Zionists play Whack-a-Mole; but the moles keep digging

This just in from Mike Cushman of BRICUP:

Recent weeks have seen an outbreak of BDS activity on North American campuses. Each student action has met a virulent reaction from Israel’s defenders; each Zionist reaction prompts further action elsewhere.

The current round started on 24 February at Northeastern University in Boston when Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) repeated a tactic used on other campuses and posted mock eviction notices under students’ doors. These notices:

 

bring Israel’s campaign of demolition and eviction to the attention of all students. It is frequently, and falsely, alleged that Jewish students are targeted for these notices in an act of antisemitic intimidation. No evidence of this has ever been produced and as the aim is to spread information such a tactic would be counter-productive. Such claims were dismissed by the authorities at Rutgers and Florida Atlantic Universities.

The administration at Northeastern responded brutally. They suspended the SJP chapter and involved the police and threatened the only women of colour in the group that distributed the leaflets with expulsion-level charges. The threat of expulsion was rescinded following a nationwide outcry. University president Joseph Aoun recently protested, on spurious free speech grounds, against the American Studies Association decision (see Newsletter 72) to adopt BDS; he obviously sees free speech on his own campus as less vital. 

This was followed on 1 March by a 798 to 585 vote by students at Windsor University, Ontario, to support BDS. University President, Alan Wildeman, immediately tried to undermine the validity of this well supported vote making claims of irregularity without providing evidence. On 12 March he announced he had hired a lawyer to carry out an “investigation” of the BDS referendum.

Worse was to follow when Richard Spencer, an alumnus and major donor posted: “I am reasonably certain that the majority, if not all, of this small percentage of the student body are of the Muslim faith, which promotes violence and hatred toward the Jews in the middle east.” Wildeman has very correctly distanced himself from these comments. However, it provokes a question about the due diligence the University conducts before accepting donations if it had been pleased to accept funds from someone prone to making such racist statements.

Despite these attacks the students at Windsor remain committed to putting their BDS policies into effect.

Next the focus moved to Barnard College in New York, an affiliate of the prestigious Columbia University. On 10 March Barnard/Columbia SJP kicked off Israel Apartheid Week by hanging a banner of a map of Palestine  outside Barnard Hall where groups conventionally post banners promoting their events. The campus former Hillel president wrote “The banner features a map of Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, without any internal borders, colored uniformly green. That is to say, C-SJP's banner, brazenly displayed on the front door of Barnard College, entirely erases the Jewish State from the map. While I hesitate to use the term too loosely, I am at a loss as to how to categorize this display as anything less than anti-Semitic.” These claims are strange, not only because Israel frequently produces maps without borders, although they tend to colour the territory blue. More weird are Hillel protests against a map that does not detail Israel’s land grabs.

Barnard’s administration swung into prompt action on receiving these pleas and tore down the banner. An action that accords with their support for Zionist Birthright trips to Israel and tolerance of regular events on campus supporting and celebrating the Occupation.

These repressive measures have fallen foul of deep US attachment to free speech and the first Amendment and even some staunch supporters of Israel have denounced such censorship.

Hillel, the organisation that seeks to organise and support Jewish students has itself become an arena of contest. Many Jewish students are arguing that Hillel should represent all of them and not make support dependent on a commitment to Israel’s policies. National Hillel has been operating a policy of sanctioning any campus group that attempts to host any speaker critical of current Israeli policy, regardless of their attitude to the continuance of the state as a Jewish entity. Harvard Hillel even banned Avraham Burg, the former speaker of Israel’s Knesset. In reaction campus Hillel groups are declaring themselves to be Open Hillels and not subject to a rigid Zionist dogma.

On 18 March students at Loyola, a Jesuit University in Chicago, agreed to divest from companies complicit in aiding the Israeli Occupation of Palestine. They identified Caterpillar, General Electric, Hewlitt-Packard, G4S, Raytheon, Elbit Systems, SodaStream, and Veolia. The vote at the student senate was passed nem con with 26 votes in favour and 2 abstentions; it followed a year long campaign by Loyola SJP and a petition signed by over 800 students. It is just a year since students at San Diego State University, UC Irvine and UC Riverside passed similar resolutions. 

The senate revisited the issue on 24 March and confirmed their earlier decision, albeit by a smaller margin. Despite this the President of the Student Association unilaterally vetoed the resolution the following day. The spotlight moves back to the Senate who can override the veto with a two-thirds majority.

On the same day students at the University of Michigan started an indefinite occupation in protest at the student government’s refusal to hold a vote on divestment. Their campaign led by SAFE, Students Allied for Freedom and Equality ,forced the student government to convene a meeting on 18 March to hold a debate and a vote. Hundreds attended but the debate was cut short and a motion to indefinitely delay a decision was passed by 25 votes to 15 but it is significant that opponents did not have the confidence to try and vote BDS down outright.  Despite this setback the campaigners are sure they have ignited a debate about Palestine at Ann Arbor and increased knowledge about Israel’s actions enormously. The campus newspaper The Michigan Daily printed an editorial supporting SAFE’s campaign for the University to be more active in investigating the ethical status of their investments. They intend to bring the motion back and are confident of winning UM students to BDS. 

