Report on divestiture conference

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

(This is posted in its entirety, since it is not available on-line.)

Chronicle of Higher Education, October 25, 2002

Vested Interests
A student movement critical of Israel gains steam and attracts scorn

By RICHARD MORGAN

Ann Arbor, Mich.
Anyone who walks into the Hillel building at the University of Michigan
here is greeted by three questions, presented in Hebrew and English on
golden plaques.

The first of the questions, from the Hebrew sage after whom the
Jewish-student organization is named, is "If I am not for myself, who will
be for me?" It is followed by "If I am only for myself, who am I?"

In the space of a weekend this month on the Michigan campus -- amid the
rah-rah routine of keg parties, parents' weekend, and a football game
against Pennsylvania State University -- hundreds of students from around
the country seemed to be asking themselves those very questions. The
students met to debate a growing pro-Palestinian movement. Riling all
sides, the movement has stirred debate about academic freedom, religious
tolerance, and the bleeding edge of student activism.

The goal of the gathering, the Second National Conference on the
Palestinian Solidarity Movement, was to plan strategy for a controversial
drive to urge American colleges to sell stocks they hold in companies that
do business in Israel, as a means of protesting Israel's occupation of the
West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Pro-Israel student groups staged
counterprotests before, during, and after the conference, calling the event
anti-Semitic.

Comparing their goals to those of college students two decades ago who
successfully urged colleges to sell investments with ties to apartheid
South Africa, students from more than 70 colleges spent two days listening
to academics and Arab-American leaders make the case for divestment as a
response to what they described as Israel's extensive human-rights
violations. They also brainstormed about how to define divestment and how
to gain support from student newspapers, minority-student organizations,
faculty members, and unions that represent campus workers.

Amenah I. Ibrahim, a Michigan graduate student and an organizer of the
divestment conference, said that the movement is growing exponentially.
"Even though it's still mostly Muslim and Arab students here, they're
starting to organize solely for this one particular issue," said Ms.
Ibrahim, who attended the first divestment conference this year at the
University of California at Berkeley. "That's a huge thing. These aren't
subcommittees anymore. These are whole student organizations."

But so far the movement has done little to sway university officials,
especially at Michigan. No college has announced plans to divest from
Israel. And Mary Sue Coleman, the university's president, stated flatly
that Michigan would not divest from companies doing business with Israel.
Laurence Deitch, a University of Michigan regent, said that the university,
in allowing the conference to take place, was not endorsing it. He said
that Michigan's commitment to academic freedom required it to permit the
conference, "no matter how objectionable."

The conference drew far more opponents than participants. On the Thursday
before the conference began, more than 1,000 students from Michigan,
Eastern Michigan University, and other colleges and schools in the Detroit
area rallied here in support of Israel and opposition to the divestment
movement. Most of the students wore shirts that read, "Wherever we stand,
we stand with Israel."

Although only a handful of students protested at the conference's
beginning, by the end of the event, pro-Israel rallies grew in size because
scores of students arrived from New York City. More than 200 pro-Israel
students held a series of rallies as they moved through the campus.

Police presence also grew more visible as the conference progressed,
although interaction between the students from both sides of the divestment
issue was minimal, and largely confined to scattershot shouting matches
without physical violence.

Flawed Democracies

A confrontational tone was set early on in the conference's proceedings.

"Israelis have always wanted Palestinians to be the new niggers of the
Middle East, a cheap labor force with a few elites," said Mahdi Bray,
director of the Muslim American Society's Freedom Foundation. Mr. Bray
spoke at a meeting that sought to point out similarities between conditions
in Israel and those of apartheid South Africa. Although he acknowledged
Israel is a democracy, he said that democracies can be guilty of
human-rights abuses, too, noting that the United States once sanctioned the
label of black people as three-fifths human during the era of slavery.

When asked at a news conference why Israel was being singled out in the
divestment campaign -- as opposed to countries such as China, Iraq, and
Saudi Arabia that violate human rights -- Eric L. Reichenberger, who is a
graduate student at Michigan and a spokesman for Students Allied for
Freedom and Equality, the chief student group behind the conference, said
that Israel is "the prime example of human-rights violators in the world."

