Divestment, a branch of the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, takes the spotlight once again as we begin a new year at UCLA.
Last year, the issue was voted down, but it still left our campus polarized. After the student government meeting on divestment, students felt uncomfortable voicing their opinions on the complex issue that is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict given that the resolution failed to reflect any nuance. This year, Students for Justice in Palestine is proposing divestment from companies that conduct business in Israel yet again, and we believe that UCLA is running the risk of perpetuating an even tenser environment between students with different backgrounds and viewpoints.
We must be wary of the long-term effects that this resolution will have on our Bruin community. By revealing the resolution’s true context and addressing the reasons why it is detrimental, we urge the Undergraduate Students Association Council to vote “no” on this resolution in order to ensure that students feel safe and comfortable to voice their own opinions regarding the conflict. Only by engaging in honest dialogue can we avoid a repeat of the detrimental effects of last year’s divestment hearing.
The damaging rhetoric in this year’s conversation has already begun. This year’s divestment effort unveiled a Facebook profile picture campaign logo that reads, “UCLA Divest,” using a map of Israel as the letter “I.” The map makes no distinction between Israel proper, the West Bank and Gaza; it instead marks the entire historic territory, without any borders. Two years ago, on our own campus, SJP corrected a Bruins for Israel map that failed to exclude the West Bank or the Gaza Strip from Israel. Since then, BFI has been cognizant and thoughtful of the borders it uses. By representing all of Israel and the Palestinian territories, SJP is questioning the borders of not only the disputed Palestinian territories, but of the Jewish state of Israel as well.
To be clear, UCLA Divest is a blatant extension of the greater BDS movement. As a whole, the BDS movement demonizes and delegitimizes Israel through its misleading approach to a complex and lengthy conflict. The BDS movement boils down to anti-Semitism as it dismisses the right of the Jewish people to self-determination by conveniently failing to offer or discuss a solution for long-term peace after its initial goal of ending the occupation is achieved. In this context, the campaign calling for human rights masks anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.
While we oppose this resolution, we do not stand for human rights violations. By framing the entire conflict as a zero-sum game, this resolution will isolate the pro-Israel community. Including diverse communities is essential to creating progressive dialogue on this campus.
Ultimately, passing this resolution would be an endorsement of the global BDS movement by members of council, whose votes are supposed to be representative of the student body that elected them. The decision to vote for this resolution – even by councilmembers who claim they do not support or agree with BDS – will extend farther than the council table when the BDS movement claims the resolution a victory. We have already seen this after UC Berkeley’s student government passed a similar divestment resolution in 2013. Multiple communities on our campus would feel marginalized, targeted, threatened and unwelcome.
Furthermore, we can’t help but question why USAC is voting on such a resolution in the first place rather than on local issues of importance to the entire UCLA community. Continuing a trend from last year’s USAC, 14 undergraduates on student council are on track to discuss and vote on an issue that has no relevance to student life or to the platforms they ran on. It is an utter disservice to themselves and to the entire student body, which pays a portion of student fees to USAC, to divert their energy and capacity for change away from important areas to an ongoing geopolitical issue that only tears apart communities and perpetuates party politics. More importantly, this is a global problem that even experts struggle to answer.
As Bruins and as human beings, we have a responsibility to support our fellow students to work toward positive progress in a safe, welcoming environment. We see this as a matter of finding a more effective, less vitriolic approach to dealing with this issue on our campus, and we hope our fellow Bruins will see it that way too.
Davidovits is a fourth-year economics student and the president of Bruins for Israel. Hit is a third-hyphen year neuroscience student and the vice president of Bruins for Israel.
