BDS. Boycott, also by Universities

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MuzzleWatch

Lessons from the UC Berkeley Divestment Effort, Hillel on Campus

by Cecilie Surasky



[Editor’s note: The Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s video report (above) on Israel-defense training for students made me think that now would be a good time to re-publish Lessons from the UC Berkeley Divestment Effort. My colleague Sydney Levy and I wrote it this summer in response to the UC Berkeley divestment struggle and Israeli Consul General Akiva Tor’s rather strange response to the effort.

30-9-2010
In watching the JTA video in which the national head of Hillel is trying to make a subtle point but revealingly ends up comparing Muslims to vampires, I’d add that it has never been so clear to me how older Jews have failed this younger generation.
Students are smart enough to handle an open conversation about complexity and Israel. But many in the older generation in power don’t want that to happen. The fundamental irony, of course, is that when it comes to both delegitimizing and existentially threatening Israel, no critic can hold a candle to Israel itself and its ever-expanding settlement project (and human rights abuses etc…) There is no faster way for Israel to continue down the path of self-destruction than to continue the status quo, unhindered. In that very important sense, the BDS movement may be Israel’s last chance. Especially now that we know that Congress and the Obama administration is no more willing to hold Netanyahu accountable than previous administrations.]

Lessons from the UC Berkeley Divestment Effort

By Cecilie Surasky and Sydney Levy, Jewish Voice for Peace

(June 1, 2010) Israel right-or-wrong apologists have reason to be worried after three lengthy UC Berkeley student senate hearings concluded each with a solid majority of votes (60% or more) in favor of divestment from companies that profit from the Israeli occupation. Though in the end, the vote fell 1 short of the needed supermajority required to overturn a veto, neither our opponents nor we forget that a clear majority consistently supported the bill.

Now, a few weeks after the hearings are over, it is a good time to examine how familiar tactics were deployed to stop the divestment effort and are now being used to prevent future similar ones. These tactics do not advance the cause of peace and have the unintended potential to cause harm to Jews in the US. Silencing debate, confusing the facts, taking over student senates, making indiscriminate charges of anti-Semitism, criminalizing anti-occupation activism, implicitly or explicitly condoning widespread hostility against Muslims, Palestinians, and anti-occupation Jews – these are the tactics with which we’ve unfortunately become too familiar. We’ll review them below.

1) Silencing debate

The first tactic, which predates UC Berkeley’s divestment initiative, is the effort to shut down debate within the Jewish community. The story is an old one, but given the growing level of desperation among the Israel right-or-wrong crowd, the measures being deployed are increasingly bold and destructive.

Just a few months ago, the San Francisco Jewish Community Federation issued the most restrictive funding guidelines in the country. These guidelines aim to silence open discussion within the institutional Jewish community on Israeli policies and the merits of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement. And they also have led to an old-fashioned blacklist of well-known human rights groups now banned from the Federation’s donor designated fund’s acceptable charities list.

The guidelines’ impact has not gone unnoticed. An open letter in The Forward signed by Jewish professors, rabbis, and other notables from both the left and center describes the San Francisco Federation guidelines in these terms:

    Despite the guidelines’ repeatedly stated commitment to the values of free and open discussion and diversity, they will have a chilling effect on the entire spectrum of community institutions, including educational, service, social justice and arts organizations. They will also limit American Jewish exposure to the range of art, literature, scholarship, and political discourse that exists in Israel. The guidelines will encourage self-censorship. Organizations will fear losing their funding; individuals will fear losing their jobs.

Though the ad is written in future tense about the negative effects the guidelines will have, we know for certain that these effects have already taken hold. Fearing loss of jobs or funding, people are staying quiet.

More recently, the guidelines were directly linked by a Haaretz columnist Bradley Burston to Israel’s banning of political linguist Noam Chomsky and other indications of incipient “fascism.”

This effort to stifle debate inside our communities has ironically meant that the only way that Jews have been able to speak face-to-face with other Jews about divestment has been at the UC Berkeley hearings. And what the hearings revealed was striking: an authentic crisis in the Jewish community. By all appearances, the number of Jewish supporters of divestment on campus easily matched the number of opponents. The group that sponsored the divest initiative, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), includes many Israelis and Jews as well as Palestinians and Muslims and many others of various faiths and nationalities, and the co-author of the divest bill himself is an Israeli Jew. Many Jewish professors, including members of the Jewish studies program, came out in support of the divest bill.

The Federation guidelines not only prevent an open conversation on these critically important issues, but they also banish these Jewish studies professors and the Jewish and Israeli students from any public forum on Israel funded by the Federation. The guidelines banish some of our best and most knowledgeable minds from the conversations where we truly need them most. By silencing debate, the Israel right-or-wrong advocates get to act like they’re speaking for the majority of Jews. But we know that they are not. For now, they’ve shut down public debate inside the Jewish institutional world, and their McCarthyite methods cast a long shadow. But the divestment hearing shows that whether or not the Jewish institutional world is ready, these conversations will take place because people, including many Jews, want to have them.

2) Confusing the Facts

The second tactic we saw used, yet again, was a consistent campaign to mislead the public about the nature of specific divestment resolutions. Many in the Jewish world, including the director of Berkeley Hillel ignored the fact that the UC Berkeley divestment resolution addressed only the Israeli occupation and repeatedly suggested instead that it targeted Israel as a whole.

3) Take over student senates

The Forward reported that,

    At an AIPAC conference in Washington in late March, AIPAC leadership development director Jonathan Kessler said that his organization would “make sure that pro-Israel students take over the student government and reverse the vote,” as recorded in a video taken at the conference by the JTA. “This is how AIPAC operates in our nation’s Capitol. This is how AIPAC must operate on our nation’s campuses,” he said.

You can watch the chilling but frank video with Mr. Kessler’s statement here, where Mr. Kessler explicitly refers to the Berkeley resolution. This of course did not stop an AIPAC spokesperson from declaring:

    “We took no position on the Berkeley student election, since like in any other election, we don’t rate or endorse candidates. Of course we would always, publicly and consistently, encourage pro-Israel students to be active in civic and political life.”

This year alone, about 1,300 students from all 50 states were offered a travel junket to DC to attend an AIPAC conference and learn the finer points of Israeli Hasbara. About a quarter of those in attendance were student government presidents, the kinds of leaders that can veto a divestment bill, just like UC Berkeley student senate president Will Smelko did. What is striking, as documented in the AIPAC video, is that a number of these student leaders had not heard of AIPAC before the offer of the free trip.

4) Making indiscriminate charges of anti-Semitism

By far the most pernicious tactic was the accusation of anti-Semitism combined with something new, a heightened sense of almost theatrical victimization. We witnessed this at the Berkeley hearings themselves and most recently in a piece posted by the Israeli Consul General, Akiva Tor.

Let’s be clear. Anti-Semitism is wrong. We condemn it when we see or hear it, we condemn it as a concept, and we work with allies who take strong positions against anti-Semitism. As Jews whose families have experienced chronic statelessness and expulsion, pogroms, the ghettos and death camps, we refuse to be lectured on this topic.

And indeed the few and isolated instances of anti-Jewish name-calling that occurred in the audience at the Berkeley hearings were publicly condemned both by divestment advocates and by the student senate. The mysterious marking of swastikas on a Berkeley dorm days before the last Berkeley hearing deserved and got vociferous condemnation at the start of the hearing. Not one person at a microphone made a comment that could remotely be construed as anti-Semitic.

Further, many Jewish students said the divest bill had for the first time helped make them feel safe on campus as anti-occupation, progressive Jews who had been shut out by the institutional Jewish world. For most Palestinian students, lack of safety or visibility on the UC campus was not an exception, but a lifetime norm.

Many members of Students for Justice in Palestine are Jewish and Israeli, and it was absolutely striking to us over the weeks we worked with them to see the breadth and depth of authentic loving relationships between students of all races and religions, and especially between Jewish and Muslim students–students who clearly would stand by each other in a heartbeat if there was a true threat. Palestinian American SJP member Dina Omar wrote, “These Jews and Israelis, whose lives I care for as dearly as my own—they are “my people.”

But you would not know any of this from Mr. Tor’s account. Then again, Mr. Tor’s words need to be read with great skepticism. With a straight face, Mr. Tor compares the Berkeley hearings to the Moscow show trials, trials in which witnesses were detained, tortured, forced to confess to crimes they did not commit and then sentenced to death or to labor camps. He also refers to a large multi-faith group that included Christian pastors, Jews, Muslims and others as a menacing group of “100 Muslims”, thus revealing more than we could ever say about how he sees the “other side.”

It was also painful to read Tor’s condemnation of 84 year old pro-divestment advocate and Holocaust survivor Hedy Epstein for “manipulation of the Holocaust.”
Apparently Tor, and the Israeli government and its proxies, hold the monopoly on the lessons from the Holocaust.

Talking points issued by the rightwing Jewish student group Tikvah explicitly encouraged anti-divestment students to avoid addressing the occupation and to appear distraught when they testified at the hearings. At the hearings it was difficult to know what fear was real and what was fabricated. There were some real instances reported of reprehensible anti-Jewish comments, and those were vehemently denounced as we said before. But most of what we witnessed was authentic discomfort, which led many anti-divestment students to call the bill “divisive” (again, per the talking points).

