The Anti-Semitic Divestment
Campaign
(Updated February 2006)
The word “peace” does
not appear in divestment petitions, which
makes clear the intent is not to resolve
the conflict but to delegitimize Israel.
Petitioners blame Israel for the lack of
peace and demand that it make unilateral
concessions without requiring anything of
the Palestinians, not even the cessation
of terrorism.
Peace in the Middle East will come only
from direct negotiations between the parties, and only after
the Arab states recognize Israel’s right to exist, and the
Palestinians and other Arabs cease their support of terror.
American universities cannot help through misguided divestment
campaigns that unfairly single out Israel as the source of
conflict in the region.
Harvard University President
Lawrence Summers observed that the divestment
efforts are anti-Semitic.
“Profoundly anti-Israel views are increasingly
finding support in progressive intellectual
communities," said
Summers. "Serious and thoughtful people
are advocating and taking actions that are
anti-Semitic in their effect, if not their
intent.”
One clear indication that the divestment
campaign is anti-Semitic is that it singles out the Jewish
state alone, among all the nations of the world, for special
treatment. If the divestment proponents were concerned about
human rights they would be focusing on the world’s principal
human rights violators, such as China, Iraq, Iran, and Saudi
Arabia.
It is especially ironic that the divestment
campaign is allegedly designed to benefit the Palestinians
whose own rulers in the Palestinian
Authority, have been documented to be among the world’s
worst abusers of human rights, suppressing the freedom of
speech, press, and assembly, and discriminating against women.
Divestment advocates ignore Israel’s efforts
during the Oslo peace
process, and at the summit
meetings with President Clinton, to reach historic compromises
with the Palestinians that would have created a Palestinian
state, compromises rejected out of hand by Yasser
Arafat.
Divestment proponents hope
to tar Israel with an association with apartheid South
Africa, an offensive
comparison that ignores the fact that all
Israeli citizens are equal under the law. “The
Israeli regime is not apartheid,” South
African Interior Minister Chief Mangosuthu
Buthelezi said. “It is a unique case
of democracy.”
Arabs in Israel have equal voting rights;
in fact, it is one of the few places in the Middle East where
Arab women may vote. Arabs currently hold 10 seats in the
120-seat Knesset;
they have served in the Cabinet, high-level foreign ministry
posts (e.g., Ambassador to Finland), and on the Supreme
Court.
Arabic, like Hebrew,
is an official language in Israel. More than 300,000 Arab
children attend Israeli schools. At the time of Israel’s
founding, there was one Arab high school in the country.
Today, there are hundreds of Arab schools
Under apartheid, black South Africans could
not vote and were not citizens of the country in which they
formed the overwhelming majority of the population. Laws
dictated where they could live, work and travel. And, in
South Africa, the government killed blacks who protested
against its policies. By contrast Israel allows freedom of
movement, assembly and speech. Some of the government’s harshest
critics are Israeli Arabs who are members of the Knesset.
The divestment campaign against South Africa
was specifically directed at companies that were using that
country’s racist laws to their advantage. In Israel no such
racist laws exist; moreover, companies doing business there
adhere to the same standards of equal working rights that
are applied in the United States.
The situation of Palestinians in the territories
is different. The security requirements of the nation, and
a violent insurrection in the territories, forced Israel
to impose restrictions on Arab residents of the West
Bank and Gaza Strip that are not necessary inside Israel’s pre-1967 borders.
The Palestinians in the territories, typically, dispute Israel’s
right to exist whereas blacks did not seek the destruction
of South Africa, only the apartheid regime.
If Israel were to give Palestinians full
citizenship, it would mean the territories had been annexed.
No Israeli government has been prepared to take that step.
Instead, through negotiations, Israel agreed to give the
Palestinians increasing authority over their own affairs.
It is likely that a final settlement will allow most Palestinians
to become citizens of their own state.
Despite all their criticism,
when asked what governments they admire most,
more than 80 percent of Palestinians consistently
choose Israel because they can see up close
the thriving democracy in Israel, and the
rights the Arab citizens enjoy there.
Even before the State of Israel was established,
Jewish leaders consciously sought to avoid the situation
that prevailed in South Africa. David
Ben-Gurion said in 1934:
We do not want to create a situation like that which
exists in South Africa, where the whites are the owners
and rulers, and the blacks are the workers. If we do not
do all kinds of work, easy and hard, skilled and unskilled,
if we become merely landlords, then this will not be our
homeland.
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