Recently, UCLA Students organized to protest the decision by the UC Regents to hike tuition, but mostly ignored an insidious behind-the-scenes spectacle. The UCLA Student government voted 8-2-2 to urge UC to divest from companies accused to doing business in the West Bank. Eerily, the vote occurred vituually at the same time that—half a world away—two Palestinian terrorists butchered four rabbis and a Druze policeman in West Jerusalem. Among those butchered: Rabbi Moshe Twersky, Boston Rabbi Joseph Soloveichik, the founder of Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies, who contributed so much to shaping “Modern Orthodoxy.” There is no place for Rabbi Soloveichik or Rabbi Twersky in Palestinian terrorists’ version of the “postmodern” world. Last February, a vitriolic meeting stacked with non-student pro-Palestinian gate crashers voted 7 to 5 against such a resolution. But this time around, Hillel and other student organizations sympathetic to Israel and Jewish life on-and-off campus, made a strategic decision to avoid an anti-Semitic firestorm by withdrawing to their parallel meeting. “We are not going to have our community sit through however long a session of bullying and hate speech,” said Tammy Rubin, the president emeritus of Hillel at UCLA. Bruins for Israel and J-Street U, she said, will now use the time not spent on opposing symbolic divestment resolutions to “reinvest in our community.” Gil Bar-Or, president of the UCLA branch of J-Street U, added: “We are trying to present an approach that’s creating positive things for both people that are involved in the conflict and not alienating anybody. . . . In order to promote one community’s interests you do not have to trample on the other community’s interests.” The Jewish student leaders motives and reasoning and understandable, given the trauma of last February for Jewish Bruins. Even so, it’s hard not to hear faint echoes from a very different situation and time long ago when German Jews gave up on open opposition to the Nazis in favor of wearing “The Yellow Star with pride.” One UCLA student who did speak up from the floor of the UCLA student government session, Avinoam Baral, the non-voting government president, who’s an Israeli, expressed his outrage. “[The resolution] says this language that it’s not meant to target you, but there’s a difference between intention and action and if our intention is to divest from all countries violating human rights and the actual effect is to only divest from Israel, the only Jewish state in the world, it’s hard for me to take it any other way. . . . It’s hard for me to not feel targeted.” His words and feelings were ignored by virtually every other “identity politics” lobby on campus that monolithically supported the resolution. The Daily Bruin listed “the Afrikan Student Union, Armenian Student Association, MEChA de UCLA, Samahang Pilipino, Student Coalition Against Labor Exploitation, Queer Alliance and Bruin Feminists for Equality”—and then gave up listing more. It’s hard to see what this cacophonous groups have in common except hatred of the Jewish state. Long ago, on Saturday Night Live, Chevy Chase used to report weekly: “And General Francisco Franco is still dead.” But General Franco’s malevolent spirit—and willingness to align with the trendy evil of his time—is still alive in the Spanish Parliament which, only one day after the Jerusalem bloodbath, awarded the complicit Palestinian authorities by “recognizing the State of Palestine.” Unfortunately, solidarity with evil extends to our college campuses where students like those who voted for the UCLA divestment resolution either without understanding or without caring that the Boycott/Divestment/Sanctions Movement has no real purpose but the destruction of Israel.