-Caveat Lector- The Record
Students urge divestiture from Israel Monday, June 10, 2002 http://www.bergen.com/page.php?level_3_id=7&page=3757300 By BRIAN KLADKO Staff Writer More than a decade has passed since student protesters staged sit-ins and erected shantytowns to push their universities to divest from South Africa - a movement that, in general, pitted students and professors against administrators and trustees. Now some students and faculty have revived that strategy, aimed at a different target: Israel. And this time, it is pitting students against students, professors against professors. The divestment movement, which gained notoriety this spring at Princeton University and has since spread to several other schools, demands that universities sell their stock in companies that do business in Israel. Their goal - which they said took on greater urgency in March when the Israeli military, in response to a series of suicide bombings, staged an armed assault in largely Palestinian territories - is for Israel to cede control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. A petition demanding that Princeton, which has about $8 billion in investments, divest from Israeli-connected companies gained the support of more than 300 students and 42 faculty members, including the history department chairman. Some of the companies identified by the group include General Electric Co., Lucent Technologies, McDonald's Corp., Merck & Co. Inc., and Lehman Bros. Inc. "We believe that the human rights of Palestinians must be respected," stated the petition, delivered to the university April 18. "Further, as members of the Princeton University community, we believe that Princeton University ought to use its influence - political and financial - to encourage the United States government and the government of Israel to respect these human rights." Whether the divest-from-Israel campaign will have the same legs as the divest-from-South Africa campaign remains to be seen. But this much is already clear: Unlike most campus causes, in which some people are strongly supportive and most others are indifferent, this movement has sparked a sharp backlash. During a protest outside Princeton's student center in April, another group of students demonstrated a few feet away, holding signs that said, "Self-defense is not apartheid," and "Arafat is no Nelson Mandela." The divestment petition prompted at least 100 students to sign an opposing petition, delivered the same day, urging the university to retain its Israeli-connected stock. In addition, 43 professors signed a letter to The Daily Princetonian condemning their colleagues for endorsing the divestment campaign. "The South African regime was a tiny minority suppressing a large majority in horrific ways," said economics professor Alan S. Blinder, who signed the letter. "Israel has a democratically elected government, elected by the majority, which is defending itself from outside aggression. You don't have to agree with all of their policies - I don't - to be offended by the parallelism. ... If there's any sanity here at all, and I think there is, it will not go anywhere." So far, it's not going anywhere, at least not at Princeton. A university advisory committee considered the petition and concluded that it did not meet the university's requirement that there be "considerable, thoughtful, and sustained campus interest" before excluding a company from its portfolio. Vincent Lloyd, the student organizer of the campaign, said he wasn't surprised by the university's decision. "We didn't see that as an ending point," he said. Princeton's holdings, or endowment, was ranked as the fourth-largest among U.S. universities last year, and is about one-third the size of New Jersey's state budget. >From the late 1970s to the early 1990s, Princeton and many other universities resisted student activists' calls to divest from companies doing business in South Africa. In 1978, students took over Nassau Hall, the main administrative building. Eventually, Princeton sold its holdings in four companies that were deemed to be in conflict with the university's values. But the issue quickly evaporated after the white-controlled South African government began dismantling apartheid, the policy of racial segregation and discrimination against blacks. Since then, the word "divestment" virtually disappeared from the campus lexicon, and student activists turned their attention to tuition increases, better wages for university workers, and banning the use of sweatshops in the making of university apparel. Lloyd, a religion major who just completed his junior year, said he was inspired to take up the divestment issue after hearing Princeton alumnus Larry Hamm describe his efforts to push the school to divest from South Africa in the late 1970s. Lloyd sees the situation in Israel as similar to South Africa under apartheid - not so much a geopolitical struggle, but an issue of human rights. His group, the Princeton Divestment Campaign, seizes on a 1989 statement by retired Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa: "I am a black South African, and if I were to change the names, a description of what is happening in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank could describe events in South Africa." When asked whether his petition might be seen as an indirect endorsement of Palestinian suicide bombers, Lloyd said, "Within a movement for justice, people have a variety of tactics. And we're trying to pursue this just cause in a way that is not violent." Lloyd's group, in addition to collecting signatures, staged a demonstration, held a teach-in with sympathetic faculty members, and took out advertisements in the campus newspaper. Lloyd even made an appearance on the MSNBC talk show "Alan Keyes Is Making Sense." Lloyd said students from a dozen schools, including Rutgers University, called him to find out what he was doing, with the intention of taking up the cause on their own campuses. "We've seen the momentum grow so much just in the few short months in the spring that we've been doing this," Lloyd said. Students and faculty at Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, both in Cambridge, Mass., have started a joint campaign for Israeli divestment on their campuses, which included a May 8 teach-in attended by about 350 people. As at Princeton, the divestment campaign has been met by counterdemonstrations and counter-petitions. Lloyd said his group has been accused of anti-Semitism by Jewish students, but he points out that a couple of the organizers are themselves Jewish. But Lloyd says he hasn't heard that accusation from faculty members, and that he doubts his activities could alienate the faculty members who grade his papers and exams. In fact, his adviser - religion professor Martha Himmelfarb - signed the critical letter in The Daily Princetonian. So far, the issue hasn't come up between the two of them. "I think most faculty members are pretty good at keeping their politics and their academic work separate," he said. 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