Qumsiyeh: A Human Rights Web

Boycotts and Divestment

"Pro-Israel student groups staged counterprotests before, during, and after the conference, calling the event anti-Semitic. Comparing their goals to those of college students two decades ago who successfully urged colleges to sell investments with ties to apartheid South Africa, students from more than 70 colleges spent two days listening to academics and Arab-American leaders make the case for divestment as a response to what they described as Israel's extensive human-rights violations. ......The conference drew far more opponents than participants. ...Down the street from Hillel, in an unlit room of Chabad House, another Jewish student center, Rabbi Avi Weiss, who had come from New York to rally Jewish students in protests, blessed Jewish students and warned them of the"evil" at the conference. "But, rabbi," asked one student, "would one form of activism be to go in and hear what they have to say?" "Should I be scared?" the student added. "I'm serious. Are any activists going inside? I want to go inside." "It's too dangerous," warned the rabbi.....Late Sunday, Jewish students who had traveled here from Barnard College and Columbia, New York, and Yeshiva Universities lay still on the sidewalk in front of the conference site, "re-enacting" the recent bombing at Hebrew University, in Jerusalem, by a Palestinian terrorist..." (Richard Morgan, "Vested Interests: A student movement critical of Israel gains steam and attracts scorn" Chronicle of Higher Education, October 25, 2002)

E-mail by e-mail, teach-in by teach-in, students and professors at institutions like the University of California, Harvard, MIT and Princeton are backing the Palestinian cause by campaigning to get U.S. universities out of stocks that do business in Israel.....

They are modeling their effort on the divestment movement that helped topple apartheid. They have run into strong opposition on campus. The Anti-Defamation League sees an attempt to ``demonize Israel, through the propagation of a false and odious comparison to apartheid-era South Africa.''

In a pro-divestment column published in U.S. newspapers in June, South African Nobel laureate and former Archbishop Desmond Tutu drew parallels between Palestinians under occupation and blacks who lived in segregated districts during apartheid....

Palestinian lawmaker Hanan Ashrawi said she was encouraged. "It will begin to get people to question their assumptions,'' Ashrawi said, noting American Jews were among the "people of courage and wisdom'' who have signed divestment petitions. One is Karen Brodkin, a UCLA anthropologist. She said in a telephone interview she did not condone Palestinian violence, but believed "the more powerful of the two sides has a responsibility to do something.''

Ilan Pappe, a Jewish Israeli political scientist, sees clear parallels between his country and apartheid South Africa." The only thing that can end the Israeli occupation is outside pressure,'' Pappe said.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2002/08/06/MN33709.DTL

Zionist panic on divestment: http://www.divestmentwatch.com/ and http://www.boycottwatch.org/
Zionist list of their own products to "buy" http://www.finefoodsisrael.com/stores.asp http://www.buyisraelgoods.org/

Back to Activist Manual
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South African apartheid and Israel/Palestine Apartheid
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/1957644.stm
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0511/S00005.htm
http://www.palestinecampaign.org/pdf/ronnie_kasrils.pdf
http://www.arthurmag.com/magpie/?p=434

"It will be a tragedy - for Israelis, Palestinians and the world - if peace is rejected and a system of oppression, apartheid, and sustained violence is permitted to prevail."
Jimmy Carter, Former US President, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid - Simon & Schuster 2006

"I've been very deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land; it reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa."
Desmond Tutu, Nobel Peace Prize winner, 29 April 2002 The Guardian

"We declare Israel as a racist, apartheid state in which Israel's brand of apartheid as a crime against humanity."
United Nations World Congress Against Racism NGO Forum Declaration 2001

"The Jews took Israel from the Arabs after the Arabs had lived there for a thousand years. In that, I agree with them, Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state." Hendrik Verwoerd South African Prime Minister 1958-66 ("Architect of apartheid")
23 November 1961, Rand Daily Mai

Pictures from Switzerland-Israel game of 2005, Basel