The student senate at U.C. Santa Cruz this week defeated a resolution urging the university to divest from companies that “profit from the illegal Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.”
The UCSC student senate voted 19-17 against the resolution, with three abstentions, on June 4. The measure, which named companies including Hewlett-Packard, Caterpillar and General Electric, needed a two-thirds majority to pass.
The senators discussed the bill for about 45 minutes and then voted, according to sources; a public session was held at the previous week’s senate meeting, with debate lasting until 1:30 a.m.
Representatives of the Santa Cruz Israel Action Committee, Santa Cruz Hillel and the new Jewish Student Union (as well as other agencies) were instrumental in lobbying against the resolution, said Danielle Meidan, a sophomore from Southern California who helped lead the push.
Meidan, a dual U.S.-Israeli citizen whose father is Israeli, said opponents of the resolution “weren’t very optimistic” that the bill could be defeated as recently as last week. “It wasn’t going in our favor,” she said. “We were preparing for the worst.”
But in the end, she said, the wording of the resolution was too aggressive, repeatedly using phrases such as “Israel’s system of apartheid” and “Israel’s ongoing human rights violations.” The resolution was introduced by the Committee for Justice in Palestine at U.C. Santa Cruz.
“We did a lot of outreach and made sure that we showed the senators our personal reasons why it would hurt us and the campus climate,” Meidan said. “It would have separated the campus, and I think that concerned the senators.”
Meidan is president of the Santa Cruz Israel Action Committee, the newly elected outreach chair of the Jewish Student Union and a StandWithUs Emerson Fellow.
The vote came four weeks after a similar resolution failed at U.C. Davis and seven weeks after a divestment resolution passed at U.C. Berkeley.
Divestment pushes at other campuses in recent months have met with varied results. Nonbinding resolutions passed at U.C. Irvine in November 2012 and at U.C. San Diego and U.C. Riverside in March, though the latter was overturned after opponents argued they were not given enough time to prepare for the vote. Student councils voted down similar resolutions at U.C. Santa Barbara in April and at Stanford University in March. — andy altman-ohr