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SJP at UCLA defeats “anti-divestment” bill

October 27, 2013 by sjpwest

In October of 2013, a bill supporting “positive investments” and denouncing divestment was presented to the UCLA student government. It was eventually struck down by a 7-5-0 margin, preserving the ability of the council to engage on the question of divestment from companies that profit from the occupation of the Palestinian territories. Below is SJP at UCLA’s press release on the issue, as well as the following links to statements and reference materials:

1. Op-Ed in Daily Bruin on the irrelevance of “positive investment”

2. Berkeley president DeeJay Pepito’s solidarity statement

3. Irvine External Vice President Melissa Gamble’s solidarity statement

4. Stanford Students for Palestinian Equal Rights solidarity statement

5. Sam Bahour letter to UCLA regarding positive investment

6. Letter from Jewish solidarity activists

7. Letter from JVP-LA activist Estee Chandler

 

STUDENTS FOR JUSTICE IN PALESTINE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
OCTOBER 23, 2013
SJPUCLA1 @ GMAIL.COM

ANTI-DIVESTMENT RESOLUTION DEFEATED AT UCLA UNDERGRADUATE STUDENT COUNCIL
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES

With 7 votes against and 5 in favor, the UCLA Undergraduate Students Association Council voted last night to defeat a resolution that threatened the ability for students to pursue divestment from companies tied to the Israeli occupation.

The resolution, entitled “A Resolution In Support of Positive Steps Towards an Israeli-Palestinian Peace” framed divestment as a source of tension on campus, while also calling for “positive investment” in a basket of companies loosely affiliated with both Israelis and Palestinians.

Over a hundred students attended the hearings, which lasted until 3am on October 23rd. Over the course of two and a half hours of public comment, over 40 students from a variety of campus communities spoke against the bill, arguing that its claims to support community engagement were hypocritical given the exclusion of SJP from the bill’s writing process; wide ranging criticism by Palestinians of “positive investment,” and criticism of the attempt to bar divestment from public debate. Two council members admitted to having taken free trips to Israel sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League, which has actively opposed divestment bills at the University of California system and campaigned against SJPs.

Council members responded by systematically removing clauses that spoke on behalf of Palestinians or limited their ability to engage in divestment activism. Eventually the bill lost support and failed when put to a vote. Students for Justice in Palestine board member Angélica Becerra commented “I am very happy with tonight’s outcome. It shows great resiliency on the part of SJP and that our community support is very strong.”

Members of SJP expressed hope that efforts to prevent debate around divestment would continue to be unsuccessful, while the statewide campaign against efforts to remove university investments from companies enabling the occupation would continue to gain momentum across the state.

Students for Justice in Palestine at UCLA was founded in 2005 and is a coalition of students working in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. 

Posted in: Activism, Anti-Divestment Materials, News, Solidarity Tagged: anti-divestment, bds, divestment, positive investment, student government, ucla

ADL and Blue Star PR fund Israel Tours this Summer

August 21, 2013 by Angelica Becerra

This summer student leaders  have participated in tours of Israel funded by the Anti-Defamation League and Blue Star PR, as well as several other pro-Israel groups. With divestment resolutions sweeping the California university system, these trips are providing student leaders with a misrepresentation of the Palestinian struggle. Reports from the trips portray their celebration of violence and militarism, tokenization of minority and oppressed communities, and failure to engage seriously with questions of Palestinian rights. In her article for Mondoweiss.net Rebecca Pierce points out some of  the effects of the Blue Star trip:

“After being exposed to such a hostile and cartoonish view of Palestinians, it is hard to imagine these students seeing their Arab, Muslim, and pro-Palestinian peers as anything other than enemies of Israel and supporters of terrorism. One also has to question the efficacy of a program that leaves participants with such a limited view of the conflict, even in terms of achieving BlueStar’s own stated goals.”

These trips and their effects on the college students that participate are also being documented by these agencies, as Pierce explains:

“In over fifty entries on the BlueStar Fellows program blog (penned with the assistance of a writing coach) participants from UC Santa Barbara, UC Santa Cruz, San Francisco State, San Jose State, and Pitzer College reflect on a trip itinerary that often glorifies Israeli state violence while promoting a dehumanized image of Palestinians. The accounts provide insight into the sensational approach to the conflict pushed by some hardline Israel advocacy groups, and raise questions about the impact of their tactics in the battle for the hearts and minds of US college students.”

It is imperative that we hold these student leaders accountable, especially given that these tours are giving student government representatives a skewed if not incomplete view of the conflict. These reports also raise ethical questions about student senators who benefit from funded trips and then may be asked to vote on questions about university funds tied to Israel’s occupation policies. Click here to read more of Rebecca’s powerful piece at Mondoweiss.net, and for more info on the ADL trip as well, click here.

 

 

Posted in: Anti-Divestment Materials, News Tagged: ADL, Blue Star, california, hasbara fellowship, student government, student leaders, uc santa cruz

In Letter to Student Leaders, UC Berkeley Student External Vice President explains divestment and encourages similar legislation

May 29, 2013 by sjpwest

As part of SB 160, the External Vice President of the Associated Students of the University of California Berkeley has written a letter to other UC student leaders explaining SB 160 and encouraging similar divestment bills across the UC. Download the letter in PDF form here.

