The Doctoral Students’ Council of the City University of New York is considering a resolution to endorse academic boycott of Israeli institutions. The body will take that up tomorrow afternoon.
A couple weeks ago, the university posted this video of a panel opposing that resolution. One of the speakers was Todd Gitlin, the author and activist who right now is fasting in an effort to get his alma mater Harvard University to divest from fossil fuels. At 26:30 or so, Gitlin sought to explain his standard for divestment from ExxonMobil, South Africa, and Israel:
I’ve spent a good deal of the last 25, going on 30 years involved in divestment campaigns. I was in the mid-1980s a leader of the faculty for full divestment at the University of California, we were divesting from corporations with dealings in South Africa. And I was also the head of Harvard-Radcliffe alumni and alumnae…against apartheid, campaigning to elect pro divestment representatives to the Harvard board of overseers.
And over the last year and a half probably my prinicipal political activity has been involvement as an alumnus in the Divest Harvard movement, which seeks to get Harvard University to divest from fossil fuel corporations.
I suppose I could be tasked with just picking and choosing my reasons for divestment. Well yes, but I have a reason. The state of South Africa, the apartheid State of South Africa was an illegitimate state, it had no right to exist. And the position of the African National Congress and those of us who supported it was not that the Boers should be driven back to Holland and the Brits back to Britain and the Indians back to India, but that there should be a unitary multinational, multiracial democratic state. And that happened.
The position of the divest Harvard fossil fuel campaign now in progress is that the fossil fuel corporations like Exxon Mobil and Shell and so on are illegitimate, they have no right to exist, no right to use the– it’s more than the public atmosphere, it’s the global atmosphere, it’s the intergalactic atmosphere for the refuse, the murderous refuse, the destabilizing refuse that is the product of their economic operations undertaken for the sake of profit.
In all those cases, the divestment is aimed at institutions that have no right to exist.
This is my challenge to the BDS movement– is to be honest. They are essentially saying that the state of Israel is like the Apartheid State of South Africa and like Exxon Mobil, that it has no right to exist. They should come out and campaign for that, that’s really what they want.
I’d point out that no one in the BDS movement has called on Jews to leave Israel/Palestine. Most I know in that movement are very openly for a multiracial multinational democracy, which Gitlin wanted for South Africa. Also, most I know in that movement regard the idea of a Jewish state as discriminatory and illegitimate. Although ascertaining an entity’s “right to exist” seems like a high bar to set when deciding whether to sell some stocks, I wonder whether Israel doesn’t meet Gitlin’s own standards.
Against apartheid. Not against South Africa.
People have a right to exist; not nations, not businesses, not educational institutions. Those depend on many factors, one of which is adhering to internationally recognized legalities.
Sorry that I didn’t have a full 2 hours to devote to the video but the first speaker dismissed the resolution because, according to him, it would hurt students — who comprise the most progressive members of Israeli society, because it’s a meaningless, feel-good fashion statement, and because the resolution calls for the “One-State” solution which is wholly unattainable.
Not having read the resolution, it’s hard to judge the exact nature of these arguments.
However, it seems not to occur to these learned gentlemen that at the core of the BDS movement is an attempt to establish accountability, or making Israel pay a price for their actions. In the current situation, this is one thing surely lacking, given the economic and political insulation from harm that Israel currently enjoys.
I’d venture to guess that most supporters of BDS against energy companies would not argue that they have no right to exist, but no right to continue operating as they have been, not just in predatory capitalist habits, but in anti-environmental mindset and practices that are contributing to our planet’s heading fullspeed into a global warming crisis.
I’d also assert that those who condemned apartheid in the 80s did not claim that a country called South Africa had no right to exist, but that it had no right to enforce a system which deprived its citizens of rights based on race and ethnicity.
I agree w you Rusty. It’s a bizarre standard. I dont remember hearing it in connection with South Africa.
In the debate, four crucial words have been omitted.
Here they are:
Does Israel have a right to exist AS A JEWISH STATE?
The last four capitalized words serve to justify racial discrimination against non-Jews.
Of course, it is possible to imagine a world in which the designation “as a Jewish state” is a meaningless phrase. Many legislative bodies around the world pass cosmetic resolutions that make no practical difference. E.g., a resolution declaring “National Pickle Week” or whatever.
It’s possible to imagine such a world, but that’s not the world that we (and the Palestinians) live in.
Her are a couple of questions for Prof. Gitlin:
Does the US have a right to exist? (Hint: the answer is yes).
Does the US have a right to exist as a white Christian state?
Note to Prof. Gitlin: if your answer to this is right, it may not be a meaningless declaration, like a declaration of support for National Pickle Week. It may justify racial discrimination against non-whites and non-Christians (like yourself). If the US is officially a white Christian state, nonwhites and non-Christians could be treated in the way that Palestinians are treated by israel.
Suppose that Martin Luther King were asked whether Alabama and Mississippi had the wrist to exist as white states. I think MLK would reply that Alabama and Mississippi had the right to exist, but ought to be the properties of all races without discrimination.