George Mason University Student Group to Boycott Israeli Billionaire Shari Arison During Graduation Ceremony

[Poster from GMU`s Students Against Israeli Apartheid] [Poster from GMU`s Students Against Israeli Apartheid]

George Mason University Student Group to Boycott Israeli Billionaire Shari Arison During Graduation Ceremony

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following report was written by Amira Hass and published on Haaretz on 17 December 2013. The graduation already took place.]

 

U.S. student group to boycott Israeli billionaire Shari Arison

 

Students at George Mason University in Virginia plan to walk out of their graduation ceremony on Thursday in protest of Israeli businesswoman-philanthropist Shari Arison, who is due to deliver a speech and receive an honorary degree from the university.

Once Arison finishes her talk, the students will return to the hall and participate in the ceremony. 

The university’s Students Against Israeli Apartheid group, which includes both students and lecturers, decided to go ahead with the protest after coordinating with the school’s administration. In recent weeks, the group has been waging a campaign on campus against the university’s ties with the Israeli-American billionaire. George Mason’s administration told Haaretz it has notified Arison of the planned protest.

The ceremony will be held for 1,500 of 4,000 students completing undergraduate and graduate degrees.

In 2012, Arison donated funds to the public university for creating the Shari Arison Endowed Professorship of Doing Good Values. The purpose of the endowment is to “[explore] a values-based philosophy in business and other leadership spheres.”

Students Against Israeli Apartheid wrote a letter accusing the Arison Group of involvement “in the illegal occupation and colonization of Palestine … and turns the repression, discrimination and displacement of the Palestinian people into profit.” The letter charges the company’s various holdings with offering mortgages in the settlements, mining for minerals in an occupied portion of the Dead Sea, financing the Jerusalem’s light rail, construction at checkpoints and the separation barrier, and involvement in the Bedouin resettlement plan by financing a new military compound in the Negev. The letter also says Israeli Arabs are discriminated against at branches of Arison’s Bank Hapoalim.

In their opinion, the connection with Arison runs counter to GMU’s declared values and hurts its reputation. “Honoring Arison,” they state in an open letter, “makes Mason appear to be a PR machine for robber baron billionaires, rather than an autonomous public research university.”

Craig Willse, an assistant professor in Cultural Studies at GMU, and Tareq Radi, a graduate student completing his Master’s degree in finance, are the co-signees of the SAIA letter. In a telephone interview they told Haaretz that the campaign they were conducting had generated an ongoing debate about issues connected directly with Israeli policies and also raised the general question of the laundering of corporate funds that are based, for example, on damage to the environment and are laundered through donations to universities. They said that their organization was created in early 2013 and that it has a nucleus of about 20 activists.

Their previous campaign targeted the sale of Sabra hummus, produced by the Strauss Group. Although campus cafeterias have not stopped selling this brand, they now offer an alternative one.

The New Century College, which has received an endowment for a Professorship of Doing Good Values (in cooperation with GMU’s School of Management), has already held an initial discussion of SAIA’s claims. Willse and Radi stated that they were very happy with the arrangement with the university’s administration, under which there will be a pre-coordinated walkout before the speech. Even if the administration does not agree with them, the coordination with it over the walkout and the recognition of their position constitute an important achievement, they said.

GMU, located not far from Washington, D.C., has a student population of 33,000. Willse and Raid noted that GMU has a relatively large proportion of Muslim Americans, due to the university’s geographical proximity to one of the largest Arab American communities in the U.S. They argue that the campus is generally apolitical but that their activities are changing that situation.

According to Willse, in light of the reduction in government support for public universities in the U.S., private donations are expected to increase and thus the principle of identifying the source of all private donations assumes increased importance.

In a written response to Haaretz, GMU Spokesperson Michele McDonald stated that of a total budget of $888 million for the 2013 fiscal year, $24.9 million, or 2.8 percent, came from private sources, and that the ratio of private funds to state funds varies from year to year. For example, the general fund (money from the Commonweath of Virginia) increased 11.2 percent while private funds increased 5.5 percent from the 2011-12 budget to the 2012-2013 budget. McDonald wrote that the endowment amount from Arison could not be disclosed.

When asked whether the facts publicized by the SAIA members in their letter were known to GMU before contact was made with Arison, McDonald replied: “Innovative, diverse, entrepreneurial, accessible … these words not only embody George Mason University’s core values and mission, they’ve also been used by global observers to describe the philanthropist and business leader who will speak at Mason’s winter graduation ceremony this week. Arison is committed to what she calls a ‘doing good values model,’ which focuses on people and the planet, not just profits.”

Haaretz asked the GMU spokesperson whether the granting of a platform to Arison, despite the criticism, signaled that the university did not find any ethical problem with her economic activities. “Mason stands by its commitment to freedom and learning, which means welcoming all points of view,” McDonald replied. “Having Ms. Arison speak at Mason provides another viewpoint and another voice, which can inspire thoughtful dialogue and greater understanding. Mason has a long history of friendship with not only the Jewish community but also with the Muslim, Arab and Palestinian communities.”

The Washington Jewish Week defines SAIA as “a small but vocal anti-Israel group on [GMU’s] campus.” The newspaper also reported that the head of Hillel at GMU, Ross Diamond, discounted the protest, calling Arison “a role model for our students. We have a lot to learn from her.”

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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