The academic year is almost over at U.C. Santa Cruz, but there was still time for the student senate to vote this week on a resolution encouraging the school to divest from companies profiting from the “Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.”
The resolution was defeated, as our story on page 5 relates. That’s good news, but a non-binding resolution that would have no effect on university policy is of much less concern than what lies behind it — the atmosphere of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hostility it represents and, perhaps, engenders.
Jewish students in California may not be under siege from the BDS movement, but their student senates certainly are. Since November, divestment measures have come before student senates at nine California universities.
That’s nine too many.
It is of little import whether the resolutions pass (as they did at U.C. Berkeley, Irvine, San Diego and Riverside, where it was later overturned) or fail (U.C. Davis and Santa Cruz) or get tabled (UCLA and U.C. Santa Barbara). When Jewish students are subjected to the vitriol directed at them during the campaigns and the senate meetings, and then afterward on campuses where they are defeated, the larger Jewish community — indeed, the entire community — must step forward and say this is not acceptable.
During the debate at UCSC last week, several Jewish students spoke up and said they felt personally threatened by the rhetoric. In response, resolution supporters insisted their campaign was not anti-Jewish or anti-Semitic, but in opposition to Israeli policies.
If Jewish students say they feel targeted, isn’t that enough? Why do outsiders get to define what is and isn’t anti-Jewish, what is and isn’t deeply hurtful to the members of a particular minority?
Yes, the content of these resolutions is itself disturbing. Student senates shouldn’t even be involving themselves in such matters — and if they do, someone should question why they spend so much time critiquing one country where democracy prevails, to the exclusion of nations like Syria, Sudan and China where it does not.
Still, our larger grievance is with the anti-Jewish and anti-Israel hostility fueling these campaigns, in the guise of free speech or political opinion. Posting a sign equating Zionism with racism (which happened at U.C. Davis) or telling an Israeli student that it would be OK if her family died in a suicide bombing (which reportedly happened at Cal) are acts of hatred that must not be countenanced.