Dear Fellow UC Student Leaders,

I am writing as the External Vice President of the Associated Students of the University of California Berkeley to share with you news of a recent bill passed by our student senate, SB 160, “A Bill in Support of Human Rights in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.” You can find a copy of this bill attached.

SB 160 is a positive step toward increased corporate social responsibility. Specifically, it calls on the Regents to engage in targeted divestment of university funds from companies profiting from human rights violations in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Companies the UC invests in that are mentioned in the bill include Caterpillar, Cement Roadstone Holdings, and Hewlett Packard. These companies have assisted the Israeli military in the illegal demolition of Palestinian homes, the creation of an illegal separation wall beyond Israel’s internationally recognized borders, and in the systematic and discriminatory violation of Palestinian freedom of movement internal to the Palestinian Territories, as documented by numerous human rights groups cited in our bill and elsewhere. By profiting from these investments our university maintains a relationship of complicity with these crimes, which SB 160 seeks to stop. Not only are we as students benefiting from these human rights abuses, but some students among us also are suffering directly from them as well, notably Palestinian students across the UC system who are put in the discomfiting position of knowing that their school is profiting from the demolition of their own family’s homes and from a violent, discriminatory occupation that harms them and their loved ones.

Our bill is very clear to distinguish between the targeted divestment of international corporations – in this case American and European ones – and divestment from any and all things Israeli; SB 160 specifically demands targeted divestment from international companies that are directly benefiting from human rights abuses. No more. No less. The human rights abuses in question are consequences of Israeli policy, but the continued occupation is not sustained by the Israeli government alone. In fact, the tactic of divestment seeks to emphasize our own complicity in these abuses, and seeks to hold ourselves accountable to the basic maxim of ‘do no evil.’

This bill affirms the common humanity of all students, Israeli, Palestinian and otherwise,
We encourage you to do the same and support similar divestment at your campuses, if you have not yet done so.

All my best,

Shahryar Abbasi
ASUC External Affairs Vice President UC Berkeley

Posted in: Activism, News Tagged: bds, divestment, student government, uc berkeley

Time to call out the campus Israel Lobby

December 1, 2012 by sjpwest

Originally posted at Mondoweiss:

By Tom Pessah:

Imagine you are a student activist trying to get tobacco products banned from your university. You insist that cigarettes cause cancer, as so much research has shown. Your opponents are other students who claim the connection is tenuous and controversial, that student government should not make judgments on complex health issues, and that some students are so attached to their cigarettes that their very identities would be under attack if such a measure were passed. What if these students called themselves regular smokers, but were in fact trained and sometimes paid representatives of Philip Morris and Marlboro? How much credibility would they have on campus?

The answer depends on whether opponents of tobacco products buy into the frame of two symmetrical student groups – “pro-smokers“ and “anti-smokers,” or whether they call out their opponents for being representatives of external bodies.

One of the biggest failings of pro-Palestine student movement in many U.S. schools is buying into the symmetry frame. We’ve largely accepted the idea that efforts to divest from Israeli apartheid are promoted by pro-Palestine student groups, and opposed by pro-Israel ones (“the Zionists”) – as if these are two symmetrical parties.

But this is a completely false picture. Groups like Students for Justice in Palestine truly are grass-root organizations. Despite persistent rumors about their secret Saudi oil money, SJP chapters hold bake sales to send students their national conferences. On the U.C. Berkeley campus, attention was diverted from SJP’s cookies and brownies by the College Republicans, who put on a lavish spectacle involving students in swimsuits. The SJP sale raised a little under $6.

Such financial improvisation is one of the hazards of truly independent student organizing. But contrast that with a recent complaint from a “pro-Israel” student: “students are bombarded with funding opportunities to engage in pre-formed activities from a dozen different organizations. There is little opportunity to be creative and scant motivation to develop programming that comes from students themselves.”

It is in fact misleading to characterize this student as simply “pro-Israel,” or “Zionist,” any more than a representative of Philip Morris is simply “a smoker.” She is a Hasbara Fellow, atrained advocate for an external organization founded in 2001 by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She will be paid back a deposit of $250 if her activism is considered satisfactory. The program is currently run by Aish HaTora International, a huge international Jewish outreach organization with private donors that works closely with the Israeli government. Aish operates “dozens of full-time branches and programs on six continents.” It is based not in the U.S. but in East Jerusalem, and supports continued settlement of the West Bank.  This organization tells its members that the occupation is nothing more than a “myth,” and disseminates hardcore islamophobic materials, like the films Obsession and Third Jihad (which wereproduced in millions of copies by an offshoot of Aish International).

One of the features of Hasbara Fellows’ activism is a relentless attempt to smear pro-Palestine students as anti-Jewish. In a failed lawsuit against her former university, U.C. Berkeley, this student claimed that Jewish students’ experiences, especially as a result of protests against checkpoints, are comparable to “incitement, intimidation, harassment and violence carried out under the Nazi regime and those of its allies in Europe against Jewish students… during the turbulent years leading up to and including the Holocaust.”