Meanwhile Vassar has been convulsed by a row over a study trip to Israel and the settlements to investigate water supply organised as part of the International Studies programme. On 6 February Vassar SJP picketed a meeting of the class, some of the students in the class claimed they felt intimidated and a meeting was held on 3 March to allow both sides to express their concerns. SJP argued the case about why the trip was discriminatory and how it embedded US support for Israel. Philip Weiss has written a detailed and nuanced account of the meeting and the events leading up to it and the wider significance of the turmoil at Vassar for the development of the campaign for Palestinian rights on US campuses.

On 19 March students at Arizona State University joined the campaign, again a motion moved by ASU Divest from Caterpillar Inc was postponed but it will be raised again on 1 April.

On 26 March McMaster University Student Union in Hamilton, Ontario passed a BDS resolution but at a well-attended but inquorate General Assembly meeting – opponents of BDS left the meeting to make it inquorate rather than staying to register tier opposition. 27 years ago McMaster students were among the first to support South African BDS.

This article is correct at the time of writing but this is a fast changing situation which we will try to track on the BRICUP website and is well reported at Electronic Intifada and Mondoweiss and on twitter.[with Jews sans frontieres bringing up the rear]

Mike Cushman

28 March 2014 

I got this from Mike Cushman early yesterday and as Mike said there could be changes on the way, in fact it's fair to say, in light of the above, Change is gonna come.  Hey, that's a good idea for a song:

UCU activist writes: It's about the Palestinians stupid

Mike Cushman 

To no one’s surprise a Zionist claque has swiftly assembled to denounce the findings of the Fraser vs UCU Employment Tribunal. It would appear that according to these voices the only business a the next meeting of UCU’s national executive will not be fighting the massive cuts in UK higher and further education but debating when and in what format to reissue The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Hysterical rubbish, of course but we have to explore why the reaction is so unbalanced. Fraser and his legal advisors chose the legal terrain and the scope of their action, not UCU. They chose their schedule of witnesses who declaimed and dissembled but failed to address the matters that Fraser wished the tribunal to consider.

Anthony White, counsel for UCU, demolished their testimony but was only able to do so with such effectiveness because they were such poor witnesses.  Ever since the tribunal, Fraser’s self-proclaimed friends have been picking over 50 pages of closely argued legal findings trying to claim they are simultaneously technically narrow and the most wide-ranging antisemitic text of recent years.

Hirsh and Susskind et al fail to grasp at least two very basic points. They solipsistically believe it is all about the Jews; they cannot understand or believe that it is about the Palestinians.

For the vast majority of those active in support of Palestinian rights it was the oppression of Palestinians that led them to activity.  They only started to consider Zionism as an ideology when they started to enquire why Israel was behaving so badly and so criminally.  At that point they encountered the Zionist justification for occupation and oppression and took a stance of either deploring the degradation of a potentially positive movement or took a more radical stance of identifying Zionist ideology, in itself, at the heart of the problem.

The absence of the Palestinians even as objects, let alone actors, in the Zionist exclusionary Jewish narrative tells us all we need to know about why being anti-Zionist is radically different from being an anti-Semite.  Anti-Zionism is a stance against a pernicious anti-Palestinian racism.  Zionism is an ideology that allows Israel to behave as it does while simultaneously believing that Israel conforms to the norms of liberal, law-based democracy.

Secondly, they continually ask, ‘why only boycott Israel?’  The Palestinian call for BDS is the only extant call for boycott by a significant national liberation movement.  Other movements and peoples call for different forms of support each of which must be considered on its merits. 

Israel’s crimes are not measured on a Richter scale of oppression against those of China or Burma or Zimbabwe and only be the subject of campaigns when they reach the hotly contested pinnacle at the top of the Premiership of abuse.  That the crimes are profound and continuing is a sufficient justification. 

Other regimes are the subject of regular denunciation and sanction by western governments, Israel is singled out not by our opposition but by the condoning of its actions by the USA; its massive military and civil aid; and its systematic cover at the Security Council.  Similarly the EU treats Israel, in defiance of geography, as a surrogate, if displaced, part of Europe and grants the privileges of association without requiring the fulfilment of Council of Europe human rights standards.

None of this is deny the possibility, and occasional reality, of support for Palestinian rights being motivated by malice towards Jews.  We have a duty to criticise and condemn such behaviour when we see it and the Palestinian rights movement is, in general, self-aware and self critical on this.  Fraser and his team were unable to discover any such motivation behind the actions of UCU officers and activists and are now reduced to asserting that its absence can only be the result of a wider collaboration to conceal it.  Such concealment is beyond the limited ability of UCU, PSC, BRICUP, the Employment Tribunal Service or other presumed conspirators.  Its absence is just that, an absence.

Mike Cushman is a member of BRICUP and is a UCU branch secretary and a regular speaker in favour of Palestinian rights at successive UCU congresses. His interventions were regularly referred to by Fraser and his witnesses.