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  • Protest or Prejudice??

    Guys/Gals



    I recently came across a couple a issue and a couple of articles I think we should discuss - I named the thread after the lead article:

    Protest or Prejudice?

    Campaigns to divest colleges and universities of stocks in companies doing business in Israel are gaining momentum – and focusing attention on anti-Semitism, free speech, and academic freedom

    By Mark Clayton

    Between classes and homework, Fadi Kiblawi, a senior at the University of Michigan, spends his free time researching US companies that do business in Israel and whose stock is owned by his university.

    What he's found so far is $151 million invested in 45 companies. His goal: to persuade the school to dump those stocks. Such a move, he and others hope, would begin to put economic pressure on Israel to soften its policies toward Palestinians.

    The effort might seem far-fetched. Only last month, the new president of the university, Mary Sue Coleman, responded to the campaign by stating she had no intention of seeking divestment from Israel. But Mr. Kiblawi, who was raised in the United States by Palestinian parents, is undeterred. This weekend, he and his supporters will host a national conference on divesting from Israel at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. About 500 people, including students and speakers from scores of universities, are expected to attend, he says.

    And support for his cause is apparently growing. Petitions calling for universities to disinvest from Israel are circulating across the University of California's 11 campuses and at least 23 others nationwide. Roughly 7,000 individuals have signed the requests, organizers say – and some predict the number of campaigns will mushroom as the school year progresses.

    But opposition to the campaign is growing swiftly as well. What's resulted is an intense debate about the issue itself, as well as the role the university plays in supporting academic freedom and open discussion about topics that touch on deeply held beliefs and sensitivities.

    The divest-from-Israel campaign, which began in earnest at the University of California at Berkeley this spring, is resonating in academia and beyond. Princeton, Yale, Cornell and others have petition campaigns. As of last week, 130 faculty, 216 students, and 237 staff and alumni at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had signed a joint online petition calling for divesting from Israel. Harvard has an estimated $614 million in such investments, according to the petitioners. MIT has about $174 million.

    Still, protests against such petitions are gaining momentum. A counter-petition at Harvard and MIT has already gathered more than 5,800 signatures (including 439 Harvard professors and 143 MIT faculty). Key figures have also spoken out against divestment.


    Charges of anti-Semitism

    Harvard University President Lawrence Summers made headlines when, at a prayer meeting with students and faculty on Sept. 17, he warned of an "upturn in anti-Semitism" around the world. But what really grabbed people's attention was his criticism of divestment supporters on campus.

    "Profoundly anti-Israel views are increasingly finding support in progressive intellectual communities," said Mr. Summers, who is also Harvard's first Jewish president. "Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect, if not their intent." Those comments hit home. With Harvard often leading on emerging academic issues, the idea that thoughtful signers could be unintentional supporters of anti-Semitism sent shock waves throughout higher education. Indeed, for some Harvard and MIT faculty signers, Summers's assertion that some were unwittingly involved in an anti-Semitic act was just too much.

    Daniel Fox, a professor of linguistics and philosophy at MIT who helped organize the petition drive on his campus and who is Jewish, was surprised by Summers's comments.

    "There is nothing anti-Semitic about the petition, neither in effect nor in intent," he wrote to the Monitor in an e-mail. "At a time when anti-Arab sentiments are rampant, I find it somewhat disturbing to hear an educational leader 'singling out' anti-Semitism while ignoring all other forms of racism."

    Likewise, Elizabeth Spelke, a professor of psychology at Harvard who also helped promote the petition on her campus, considers herself an ardent supporter of Israel. She signed the petition because she sees it as a necessary first step toward a stable, two-state reconciliation.

    "The charge [of anti-Semitism] is completely groundless, both for Jews like me and non-Jews who are supporters of the petition," she says. She wrote in The Harvard Crimson student newspaper that charges of anti-Semitism served to "deflect attention from the Israeli governmental actions" and onto the petitioners' motives.

    Others, like Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, praised Summers for taking a stand. The outspoken lawyer argues that the petition campaign is intellectually bankrupt. One may reasonably debate Israel's policies, but "singling out" Israel – which has a better overall human-rights record than many other nations – is unfair, he says.

    "You can't characterize as anti-Semitic all the signers of this petition," he says. "But Summers put his finger on it. Why do people single out only Israel for economic capital punishment? Let's debate whether Israel or China or Egypt merits it. Now that's a fair debate."

    One of those who thinks singling out Israel is fair is Francis Boyle, a law professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

    In a speech on campus in 2000, he suggested divesting from Israel. From a legal point of view, Israel's policies toward Palestinians paralleled those of South Africa's apartheid regime toward blacks, he argues. He points to the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, which identifies apartheid as a "crime against humanity." An organizer of the campaign to divest from South Africa, he thought the approach also made sense for Israel.

    "Apartheid is apartheid," he says. "Israel's policies and actions clearly fit the definition. So, I put the speech on the Internet, and the students at Berkeley picked it up. It took off from there."