A philosophy professor from Ohio State University, Joseph Levine, added
that the criticism implied in the question is baseless. "If you say you
can't target one cause because there are all these others, it's just a
recipe for passivity," he said, adding that it's "not an embarrassment" for
Jews to target Israel. Mr. Levine, who is Jewish, elaborated: "Look, our
aim is to end the occupation. We targeted whatever company will help us
achieve that. Don't tell me that I can't defend Palestine because of China.
That's absurd."

Student leaders at the conference said that the University of Michigan has
$151-million directly invested in Israel, or in companies that do business
in Israel. But they were unable to specify where or how that money is
spent. Many of the examples they cited -- Boeing, Caterpillar, Intel, and
Starbucks among them -- are multinational companies whose operations in
Israel represent a small fraction of their overall budgets.

In response, Michigan officials said they know of only $500,000 the
university invests in two companies -- a generic drug manufacturer and a
medical-technologies company -- that are directly based in Israel.
University officials also noted that, like most colleges, Michigan's
$3.4-billion endowment is handled by private professional portfolio
managers. Decisions about investment are not usually made by university
employees.

Much of the discussion at the conference was framed as a clear response to
recent academic controversies and assumed a defensive tone.

Hussein Ibish, communications director for the Washington-based
Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee, listed recent incidents that
he portrayed as anti-Arab during a seminar titled "Israel's Campus Thought
Police and the Slur of Anti-Semitism."

Among them: a speech by Lawrence H. Summers, president of Harvard
University, that cast the divestment movement as having an anti-Semitic
impact; the collection on a Web site of "dossiers" on professors who
actively criticize Israel; a petition circulated by college presidents
calling for a statement against anti-Semitism on campuses; controversy over
a Palestinian activist speaking at colleges in Colorado during the week of
the anniversary of the September 11 attacks; and a failed lawsuit against
the conference itself, wherein two Jewish students argued that the presence
of the pro-Palestinian movement was a threat to the physical safety of
Jewish students.

Mr. Ibish told attendees that "everything short of assassinating people has
been done to stop this conference." Students laughed along with him in
response.

He said that the controversies were "chilling the speech of graduate
students and junior faculty," who are not protected by tenure. "It's
racist. It's McCarthyist. Even in a free society -- even on campuses --
criticism of Israel still somehow crosses the line."

Addressing Muslim and Arab students in the crowd, Mr. Ibish lamented that
the current cultural obstacles facing pro-Palestinian movements are "our
fault" for pursuing careers in engineering and medicine rather than
entering journalism, which he contended is run by Jews.

Controversy around the conference started long before the event itself
began. In the weeks leading up to the meeting, students and campus groups
engaged in heated debates about the event. One spark was an anti-Semitic
e-mail message sent to the student body last month that called for
"bringing down" Israel and appeared to originate from a pro-Palestinian
student group. But that group said that its e-mail account had been
"hijacked" in an attempt to slur the group.

An 'Evil' Movement

On the Friday night before the conference, while celebrating the Jewish
Sabbath, students at the Hillel here fretted, prayed, and planned for the
weekend's events.

Down the street from Hillel, in an unlit room of Chabad House, another
Jewish student center, Rabbi Avi Weiss, who had come from New York to rally
Jewish students in protests, blessed Jewish students and warned them of the
"evil" at the conference.

"But, rabbi," asked one student, "would one form of activism be to go in
and hear what they have to say?"

"Should I be scared?" the student added. "I'm serious. Are any activists
going inside? I want to go inside."

"It's too dangerous," warned the rabbi.

The divestment movement is "by no means purely a student movement," said
Avi E. Jacobson, a junior at Michigan and a leader of a campus group that
backs Israel. "It's very much an international movement that plays on the
ignorance -- the emotional ignorance -- of students."

Mr. Jacobson called divestment "sinister" and characterized the weekend
conference as a "publicity stunt" meant to smear Israel and cause "the
economic destruction of a democratic state."

