A BDS Supporter (Wikimedia Commons) On March 16, the BDS National Committee hosted its sixth annual BDS National Conference in Ramallah. The conference, which received a statement of support from internationally recognized terrorist organizations such as Hamas, the Palestinian National and Islamic Forces (PNIF), and the People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), was heavily attended by individuals associated with terrorism. Khitam Saafin, a leader in the PFLP, attended as a panelist for a workshop on BDS policy. Also in attendance was Abu Marsel Karaja, a member of the PFLP who has been arrested numerous times by Israeli security forces. Lastly, Dr. Wasel Abu Yousef, who currently acts as secretary of the PNIF in the West Bank, attended the conference as a speaker. The main goal of the conference was to advocate for the expansion of boycott practices and the implementation of a strict “anti-normalization” policy with Israel. The conference also pushed for increased lobbying against Israel within international bodies and organizations such as the European Union. The conference included workshops on boycott policies, labor sectors and trade unions, normalization, and BDS within the Palestinian Territories. The conference was acknowledged by diplomats from several countries, including Baleka Mbete the speaker of the lower house of South Africa’s National Assembly. Mbete sent a recorded statement affirming that the “Palestinian struggle is our struggle.” Among the attendees was Omar Barghouti, the Qatar-born US educated founder of the Israel boycott movement. Barghouti was recently denied permission to travel to the United States. Barghouti and other leaders in the boycott movement stated at the conference that BDS was part of a “popular resistance” movement against Israeli “occupation.” As part of this stance, BDS leaders stated that the Palestinian Liberation Organization would not work with the Israeli police on fighting crime and terrorism, regardless of whether those crimes affect both Palestinians and Israelis. The leaders also called on members of the Palestinian Authority government in the Gaza Strip to cease all forms of security coordination, economic cooperation, and cultural normalization with Israel. As reported by JNS, BDS experts Brig. Gen. (res.) Yossi Kuperwasser and Dan Diker, noted how “the organizers’ affiliations and cooperation with terrorist groups indicate that BDS is aimed at annihilating the Jewish state—the political form of terrorism.” Both Diker and Kupperwasser also agreed that “by promoting anti-normalization, BDS clearly shows that it does not aim to help the Palestinians, as the Palestinians are the ones who gain the most by normalizing and working together with Israelis, whereas Israel would do just fine without cooperating with the Palestinians in business.”
The Brandeis Center welcomes some good news for three of our clients. On Friday, Brooklyn College President Karen Gould publicly apologized for the school’s forcible ejection of four Jewish pro-Israel students from a 2013 anti-Israel event sponsored in part by the school. The Brandeis Center, which represents three of the students removed from the lecture, had called for a public apology from Brooklyn College, and was pleased when the apology was issued late Friday afternoon. Brooklyn College (source: wikipedia commons) LDB President Kenneth L. Marcus lauded the apology in a press release issued this morning: “This apology reflects the fact that the university violated the constitutional and civil rights of our clients at a public event. This was a shameful incident, and we are pleased that the university has accepted responsibility,” said LDB President Kenneth L. Marcus. “We appreciate the apology and look forward to working with the school to ensure that other Brooklyn College students will not have to endure what happened to our clients.” Here’s a summary of the case, which many readers will recall from last year: On February 7, 2013, the Brooklyn College Students for Justice in Palestine chapter – with official sponsorship from the school – hosted an event promoting the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement, which is aimed at Israel. The event featured Judith Butler … and Omar Barghouti…. Shortly after the four Jewish students – including LDB clients Melanie Goldberg, Michael Ziegler, and Ari Ziegler — arrived at the event, they were forcibly removed by two public safety officers of Brooklyn College at the urging of an event organizer unaffiliated with the school. Brooklyn College President Karen Gould Brooklyn College President Karen Gould directed the school’s apology, reprinted in full below, to the four students. In the wake of the BDS event, the students had been falsely accused of wrongdoing and subjected to intense scrutiny from school officials and the media, but were vindicated by a two-month investigation into the incident conducted in March and April, 2013 by the City University of New York, of which Brooklyn College is a