The inane campus left is at it again. From the small -- but loud -- segment of American college students that barely waited for the World Trade Center's second tower to fall before protesting the war against terrorism comes a nascent campaign to persuade universities to sever ties with companies linked to Israel.
The movement's unsurprising origins are at the University of California, Berkeley, where a group called Students for Justice in Palestine has been pushing the administration to divest. In February, the organization sponsored a conference that attracted 450 students from all over the country to California. As a result, interest in divestment movements is percolating at such places as the University of Michigan, San Francisco State, and Columbia University.
At Berkeley, the divestment campaign is deriving support from both students with specific grievances against Israel and knee-jerk freelancers who opposed the war in Afghanistan last fall. With that war an unqualified success -- you don't hear the words "quagmire" or "Vietnam" tossed around too much these days, probably even at Berkeley -- it should come as no surprise that the campus left has turned its attention elsewhere.
The divestment movement also appears to have aroused some interest at my alma mater, Princeton University, where a group called Students for Progressive Education and Action is loosely coordinating the divestment campaign. It's a particular shame because during my undergraduate years, the organization fought for such noble goals as ending the manufacture of Princeton apparel in Third World sweatshops and raising the wages of the university's lowest-paid employees. And it surely says something about the sad state of American liberalism after September 11 that the group's agenda has been lately reduced to not-particularly-thoughtful denunciations of Israel.
"We're on the right side of history," said junior Vincent Lloyd, one of the campaign's main organizers at Princeton. It struck me as the sort of brash statement that could be made only by one of three kinds of people: a West Bank settler, a Palestinian extremist, or someone who grasps neither the complexity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict nor its long history.
I'm going to guess many of the divestment backers fall into the third group. That's too bad, because the war in Israel and the territories is a nuanced and difficult one that is going to be solved, ultimately, through the give-and-take of pragmatic compromise on both sides -- compromise that results in statehood for Palestinians and security for Israelis. Imploring universities to separate from companies linked to Israel is no more helpful, or levelheaded, than advocating the mass transfer of Palestinians out of the West Bank, as right-wing Israelis have been doing for quite some time. Both positions are little more than vehicles for hatred and demagogy -- far from rational solutions to the crisis.
In defending their choice of Israel as a target for divestment, the students I spoke with all invoked the lessons of the 1980s, when college protesters helped focus attention on South Africa by persuading their schools not to associate with companies that did business with the apartheid regime.
But in drawing that particular comparison, they insult the memory of what was, both at the time and in retrospect, a deeply moral undertaking -- and reveal themselves to be unthinking opponents of Israel rather than thoughtful students of a Middle Eastern reality that is vastly different from South African apartheid.
Still, what's most disturbing about the divestment movement is not its criticism of Israel -- criticism of Israel is fine -- but rather its implication that Israel should not exist as a Jewish state. You don't advocate divestment in the case of a country you have a policy disagreement with; you advocate divestment in the case of a country -- like apartheid-strapped South Africa -- whose ruling regime you hope to end.
The students, of course, claim that's not their goal. Berkeley's Students for Justice in Palestine does not take a position on Israel's existence, says graduate student Snehal Shingavi -- it just wants an end to occupation of the territories and Israeli human-rights abuses. But when I ask Shingavi whether he personally thinks there ought to be a Jewish state, he calls the idea "racist," and goes on to compare it to Nazi ideology and ethnic cleansing. If his views are any indication of the way his fellow divestment advocates feel, then theirs is not a movement to end occupation; it's a movement to end Israel.
Instead of Israel as we know it, Shingavi wants a "secular, democratic" state on the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. Overlooking the fact that Israel already is a "secular, democratic" state -- albeit a far from perfect one -- I'll take Shingavi at his word. And I'll therefore be looking forward to campaigns for divestment in other non-secular or non-democratic Middle Eastern states -- like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Kuwait, Jordan, and Syria. Or should I not hold my breath?