It seemed as though the sudden exposure to such widespread support for the Palestinian narrative, perhaps for the first time in their lives, made these students uncomfortable. At the same time, many Palestinian students who reported living with daily exposure to racism said that for the first time in their lives, they suddenly felt visible, safer and supported.

Should the intensity of emotions and pain of looking at tough truths triggered by any difficult political debate be dismissed as massive anti-Semitism? Clearly not, yet that is exactly what Tor predictably seeks to do.

Not lost on most at the UC hearings, Jewish or otherwise, was the fact that Jews are members of one of the most successful immigrant/ethnic groups in American history. There is no longer any institutionalized or systematic discrimination against Jews in this country - as Jews, our marriages are not illegal in most states, we are not kicked out of the military if our identity is discovered; though we were immigrants, we don’t fear being rounded up by the INS or queried about papers proving our identity; we are no longer limited by quotas or gentleman’s agreements, we are not paid 77 cents on the dollar, we are not stopped by police for driving-while-Jewish, and most of us do not have to contend with grotesquely high interest housing loans or generational poverty.

If anything, especially the majority of Ashkenazi Jews are beneficiaries of massive white and class and even specifically Jewish privilege: Jews on all sides of the conflict are frequently given the space to talk about the issue while Palestinians and others are consistently marginalized.

The language of Jewish victimization, as though every moment were 1938 and every non-Jew a latent anti-Semite, is simply alien to the experience of this generation of Jews. And yet, it is precisely that kind of fear which is deliberately cultivated by Israel’s advocates in younger generations, not as a way to fight bigotry, but cynically, as a way to protect Israel from accountability. As former AIPAC and Israel Policy Forum staffer and analyst MJ Rosenberg wrote about the hearings:

    AIPAC and Hillel, the Jewish student group allied with AIPAC, came up with the strategy of having Jewish students tell the university senate that seeing signs calling for divestment frightened them. Some broke down in tears when describing the pain of seeing pro-divestment placards in the student union.

    It was hilarious because it was so utterly bogus. I know that I come from a different era. Back in the day when I was a pro-Israel activist on campus, we traded insults and threw chairs when confronted by our adversaries (some were scary Maoists!) but I don’t recall weeping. We liked confrontation. We were college kids.

    But this is the new style of pro-Israel advocacy built on victimhood. No wonder so few American kids buy into this. (As for Israeli kids, they would fall over laughing).

Our guess is that at least some of those students did feel various levels of fear—and we feel terrible that those feelings are real– but the fear is stoked, cultivated and serves to isolate them and push them further into denial about Israel, not to connect them or weave together a broad-based coalition opposed to all forms of bigotry, including anti-Jewish hatred.

How exactly are these fears stoked? What are the students being told? We have a few ideas.

In one behind-closed-doors meeting with students senators organized by Berkeley Hillel and in the presence of Mr. Tor himself, according to a few witnesses who took copious notes, the students in attendance were told that Jews who supported the bill were afflicted by a “cultural pathology.” The student senators were given a bizarre interpretation of what constitutes anti-Semitism.

They were reportedly told that comparing Israel with Apartheid South Africa was anti-Semitic, plain and simple.

Worse yet, they were told that it was anti-Semitic to make the mere suggestion that Israel did not distinguish between civilians and combatants during the attack on Gaza and that as a result many children died. And not just any kind of anti-Semitism, mind you. Making this assertion was compared to medieval blood libels against Jews. The fact that Israel fired deliberately or indiscriminately into civilian areas in Gaza resulting in the deaths of adults and children has been verified by the Goldstone Report and by many reputable human rights organizations. On the other hand, the anti-Semitic blood libels falsely charged Jews with the killing of gentile children for ritual purposes and generally ended in deadly attacks against defenseless Jewish communities. Where is the comparison between the two?

These false charges of anti-Semitism cause great damage to our credibility as Jews whenever we face real attacks against us.

5) Criminalizing BDS and anti-occupation activism on campuses

Coincidentally, around the time of the first Berkeley divestment hearing, a number of Jewish organizations (as part of a campaign led by the far right Zionist Organization of America) sent a letter to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, asking the department’s Office for Civil Rights to adopt a policy that would protect Jewish students from anti-Semitic harassment on college campuses by barring federal funding from academic institutions deemed anti-Semitic. This is a laudatory move in and of itself, were it not for the fact that Mr. Tor and others use false charges of anti-Semitism to protect Israel from criticism. Such a change could easily lead to federal investigations of campus activism and teaching.

As the Forward reported:

    The Jewish groups’ letter argues that “anti-Israel and anti-Zionist sentiment” can cross “the line into anti-Semitism,” and that “conduct that threatens, harasses or intimidates particular Jewish students to the point that their ability to participate in and benefit from their college experience is impaired should not be deemed unactionable simply because that conduct is couched as ‘anti-Israel’ or ‘anti-Zionist.’” The letter, however, also acknowledges that “much vehemently anti-Israel and anti-Semitic speech can - and should - be protected First Amendment activity” and that “there is a high bar before any speech or conduct can amount to legally actionable harassment.”

Like clockwork, just days after the last hearing, the far right wing Israel advocacy group StandWithUs reported in an email to supporters:

    [May 20-San Francisco] “Pay attention to the growing anti-Semitism on UC campuses…Condemn anti-Semitism as clearly and vigorously as you would condemn other forms of racism,” Dr. Mike Harris of the Bay area chapter of StandWithUs, S.F. Voice for Israel, urged the University of California Regents during their meeting on Wednesday, May 19.

    Harris urged the regents to set up a committee to implement the U.S. State Department definition of anti-Semitism that recognizes that anti-Zionism is a new form of anti-Semitism and condemn it on UC campuses.

And thus, a more coherent campus-based strategy reveals itself. Overly-dramatizing Jewish suffering and calling divestment efforts divisive (as though the status quo of silence and complicity were unifying for anyone other than students who unconditionally support Israel) is a way to involve federal and campus administrations in shutting down anti-occupation activism.

Such strategies are well under way. David Theo Goldberg and Saree Makdisi wrote about them at length in Tikkun in The Trial of Israel’s Campus Critics.

6) Remaining silent and/or actively fueling atmosphere of hate against Muslims, Palestinians and progressive anti-occupation Jews

What makes Tor’s and others’ strategy of indiscriminate charges of anti-Semitism particularly galling is the myriad ways the Israel right-or-wrong crowd has deliberately trafficked in anti-Muslim imagery and demonizing language against dissenting Jews. Despite his habit of making outrageous comments like comparing Jewish South Africa jurist Richard Goldstone to infamous the Nazi Dr. Menegele and repeatedly saying that Palestinians played a significant role in the Holocaust, Alan Dershowitz was rewarded by the Israeli government, Mr. Tor’s employers, with an offer (which Mr. Dershowitz refused) to be the Israel ambassador to the UN.

Tor’s own boss, Israeli foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman is a well known virulent anti-Arab racist who has been compared to Jorg Haider of Austria and Jean-Marie le Pen of France. The Israeli Knesset discusses and passes laws that are by American standards openly and even proudly racist against non-Jews.

Further up the command chain, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu sends as his special emissary to American campuses none other than Effie Eitam, an Israeli politician notorious for his proposal to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from the West Bank.

“We’ll have to expel the overwhelming majority of West Bank Arabs from here and remove Israeli Arabs from [the] political system.”

His campus tour was sponsored by the Jewish National Fund and by Hillel, and protests against this racist Islamophobe who called Palestinian citizens of Israel “a cancer” were met with the absurd counter-charge of medieval blood libels. Sounds familiar?

In late 2008, when student members of the most vociferously pro-Israel group on campus physically assaulted Palestinian students who were silently and nonviolently standing with a Palestinian flag, they yelled terrible things at the Palestinian students like “I will kick your Arab ass,” and “Arab pigs”. Where was the condemnation from the Consul General?

The combination of silence in the face of real attacks and discriminatory, deliberate misrepresentation of Palestinians and anti-occupation Jews fuels a dangerous environment. Rabbi Michael Lerner’s house was just vandalized, and, like him, we at Jewish Voice for Peace have come to see the steady stream of hate speech and at times death threats as part of daily life.

A number of student senators told us that during the weeks of the divestment debate, they received countless emails calling them terrible names, some even threatening them over future employment. The San Francisco Jewish Community Relations council acknowledged this dangerous underbelly of Jewish hatred when they started adding additional warnings on their action alerts about the UC hearings. The last ones said:

• Please send POLITE and RESPECTFUL messages to the students (remember, they are 18-22 years old)
• Messages that attack the students or use profanity are NOT helpful and may harm efforts to sustain the veto

When such pointers must be offered for emails being sent to student senators at the most prestigious public university in the country, there is no question that a blatant atmosphere of hatred and hostility has been fomented.

If you have any doubt, ask the Muslim and Arab students at UC Berkeley, or simply take a moment to read the hateful comments following a recent article at the Daily Californian.

Akiva Tor finishes his essay with an unanswered question: “how in the name of heaven will we ever make peace?” We answer him with our own question: “for how long will you continue this farce that you are a peacemaker when you consistently demonize, silence and endanger the other side – not just here, but in Israel and Palestine?”

