Good Faith or Good Tactics? How Some Anti-Divestment Groups Manipulate Public Discourse and Smear SJP

Good Faith or Good Tactics? How Some Anti-Divestment Groups Manipulate Public Discourse and Smear SJP

Good Faith or Good Tactics? How Some Anti-Divestment Groups Manipulate Public Discourse and Smear SJP

By : Omar Zahzah and Rahim Kurwa

When preparing to bring up its divestment bill in February of this year, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) engaged in what is widely described as one of the most open and far-reaching public campaigns on campus. The organization made presentations to over twenty student groups, including those which hold views that might be described as our polar opposite. During this time, SJP repeatedly contacted UCLA student groups Hillel and Bruins for Israel (BFI) in order to secure a presentation to their members. The results of this outreach are worth reviewing as they put into question whether groups that oppose divestment were acting in good faith or merely taking advantage of SJP’s openness and flexibility.

Taking Advantage of SJP

Instead of being allowed to present their resolution to Hillel’s general membership, SJP was asked to hold a closed meeting between student representatives from both organizations. In this meeting, Hillel and BFI leaders were presented with the resolution and asked for any edits or suggestions they wished to make. They said that while they did not have serious problems with the bill as written, they opposed the BDS movement as a whole and asked that we include a clause expressing neutrality with respect to the BDS movement. Acting in good faith, SJP agreed to add the language they requested on the logic that while our organization supports the BDS movement, it was not necessary for everyone on campus to support the entire movement in order for a bill focused on campus divestment to be passed.

However, rather than this concession resulting in their being less opposed to the bill, the very students who asked for the BDS neutrality clause used it as a new source of talking points in order to further attack SJP. During the divestment hearing, these groups claimed that SJP was being duplicitous by inserting this clause and that despite the bill`s neutrality on BDS they could prove that SJP actually supported the entirety of the BDS movement. This made it look like BDS was something to be afraid of and something SJP was hiding its support for, when in fact SJP has always supported BDS (and all non-violent economic and social pressure) and only added that clause to respond to their concerns. In the end, SJP was attacked for making the exact concession that its attackers had asked for in the first place.

Another issue that bears examining is the claim that SJP should have co-written the resolution with BFI and Hillel. There are several problems with this contention. In the first place, it demonstrates how SJP, and Palestinian Bruins overall, are held to a completely different standard than other groups on campus. For instance, would Bruin Democrats seriously be expected to co-write a bill alongside Bruin Republicans? SJP is one student organization, like any other, and like any other student organization, SJP has the right to draft bills which concern the priorities and values of its members. Nevertheless, the fact that SJP reached out to members of Hillel and BFI to give them an opportunity to hear more information about the resolution and voice their concerns means that SJP was attempting to include them. Any organization that was contacted, that had the opportunity to ask questions, pose problems, and communicate with SJP members in depth about the bill was a part of the bill-creation process. For these reasons, when asked in February to co-write a bill with BFI and Hillel, we politely declined but still offered to make reasonable edits that their students asked for. But despite our openness to their edits, these groups publicly claimed that only being able to co-write a bill from scratch would satisfy their concerns. They went on to create a narrative that said that there was some meaningful area of agreement that could be reached between both parties if they just started over from scratch. However, as evidence from the campaign shows, this turned out to be false.

In a radio interview held on 25 February 2014, Daily Bruin opinion editor Eitan Arom asked SJP and Hillel representatives what they could agree to co-write. SJP said that they were completely flexible on the content of a resolution, as long as the minimum requirement of divestment from companies that violate Palestinian rights was met. The Hillel representative, however, could offer no such avenue of compromise, instead suggesting that the groups write a resolution saying that “We are Bruins, you are Bruins, and we can agree to disagree.” (See roughly ten minutes and twenty-five seconds into this radio show for the clip.) SJP students also met with a university administrator, Berky Nelson, who had taken it upon himself to ask members of BFI if they would agree to divest from just one of the five companies on SJP’s list, Caterpillar, based on its completely obvious and egregious violations of Palestinian human rights. The response he described to SJP was a flat out no.

So, on the one hand, we see anti-divestment groups acknowledging that they were unwilling to move towards SJP’s position in any meaningful way. On the other hand, we see them promoting the idea of “co-authorship” as if it was actually a genuine possibility, and attacking SJP as somehow at fault for not having pursued it.

Stepping back for a moment, we can see that if the groups opposed to divestment had been acting in good faith, then SJP’s concessions would have produced a change in their response to the divestment resolution, even something as small as opposing the bill for a different reasons. Instead, these groups used SJP’s concession on BDS as a new way to attack the resolution and SJP’s integrity. The same applies to the possibility of co-authorship. If anti-divestment students had been acting in good faith, they either would have been able to offer some kind of meaningful compromise, or they would never have claimed that co-authorship was possible. Instead, while privately admitting that they would not compromise, they still used the public stage to claim the opposite, arguing that if SJP had been more reasonable, the groups could have co-authored a bill together and satisfied everyone’s concerns.

The Same Behavior, Now Applied to the MSA

The divestment hearing sadly also included a cavalcade of racist, tokenizing, and grotesquely Islamophobic commentary. In the wake of this shocking display, the Muslim Students Association (MSA) took it upon itself to draft a statement denouncing Islamophobia on campus and urging the campus to adopt a diversity requirement as one way of pushing back against the deeply offensive ideas on display at the hearing. However, when MSA approached BFI and Hillel with the statement, the same saga played out again. First, BFI and Hillel asked for the statement to include language denouncing anti-Semitism. Then, when the MSA added this language, BFI and Hillel objected to the resolution, and rather than offer edits to the MSA’s new clauses simply declined to endorse the statement, stating instead that they wished that MSA leaders would agree to start over by co-writing a statement. It got so absurd that the MSA’s anti-Islamophobia statement was eventually falsely portrayed as an attack on Jewish students. Once again, we see the same cat and mouse game playing out. When approached with a reasonable statement, offer edits. When the edits are accepted, argue that they are not good enough and that the only possible way forward is to start from scratch all over again. When these demands are not met, describe the other group as the aggressor.

At the end of the day, members of SJP and MSA were clearly taken advantage of over the course of the past quarter. Their openness and flexibility was met with a perplexing back and forth that only served to delay and obscure the original intent of their work. Being open and transparent is admirable and both SJP and the MSA should continue their policies of transparency and flexibility. But in the future, SJP and the MSA should not automatically assume that their good faith will be met with the same good faith, and should make sure that their openness is not taken advantage of in the same way as it was this year.

Fortunately, over thirty different organizations signed on to MSA’s press release, and over twenty different organizations came out to speak in support of SJP’s divestment resolution. What all of these organizations recognized is that standing in solidarity with another group does not mean asserting your voice over theirs. It does not mean compulsively inscribing the narrative of your troubles over the troubles of others. It means that, for everything you give, there is so much more you hold back, because you recognize that the most precious and necessary moment in overcoming oppression is that in which one stands and speaks in their own voice, with their own words, as the rest of the world looks on. Despite the frustrating experience of attempting to work with BFI and Hillel, the beautiful acts of solidarity shown by so many other groups reaffirm the value and importance of our anti-racist and anti-oppression activism.

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412