part. The CUNY investigation, which included interviews with more than 40 witnesses, found that the non-campus-affiliated event organizer was motivated by a “political viewpoint” in removing the students as he had heard Melanie Goldberg’s pro-Israel views at a prior campus event; that the administrators and public safety officers at the event wrongly deferred to the event organizer; and concluded that “there was no justification for the removal of the four students.” In the Brooklyn College apology, Gould stated that a College spokesperson had released “an erroneous” statement to the press after the event saying that the students were being disruptive. Gould acknowledged that the university’s statement was false. The Brandeis Center has emphasized that more work remains to be done: (more…)
University of California at Berkeley The University of California’s long, ugly battle over anti-Israel divestment has just gotten even messier. Brandeis readers will recall that Berkeley’s student senate passed a resolution on April 18 urging divestment from companies that do business with Israel. Berkeley’s Chancellor Robert Birgeneau immediately repudiated the measure and announced that it would have no impact on university policy. Nevertheless, the whole situation was bad enough to draw additional legal challenges from the lawyers who had previously filed a federal anti-Semitism complaint against the Berkeley campus. Now, the anti-Israel boycott, divestment and sanctions movement (BDS) faces another blow as Berkeley student senators have revised the resolution to remove most of its operative provisions. Moreover, as details of the resolution come to light, some commentators now argue that the resolution harms the BDS movement itself more than it does the State of Israel and its supporters. As the Daily Californian reports, student senators have removed the clauses that dealt with the student senate’s own investments and appropriations, which are the only funds that they control. The senate has removed these operative provisions in order to settle charges that the divestment resolution violated the institution’s constitution because it was not passed by a two thirds majority. Some insiders argue that this move neuters the anti-Israel resolution. “I think SB 160 has lost a lot of weight through this settlement,” said Noah Ickowitz, SQUELCH! party chair and a former columnist for The Daily Californian. “The bill that passed is now a completely different bill once these clauses are stricken. It loses almost all its authority. I hope the public understands that this is no longer ASUC divestment.” Others insist that the amendment did not substantially change the resolution, since it never amounted to anything but symbolism anyhow. Student Action Senator George Kadifa, who authored the bill, disagreed that the settlement watered down the bill in any way, emphasizing that the purpose of the bill has been largely symbolic since its inception. To the extent that the Berkley resolution was merely symbolic, its meaning will be difficult to ascertain. In fact, some commentators have argued that the boycott resolution was never as much a victory for the BDS movement as most people believed. Indeed, Berkeley Professor Ron Hassner has argued that UC Berkeley “killed BDS” by passing a resolution which includes language which is critical not only of Israel but also of the BDS movement. Hassner argues that the Berkeley boycott resolution was unique in that anti-Israel student leaders distanced themselves from the BDS movement and its international leader, Omar Barguoti. In his Times of Israel blog, Hassner explained this difference: (more…)
President Harry S. Truman, a history buff, said: “The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know.” As a professional historian, I confess to an occupational affliction, which might be called “the obsession with origins,” that is a more sophisticated version of Truman’s aphorism. This causes me, like many of my professional confreres, to believe instinctively that past is key to present, and the essence of a thing resides in its origins. Sometimes, this instinct is right—sometimes not. Allow me to speculate first about the remote origins of the Boycott/Divestment/Sanctions (BDS) Movement, critiqued in my Boycott/Divestment/Sanctions (BDS) Against Israel: An Anti-Semitic, Anti-Peace Poison Pill (link: www.wiesenthal.com/atf/cf/%7B54d385e6-f1b9-4e9f-8e94-890c3e6dd277%7D/REPORT_313.PDF). BDS was officially launched only on July 9, 2005, with “the Palestinian Civil Society Call for BDS” in which over 100 named Palestinian organizations declared that “fifty-seven years after the state of Israel was built mainly on land ethnically cleansed of its Palestinian owners,” they were launching a movement “inspired by the struggles of South Africans against Apartheid.” Obviously, as we shall see, the movement gestated before 2005. Yet it can be argued that its roots go back, not only to the early twenty-first century, but to before the modern era. (more…)