-Cecilie Surasky, Jewish Voice for Peace, www.jvp.org

Source


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Arab American News.com

Nationwide Israeli army PR campaign visits Michigan universities

By Jessica Barrow

2-10-2010
With the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel gaining momentum nationwide, especially on campuses, it’s no surprise that some corporations and pro-Israeli groups are concerned about the growing pro-Palestinian movements.



Israeli soldiers will speak on an upcoming PR campaign organized by StandWithUs organization to polish the army's tarnished image in light of numerous UN war crimes allegations. Shown above are real pictures of the Israeli army edited into a promotional flier distributed by the StandWithUs organization; the pictures do not represent the actual organization or the campaign,however. GRAPHICS: TAAN

In an effort to combat these movements and polish the tarnished image of the Israeli army in light of numerous allegations of war crimes by UN reports, a group named StandWithUs is sponsoring a tour during which six Israeli army soldiers will speak about their experiences. 

UN reports including the Goldstone Report about the January 2009 siege on Gaza by Israel that was released in September 2009 and a UN report released this month examining Israel's attacks on an aid flotilla in international waters against activists in May both alleged numerous war crimes committed by Israeli soldiers. The Israeli army also upholds a blockade and occupation against the Gaza Strip that British Prime  Minister David Cameron called a "prison camp." 

The Michigan tour stops will feature speeches by two soldiers named Omer and Shai. They will visit Michigan State University in Lansing on Oct. 19 and The University of Michigan-Ann Arbor on Oct.  20.

Trophy photos” taken by Israeli soldiers with dead Palestinians who had been abused became a widespread phenomenon in 2004 according to the daily right-wing Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronot as reported by The Christian Science Monitor.

Many in the Arab American and pro-Palestinian communities are concerned that the  tour is not about imparting knowledge, but is instead a glorified PR campaign in response to the BDS movement and an attempt to gain sympathy for Israel at a time when  sentiments are turning against them on college campuses in concert with international movements.


“Such a tour is intended to undermine the growing BDS efforts on American campuses. As you know, the University of Michigan-Dearborn (UM-D) Student Government passed yet another divestment resolution last year, and will likely approve one this year as well,” said Dr. David Skrbina, professor of Philosophy at UM-D.

Michigan-Dearborn was one of numerous universities  that have passed resolutions in support of boycotting companies that allegedly support Israel's military.

“The Israeli army has not been facing good press within the media regarding the flotilla attacks and with how they treat the Palestinians in occupied Palestine,” said Mahde Abdallah, a senator in the UM-D Student Government. “Them coming to polish their image is just showing that they're worried about the pro-Palestinian movements on campuses in the US.”

