Students say:
No business with apartheid Israel
By
Betsey Piette
Philadelphia
Published Mar 12, 2009 8:34 PM
A divestment teach-in at Temple University on March 5 put technology to use for
Palestine as students here spoke directly with students from the Hampshire
College divestment movement in Massachusetts through the power of Skype, an
Internet telephone program.
Temple Students for Justice in Palestine hosted the teach-in as part of Boycott
Israeli Apartheid week. The panel featured Godfrey Sithole, a member of the
African National Congress and veteran of the 1980s movement to divest from
South Africa, and Adam Horowitz from the U.S. Campaign to End the Occupation of
Palestine.
The teach-in was held to reignite a divestment campaign at Temple. It was part
of a week of actions that included banner droppings and a protest urging people
to “hang up on Motorola” for its complicity in Israel’s human
rights violations and military occupation.
Horowitz described the three components of the BDS movement—boycott,
divest, sanctions—that is gaining momentum internationally, especially
since Israel’s brutal war on Gaza. He explained that the divestment
movement must be seen as a tactic in a broader solidarity struggle.
The BDS movement encourages student groups, unions, religious and community
organizations to identify ways in which the institutions they are connected
with are complicit in Israel’s occupation and wars against the
Palestinian people.
The movement against Israeli apartheid borrows from the success of the earlier
struggle to weaken apartheid in South Africa through similar tactics. Sithole,
who in the 1980s led the movement in Philadelphia to divest from South Africa,
stated: “The highlight of that campaign was when people could see the
atrocities committed in South Africa. It’s a pity to have to revisit an
issue we thought we’d never have to go back to.”
Sithole compared apartheid in South Africa, where racial divisions and
inequities were used to enforce policies that benefited the whites in power, to
the situation in Israel and occupied Palestine today, where similar racist laws
and policies are used to consistently deny rights to Palestinians and Arab
people in Israel.
“When you see laws similar to what Hitler used against Jewish people,
it’s so hard to see the same people who faced the atrocities of Nazi
Germany doing this to other people,” Sithole said. “Apartheid in
South Africa also copied some of the same laws that were enforced by the Nazis.
It’s an issue of control—passbooks in South Africa, checkpoints in
Palestine.”
Sithole referred to a recent “60 Minutes” segment that showed
Israeli soldiers occupying a Palestinian home in Gaza and controlling when
family members could come and go. The soldiers let the children leave for
school but refused to let them come home, making the departure of the
television crew a condition for their return.
“Bit by bit the international solidarity movement is rising up and it
will make a difference,” said Sithole. “Two weeks ago dockworkers
in South Africa took a bold step and refused to unload ships from Israel. We
were once the ones isolated—called terrorists—but the solidarity we
saw with South Africa gave us hope.”
Hampshire students Brian Van Slyke and Jay Cassano from Students for Justice in
Palestine joined the program through a Skype hook-up that allowed them to have
an open discussion with the Philadelphia audience. Hampshire College was the
first college to divest from South Africa in the 1970s and the first campus to
protest the war in Afghanistan in 2001. When the Palestinian Civil Society
issued a call for divestment from Israel several years ago, students felt they
had to live up to that history.
Van Slyke and Cassano described the struggle to get Hampshire’s Board of
Trustees subcommittee on responsible investment to finally respond to student
pressure earlier this year. First they identified corporations—including
Caterpillar, United Technologies, General Electric, ITT, Motorola and
Terex—that Hampshire had investments in and that were linked to
Israel.
SJP showed films, sponsored faculty panels, built a mock wall on campus and set
up checkpoints to raise student awareness and participation over the two-year
campaign. “You can’t be passive about the issue,” Van Slyke
noted. “Otherwise people will brush you off.”
Both pointed out that although Hampshire divested from South Africa in 1977,
there was almost a 10-year gap before other schools followed suit. But by 1988
more than 150 institutions had divested. Already students at the University of
Mississippi, the University of Rochester and the University of Massachusetts
have taken on similar campaigns to divest from Israeli apartheid.
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