The original version of this article contained an error and has been changed. See the bottom of the article for additional information.
By Gil Bar-Or
Fellow Bruins, not just Israelis or Palestinians, Muslims or Jews, but every single student on the UCLA campus: I want you to sit back and think about the fact that a majority of our elected council members decided to vote against a resolution that recognized the plight of both Palestinians and Israelis. Politics aside, this resolution simply asked to frame a more proactive, constructive dialogue on campus.
I am an Israeli who believes the Palestinian people have a right to self-determination in their homeland just as the Jewish people have a right to self-determination in theirs. I’ve visited the Gaza border with a joint Israeli-Palestinian non-governmental organization, Other Voice, participated in several protests on the streets of Tel Aviv and spoken with a number of Palestinian activists fighting for the welfare of the Palestinian people. I chose these experiences out of a genuine mission to understand the suffering of the other side.
I have spoken many times with the resolution’s main author, Undergraduate Students Association Council Internal Vice President Avi Oved, and am confident that his intention was to foster a positive space where students, as human beings, can sit down and discuss a global conflict without yelling, name-calling and overused talking points.
Anyone who attended the meeting can agree that Oved offered compromise on virtually every single contentious issue by the time the final amended version of the resolution was read. The continued personal opposition to Oved by other council members, despite his willingness to accept their own amendments, hinted at a lack of ethical conduct by our democratically elected representatives. Furthermore, some opponents were directly violating democratic values by amending many parts of the resolution but ultimately voting against the final version.
This proud Bruin, who stayed in the council meeting for its whole eight-hour duration, 7 p.m. to 3 a.m., apparently has no right to speak to fellow Palestinian students because the widely accepted definition of “dialogue” is not in conjunction with the views of the majority of our elected representatives on the student council and their supporters on campus. Bringing all sides onto a negotiation table without deliberately placing one above the other is a fundamental principle of conflict resolution. Unfortunately, several opponents on the student council stated that because Israelis and Jews come from a background of “white privilege”, those groups cannot be placed on an equal dialogue table with Palestinians.
The essence of democracy relies on a mutual understanding that different perspectives exist and that each viewpoint, especially the minority one, should have a legitimate representation in the decision-making process. At their last meeting, our council decided to vote against this founding principle of democracy by rejecting a resolution that directly calls for dialogue.
I urge you to read the amended resolution for yourself and decide on your own whether we, as True Bruins who “respect the rights and dignity of others,” reject dialogue and cooperation as a necessary ingredient of conflict resolution. At a time when an Israeli delegation and a Palestinian delegation, for the first time in four years, are finally sitting down in dialogue over peace talks, and are in desperate need of public support from both ends, our own student council does not see fit that we build a similar campus climate.
Bar-Or is a first-year electrical engineering student and a fellow in the USAC Internal Vice President’s Office.
Correction: The word public was misspelled.