xxEden Abergil, an Israeli soldier, ended up in hot water over the above picture posted on Facebook that showed her smiling in front of blindfolded Palestinian captives. website Soldiers Speak Out to correct misconceptions. “We created this website because a few isolated allegations from ‘anti-war’ Israeli soldiers are being used to defame the Israeli Defense Forces  (IDF),” said Roz Rothstein, co-founder and CEO of Stand WithUs.  “Yet the IDF has over 700,000 citizen soldiers and  reservists who try to live up to its high ethical standards. The IDF impartially  judges all alleged violations, and punishes offenders.” StandWithUs reports that the two soldiers who are visiting the campuses have received honors in the military and have upheld all the moral codes of the Israeli Army. Skrbina doesn’t think this tour will help the image of the Israeli army much, however, as evidence continues to mount against their declarations of upholding a high moral standard. “They have an uphill battle, thanks to Israel's war crimes in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and at sea,“ he said. "They are sponsoring this 'tour' by two IDF soldiers to argue that Israel is only 'defending itself'… and to show that the soldiers are really 'nice guys'. Any soldiers who are involved with enforcing an illegal occupation are clearly not 'nice guys'.”   For more information, visit www.soldiersspeakout.com  Source --------------------------------------------------------------- DesertPeace SOUTH AFRICA LEADING THE WAY TO END APARTHEID IN ISRAEL An international boycott helped end apartheid – now South Africans are leading world opposition to racism in Israel South Africa Champions the Academic Boycott of Israel We can easily be enticed to read reconciliation and fairness as meaning parity between justice and injustice. Having achieved our own freedom, we can fall into the trap of washing our hands of difficulties that others face. Yet we would be less than human if we did so. It behooves all South Africans, themselves erstwhile beneficiaries of generous international support, to stand up and be counted among those contributing actively to the cause of freedom and justice. – Nelson Mandela, December 4,1997 30-9-2010 Occupied Ramallah, — PACBI welcomes the decision [1] yesterday by the Senate of the University of Johannesburg (UJ) “not to continue a long-standing relationship with Ben Gurion University (BGU) in Israel in its present form” and to set conditions “for the relationship to continue.” The fact that the UJ Senate set an ultimatum [2] of six months for BGU to end its complicity with the occupation army and to end policies of racial discrimination against Palestinians is a truly significant departure from the business-as-usual attitude that had governed agreements between the two institutions until recently. If the Senate decision was a commendable first step in the right direction towards ending relations with Israeli institutions implicated in apartheid policies and support for the occupation, the real victory lies in the intensive mobilization and awareness raising processes by key activists and academics in South Africa that indicated beyond doubt the groundswell of support for Palestinian rights in the country and that played a key role in influencing the UJ Senate vote. A petition urging UJ to sever links with BGU remarkably gathered more than 250 signatures of academics from all academic institutions in South Africa, including some of the most prominent figures. The mainstream media attention, in South Africa and the West, to the facts about BGU’s complicity and the heavy moral burden placed on the shoulders of South African institutions, in particular, to end all forms of cooperation with any Israeli institution practicing apartheid has been unprecedented, with views favorable to justice and upholding international law gaining wide coverage. The UJ Senate has requested BGU to “respect UJ’s duty to take seriously allegations of behaviour on the part of BGU’s stakeholders that is incompatible with UJ’s values” and to provide more information about “BGU’s formal policies and informal practices.” Explaining this aspect of the ultimatum, Adam Habib, UJ’s Deputy Vice-Chancellor, told Aljazeera [3]: [W]e know that the BGU has collaborative projects with the Israeli army and we also know that the university implements state policy which invariably results in the discrimination of the Palestinian people. Crucially, there can be no activities between UJ and an Israeli educational institution that discriminated against the Palestinian people. Salim Vally, a senior researcher at the UJ Faculty of Education and spokesperson for the Palestinian Solidarity Committee (PSC), welcomed the decision saying: “While the PSC supports an unequivocal and unambiguous boycott of all Israeli state institutions, this is a move in the right direction and we are confident that it would lead to a more comprehensive boycott of Israel in the future.” [4] Regardless of all concerns about the details of the decision, a predicted outcome of a delicate balance of forces in a university that is still dealing with its own apartheid past, it cannot but be viewed as a triumph for the logic of academic boycott against Israel’s complicit academy, as consistently presented by PACBI and its partners worldwide, including in South Africa. It is, indeed, as a significant step in the direction of holding Israeli institutions accountable for their collusion in maintaining the state’s occupation, colonization and apartheid regime against the Palestinian people. As former South African cabinet minister and ANC leader Ronnie Kasrils wrote in the Guadian, “Israeli universities are not being targeted for boycott because of their ethnic or religious identity, but because of their complicity in the Israeli system of apartheid.” [5] PACBI warmly salutes all those who worked on and who endorsed the campaign to cut links with BGU. The precedent-setting petition, endorsed by the heads of four South African universities and prominent leaders such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Breyten Breytenbach, John Dugard, Antjie Krog, Barney Pityana, and Kader Asmal, does not mince words in calling for severing links with BGU and, it implies, with all Israeli institutions complicit in violations of international law [6]: While Palestinians are not able to access universities and schools, Israeli universities produce the research, technology, arguments and leaders for maintaining the occupation. Archbishop Tutu defended the call to sever links with complicit Israeli institutions saying [7], “It can never be business as usual. Israeli Universities are an intimate part of the Israeli regime, by active choice.” Reiterating his unwavering support for the Palestinian-led global campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel, he eloquently adds: Together with the peace-loving peoples of this Earth, I condemn any form of violence – but surely we must recognise that people caged in, starved and stripped of their essential material and political rights must resist their Pharaoh? Surely resistance also makes us human? Palestinians have chosen, like we did, the nonviolent tools of boycott, divestment and sanctions. While challenging BGU’s complicity, the UJ Senate decision does not fully heed the call by Archbishop Tutu or the 250 South African academics. It makes problematic assumptions and reaches, in part, conceptually and morally flawed conclusions. First, by conditioning the continuation of links with BGU, among other conditions, on including a Palestinian university in a three-way collaboration, the UJ Senate decision indirectly assumes “parity between justice and injustice,” which Mandela cautioned against, and balance between an institution that is in active partnership with the system of apartheid and occupation and another university that is suffering from this same system. This position is morally untenable, especially when espoused by an academic institution that is transforming itself from an apartheid university to one committed to equality and social justice. Furthermore, this attempt to cover up an essentially immoral relationship with BGU — that was forged during apartheid at the height of Israel’s partnership with the racist regime in South Africa — by suggesting a Palestinian fig leaf is in direct violation of the long standing position by the Palestinian Council for Higher Education which has consistently called on all Palestinian academic institutions not to cooperate in any form with Israeli universities until the end of the occupation. [8] It is also in conflict with the Palestinian Call for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel [9] and the Guidelines for the International Boycott of Israel,[10] both widely supported by Palestinian civil society, particularly by the Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees (PFUUPE), representing the academic and support staff in all Palestinian universities and colleges. Does enticing the victim of a criminal to “partner” with that criminal make the latter less so? Second, the statement that “UJ will not engage in any activities with BGU that have direct or indirect military implications” is quite troubling in its logic, if taken literally, not as interpreted by Prof. Habib above. It basically says that it is acceptable to do business with a criminal entity so long as the particular business done with it is above suspicion. Had this logic been applied to a South African apartheid institution at the height of the international academic boycott, it would have meant continuing business as usual with that racist institution so long as the specific project conducted with it was not directly or indirectly implicated in apartheid policies. The fact that the institution as a whole is guilty of complicity in apartheid would have been deemed irrelevant. BGU as an institution is guilty of complicity in the Israeli occupation and apartheid policies; nothing can make any “environmental” or “purely scientific” project it conducts with UJ morally acceptable until it comprehensively and verifiably ends this complicity. The culpability of the entire institution in violations of international law and human rights cannot be washed away by narrowing the focus or diverting attention only to details of the project with UJ. As Archbishop Tutu said: In the past few years, we have been watching with delight UJ’s transformation from the Rand Afrikaans University, with all its scientific achievements but also ugly ideological commitments. We look forward to an ongoing principled transformation. A post-apartheid South African university that is in the process of transforming itself to a truly democratic institution cannot possibly complete this necessary transformation while maintaining a partnership with an apartheid institution elsewhere. We sincerely hope that UJ will continue on the path it has taken, by completely severing its links with BGU and any other Israeli institutions complicit in violating international law and human rights. Source Also see THIS brilliant piece by Ronnie Kasrils   [1] Media release issued by the UJ Division of Marketing and Communication on 29 September 2010. [2] http://english.aljazeera.net/news/africa/2010/09/201092920223262366.html [3] Ibid. [4] Ibid. [5] http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/sep/29/south-africa-boycott-israel [6] www.UJpetition.com [7] http://www.timeslive.co.za/world/article675369.ece/Israeli-ties--a-chance-to-do-the-right-thing [8] The Palestinian Council for Higher Education, composed of heads of Palestinian universities and representatives from the community, has, since the 1990’s, adhered to its principled position of rejecting "technical and scientific cooperation between Palestinian and Israeli universities" until Israel ends its occupation; this position was reiterated in a statement of thanks to the UK academic union NATFHE for adopting the academic boycott of Israel in 2006: http://www.mohe.gov.ps/ENG/news/index.html#7  [9] http://pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=869 [10] http://pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=1108 Source --------------------------------------------------------------- al Jazeera SAfrica school rethinks Israel ties University of Johannesburg threatens to sever ties with Israeli Ben-Gurion University if certain conditions are not met. S African academics allege that Ben-Gurion university has collaborative projects with the Israeli army [REUTERS] 30-9-2010 The South African University of Johannesburg (UJ) senate has threatened to end its relationship with the Israeli university, Ben-Gurion (BGU), unless certain conditions are met. In a statement released on Wednesday, the South African university's highest academic body said Ben-Gurion University would have to work with Palestinian universities on research projects and stop its "direct and indirect support for the Israeli military and the occupation". "The conditions are that the memorandum of understanding governing the relationship between the two institutions be amended to include Palestinian universities chosen with the direct involvement of UJ," the university said in a statement. "Additionally, UJ will not engage in any activities with BGU that have direct or indirect military implications, this to be monitored by UJ's senate academic freedom committee. "Should these conditions not be met within six months, the memorandum of understanding will automatically lapse on April 1 2011," UJ said. Describing the afternoon senate meeting on Wednesday as mostly "tense", the UJ senate also called on BGU to "respect UJ's duty (and) to take seriously, allegations of behaviour on the part of BGU's stakeholders that is incompatible with UJ's values". 