Palestinian BDS movement makes inroads on US campuses

The current academic year is seeing an increasing number of student boycott-divestment-sanctions movements against Israel's policies towards the Palestinians.

Students celebrate after the student government senate passed a Northwestern Divest-sponsored resolution in Evanston, Illinois on February 19, 2015. The Daily Northwestern, Nathan Richards/AP Photo

NEW YORK // The lecture hall had filled quickly. Several students arrived wearing kaffiyehs, while in the front row, a young man sat draped in the Israeli flag. As the meeting opened, a student government officer went over the rules of debate, warning that physical confrontations would not be tolerated.

“We want this to be safe for everyone,” she said.

It was time for a ritual that has become increasingly commonplace on many US university campuses: a student government body, in this case at the University of California, Davis, would take up Israeli policy toward the Palestinians, and decide whether to demand their institution divest from companies that work with the Jewish state.

In the United States, Israel’s closest ally, the decade-old boycott-divestment-sanctions (BDS) movement is making its strongest inroads by far on university campuses. The current academic year is seeing an increasing number of BDS movements at institutions, stretching from the University of California to Northwestern University and beyond. Since January alone, student governments at four universities have taken divestment votes.

While the campaigns unfold around resolutions largely proposed by branches of Students for Justice in Palestine, other groups have become increasingly involved – from American Muslims for Palestine and the Quakers’ American Friends Service Committee on one side of the debate, to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, on the other. At some campuses, candidates for student government are being asked their views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“It’s creating a debate. It’s creating a significant amount of conversation in the entire community and it’s set on the terms the activists want it to be set on,” said Rahim Kurwa, a doctoral candidate and member of Students for Justice in Palestine at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The BDS movement grew from a 2005 international call from Palestinian groups as an alternative to armed struggle over control of the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem, which Israel captured in 1967 and Palestinians seek for an independent state.

BDS advocates say the movement – which is based on the campaign against South African apartheid – is aimed at Israeli policy, not Jews, and is a response to two decades of failed peace talks and expanded Israeli settlement of the West Bank and east Jerusalem.

But supporters of Israel say that boycotting the country is no way to make peace.

As part of their campaigns, BDS activists organise lectures and workshops on Israeli policy and Palestinian history, alongside staging protests that include mock-ups of Israeli military checkpoints and the West Bank separation barrier

Flash mobs perform the dabke, or Arabic folk dance, to highlight Palestinian culture, while some activists write opinion pieces for campus newspapers with appeals to protect Palestinian human rights.

Pro-Israel groups, meanwhile, counter with their own demonstrations, lectures and opinion pieces.

Ultimately, however, the student divestment votes are purely symbolic: university administrators and boards – not student governments – oversee investments, and trustees have rejected divestment resolutions for several reasons, including that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is too complex to single out one country.

But despite this, when divestment proposals come up for a vote before student governments the hearings can last for days, drawing campuswide attention. The 2013 hearings at UC-San Diego stretched over three weeks.

And Taher Herzallah, national campus coordinator for American Muslims for Palestine – an Illinois-based education and advocacy group that provides advice and support for student activists – believes the hearings are having a positive effect.

“It helps get the plight of the Palestinian people into mainstream discourse,” he said.

* Associated Press