When routinely compared to Nazis (a comparison considered extremely offensive if made in the opposite direction), pro-Palestine students often get defensive. They protest that they’ve succeeded in drawing the line between anti-semitism and anti-Zionism, and display some of their Jewish members as proof. By doing so they implicitly accept the idea that what is at stake here is the feelings of Jewish American students, and that these students should therefore be the main parties to the debate. This framing doubly undermines our own work: first, it reproduces the very structures of power and prejudice that marginalize Palestinians in the first place. Secondly, by obscuring the voices of Palestinian American students it contributes to the perception that human rights abuses happen far away – an international issue so complex that U.S. students cannot form an opinion about it, much less act on it. But the most compelling arguments are the ones that draw connections between companies our schools are invested in and human rights abuses suffered by students in those same schools – from H.P.’s equipment for checkpoints to General Electric’s parts in helicopters which are used to attack civilians in Gaza. Palestinian students who’ve been impacted by these horrors are the experts, and they are students on our campuses. They are our best advocates. 

A better way of countering these endless accusations of anti-Semitism would be to clearly distinguish the diverse community of Jewish students in each university from advocates of particular external groups. Many accusations of anti-Semitism are made by Hasbara Fellows, members of an organization that disseminates extreme islamophobic materials, as mentioned above. Similar accusations of antisemitism come from student representatives of AIPAC, whose group seeks tocut aid to Palestinian refugees, is pushing the U.S. towards war with Iran, and hasa long history of preventing recognition of the Armenian Genocide. In 2010 after a divestment resolution was initially passed at UC Berkeley (before it was vetoed), an AIPAC official promised “we’re going to make sure that pro-Israel students take over the student government and reverse the vote…This is how AIPAC operates in our nation’s capital. This is how AIPAC must operate on our nation’s campuses.”

This year, a student body representing the University of California system passed a resolution distinguishing anti-semitism from criticism of Israeli state policies and affirming the legitimacy of calls for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. In response, several current and former student senators published an open letterthat contained the following language:

“UCSA’s resolution refers to “Israel’s illegal occupation” and charges Israel with “racism and Apartheid in the context of Israeli policies” without recognizing the level of debate and dissension constantly occurring around this hostile rhetoric. Furthermore, the resolution takes a stance “in strong opposition to…the racism of Israel’s human rights violations” and “encourages all institutions of higher learning to cleanse their investment portfolios of unethical investments” in companies that do business with Israel. This extreme language alienates a significant portion of the campus community, especially those whose identities are closely tied with the Jewish state. As a governing body, it is the responsibility to create a safe campus environment and avoid making comprehensive statements that can be perceived as an attack on those UCSA claims to represent.”

This letter is being disseminated by the AIPAC representatives in each school. Imagine students openly representing Exxon disseminating a letter that called any talk of global warming “extreme language” that creates an unsafe environment for students whose identities are closely tied to purchasing oil. Most students would see this as absurd. But pro-Palestine students have been very hesitant to draw these connections. Part of the reason lies in conflict avoidance: why criticize fellow students who already say (or are told to say) we are hurting their feelings? Shouldn’t we be gentler with them? 

Again, being gentle to trained representatives of an advocacy group makes as much sense as reaching out to a Bank of America employee who is about to foreclose your home. Of course there is no need to deliberately offend. But if external advocacy organizations are like big corporations, pro-Palestine students can borrow from the rich traditions of anti-corporate activism. Where are our adbusters? What can we learn from Naomi Klein’s No Logo? Why should paid advocates of external bodies have unrestricted access to student newspapers, without providing full disclosure? Shouldn’t we be demanding a protocol to pre-empt that? What transparency do they owe if they serve in elected student bodies? How can the Freedom of Information Act be used to expose their typically covert lobbying? You’ve seen Shit Zionists Say – how about Shit AIPAC Says? What about a “Who Advocates?” website, modeled on Who Profits? When will “Hasbara Fellow” become a familiar term that every student associates with a tiny group of advocates for external anti-Palestinian groups – instead of seeing them as representing the voice of Jewish students? In 2011 there were only 250 Hasbara Fellows in 80 U.S., universities, an average of 3 students per school, yet they consistently speak in the name of entire Jewish communities.

While Hasbara Fellows themselves are concerned that their student groups could be seen as “a façade for multi-million dollar organizations,” the pro-Palestine movement has rarely attempted to call out the Israel Lobby on our campuses. We cannot tell our local AIPAC representatives from the Hasbara Fellows. We do not even know the names of other external advocacy groups. Serious and well-documented research on each school can engender new and creative strategies to challenge these champions of the status quo, who are blocking crucial action to end Israeli apartheid in all its forms. There is no time to waste, especially after the latest slaughter in Gaza. It’s time to call out the campus Israel Lobby.

 

Posted in: News Tagged: aipac, aish international, hasbara fellowship, student government

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