'Human dignity' Adam Habib, the UJ's vice-chancellor told Al Jazeera that the decision was based on two principles. "Firstly it was important to identify with an oppressed population and secondly, it was about creating an enabling environment for reconciliation and the achievement of human dignity." Habib said his university will be engaging Palestinian academic institutions in a bid to solicit advice on mapping a way forward, and that the current memorandum of understanding (MOU) between UJ and Ben-Gurion would have to broaden. "For instance, we know that the BGU has collaborative projects with the Israeli army and we also know that the university implements state policy, which invariably results in the discrimination of the Palestinian people," Habib said. "Crucially, there can be no activities between UJ and an Israeli educational institution that discriminated against the Palestinian people." Habib said that while the decision still had to be ratified by the university council, these changes would have to happen over the next six months, or the existing MOU would collapse. 'Unprecedented momentum' Salim Vally, a senior researcher at the Faculty of Education and spokesman for the Palestinian Solidarity Committee (PSC), told Al Jazeera that the move to sever academic ties with BGU "has created an unprecedented momentum and has galvanised academics towards fighting for social justice". "While the PSC supports an unequivocal and unambiguous boycott of all Israeli state institutions, this is a move in the right direction and we are confident that it would lead to a more comprehensive boycott of Israel in the future. "We know that they have a relationship with the military, making them complicit in the acts of the army, and in the next six months we will prove that the relationship with BGU should be severed completely," Vally said. Relations between Ben-Gurion University and the University of Johannesburg, formerly the Rand Afrikaans University, a formerly all-white university under South Africa's apartheid system, began in 1987. The University of Johannesburg, created in 2005, took over various campuses including Rand Afrikaans University and a university in the black township of Soweto as part of efforts to ensure higher education was transformed with the rest of South Africa after the end of apartheid. The current partnership with Ben Gurion dates back to August 2009 when the universities signed an academic cooperation and staff exchange agreement, concerning water purification and micro-algal biotechnology research. Academic dissonance The re-established relationship drew sharp criticism from the university community and catalysed the formation of a petition that has drawn some of the biggest academics, authors and social activists in South Africa. Desmond Tutu and around 250 other prominent South African academics have supported ending UJ's links with the Israeli institution. "Israeli universities are an intimate part of the Israeli regime, by active choice,'' Tutu wrote in an essay that appeared in a South African newspaper on Sunday. "While Palestinians are not able to access universities and schools, Israeli universities produce the research, technology, arguments and leaders for maintaining the occupation.'' Academic boycotts of Israeli universities have been inspired by boycotts of South African institutions during apartheid. A 2003 proposal for British universities to sever all ties with Israeli academic institutions was defeated. Two years later Britain's Association of University Teachers voted to boycott Israel's Haifa and Bar Ilan universities. That decision was overturned only a month later under fierce international pressure. US professors and students also have called for academic and cultural boycotts of Israel. The moves have prompted sharp criticism. Harvard University law professor Alan Dershowitz once threatened legal action that would "devastate and bankrupt'' anyone who boycotts Israeli universities. The New York-based Anti-Defamation League described the British moves as anti-Semitic (italic H.), arguing Israel was being singled out while human rights violators such as Iran, Sudan, Venezuela and Zimbabwe were ignored. (Well, than they are in good company with Norman Finkelstein,  Ilan Pappe, president Carter and more.  H.) Source --------------------------------------------------------------- Youth Against Normalization The campus campaign to divest from Israel, its Jewish student supporters and where it's going 29-9-2010 Students for Justice in Palestine had declared victory at Hampshire College. It was Feb. 12, 2009, and the Hampshire Board of Trustees had just voted to divest from the State Street Fund, an investment firm with holdings in Israel and the West Bank. It was, SJP thought, the first time that any school in the country had divested from Israel. Soon afterwards, however, the board of trustees issued a statement claiming that the school had not divested because of the company’s connections to the Israeli occupation. In fact, the board stated, the decision “expressly did not pertain to a political movement or single out businesses active in a specific region or country.” This did not matter to the SJP. The group—a national organization—called for a renewed push nationwide for what they call BDS, or boycott, divestment and sanctions targeting the Israeli occupation of the West Bank for alleged human rights violations. This was not the first time that activists at the 1,500-student liberal arts college in western Massachusetts had advocated for such a boycott. Hampshire was the first school in the country, in 1977, to divest from Apartheid-era South Africa—sparking a national wave of similar resolutions. Notwithstanding the statement of the board of trustees, BDS supporters hoped for the same result this time. Source --------------------------------------------------------------- Ma'an SA university must reconsider Israel ties - Haidar Eid 28-9-2010 As a graduate of the University of Johannesburg and a resident of Gaza, I find it distressing that the university has signed an agreement with Israel's Ben Gurion University despite the policy of ethnic cleansing and the latest war crimes committed against the people of Gaza by the nation's government. Israeli academic institutions are known to be complicit in Israel's policy of colonization and apartheid. As such, an agreement with an academic institution goes against the words of Nelson Mandela, who said in 1997: “It behoves all South Africans, themselves erstwhile beneficiaries of generous international support, to stand up and be counted among those contributing actively to the cause of freedom and justice … we know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.” Every day, millions of Palestinians are denied the full right to education in the occupied Palestinian territories and in the refugee camps of the diaspora. Education is denied because of Israeli checkpoints, the siege of Gaza and the apartheid-like discrimination faced by Palestinian students in Israel. Thousands of Palestinian students and lecturers are in Israeli dungeons often without trial or sentenced by military courts. All credible international human rights and humanitarian organizations have detailed how the Israeli military deliberately targets Palestinian students and schools including UN schools. The recent Goldstone report corroborates these facts. Palestinians stood with South Africans during the struggle against South African apartheid. We ask you to join us in our struggle against Israeli apartheid. Almost all Palestinian academics and a small but significant number of Israeli academics understand why Israeli institutions must be boycotted in the face of an intransigent, racist and militarized Israeli regime. It is unconscionable that UJ becomes complicit in Palestinian oppression. I have no doubt that the vast majority of the UJ community based on my experience there, believe in the values of social justice and if they were aware of the appalling atrocities I have witnessed, would not hesitate to support the petition opposing links with Israeli institutions. Palestinians are an oppressed people without a state. We increasingly rely on international law and solidarity for our very survival. Israel with the fourth largest army in the world has violated international law and numerous global conventions. Israel’s latest barbarity is the illegal use of white phosphorus against civilians killing 1,400 people including hundreds of children. International jurists, including South Africans such as John Dugard consider Israel to have committed war crimes. In a comprehensive and meticulous report, senior researchers from South Africa’s own Human Sciences Research Council consider Israel to be an apartheid state. The decision of UJ's management executive committee must be reversed. South Africans, amidst all people, must not be on the "wrong side of history." Professor Haidar Eid The author is an independent political commentator and professor in the Department of English Literature at Al-Aqsa University in Gaza. Source --------------------------------------------------------------- Sabah Desmond Tutu: We Must Boycott and Isolate Israeli Universities The University of Johannesburg's Senate will next week meet to decide whether to end its relationship with an Israeli institution, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, on the grounds of that university's active support for and involvement in the Israeli military. Archbishop Desmond Tutu supports the move. He explains why. Archbishop Desmond Tutu (Photo: Rbyn Beck  AFP) 26-9-2010 "The temptation in our situation is to speak in muffled tones about an issue such as the right of the people of Palestine to a state of their own.     We can easily be enticed to read reconciliation and fairness as meaning parity between justice and injustice. Having achieved our own freedom, we can fall into the trap of washing our hands of difficulties that others face. Yet we would be less than human if we did so. It behoves all South Africans, themselves erstwhile beneficiaries of generous international support, to stand up and be counted among those contributing actively to the cause of freedom and justice." – Nelson Mandela, December 4 1997 Struggles for freedom and justices are fraught with huge moral dilemmas. How can we commit ourselves to virtue – before its political triumph – when such commitment may lead to ostracism from our political allies and even our closest partners and friends? Are we willing to speak out for justice when the moral choice that we make for an oppressed community may invite phone calls from the powerful or when possible research funding will be withdrawn from us? When we say "Never again!" do we mean "Never again!", or do we mean "Never again to us!"? Our responses to these questions are an indication of whether we are really interested in human rights and justice or whether our commitment is simply to secure a few deals for ourselves, our communities and our institutions – but in the process walking over our ideals even while we claim we are on our way to achieving them? The issue of a principled commitment to justice lies at the heart of responses to the suffering of the Palestinian people and it is the absence of such a commitment that enables many to turn a blind eye to it. Consider for a moment the numerous honorary doctorates that Nelson Mandela and I have received from universities across the globe. During the years of apartheid many of these same universities denied tenure to faculty who were "too political" because of their commitment to the struggle against apartheid. They refused to divest from South Africa because "it will hurt the blacks" (investing in apartheid South Africa was not seen as a political act; divesting was). Let this inconsistency please not be the case with support for the Palestinians in their struggle against occupation. I never tire of speaking about the very deep distress in my visits to the Holy Land; they remind me so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa. I have seen the humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks, suffering like we did when young white police officers prevented us from moving about. My heart aches. I say, "Why are our memories so short?" Have our Jewish sisters and brothers forgotten their own previous humiliation? Have they forgotten the collective punishment, the home demolitions, in their own history so soon? Have they turned their backs on their profound and noble religious traditions? Have they forgotten that God cares deeply about all the downtrodden? Together with the peace-loving peoples of this Earth, I condemn any form of violence – but surely we must recognise that people caged in, starved and stripped of their essential material and political rights must resist their Pharaoh? Surely resistance also makes us human? Palestinians have chosen, like we did, the nonviolent tools of boycott, divestment and sanctions. South African universities with their own long and complex histories of both support for apartheid and resistance to it should know something about the value of this nonviolent option. The University of Johannesburg has a chance to do the right thing, at a time when it is unsexy. I have time and time again said that we do not want to hurt the Jewish people gratuitously and, despite our deep responsibility to honour the memory of the Holocaust and to ensure it never happens again (to anyone), this must not allow us to turn a blind eye to the suffering of Palestinians today. I support the petition by some of the most prominent South African academics who call on the University of Johannesburg to terminate its agreement