posted by DrMike at http://www.bluetruth.net/2010/09/bds-movement-at-uc-berkeley-how-it.html
In the Spring of 2010, anti-Israel activists nearly managed to get an anti-Israel bill passed in UC Berkeley's student government. This bill, if passed, would have given anti-Israel activists worldwide the opportunity to claim that Berkeley's student body is in support of divestment from Israel. The story of how this bill came about, what the battle over it was like, and how I and my colleagues in the pro-Israel community managed to see the bill defeated is an important one, and I'd like to explain this story. I also would like to offer commentary and advice to current and future college students on how to fight and defeat anti-Israel measures in their own student governments.
It began when I heard through the grapevine that a divestment bill was being proposed in Berkeley's student government, the ASUC (Associated Students of the University of California).
My student group, Tikvah: Students for Israel (I was an executive member of the group in Spring 2010, and had been one of the group's first members, helping shape the group's ideology and methods, during the group's inception back in the Fall of 2007), only heard about this at the last minute, and so several of us went to the Senate committee meetings which would determine whether this divestment bill would make it on to the general floor, with the intent of trying to stop that from happening.
It was useless; as a friend of mine in the ASUC, a Jewish student senator, told us: "There's nothing we can really do to stop this from getting through and on to the general floor." People's – the Senators' (or those Senators who were in the relevant committees) – minds had already been made up by the time we got to the committee meetings. I write "meetings" plural: Students for Justice in Palestine, the notorious, vehement anti-Israel group on campus, had actually written up two bills of nearly identical text in order that if one failed (didn't get through the Senate committee it was being brought up at), the other, proposed at a different committee, might yet pass and get on to the general floor. As it would turn out, one of these bills did make it through.
The bills had both been written by two particularly inflammatory members of the Berkeley chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine: one, Tom Pessah, is an Israeli expatriate who seemingly has made it his personal mission to spread hatred for his own state as wide as possible in Northern California; the other, Emiliano Huet-Vaughn, was a newcomer to Berkeley, a new graduate student who had a track record of stirring up anti-Israel sentiment abroad at the London School of Economics and attempting (once successfully) to pass divestment there. (Huet-Vaughn's past was even more sinister than that, I would soon find.) These two Berkeley graduate students had done 'meticulous research' and written up the two essentially identical bills, both extended diatribes against the state of Israel tossing in all the language typical of rejectionist anti-Israel propaganda ('illegal occupation', 'war crimes', 'disregard for human rights', 'laying siege to the citizens of Gaza', etc.). Their bill was loaded with citations from organizations which Israel advocates know to be either horrendously biased, or simply hateful and generally not credible: Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, in particular, belonging to the former category. (Concerning the latter group: It is worth noting that Robert Bernstein, founder of Human Rights Watch, had only recently publicly disowned his own organization, on the basis of its having become obsessively anti-Israel. His opinion piece in the New York Times can be found here)
The bill which ended up making it to the general floor (and which I will henceforth refer to as the 'divestment bill') was voted on very promptly and passed. This led to a flood of over ten thousand emails sent from around the world to ASUC members and officials, as well as to campus officials, variously praising and disapproving of the passage of the bill. Anti-Israel partisans, unsurprisingly, wrote of the 'moral fortitude' and 'courage' expressed by the Senate for approving divestment; pro-Israel individuals wrote of their shock and disgust that the only even reasonably moral state in the Middle East was being singled out for criticism and was publicly being tried and convicted, in the absence of any clear evidence, of all manner of atrocities.
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten