israel with South Africa and denouncing the "racism inherent in Zionism," other campus campaigns place less of an emphasis on racial politics. Julia Salzman, a former divestment organizer at Princeton and now a graduate student in mathematics at Stanford, says that the movement "varies across different college campuses." At Princeton, for example, where over 300 students and 30 faculty members have signed a petition to divest university funds from Israel, the tone of the document is somewhat conciliatory and vague with respect to the group’s aims. The preamble to the petition reads, "We believe that the human rights of Palestinians must be respected …[and] we believe that Princeton University ought to use its influence—political and financial—to encourage the United States and the government of Israel to respect these human rights." Salzman explains, "It’s mostly a campus focusing on human rights and asking Israel to abide by the international consensus."

Vocal critics have attacked such human rights claims, accusing activists of bigotry and moral blindness in only targeting Israel. The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman wrote this fall that, "Singling out Israel for opprobrium and international sanction—out of all proportion to any other party in the Middle East—is anti-Semitic, and not saying so is dishonest."

Salzman, however, dismisses Friedman’s argument because it "implies that human rights abuses are somehow not as significant if worse abuses exist." For Salzman, not taking action against Israel is dishonest. "Americans bear particular responsibility," she says, because Israel receives more American aid than any other country.

This past spring, the movement spread to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Barely noticed by the mainstream media or the Jewish community until then, the hostile reaction of both prestigious campuses to the Harvard-M.I.T. joint petition, and Harvard President Larry Summers’ condemnation, brought the Divest from Israel campaign serious attention.

Since the petition urging Harvard and M.I.T. to divest from Israel began circulating on the Internet about six months ago, 130 faculty and 216 students from Harvard and M.I.T., as well as five professors affiliated with Harvard who live in Israel, have signed on. In response, a petition to "oppose divestment from Israel" circulated rapidly and was submitted to Harvard and M.I.T. with 582 faculty and 1191 student signatures. The counter-petition took issue with claims that Israel is a racist state and it criticized the pro-divestment petition for not recognizing Israel’s right to exist, for ignoring Palestinian blame in the conflict, and for its failure to advocate for a peaceful solution to the conflict. The preamble reads, "We are unanimous … in our condemnation of this petition as a one-sided attempt to delegitimize Israel."

Summers, who is Jewish, was also unequivocal in his rejection of divestment from Israel, issuing a statement that read: "Harvard has no intention of [divesting] … Harvard is first and foremost a center of learning, not an institutional organ for advocacy on such a complex and controversial international conflict." The Harvard debate peaked with Summers’ warning that, "serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect if not in their intent," setting off a debate about the boundaries between anti-Semitic and anti-Israel activity.

Ironically, Summers’ condemnation of divestment helped bring attention to the second national conference of Divest from Israel supporters. While the national media barely mentioned last year’s conference held at Berkeley, this year’s conference held in October at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor garnered national attention. The Washington Post, The New York Times, Newsweek, the Associated Press, and various campus publications all covered the event.

Even at the conference, voices within the movement raised questions about perceptions of anti-Semitism and extremism. The Forward reported that at one conference discussion, an argument erupted between Michigan- and Berkeley-based factions. The Michigan group’s members wanted to excise certain passages from the conference’s guiding principles, arguing that references to "the racism inherent in Zionism" made the movement appear anti-Semitic and hurt the cause. They also criticized the statement, "As a solidarity movement, it is not our place to dictate the strategies or tactics adopted by the Palestinian people in their struggle for liberation," arguing that such language suggests a tacit acceptance of suicide bombing and other terrorist tactics. In the end, the Michigan faction lost.

Taufiq Rahim, a Princeton student and former organizer, quit the Divest from Israel movement because he felt it was neither raising awareness of Palestinian suffering nor altering Israel’s behavior. He has since established Princeton Peace Process, which brings together various perspectives with the aim of finding common ground. "I wanted to provide a middle ground for those interested in a fair and just Middle East peace: the ability to support Palestinian rights and freedoms without supporting divestment and a one-sided approach," he says.

If the divestment campaign were to succeed, it could have potentially disastrous effects on Israel’s already weakened economy. But it doesn’t look likely that will happen anytime soon. Summers’—and therefore Harvard’s—rejection of the petition is indicative of a general trend on campus. As of yet, no campus administration has seriously considered divesting from Israel. A University of Michigan spokeswoman put it succinctly: "We do not believe political interests should govern our investment decisions."

Harvard and the University of Michigan, however, are among the 180 schools that did divest from South Africa in the 1980s. Given the low levels of institutional support and the widespread criticism, adopting the divestment tactic of the South Africa campaign has not been a great success for the pro-Palestinian movement. It seems the slogan "Just like South Africa" is just not quite right.
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Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved.
 
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