By the time the council actually voted on the issue, the meeting had extended into the wee hours of the morning on February 26. It lasted for nearly 12 hours, with nine hours of public comments, despite each speaker being limited to only two minutes per statement. As a student in the audience, I watched with a sense of helplessness as blocks of students went up to the microphone to gush hate, bias, and one-sided claims from all sides of the divestment advocacy spectrum.
When it was finally my turn to read my statement to the council, three hours after I had gotten in line, my whole body began to shake with the force of my words and the knowledge that hundreds of eyes in the room—and thousands of ears listening to a live stream—were focused on me. I shook with the power of conviction and the feeling that I must fight to do something, anything, to carve out a place for myself in a university that was threatening to stifle not only my voice, but also my identity and my connection to the Jewish homeland.
After sitting through the public comments, the council members deliberated on what they had heard. After two straw votes, former USAC President John Joanino decided to move to a secret ballot—though many believe that secrecy was compromised, since the two straw votes clearly revealed the council members’ opinions. The meeting ended with a 5-7-0 vote: The divestment resolution failed.
Reflecting on the USAC meeting, Eshaghian said,
Since the divestment hearing and listening to nine hours of individuals continuously attack Israel and spew slanderous claims, I have felt ashamed to call myself a Bruin. As a result of divestment, not only my mental stability but also my academics have suffered. These attacks on my identity and rights to self-determination have not only affected me emotionally, but have had devastating effects on my academics and have hindered my purpose on this campus—to be a student. It is ridiculous to me that at such a world-renowned university, our education is being put on hold because my identity is being put on trial.
Many of us felt precisely the same way. And in the aftermath of the divestment decision, our feelings were unfortunately confirmed. An eruption of hate targeted council members with extreme cyberbullying from students who disagreed with their stance, which had been made public during the straw votes.
The divestment resolution was by no means an isolated incident. Days before the end of the winter quarter, the Muslim Student Association published an official press statement condemning Islamophobic speech, and asked councilmembers and student groups to sign in solidarity. While the underlying idea of denouncing Islamophobia is a commendable one, the statement included language that was offensive to students who support the Jewish state of Israel, since it made a distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.
BFI, Hillel at UCLA, and former USAC Internal Vice President Avi Oved did not agree with this distinction and chose not to sign. As a result, they were vilified for their supposed failure to denounce Islamophobia. The individuals who question these Jewish organizations and representatives neglect to take into consideration the gravity of the offending language, which undermines the identity of most Jewish students, which is, in turn, predicated on the connection between Israel and Judaism.
While many students hoped that the steadily deteriorating campus climate would return to a tolerable equilibrium after the spring break, this hope proved futile, since USAC elections in the middle of the spring quarter once again turned the campus on its head and polarized its communities.
