Alan Dershowitz has responded angrily to the Hampshire College divestment initative for singling out Israel:
divestment campaign applies to Israel and Israel alone. Hampshire will
continue to deal with companies that supply Iran, Saudi Arabia, China,
Cuba, North Korea, Zimbabwe, Libya, Syria, Sudan, Belarus and other
brutal dictatorships around the world that routinely murder civilians,
torture and imprison dissenters, deny educational opportunities to
women, imprison gays and repress speech. Indeed many of those who
support divestiture against Israel actively support these repressive
regimes. This divestment campaign has absolutely nothing to do with
human rights. It is motivated purely by hatred for the Jewish state.
A few responses: 1. The campaign is aimed not at Israel proper (wherever the borders are!) but at the Occupied Territories and apartheid conditions there, which are based on religious/ethnic differences. American companies should have nothing to do with this type of discrimination. There Palestinians are denied so many basic rights that two leaders of the Palestinian community last week compared the conditions to slavery.
2, This site was certainly for actions against China over its treatment of Tibet and other ethnic minorities. I wonder how much business we're doing in North Korea and the Sudan. That said, I'm sure the Hampshire students would consider measures aimed at other countries.
3, The specialness of Israel is that the U.S. is joined at the hip to Israel, which is practicing apartheid in the Occupied Territories; and this is destroying my country's image across the Arab and Muslim world. The aim of a divestment campaign is not strictly the targeted country, but American policy. This was the goal of the South Africa campaign. It forced institutions in the U.S. to question South African policy, and ultimately for the U.S. government to pressure South Africa. This is the essential difference between Israel and other countries. This injustice has a special character. Our actions in Zimbabwe are not hurting the democracy effort there. And Africans are not flying planes into our buildings because of our Zimbabwe policy.
