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Boycott Divestment and Sanctions

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Columbia undergraduates voted by 61 to 27 percent to divest from companies profiting from Israeli apartheid, and school president Lee Bollinger dismissed the vote as no guide for investment. Bollinger’s statement reminds Rashid Khalidi of what Trump said during the first debate, when he refused to say that he would respect the result of a democratic vote on November 3, thereby confirming his contempt for the democratic process.

The lack of moral consistency from pro-Israel groups is hardly surprising, but you rarely see such a nice distillation within the span of just a few days.

Photo: Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine Facebook page

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Columbia University have both passed historic resolutions calling for divestment from Israel. “These campus BDS victories are indicative of the rapidly changing tide we’re seeing across the United States,” the BDS Movement’s North America coordinator Olivia Katbi Smith told Mondoweiss. “Despite the escalating campaigns of repression on campuses and in the halls of government, it is becoming impossible to be ‘progressive except Palestine’, because it is becoming impossible to silence our movement.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. (Photo: William B. Plowman/NBC/NBC NewsWire/Getty Images)

A landmark event in the politics of Palestine has just taken place: Congressional star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York withdrew from a scheduled memorial to Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli Prime Minister who was slain in 1995 by a rightwing extremist, after critics pointed out Rabin’s human rights record. Americans for Peace Now is sponsoring the Oct. event, with host Mandy Patinkin saying, “We would have peace today had he been with us all this time, I am absolutely certain of that.”

For the last couple years, we’ve heard a lot about the perils of “Cancel Culture” and the free speech crisis that has plagued our universities, but it’s very clear that this alleged problem only applies to certain viewpoints. The people who push these narratives don’t care if Palestinians or advocates for Palestine are literally silenced.