© www.haaretz.comA BDS flag hangs off New York's Manhattan Bridge as NYU academia joins the movement.
It's unclear which companies NYU is invested in. The students and professors pushing for divestment under the name NYU Out of Occupied Palestine say the university is not transparent about its investments. But they suspect that the university, like other institutions in the U.S., has investments in U.S. companies that supply the Israeli army with weapons they use for assaults on Gaza and the occupation of the West Bank.
The call from professors is part of the larger boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement that has found some success in student governments, particularly in California. The BDS movement on campus has sparked conversation about Israel/Palestine and also lead to tensions between pro-Israel students and activists working for divestment. In March, NYU's Students for Justice in Palestine displayed a mock separation wall during Israeli Apartheid Week, while across the street pro-Israel students rallied with Israeli flags.
At NYU, students and faculty are not calling on the student government to pass a divestment resolution. They are taking a different path by deploying prominent professors to call for transparency in the school's investments and for divestment. It's similar to how Princeton University professors called for divestment last year.
The only university to have divested from companies linked to the occupation is Hampshire.
"I support NYU Out of Occupied Palestine because I am opposed to apartheid, and the international boycott of apartheid in South Africa was a significant factor in its demise," English Professor Elaine Freedgood said in a press statement.
Other professors who signed the petition include: Iraqi novelist Sinan Antoon; historians Greg Grandin and Zachary Lockman; and Ella Shohat, a well-known cultural studies scholar.
The petition reads:
We, the undersigned members of the NYU faculty and student body, call on our colleagues, classmates and the wider university community to take a stand in support of human rights and respect for international law.Faculty members held an April 8 forum to bring attention to their call. The coalition of students and faculty are also linking the divestment movement to other issues like divesting from fossil fuels and NYU's investments and labor practices in China and the United Arab Emirates. Rabbi Yehuda Sarna, the head of NYU's Bronfman Center for Jewish Student Life, criticized that linkage. He told Tablet magazine that "the twinning of a radical proposal to divest from Israel with the broadly shared concerns around fair labor and fossil fuels is outrageous."
There is good reason to believe that NYU is invested in companies which contribute to or profit from - and thus help perpetuate - Israel's ongoing occupation and illegal settlement of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, its military and economic siege of Gaza, and its denial of the most basic human and civil rights to the 4.5 million Palestinians who live in these occupied Palestinian territories. While we may hold different views on the situation in Israel/Palestine, we are united in the belief that our university should not be complicit in the systematic denial of the rights of the Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation. We therefore believe that NYU must divest itself of any holdings it may have in such companies.
For decades, the State of Israel has brutally suppressed Palestinian demands for self-determination. Since 1967, Israel has implanted hundreds of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and unilaterally annexed East Jerusalem, both of which are actions deemed illegal by the international community, including the United States. The International Court of Justice has ruled that Israel's construction of a wall that encloses parts of the West Bank and further infringes on Palestinian lives and livelihoods is a violation of international law. Israel's policies violate the rights of Palestinian refugees, as stated in UNGA 194. At the same time, Israel has turned the impoverished and densely-populated Gaza strip into the world's largest open-air prison and launched repeated military assaults against it. The Israeli offensive against Gaza this past summer killed more than 2,100 Palestinians, the great majority of them civilians and a quarter of them children.
Several multinational corporations have been targeted in recent years for their profiteering from the occupation. These include Caterpillar, which sells the bulldozers that routinely demolish Palestinian homes and uproot their olive trees; Veolia Environment, which helped construct and currently operates the light rail system connecting West Jerusalem to illegal Israeli settlements; Motorola Solutions, which provides motion-detection "virtual fences" for the illegal West Bank settlements, as well as a mobile communication system for the Israeli Army; Hewlett-Packard, which provides biometric identification systems used at Israeli military checkpoints to control the movement of Palestinians; G4S, which provides equipment for Israeli prisons holding Palestinian political prisoners and for Israeli military checkpoints and the Separation Wall; Elbit Systems, which manufactures Hermes military drones that Israel uses for targeted extrajudicial killings in Gaza; and Northrop Grumman, which supplies the Israeli military with the Longbow system for Apache AH64D helicopters, including Longbow Hellfire missiles, as well as radar engineering and support for F-15 and F-16 combat jets. A growing number of organizations, including TIAA-CREF, the Presbyterian Church (USA), the United Methodist Church, the Mennonite Church and the Quaker Friends Fiduciary Corporation, have already divested from some of these companies.
NYU students, faculty and staff have a long and proud tradition of demanding that the university live up to its professed values, from the anti-apartheid struggle to the current fossil fuels divestment campaign. The time has now come for NYU to take action that, by exerting financial and moral pressure, can help end the Israeli occupation and support the aspirations of both Palestinians and Israelis for justice and self-determination.
We therefore call on NYU to divest from all companies in its portfolio that contribute to or profit from the Israeli occupation.
Comment: The rabbi should clean his glasses and reread the petition which has no per se linking or "twinning." If the action of divestment makes the statement of a moral high ground to other issues of concern, it is an acceptable pursuit. What is outrageous is Israel pissing on human rights and international law, killing innocent children, obliterating Palestinian neighborhoods, destroying agriculture and infrastructure, restricting food and water, stealing land, military aggression...and the list goes on. Perhaps the other equally divested and boycotted concerns should be upset they are viewed in the same league as the Israeli abomination.
The NYU administration has rejected calls for divestment from fossil fuel companies. In March, the university said divesting from fossil fuels would have little impact and that they would consider divestment only in cases of "clear and compelling moral or humanitarian objective and an absence of alternative actions NYU can take."
. . . is pitifully small number out of a total faculty count well in excess of 2000. Nevertheless, it is still a hopeful sign that that at least some Americans are publicly opposed to US assistance in the perpetration of Israeli crimes and are willing to stand up and be heard, even at peril to themselves.
Sadly, I'm quite certain that the power of AIPAC and similar organizations will make all of them pay for their stand, either via massive propagandizing against them which may well result in loss of their jobs/status or by having AIPAC's bought-and-paid-for politicians expand the scope of already existing laws which hinder organized efforts to boycott Israel for any reason, probably both.