The inspiring moral leadership of the Hampshire students

A few times in the last 3 years I have declared that young people are going to lead us; and each time I have been premature. I did it at Columbia University in an article for New York Magazine in '07. I did it at Brandeis University in The American Conservative that year too. On both occasions I was stunned to see the diversity of the progressive movement on campus: identity politics meant nothing to these kids; Jews intermingled with Muslims and Asians in a cohesive manner, and no one gave a s**t.

Well now I am saying the same thing about the Hampshire divestment and betting that I will be right. This is a shot that will be heard 'round the nation. It is no wonder that Dershowitz called the students in a threatening manner as soon as they had taken the action: Dershowitz and I recognize the huge symbolic meaning of this stroke. For years divestment was stopped dead by then-Harvard-President Lawrence Summers's attack on it, in 2002, saying it was antisemitic in effect if not intent, which caused rightthinking gentile faculty to steer away from the issue like a plague. Then it was stopped among the Protestant churches by endless legal wrangling, again with the threat of being labelled antisemitic hanging over their heads.

Those Protestant churches couldn't adopt simple measures that limited the divestment to companies doing business in the Occupation! The evil occupation, with its crazy settlers and pogroms--which is all the Hampshire initiative applies to, the companies that helped in one way and another to kill Rachel Corrie! So let us be clear, This is a huge moral stroke. And who is responsible: not Protestant churches or Middle East Studies professors, but an organization of committed students, many of them Jews, who will not be intimidated by anyone, their own administration or Alan Dershowitz. Bless them and honor them!

According to one of those students, in this comment on Indypendent, when Hampshire College first divested from Apartheid South Africa years ago, "the Administration did what it could to distance itself from the situation then, too, with then-President Adele Simmons calling it a 'big non-issue.'" And today when you visit Hampshire, they brag on that bold move! This will happen again. We and Hampshire will look back on the bravery and independence of Hampshire students as we look back on the bravery of the Wilmot Proviso, or of Harriet Beecher Stowe, or of Congressman Abraham Lincoln when he introduced anti-slavery legislation in Congress in 1848-- on all these hammer blows by free and unafraid people, others were summoned to the great task at hand!

Again: Dershowitz knows this as well as I do. He is a great advocate. He knows he must stop this now, and blacken the Hampshire initiative, so that no signal goes out to others FROM JEWS that It is OK to do this thing. But Dershowitz is too late. The students hung up on him and laughed. Generational forces are moving past him. He is 70 years old and is advocating for the evil settlement program that even the American government knows is a disaster, that even Gary Ackerman, the Israel Lobby's main man in the House, or one of them, has lately condemned as settler "pogroms"  (language first employed by me, then later by Jeffrey Goldberg).

Dershowitz employed a traditional Jewish intimidation tactic, calling the Jews and reminding them of their loyalty to the Jewish family. It didn't work. These were Hannah-Arendt-Baruch-Spinoza Jews who feel loyalty first to the human family.

It is also fascinating that Dershowitz is Israel's lawyer in the U.S. He played the tough prosecutor here:

We must accept that he IS Israel's lawyer, Israel has accepted that, the press has accepted it, and the Jewish leadership has accepted it. As happened when he helped muscle Jimmy Carter away from the Democratic convention. Tragic, but true: that a man of such blindered ethnocentrism and persecution anxiety ("Auschwitz borders," he called the Green Line) has such a prominent position in Jewish life. 

That is ending due to the incredible act of the Hampshire students. Click on these videos below; hear these students talking about what they did. There is no prevarication, there is no legalism or subtlety. They saw a wrong and wanted to decry it. They did not think about the Israel lobby, about their jobs, about the funding of their school, or the Hamas charter. They did not think about their dual loyalty to the Jewish state. They thought about the social and political evil in which their country is implicated. They thought: those 412 children in Gaza will not have died in vain. These kids are leading us.
(Phil Weiss)