Examining the Error of the Divestment Campaign

The current campaign by Students for Justice in Palestine and other groups in support of divestment by UC in companies doing business in Israel is part of an old, ugly history.

The campaign emerges from the Arab League boycott that has been operating for over 50 years, and which itself traces to the 1922 Palestine Arab Congress anti-Jewish boycott call. This boycott diminished over the last decade, but never disappeared. A primary boycott prohibiting direct dealing with Israel continues to operate in many states, although the Palestinian Authority officially disavowed the boycott.

A secondary boycott denies business to firms operating in Israel. This is the blacklist, and it is at this level the divestment campaign proposes to operate by selling off UC investment in companies with operations in Israel, targeting the high-tech sector. The Arab League tertiary boycott involves denial of trade with firms that have business ties with blacklisted companies.

The original boycott was xenophobic in that it represented a political and economic strategy to contain, isolate, monitor and eventually destroy what it perceived as an alien presence. Inviolable borders had to be maintained against subversive infiltration. It sought to preserve a hegemonic definition of territory as Arab, rejecting peaceful relations with an entity deemed fundamentally illegitimate. A boycott was a weapon to eliminate an "artificial" presence that had no right to exist.

Boycott officials in Damascus pored over corporate reports from around the world to identify both intercorporate links (e.g. did your company deal with another company that had dealings with Israel?) and Jewish agents of power. Routine administrative forms circulated to collect information on the religion and national origin of corporate employees. The Central Boycott Office issued "non-Jew" certificates to foreign organizations.

A Jewish name was enough to ensure that you would not be hired at large firms with major projects in Arab countries; a new class of closeted Jews appeared in response and there was a run on false baptismal certificates.

The boycott's intellectual terms were changing, however. In 1975 came UN Resolution 3379 (repealed in 1991) equating Zionism with racism and apartheid, which served as the political analogy that would justify maintaining an isolation containment around that alien presence. The Arab League affirmed its solidarity with the then-rising anti-apartheid boycott and began conceptually re-positioning its own boycott. What changed was less the original purposes and methods of the anti-Israel boycott, more its rhetorical references that relied on stigmatizing one nationalism among all others.

So the current divestment campaign directed at the UC administration is nothing new. Beyond recapitulating an originating racism and xenophobia, what it does in political terms is the opposite of establishing mutuality at a time when that is a desperate need. It promotes a false belief that economic and cultural ghettoization will alter Jewish society toward right civic order, a centuries-old anti-semitic concept. It resurrects national pariah status for a pariah people, or a recapitulation of racism that emphasized ostracism as a corrective moral solution.

That anyone seriously entertains this notion is a measure of the penetration of anti-semitism into Euro-American progressive movements. That an occasional Jew may even support such an idea testifies to their historical ignorance, communal self-abnegation, or willingness to embrace anti-semitism in misbegotten political righteousness.

It is especially important that the UC community takes an emphatic stance against rejectionism masquerading as "divestment" given the specter of an academic and cultural boycott in European universities.

Progressive advocacy for peace and democracy will arrive through support for those who seek non-violent solutions to this impasse of killers; for those who sit and stand in front of Sharon's invading tanks; and for those who risk speaking against and opposing too many on both sides who would harm the Other.

Political opposition arrives in its strongest form when Arabs and Jews treat each other as partners at UC campuses, supporting co-existence between Israel and Palestine; when Ashkenazi Jews and Maghrebi activists join together at a SOS Racisme demonstration in Paris; or when Israelis and Palestinians lock arms to face tear gas attacks at a peaceful rally in Bet Hanina.

Without mutual respect there is neither justice nor peace.

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