with Ben-Gurion University in Israel (BGU). These petitioners note that: "All scholarly work takes place within larger social contexts – particularly in institutions committed to social transformation. South African institutions are under an obligation to revisit relationships forged during the apartheid era with other institutions that turned a blind eye to racial oppression in the name of 'purely scholarly' or 'scientific work'." It can never be business as usual. Israeli Universities are an intimate part of the Israeli regime, by active choice. While Palestinians are not able to access universities and schools, Israeli universities produce the research, technology, arguments and leaders for maintaining the occupation. BGU is no exception. By maintaining links to both the Israeli defence forces and the arms industry, BGU structurally supports and facilitates the Israeli occupation. For example, BGU offers a fast-tracked programme of training to Israeli Air Force pilots. In the past few years, we have been watching with delight UJ's transformation from the Rand Afrikaans University, with all its scientific achievements but also ugly ideological commitments. We look forward to an ongoing principled transformation. We don't want UJ to wait until others' victories have been achieved before offering honorary doctorates to the Palestinian Mandelas or Tutus in 20 years' time. (Times Live – South Africa) Source --------------------------------------------------------------- Sabah Eight American Universities Say Yes to Apartheid By Lawrence Davidson 26-9-2010 A letter from Gaza appeared on the Web dated September 24, 2010. It was from a group of Gaza academics and students and sought to publicize the fact that eight American universities have recently signed agreements with various Israeli universities to offer U.S. students free semester long programs in Israel. Among the American universities participating in this venture are Harvard, Columbia and Michigan. The Gaza academics and students expressed shock at this turn of events. And so they might given the fact that they are sitting in an outdoor prison of Israeli making and have seen their educational institutions both starved of resources by an Israeli blockade and literally bombed to rubble by Israeli warplanes. The situation in Gaza is but the worst of a bad situation for all Palestinians, including those in the West Bank and Israel proper. When it comes to education in all of these locales apartheid policies are in place to interfere with Palestinian students and teachers and minimize the educational experience. Actually, this is part of an unspoken strategy of cultural genocide. Such policies are directly or indirectly supported by the Israeli academic institutions to which the participating American universities now want to send their students. How can these U.S. universities do this? This is certainly a legitimate question in an age when discrimination and racism are, supposedly, no longer socially or politically acceptable. After all Harvard, Columbia, Michigan, etc. are institutions of higher learning housed in a country that prides itself on broad civil rights laws and all of them adhere to social equity rules. Yet here they are climbing into academic bed, so to speak, with a state that practices apartheid against its non-Jewish minority and is attempting to ethnically cleanse the indigenous population of the Occupied Territories. Well, there are any number of scenarios that might lead them to this sort of hellish arrangement and here I offer only one possibility. It assumes an "Adolf Eichmann context." 1. The realm of the bureaucrat The people in control of American universities (and perhaps all universities) are mostly bureaucrats. Some of them are trained in the specialty field of higher education administration, some are professors who have crossed over to an administrative career line, and some are just folks hired from the general population pool to run sub-departments such as public relations and accounting. They are all trained to pay lip service to various sorts of mission statements and assessment markers, however their lives are really very insular and their goals narrow and short term. For instance, even at the highest level, say the office of the university president, there are usually but a few major goals, and the main one in this case is to raise money. Somewhere in the organizational chart is an office of overseas programs (or some similar title). It is usually a small operation with a director and a secretary. Their job is to set up exchange programs. What they are looking for are programs at overseas schools that are roughly similar in quality to the courses their own institution offers. That way the credits can be legitimately transferred back home and stand in for some of their student's degree requirements. The people who are arranging these exchanges usually know little or nothing of the social or political situation in the overseas institution's country. And, they are not likely to educate themselves on these subjects beyond some assurance that the place is relatively safe for the students that will be participating in the exchange. It may be hard for those of us who are so focused on Israeli apartheid to accept this, but for most of the folks in these little offices, Israel has about the same cachet as the Czech Republic or maybe Ireland. There is a lot of ignorance at his level. 2. What else is going on? Of course, that is not the end of the story. There are other folks out there, most of whom are indirectly associated with the university in question. These people know that there is a war going on against apartheid Israel, and they are not on our side. They want to counter the increasingly effective process of "chipping away at Israel's legitimacy." They also have deep pockets and lots of influence. These folks may be big donors to these universities and some of them may well sit on the institution's board of governors/regents. When the president or his representative goes out to raise money these donors have what appears to be innocuous conditions for their gifts. So they say to president x or y, "sure we will give you half a million dollars for that new sports complex you so covet, but in return we want you to create this exchange program with Hebrew and Haifa U." The president thinks that this is little enough to ask for such a generous gift, and his friend on the board of governors/regents seconds the motion. A telephone call is made to the director of overseas programs who is given a contact name and number at the Israeli embassy to get things rolling. And that is how it happens. 3. What comes next? Soon enough this arrangement becomes public. You have to figure if they know about it in Gaza, they know about in Cambridge, Ann Arbor and upper Manhattan. Given the times there will probably be some sort of public protest, but the ensuing struggle will not be easy for the following reasons: a. The university position will almost certainly be that to shun Israel is a violation of academic freedom, free inquiry, and the essential non-political status of learning. This sort of argument is age old. The U.S. universities were making it when they were asked to divest from apartheid South Africa and stop research funded by the "Defense" Department during the Vietnam war. One can never lay this argument to rest in any final way because it represents a cherished, if somewhat unreal, ideal. So you point out for the one thousandth time that there is an inherent contradiction when you take this position relative to Israeli universities just because they do not promote these academic ideals. They are destroyers of free thought and free inquiry as far as Palestinian rights (and particularly the right of education) are concerned. And so if the ideal of a non-political status for learning exists anywhere in the real world, it ain't in Israel. The whole Zionist academic setup has been criticized by international as well as Israeli human rights organizations for these anti-educational activities. And finally, you try to tell the university decision makers that there is precedent for universities taking a stand against apartheid practices. At this point you notice that they have, figuratively, clicked on their I-pods and are no longer listening. b. Next you go to the professors of the institution and try to explain the same thing. That is when you come to the stomach wrenching realization that most of them do not care. Most academics are as specialized as the bureaucrats, and live their lives in just as insular a world. They know a lot about their sub-field and very little beyond it. They are dedicated to their families and their local communities and are, on the whole, decent people, but they are not interested, nor are they going to hit the street, for oppressed people far away. This is particularly true when their local news sources have been systematically libeling those people for sixty plus years. They too will hide behind the idea of academic freedom. It should be noted that this is not quite the same thing as Julien Benda's "treason of the intellectuals." There is very little spouting of national chauvinism or the racism of Islamophobia (except for the Zionists professors among them). No, it is just co-option into the system. It is just natural localism-I really just want to live my life and work in my lab or library cubicle, etc. I am reluctant to get too annoyed at my fellow academics for this attitude, because theirs is the immemorial stance of all ordinary folks everywhere. c. So that leaves the students, and here there is a much better chance to gather a crowd and take a stand. There is always a socially conscious group among the youth who are willing to fight for a good cause and risk defying the powers that be. This is because they have yet to become ensconced in the system, bogged down with career, family, mortgage and the like. In other words, some of them have not yet shrunk into an insular world of very local interests and goals. And those are the people who will protest, if anyone will, at the ivy towers of Harvard, Columbia, Michigan and the five other schools which have willed their own corruption. 4. What are the odds of victory? Whether anyone will listen to the protesters depends on how many there are, how loud they protest and how far they are willing to go with it. Are they willing to go into the dormitories and spread the word? Are they willing to picket not only the ordinary centers of power on campus, but also the admissions office when prospective students come to visit, or demonstrate on home-coming day and at all the football games? Are they willing to hunt for donors who might say they will not give if their institution partners with Israel? Are they willing to occupy the president's office and thereby risk arrest? Are they willing to keep all of this up for weeks on end? It might take all of these sorts of activities to even have a chance at winning this contest. And even so the odds are not good. Essentially, you have to create such a cost to the institution in trouble and bad publicity that it outweighs that donor's half a million dollars and/or the anger of the fellow on the board/regents. If in the end you do not win, you have to understand that it is not wholly a defeat. After all, you have certainly raised consciousness. In other words, you have set the stage for the next battle and made that one a little easier to win. So you have to have the energy to fight again and again. It is a scenario wherein youth is a definite plus. There is another way in which the mounting a serious protest at any of these schools must constitute a victory. And that is the fact that such a protest will demonstrate to the academics and students in Gaza and the rest of Palestine that the world has not abandoned them, that they have allies and their struggle is now a worldwide one. In the short run, that might be the most important victory of all. In Conclusion Here is quote from the American academic Richard Hofstadter, "A university's essential character is that of being a center of free inquiry and criticism-a thing not to be sacrificed for anything else." If this so (and all the leaders of the institutions involved in these exchanges will undoubtedly agree) then why are these eight universities sending their students off to Israeli schools that cooperate with state policies that deny just these sacrosanct pursuits to persecuted Palestinians? Why are they sending their students to a country that seeks to silence, at all levels of society, any free inquiry and criticism of its racist and oppressive national ideology? Why are they cooperating with institutions that have state dictated policies (for instance, admissions policies) that would be illegal in the United States? Do they condone such behaviors? If they go through with these exchange programs the answer is, for all intents and purposes, yes, they do. Essentially, they now lend themselves to the destruction of the very educational virtues they claim to cherish. * Lawrence Davidson is professor of history at West Chester University. He is the author of numerous books, including Islamic Fundamentalism and America's Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood. Source --------------------------------------------------------------- Mail and Guardian online New pressure on UJ to sever Israel ties By David Macfarlane 24-9-2010 Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Unisa vice-chancellor Barney Pityana and author Breyten Breytenbach have added their voices to calls for the University of Johannesburg to sever academic ties with Israel's Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. The cooperation between the two universities dates