    Professor Dershowitz says there's "nothing grass roots" about the growing campaign, and that Professor Boyle is a paid consultant of the Palestinian cause. Boyle acknowledges that his expenses were paid when he served as legal adviser to the Palestinian Delegation to the Middle East Peace Negotiations from 1991 to1993 and to the Palestine Liberation Organization from 1987 to 1989.

    Concerns about academic freedom

    It was not Boyle's but Summers's speech, however, that has put the campaign in the public eye and shifted its focus. The debate is now less about whether divestment helps Palestinians and more about freedom of speech and anti-Semitism, observers say.

    "[Our] original petition was answered by a counterpetition – and [that group] out-polled us by a large margin," says Patrick Cavanagh, a Harvard psychology professor who helped organize the petition drive. "Summers has brought the debate back into public focus, but it's the wrong debate. Our issue was Palestinians and human rights. We're not getting that debate."

    Instead, there is debate about phenomena like the website "Campus Watch," which was posting "dossiers" on professors alleged to have made anti-Israel comments. Sponsored by the Middle East Forum, a pro-Israel research group, Campus Watch last week dropped the dossier section, which had been attacked as McCarthyism. Debate continues, too, over two Israeli professors fired from the academic boards of two British journals this spring

    Meanwhile, the petition drive is popping up on more campuses
    . That encourages pro-Palestinian supporters even as it unsettles other students. Yet the fact that at least two university presidents have taken a strong stand against divestment encourages some.

    "I think President Summers was the one who really opened the floodgates by making it OK for a university president to take a moral stand," says Rachel Roth, a sophomore at the University of Michigan and cochair of the student-run Israel Michigan Public Affairs Committee. "I have felt greatly supported by President Coleman's position, too."

    She says the first national conference on the issue at Berkeley this spring brought "anti-Semitic acts and hate crimes," and is part of a growing problem on campus. Recently, at San Francisco State University, students yelled "Death to Jews!" and "Hitler should have finished the job."

    Caught in the middle are students who may not approve of Israel's treatment of Palestinians but also don't support divesting from Israel.

    Taufiq Rahim, a Princeton student who is a Muslim, once helped lead the charge for divestment on his campus. But in an open letter to faculty, the Canadian student renounced his involvement. What changed his mind was open, heartfelt discussion with faculty – not charges of anti-Semitism.

    "Instead of working toward Palestinian freedom, divestment would only serve to isolate Israel and Palestine from each other and prevent them from coming together with fair and just positions," he says
    _____________________


  • #2
    From churches, a challenge to Israeli policies

    Some may wield an old financial tool - divestment - to register concern about peace prospects.

    By Jane Lampman

    A vote by the Presbyterian Church (USA) to use economic sanctions against certain companies doing business with Israel - namely those that profit from the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza - has set off a quiet firestorm within the American religious community.

    The Presbyterians' decision to consider divesting such businesses from its $8 billion portfolio, coupled with the prospect that the Episcopal Church and other churches might do the same, is adding to tensions that have risen over recent years between mainline Protestant churches and the American Jewish community over their differing views of the Israeli- Palestinian conflict.

    It is also stirring Jewish groups to try to head off divestment - and to rebuild a rapport with these churches, with whom they have long worked to further civil rights and social justice.

    "To call for divestment played into all the language of boycott, from earlier periods in Jewish history to the Arab boycott of Israel. It caused an explosion in the Jewish community," says David Elcott, director of interreligious affairs for the American Jewish Committee (AJC).

    In some ways, last summer's divestment vote has forced a conversation about the Middle East conflict. It also raises the stakes for those who, earlier this year, launched a bid to renew the old coalition. Christian and Jewish leaders have met twice, hosted by AJC and the National Council of Churches. From discussions on the "theology of land" to the divestment issue, the religious leaders "spoke from their pain" and asked tough questions of one another, says the Rev. Shanta Premawardhana, NCC interfaith secretary.

    Tensions rose when a Presbyterian delegation traveling in the Middle East in October met with members of Hizbullah, the Lebanese group on the US terrorist list. The church's national leadership disavowed the action. Then in November, the church received a letter threatening arson against Presbyterian churches unless it halted the divestment process. Jewish groups condemned the threat.

    Last week, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs asked Protestants to reject divestment in favor of joint efforts to end the conflict. Elaborating on Jewish concerns, it said the divestment process is discriminatory, will provoke intransigence on both sides, and "is dangerously ill-matched to our passionately shared vision of a peaceful resolution to the conflict."

    Mainline churches have supported Israel since 1948 and reject terrorism; they also have longstanding ties to churches in the Holy Land and are critical of Israeli military practices in the territories. Illegal expansion of Israeli settlements and a new security wall that encroaches on Palestinian land are making a viable Palestinian state less feasible, Presbyterians and others say. With the US government taking little action to help matters, they add, unusual measures are required.

    "The decision to initiate a process of phased, selective divestment ... was not taken lightly," the Rev. Clifton Kirkpatrick, a Presbyterian leader, wrote to members of the US Congress. "It was born out of the frustration that many of our members, as well as members of other denominations, feel with the current policies of Israel and those of our own government."

