Press Release: SJP at UCLA Concerned by Judicial Board Verdict and Its Implications for Student Government

Press Release: SJP at UCLA Concerned by Judicial Board Verdict and Its Implications for Student Government

Press Release: SJP at UCLA Concerned by Judicial Board Verdict and Its Implications for Student Government

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following press release was issued on 21 May 2014 by Students for Justice in Palestine at the University of California Los Angeles in response to a recent no conflict of interest verdic by the UCLA Student Judicial Board.]

Contact: sjpucla1@gmail.com

Students for Justice in Palestine views today’s Judicial Board ruling in SJP v. Singh and Rogers as a major blow to the integrity of student government at UCLA. Sunny Singh and Lauren Rogers’ actions clearly constituted a conflict of interest, and this was a missed opportunity for the Judicial Board to set a precedent. SJP is concerned that this verdict will signal a green light to additional off-campus groups to lobby student leaders and council members through free trips and other in-kind gifts as a means of buying loyalty and influencing council votes. SJP will await the full opinion of the Judicial Board, the justification of the majority opinion, and the position of minority opinion (if any) before outlining its next steps in the struggle to keep USAC free of off-campus lobbying interests.

The evidence presented by SJP would concern any reasonable observer, and stands as a counter to any claims by the Respondents that the case was merely a political attack. Both Singh and Rogers admitted on record to receiving in-kind gifts in the form of international travel, accommodation, meals, and networking opportunities worth thousands of dollars from the Anti-Defamation League and American Jewish Committee, respectively. These organizations have a public anti-divestment position, and are on record as encouraging students across campus to oppose divestment and other resolutions critical of the investment of university assets in the systematic violation of Palestinian human rights. The two organizations maintained ongoing contact with each of the respective Respondents since their trips, and continued to provide them with various benefits and networking opportunities throughout the academic year. Even more troubling is the fact that the ADL explicitly stated that it expected participants to apply what they learned from them through their position as student leaders, while the AJC contacted Rogers and explicitly asked her to vote against the divestment resolution. Any reasonable observer of these facts would believe that it is very possible that Singh and Rogers’ votes on divestment were influenced by these gifts and the political positions of those that provided them. Once given permission by the Judicial Board, SJP will release all relevant documentation provided to substantiate these claims. 

The real losers in this verdict are the UCLA students and the integrity of their student government. Through its verdict, the Judicial Board has validated behavior which many students believe was unethical, a violation of the duty of student government representatives, and would be deemed unacceptable had it replicated at the level of local, state, or federal government. The verdict also opens the door for outside groups to use free trips and other in-kind gifts to influence the undergraduate student government. If the trips provided by off campus pro-Israel organizations are permissible, there is a strong possibility that organizations with other political and commercial interests—in such industries as those of fossil fuel or private prisons—will engage in the same behavior to achieve their desired outcomes. Thus, it is our position that if the conflict of interest language is not strong enough to prohibit even this clearly inappropriate behavior, then the bylaws are in need of revision. We look forward to the Judicial Board recognizing this shortcoming at the very least, when it issues its full opinion.

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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