Israel divestment efforts increasing on U.S. campuses
By Debra Nussbaum Cohen | Apr. 20, 2015 | Haaretz
▻http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-news/.premium-1.652673
NEW YORK – The debate went on for close to nine hours, before the student government at the University of California, Santa Barbara, narrowly voted down an Israel divestment resolution last week.
In the end, it lost by a single vote. It was the third year in a row that this particular campus in the UC system – which has more than 18,000 undergraduate students, including about 2,500 Jews – narrowly defeated divestment.
Princeton University undergrads will vote on a similar motion this week, in a referendum capping months of activity from both sides on what is usually a nonpolitical campus.
While there has been no precipitous jump in the number of divestment resolutions, such efforts are gradually rolling out from coast to coast.
They are presently being considered at the University of New Mexico; Bowdoin College in Maine; Wisconsin’s Marquette University; Ohio State University; and the University of Texas at Austin.
They have already passed at colleges including Loyola, Wesleyan, Oberlin, DePaul University, Evergreen, University of Toledo, Stanford, and the University of California campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Riverside and San Diego. The February vote at UC Davis was overturned by another campus body, which said it was not within the purview of the student government to approve such a measure.
New York University professors and students recently published an open letter and are gathering signatures for a similar effort.
At some campuses, the divestment question has crept into other areas. Molly Horwitz, a Jewish candidate running for election to Stanford University’s student government, was questioned about having dual loyalties. Horwitz reportedly scrubbed her Facebook page of evidence indicating support for Israel before she began collecting signatures for her campaign.
At UCLA, a candidate for the student council judicial board was initially disqualified from running, and accused by the student council of having a conflict of interest because of her affiliation with Hillel and a Jewish sorority.
At Princeton, the undergraduate student referendum – part of a student government election ballot open to the university’s 5,200 undergraduates this week – seeks to impact the policy of the Princeton University Investment Company (Princo), which manages a $19 billion endowment. That is the third-largest endowment of any university in the United States.
The referendum calls on Princo to withdraw money from multinational corporations “that maintain the infrastructure of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank,” are involved with Israeli and Egyptian “collective punishment of Palestinian civilians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and facilitate state repression against Palestinians by Israeli, Egyptian and Palestinian Authority security forces.”
There is a high bar to meet, said the chair of the committee that functions as the endowment managers’ gatekeeper. That group, called Princeton’s Resources Committee, earlier this year rejected resolutions calling for Israel divestment. “The committee was correct to do so,” Princeton President Christopher L. Eisgruber told Haaretz.
Tensions about the referendum have grown in recent days on the bucolic New Jersey campus.
Kyle Dhillon, a junior from Atlanta who is involved with both the Princeton Committee on Palestine and Princeton Divests Coalition, said their posters around campus were repeatedly torn down last week. Table tents left in the residential dining halls also mysteriously disappeared. “Typically, we don’t have to worry about people limiting free speech here,” said Dhillon. The divestment coalition held a “teach-in” on April 8, at which Cornel West, a Princeton professor emeritus, spoke, as well as Max Blumenthal, who last year called the European Union “an accomplice to the preexisting ethnically cleansing Jewish state.”