from the 1980s, when the local partner was called Rand Afrikaans University. The agreement now under fire involves scientific interaction and was signed in August last year, renewing a controversial apartheid-era collaboration, its critics say. On Wednesday next week UJ's senate will hear recommendations on the future of the university's ties with Ben-Gurion. The Mail & Guardian reported in May that the senate had debated the matter then and had asked a senate subcommittee headed by deputy vice-chancellor Adam Habib to make recommendations within three months. "We have concluded our deliberations and arrived at recommendations," Habib told the M&G. "It has taken a long time because the matter is highly contested. And I can’t say what our senate will decide." Tutu, Pityana and Breytenbach are recent signatories to an online petition launched after the May senate meeting. It calls for "the suspension of UJ’s agreement with Ben-Gurion" and this week had notched up nearly 200 signatories. Law professor John Dugard, theologian Allan Boesak, ANC stalwart Kader Asmal, struggle veteran and language-rights expert Neville Alexander, poet Antjie Krog, former Freedom of Expression Institute director Jane Duncan and Wits University sociologist Ran Greenstein are among other recent additions to the petition. Leading the fight to retain ties with Ben-Gurion is the South African Associates of Ben-Gurion University, whose chairperson, Herby Rosenberg, told the M&G he had thought the senate meeting in question would be held late in October and he would "need to make inquiries" before commenting. His organisation's president, Bertie Lubner, was on a plane and unavailable, he said. The associates arranged that local advocate David Unter-halter and Ben-Gurion professor Ilan Troen argue in the May senate meeting for retaining ties with UJ, the M&G reported at the time. The petition's signatories come from a range of local universities and identify themselves as "the academic community of South Africa, a country with a history of brute racism on the one hand and both academic acquiescence and resistance to it on the other". "The Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories has had disastrous effects on access to education for Palestinians," the petition reads. "While Palestinians are not able to access universities and schools, Israeli universities produce the research, technology, arguments and leaders for maintainingthe occupation." By virtue of its ties with the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) and the arms industry, Ben-Gurion "structurally supports and facilitates the Israeli occupation", the petition says. One example of its "complicity is its agreement with the IDF to provide full university qualification to army pilots within a special [Ben-Gurion] programme," it says. The petition calls on UJ's senate to suspend the relationship with Ben-Gurion until, "as a minimum", Israel "adheres to international law and ... as did some South African universities during the struggle against South African apartheid, openly declares itself against the occupation and withdraws all privileges for the soldiers who enforce it". Source --------------------------------------------------------------- The US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI) 20-9-2010 Press Release: USACBI Announces Over 500 Academics Have Endorsed the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel Over 500 academics have endorsed USACBI!     “We have to be careful not to over-exaggerate on this, but we also have to be careful not to ignore it,” said Gerald Steinberg, a political science professor at Bar-Ilan University and co-founder of the International Advisory Board for Academic Freedom. “It is a festering wound and it needs to be countered, not ignored.”     “The danger is not these 15; the danger is if it (the USACBI) becomes 500,”     From the New York Jewish Daily, Wednesday, February 4, 2009 When originally founded in 2009, only a handful of academics called for the academic and cultural boycott of Israel. The call was dismissed as having little to no significance and was reflected in the statement from Gerald Steinberg. For Steinberg and others, the power of an academic and cultural boycott would be achieved with a critical mass of 500 endorsers. The USACBI is pleased to announce that we have reached that critical number. Endorsements by US academics and scholars recently crossed 500, and there are now 150 cultural workers who have also endorsed USACBI! This is a major victory for the growing academic and cultural boycott of Israel, and for the movement for justice and equality in Israel, as defenders of the status quo in Israel have repeatedly observed that the legitimacy of the state of Israel in the global court of public opinion is threatened by the boycott movement. There is a growing shift in the tide of public opinion in the U.S. which has only swelled in the wake of Israel’s massacre of international activists and relief workers on humanitarian aid flotilla’s off the coast of Gaza in international waters on May 31. More people are realizing the urgent need for the international civil society to challenge the siege of the 1.5 million people imprisoned by the U.S.-backed Israeli blockade of Gaza and the exceptional impunity of Israel. The presence of Palestinian Israeli MP Haneen Zoabi on board the ship also sheds light on the state of apartheid in historic Palestine, an issue that has long been suppressed but is increasingly drawing attention. The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) has called on people of conscience around the world to pressure Israel to comply with international law by joining the growing boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. As PACBI reports, ‘Alice Walker has reminded the world of the . . . boycott of a racist bus company in Montgomery, Alabama during the civil rights movement, calling for endorsement of BDS against Israel as a moral duty.’ USACBI was formed during the war on Gaza in early 2009 and our list of endorsers has grown steadily. USACBI is linked to the larger BDS movement that is expanding across the U.S. This past year has seen Hampshire College’s successful drive to divest from Israel spread to campuses across the U.S. On the cultural front, artists such as Elvis Costello, Gil Scott-Heron, and the Pixies, have cancelled shows in Israel as a sign of principled solidarity with the Palestinian people, similar to the cultural boycott of apartheid South Africa. Labor organizers and churches have also taken a moral stance by engaging in BDS campaigns. In Oakland, activists united with dock workers to prevent the unloading of Israeli Zim line ships in response to the flotilla massacre. USACBI calls on academics, students, and cultural workers (artists, filmmakers, writers, journalists, poets) to (1) endorse our call for academic and cultural boycott, if they have not done so already, by sending an email to uscom4acbi[at]gmail.com, and invite as many others as possible to do so (see our website for more information); and (2) join us in mobilizing with the expanding boycott and divestment movement in the US. There are several ways in which you could support the campaign! If you would like to get involved, please write to us at uscom4acbi[at]gmail.com. To see who is currently on our Organizing Collective or Advisory Board, check out our website. Source --------------------------------------------------------------- Mondoweiss Le Moyne students hear Finkelstein despite calls to cancel lecture by Ira Glunts 19-9-2010 A small group of faculty members convinced Le Moyne College officials to permit Norman Finkelstein to lecture at their school, despite an organized campaign to persuade Le Moyne to cancel the event. The week before Finkelstein was scheduled to appear, a number of local Rabbis, a high ranking member of the New York State Catholic hierarchy, and other prominent community members contacted the school to request that the event be called off. In a carefully written statement composed by a faculty committee and issued by the Provost, Linda LeMura, the school said, “[Finkelstein’s] appearance is not an endorsement of his work or views, but rather a recognition that a variety of perspectives, some difficult and controversial, need to be considered. Le Moyne is committed to freedom of speech, including points of view that are intellectually serious even if not generally accepted by all segments of the community.” An overflow audience of over 250 people attended the Finkelstein lecture, which began at 5 PM on September 16. Finkelstein gave a talk which focused on the 2008 Gaza War and the assault on the Mavi Marmara flotilla. The crowd appeared to be overwhelmingly sympathetic to Finkelstein’s point of view. He got two standing ovations during his talk and only one expression of disagreement during the Q and A segment. I met Norman Finkelstein a day after his Le Moyne appearance at an event in a private home where I was to introduce him. He seemed completely unaware and unbothered when I mentioned that his lecture had been in danger of a last-minute cancellation. He responded that “it was no big deal” and that he would never have even been invited a couple of years ago. Now, he says, he is getting more invitations to speak at colleges and to appear in the media. He credits this to a recent opening up of the debate over Israel/Palestine. Opening up or not, it is noteworthy that on September 28, Le Moyne will host a panel discussion in response to the Finkelstein lecture. A suggestion to have a response to Finkelstein as part of the event on September 16 was considered and then rejected. Apparently, Le Moyne feels that presenting Finkelstein without a consumer warning label would be irresponsible. It is true that Finkelstein is getting more invitations to speak at colleges and appear in the media. However, I doubt we will be seeing him on NBC or in the New York Times any time soon. It is also encouraging to learn of this group of courageous faculty who fought off some very powerful community voices in order to allow the Finkelstein lecture to be held. Source --------------------------------------------------------------- Mondoweiss Harvard students: Peretz invitation ‘lends legitimacy and respectability to views that can only be described as abhorrent and racist by Adam Horowitz 19-9-2010 The following letter was recently delivered to the organizers of the Social Studies 50th Anniversary Celebration: Dear Professor Tuck and Dr. Bernstein, We are writing on behalf of the Harvard Islamic Society, Harvard-Radcliffe RAZA, Society of Arab Students and Latinas Unidas. In a recent blog post for The New Republic Martin Peretz, wrote:     “But, frankly, Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims. And among those Muslims led by the Imaam Rauf there is hardly one who has raised a fuss about the routine and random bloodshed that defines their brotherhood. So, yes, I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.” He had the following to say about Mexicans in another TNR piece:     “Well, I am extremely pessimistic about Mexican-American relations, not because the U.S. had done anything specifically wrong to our southern neighbor but because a (now not quite so) wealthy country has as its abutter a Latin society with all of its characteristic deficiencies: congenital corruption, authoritarian government, anarchic politics, near-tropical work habits, stifling social mores, Catholic dogma with the usual unacknowledged compromises, an anarchic counter-culture and increasingly violent modes of conflict.” And the Washington Post reported the following remarks Mr. Peretz made about African Americans:     Citing statistics on out-of-wedlock births among blacks, Martin Peretz, editor in chief of The New Republic, said, “So many in the black population  are afflicted by cultural deficiencies.” Asked what he meant, Peretz responded, “I would guess that in the ghetto a lot of mothers don’t appreciate the importance of schooling.” Mfume challenged Peretz, saying, “You can’t really believe that. Every mother wants the best for their children.” Peretz agreed, then added, “But a mother who is on crack is in no position to help her children get through school.” Some in the audience of 2,600 young Jewish leaders hissed at Peretz’s remarks. We acknowledge Mr. Peretz’s right to hold and express these views, but we are disturbed that he is honored at Harvard University by being invited to speak at the Social Studies Anniversary Celebration on September 25. Such an invitation lends legitimacy and respectability to views that can only be described as abhorrent and racist in their implication that the rights guaranteed by the U.S. constitution should be withheld from certain citizens based on their religious affiliation. While the organizers of the Celebration cannot be held accountable for every statement made by its guests, we the undersigned take great exception to Harvard giving such ideas a platform, and we worry that in so doing the University, and the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies in particular, will be alienating a large segment of its student body. In light of these concerns, we respectfully ask that you reconsider having Mr. Peretz as one of the Celebration’s speakers, or at least that he be publicly challenged to defend views that are, in our opinion, indefensible. Sincerely, Abdelnasser Rashid, Harvard Islamic Society Maricruz Rodriguez, Harvard-Radcliffe RAZA Annissa Alusi, Harvard Society of Arab Students Beverly Pozuelos, Latinas Unidas Source --------------------------------------------------------------- Ha'aretz At Ben-Gurion University, student protests can lead to disciplinary action Student who organized demonstration for maintenance workers' rights at the campus was brought in for disciplinary hearing, and on Wednesday, several students who protested against Israel's Gaza flotilla raid will be summoned. By Or Kashti 15-9-2010 Ben-Gurion University of the Negev this week started subjecting students involved in campus protests to disciplinary action, in contravention of its own regulations. On Tuesday, a student who organized a demonstration for maintenance workers' rights at the Be'er Sheva campus was brought in for a disciplinary hearing, and on Wednesday, several students who protested against Israel's Gaza flotilla raid will be summoned as well. In all, seven students will be disciplined, with penalties as severe as suspension from classes. Students and faculty criticized the measures, with several law professors volunteering to represent the summoned students. Dr. Dani Filc, head of the Politics and Government Department at BGU, said students shouldn't be turned into "lawbreakers," adding, "We should be glad to have students like these." Filc will represent the students called in on Wednesday. Sources at the student unions at Tel Aviv University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem said they couldn't remember any instances of students at their institutions being disciplined for similar matters. "A student who intends to demonstrate is treated as a lawbreaker even before he actually demonstrates ... The result is real damage to freedom of expression," a source said. Tuesday saw the disciplinary hearing of Tal Baharav, a student in the Education and Politics and Government departments who led the maintenance workers' fight. That campaign began six months ago, with a rally for which Baharav had received university authorization. But after he took the campaign further by writing a letter of protest to university president Rivka Carmi, he was accused of "violating the terms set for holding the demonstration." Still, Baharav received a relatively light sentence: a warning against engaging in similar activity in the future. Baharav said after his hearing on Tuesday, "This summons carried a clear message, that students who want to be socially active on campus are under threat, as are their studies." Boaz Toporovsky, head of the National Union of Israeli Students, has also thrown his weight behind Baharav. Earlier this week he wrote to Carmi describing the Ben-Gurion student as "an activist dedicated to the rights of contract workers. I ask you to reconsider Baharav's behavior in light of all the work he has done for social justice and equality." A statement from the university read: "Regulations for social and political activity at the university hold that anyone violating them will be called in for a disciplinary hearing, or will be charged in court, depending on the circumstances." The university added that the students summoned for disciplining "are charged with violating regulations, irrespective of political orientation." Source --------------------------------------------------------------- Electronic Intifada Academic research collaboration emboldens Israeli apartheid By Diane Shammas Israeli universities play no small role in the state's military strategy. (Keren Manor/ActiveStills) 14-9-2010 In July, Donna Shalala, the president of the University of Miami and former United States Secretary of Health and Human Services during the Clinton administration, joined a 13-member delegation of American university presidents to Israel. The delegation's main objective was to discuss opportunities for academic collaboration with Israeli universities and reciprocal exchange programs for student and faculty. The majority of these Israeli universities, if not all, have been implicated in war crimes and other human rights violations against Palestinian and Lebanese civilians ("Academic boycott against Israel? Umberto Eco misses the point," Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, 10 July 2010). Prior to the delegates' arrival in Israel, they drafted and sent individual letters to their executive counterparts at the Israeli universities, stating that they "clearly denounce[d] the boycott of Israeli academics" ("Shalala among delegation of university presidents to visit Israel," University of Miami news release, 2 July 2010). The karmic twist to Shalala's visit to Israel was that in spite of her obsequious endorsement of the anti-boycott stance, she was not spared from a three-hour, humiliating interrogation and detainment upon her departure from the Ben Gurion Airport. Israel's Ynet News reported that she was detained because of her Arabic surname ("American VIP humiliated at airport," 6 August 2010). When later interviewed by the Miami Herald, Shalala dismissed the inconvenience of her detention as purely security protocol to ensure traveler safety. Leaving aside all speculations as to why Shalala, an Arab-American, did not speak out against the indignity of her treatment at the airport, the larger conversation should be the strategic marketing and funding of research partnerships between American and Israeli universities. Research and development collaboration between higher education institutions amount to billions of dollars annually. In 2008, the federal government alone funded $31 billion for academic research and development expenditures of which $1.6 billion were passed through to other university sub-recipients, domestic and foreign (National Science Foundation). Apart from the steady growth of research collaborations with "Asian 8" countries, such as South Korea and Taiwan, the research partnerships between American and Israel universities have been consistently strong and significant. Large corporate donors, like Coca-Cola Company and Quaker Oats, a division of Pepsi-Cola, subsidize many of these collaborative research projects between US and Israeli universities, due principally to their robust ties with the American-Israel Chamber of Commerce ("American Israeli Chamber of Commerce promotes academic and research exchanges between University of Minnesota and Israeli educational and research institutions," American-Israel Chamber of Commerce press release, 10 August 1998). While the actual number of US-Israeli research partnerships is not readily available, a proxy indicator is the annual percentage of collaborative science and engineering articles between the two countries. Israel has the third-highest percentage of co-authored articles, 52 percent, with American researchers, after South Korea (54 percent) and Taiwan (53 percent). It is important to point out here if the percentage of co-authorship for Israel appears inflated, it is because their co-authorship output with the US is greater than their considerably smaller educational infrastructure. Therefore, the National Science Foundation has corrected for the infrastructural disparities by placing Israel's rate of co-authorship with US at 1.21, qualitatively speaking, "higher than expected," along with similar rankings for South Korea and Taiwan. Shalala's delegation specifically expressed an interest in collaborating with Israeli universities on the application of technological research to the manufacturing of marketable products. Israel aggressively courts research partnerships with American universities by hosting academic delegations. For example, Project Interchange, an educational organization of the American Jewish Committee, sponsored Shalala's delegation to participate in their week-long program. A brief portrait of Project Interchange will illustrate that these academic delegations are political-educational junkets, which subliminally promote a Zionist ideology along with coordinating potential partnerships with Israeli universities. Project Interchange regularly sponsors academic delegations and conducts programs in a seminar format. According to their website, Project Interchange customizes the theme of the seminar to each group's interest, but all seminars are framed within the broader discourse of Israeli culture, society and politics -- with a predominant focus on Israeli foreign policy. Project Interchange identifies itself as "non-partisan," "apolitical" and [[an]] "educational organization." If one carefully deconstructs the language that Project Interchange uses on its website to describe its seminars -- "challenging and promoting dialogue" and "offering multiple perspectives on complex issues" -- it feigns a non-partisan and apolitical agenda by reducing the Palestinian struggle against occupation and dispossession to mere differences of opinion among ostensibly rival equals -- Palestinians and Israelis. The message conveyed, therefore, is deceptive, because it completely denies the existence of the relationship between the colonizer -- Israel -- and the colonized, the indigenous population. The subordinate reference to "also meeting with Israeli Arabs and Palestinians" blatantly exposes Israel's relegation of the indigenous population to second class citizens. Another component of Project Interchange's seminar program is coordinated site visits to the Israeli and Arab/Palestinian communities. In July, The Chronicle of Higher Education published an account of one site visit by a member of Shalala's delegation, a president from an elite East coast university, who lauds the multi-cultural efforts of the Jerusalem International YMCA Peace pre-school: "'Boker tov!' 'Sabaah al-khayr!' 'Good morning!' The excited voices of the kindergarten students and their tri-lingual teachers make us all smile as our group of American academic leaders visit the International Jerusalem YMCA peace pre-school ... In the preschool, which serves an equal number of Arab (Christians and Muslims) and Jewish students, young people don't seem to know they're from different backgrounds and they are supposed to hate each other but they are friends" ("What we can learn from Children," 16 July 2010). Even though the delegate acknowledges the preschool's diversity, his latter remark about the surprising amity among Arab and Jewish children and declaration that "they do not seem to know that they're from different backgrounds" demonstrates his racial and religious blindness. He blissfully dismisses this purported hatred between Jews and Palestinian Arabs as if it originates from a historical rivalry on equal footing rather than a deep-rooted power imbalance between occupier and occupied. Moreover, what is astonishingly naive about his comment is that, as a university president, he is (or should be) cognizant of the racial tensions among minority student populations, and yet, he seems to be taken in by the artificial democratic setting of the Israeli preschool, which is precisely the falsely egalitarian image of Israel that Project Interchange is endeavoring to promote by their site visits. In the final analysis, Project Interchange's objective is to transform a research collaboration initiative into a commodified, politicized and hegemonic project that is an extension of the Israeli state apparatus. To this end, American universities' collaboration with Israel's educational institutions is complicit in the occupation. The portrait of Project Interchange lends insight into how a United States-Israeli global network intercedes on behalf of US academic leaders to establish strategic research partnerships with Israeli universities. Because Israeli universities mirror the racist institutional structure of the Israeli government and the US enables the Israeli occupation, it is highly unlikely in the present political environment that any research collaboration between American and Israeli universities would comply with the guidelines outlined by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI). In recent months, global boycott, divestment and sanctions have made enormous strides and have reported several victories in the areas of economic and cultural boycotts. To that end, American and Israeli university partnerships merit closer scrutiny in particular, as well as the intermediary organizations and the large corporate and private donors and binational foundations that annually fund billions of dollars to them (e.g., Binational Industrial Research and Development Foundation (BIRD), Binational Science Foundation (BSF) and Binational Agricultural Research and Development Fund (BARD)). Diane Shammas is of Lebanese/Arab American heritage, and holds a Ph.D in International and Urban Education and Policy, with a specialization in Arab American Studies. She currently teaches a course on social construction of race and citizenship. She recently lived in Gaza City for three months, taught at Al Azhar University (Gaza), and passed through the West Bank on her return to the United States. Source Archive: 5 july - 8 sept 2010 Archive: 24 march - 27-6-2010 Archive: 10 feb 2009 - 4 may 2009 Archive: 11 jan 2010 - 19-3-2010 Archive: 4 may 2009 - 11 jan 2010

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	Reactie van Roos De Fraine	datum: 2009-04-02 01:26:57
Een van de studenten aan de univeriteit van Manchester studeerde was Tom Hurndall: On 11 April 2003, Tom Hurndall, a peace activist, was shot in the head by an Israeli soldier as he tried to pull Palestinian children away from Israeli gunfire. He then passed away on the 13th of January 2004. Een reden te meer om gevoelig te zijn voor de Palestijnse kwestie.

	Reactie van Roos De Fraine	datum: 2009-04-02 01:26:32
Een van de studenten aan de univeriteit van Manchester studeerde was Tom Hurndall: On 11 April 2003, Tom Hurndall, a peace activist, was shot in the head by an Israeli soldier as he tried to pull Palestinian children away from Israeli gunfire. He then passed away on the 13th of January 2004. Een reden te meer om gevoelig te zijn voor de Palestijnse kwestie.