    The Presbyterians say their aims are to influence the practices of companies and use their resources - an $8 billion portfolio - in morally responsible ways. "We have to be principled; we respect human rights and the legitimacy of international law, and when Israelis or Palestinians breech either we'll take a hard look at our investments," says the Rev. Marthame Sanders, who was in ministry in the West Bank.

    The church's committee on socially responsible investment will identify firms that provide services or equipment to support the military occupation or Jewish settlements; finance or assist in building the wall; or provide help to Israeli or Palestinian groups that commit violence against innocent civilians.

    It will seek meetings with corporate leaders, and possibly file shareholder resolutions, using divestment a last resort. Divestment decisions require approval by the church general assembly in 2006
    .

    Some US Jewish peace groups support the initiative, Mr. Sanders says, including Jewish Voice for Peace. JVP has filed its own shareholder initiative asking Caterpillar Inc. to investigate whether Israeli use of its bulldozers to demolish Palestinian homes violates the firm's code of conduct. Other liberal Jewish groups, however, oppose it.

    The Jewish community has countered other divestment efforts. Campaigns on colleges have made little headway. A proposal to make Somerville, Mass., the first American city to divest from Israel is likely to be turned back this week.

    It is making some inroads with the churches, too. Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago, which has close ties to a neighboring synagogue, is asking the denomination to slow the process and engage the Jewish community. It proposes that, if divestment occurs, money from stock sales be reinvested in Israel in companies not tied to the occupation.

    "I've tried to interpret to my Jewish friends that this is not an anti-Israel nor anti-Jewish decision, but an attempt by a church to speak a word of hope and justice for [Palestinians] for whom those words are pretty elusive," says the Rev. John Buchanan, church pastor. But "I'm not convinced divestment is a wise thing."

    The US Episcopal Church, meanwhile, said in November it will begin to study how it should respond to companies that contribute to the occupation's infrastructure or to violence against civilians. It will include Jewish groups, Palestinians, and the Episcopal Church in Jerusalem.

    "For us, the term is not 'divestment,' " says Bishop Christopher Epting, deputy for interfaith relations. "We'd be voting certain shareholder resolutions expressing concern to companies in which we own stock." Jewish leaders are more approving of this approach.

    Other mainline Protestants are also talking about the issue.

    "The notion that a two-state solution might no longer be realistic is very unsettling to many people, both Jewish and Christian," says Jim Winkler of the United Methodist Church's public policy board.

    Jewish and mainline Christian leaders say they will travel together to the region to talk with Israelis and Palestinians, and will urge the US government to become more engaged in the peace process. "The Presbyterian decision was a flash point," says Bishop Epting, "but in a strange way, it may well reenergize the relationship."
    _____________________

    Comment


    • #3
      Issues like this seem to boil down to the concept of "one can be against Israel's policies without being honestly antiSemitic." While true in principle, it leads to some rather shaky ground with a lot of folks.

      Anyway, I would only support this kind of thing myself if the same groups also applied pressure (or called for pressure by others) on Palestinians to stop the tacit approval of the barbarian acts that are committed in their name.

      -dale

      Comment


      • #4
        How do we negotiate that "shaky ground"?? Because I think this is a pretty huge issue or really sets of issues.

        How does one register protest and not be considered prejudiced??

        This whole protest and divestment issue is, in my opinion, a significant issue and has the potential to be incredibly divisive and entirely unconstructive - on the other hand it is clear or it ought to be, that the Anglican Church (in UK) will also be open to similar propositions - and if that pressure is significant more mainline denominations will find the issue making inroads.

        And then, how will protest play??

        And Will any of this actually serve the cause of peace and the Two state solution??

        If I were an israeli, I would look seriously into these issues because it is not far when these issues break on the scopes of the major media, even against their wish - the world wants a credible solution and that may not be the same awareness in Israel.
        _____________________

        Comment


        • #5
          Originally posted by tarek
          How do we negotiate that "shaky ground"?? Because I think this is a pretty huge issue or really sets of issues.

          How does one register protest and not be considered prejudiced??
          Hard for me to say. I don't see how anyone can support the Palestinians at all these days, so I don't see much utility in protesting Israel right now.

          This whole protest and divestment issue is, in my opinion, a significant issue and has the potential to be incredibly divisive and entirely unconstructive - on the other hand it is clear or it ought to be, that the Anglican Church (in UK) will also be open to similar propositions - and if that pressure is significant more mainline denominations will find the issue making inroads.

          And then, how will protest play??

          And Will any of this actually serve the cause of peace and the Two state solution??

          If I were an israeli, I would look seriously into these issues because it is not far when these issues break on the scopes of the major media, even against their wish - the world wants a credible solution and that may not be the same awareness in Israel.
          Hm. I just don't see divestment as being that big a deal.

          -dale

          Comment


          • #6
            Interesting - Yes, certainly awareness in Israel is not the same as elsewhere.
            Palestinian bad is not the same as Israeli good -- but live and learn I guess. Divestment may not have a economic effect, but man does not live by bread alone - when entire denominations become involved, it's only prudent to take notice. And ofcourse the prudent will.
            _____________________

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