Jewish students stood outside of the doors of the Palestinian Solidarity
conference all day Saturday holding signs that read, "This conference
supports suicide bombing" and "This is an anti-Semitic hate conference."
They chanted phrases such as "Shame for inciting violence" and "Shame for
supporting the killing of university students."

Late Sunday, Jewish students who had traveled here from Barnard College and
Columbia, New York, and Yeshiva Universities lay still on the sidewalk in
front of the conference site, "re-enacting" the recent bombing at Hebrew
University, in Jerusalem, by a Palestinian terrorist.

Ari Y. Saks, a Columbia sophomore, was one of those student re-enactors. He
said Israel is "the front line of what America could face in the next 10
years," and that U.S. colleges could face similar terrorist threats.
"There's a sense of radicalism at universities: antiwar, anti-establishment
socialist groups. If you're a place that fosters ideas, you foster
radicalism, for better or worse."

Daniel M. Aghion, a University of Michigan junior, agreed. Mr. Aghion, who
grew up in Boston but is of Egyptian Jewish descent, has filed a lawsuit in
state court against Arab students who allegedly cursed at him and threw a
glass bottle at him in June. (The case is pending.) He compared the
pro-Palestine student groups to "terrorists," saying, "I have to walk
around this campus and fear being attacked because -- why? Because I wear a
yarmulke? It's because of the kind of people that these students look up to."

"I don't see any point to holding a conference after the president said 'We
will not divest,'" he said. "It's a futile cause, really, just a cheap way
to spread hateful speech about Jews."

But organizers of the conference see things differently.

"We categorically reject the accusations of anti-Semitism that are being
tossed around as part of a desperate effort to discredit the movement,"
said Ora R. Wise, a junior from Ohio State University and a Jew who helped
organize the conference.

"As Jews fighting for Palestinian liberation, we are struggling for Jewish
emancipation from the reactionary, narrow, uncritical mentalities of those
Jews who make it impossible." (Pro-Israel students, like Michigan's Mr.
Jacobson, dismissed the inclusion of Jewish students in the pro-divestment
movement, calling them "tokens.")

'A Sense of Justice'

Religious and ethnic identity played a strong role for students on both
sides of the debate, though not for every participant.

Some students at the divestment conference were neither Muslim nor Arab.

Among them, Sean S. Krebs, a sophomore at Ohio State University who
describes himself as "spiritual" but not religious, said he attended the
conference because "I've come to the realization that I -- as an American
-- I have a unique responsibility here. I am paying for some of the killing
going on. I think it's a secular issue, though. It's not just about Jews
and Muslims, Israelis and Palestinians. People say, 'It's not my cause,'
but it is. It's an issue of human rights."

Amer K. Ardati, a third-year medical student at the Ann Arbor campus, is
both Arab and Muslim. However, he maintains that those identities do not
color his choice to support divestment.

"I work toward universal health care, but I don't do that because I'm a
medical student; I do that because I know people in this country are dying
needlessly," he said, adding, "The jump to the conclusion that, just
because I'm Arab and Muslim, then I must be for Palestine, precludes
thinking that I have a sense of justice. [The conference] isn't
anti-Semitic. Not at all. I'm a Semite. I'm Arab. I am Semitic, as well."

As the conference ended, however, it was unclear what the tangible impact
would be on campuses nationwide.

Hillel's third question is: "And if not now, when?" As is the case at many
colleges, most students at Michigan saw the weekend as a time to focus on
concerns other than the Middle East. While divestment activists bought
kaffiyehs and draped themselves in Palestinian flags, the men of the Chi
Psi fraternity house donned jackets and ties for their annual parents'
weekend dinner.

And, at Scorekeepers, a pub down the street from the conference site, a
Michigan student who identified himself only as George leaned against the
bar, his eyes fixed on a television.

"Conference?" he said, during a commercial break, when asked about the
goings-on. "I don't know about any conference. But we need the money. If
Israel's selling, I'm buying." Taking another swig of beer, he added, "But
right now, I just want Penn State to lose."

At least one score was settled: Michigan 27; Penn State 24 -- in overtime.




Louis Proyect
www.marxmail.org


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