The student council at the University of Illinois-Chicago (UIC) on Tuesday voted to divest their school’s $2.3 billion endowment from Lockheed Martin, Hewlett-Packard, Boeing, and Caterpillar, in other words, the usual suspects guilty of doing business with the Jewish State, but the vote came with a twist: those companies were also punished for their shameful collaboration with other “despotic regimes,” such as the United States and the United Kingdom.
According to the Washington Free Beacon, the debate over the decision became so fierce, Jewish students asked campus police for protection.
The decision reads like the brainchild of an SDS manifesto from the 1960s and a PLO list of demands from a hijacked Swissair Jumbo in Tripoli — probably because it is. It condemns America’s “drone attacks in foreign countries that have killed between 2,700 and 5,000 people, torturing prisoners and keeping them indefinitely in Guantanamo Bay, and NSA’s mass surveillance,” which is why their school’s money should be kept from “Caterpillar, Hewlett-Packard, G4S, Lockheed Martin, Foxconn, Elbit Systems, and Boeing.”
According to the AMCHA Initiative, after a process that students described as non-transparent and discriminatory, a group called the Coalition for Peace made its case for fairness during a meeting of Undergraduate Student Government. In two hours of hostile debate, the Coalition for Peace made the case that the divestment resolution, as written, was anti-Semitic and targeted Israel unfairly.
Concerned Undergraduate Student Government (USG) members invited the Coalition for Peace to sit with members of UIC Divest and USG to re-write the resolution. At a meeting during which BDS proponents and opponents reportedly negotiated fairly, the parties agreed to a new resolution.
“Negotiations over the resolution were not easy but we tempered it so that it does not single out one nation, Israel, for condemnation,” said Moshe Rubin, a student involved with UIC Coalition for Peace.
The new resolution calls on UIC to divest from companies contributing to human rights abuses in the United States, China, Israel, the United Kingdom and elsewhere. The Coalition for Peace no longer considers the new resolution anti-Semitic, and so will not oppose it. But the group will not endorse it either, remaining concerned that the resolution is still connected to the global BDS movement.
Sociology major Chloe Schofield told the Beacon the resolution was initially mostly against Israel, but eventually “became fairer and more accessible to all UIC students.” She said she was “very proud to have played a part in the changes made to this resolution from one that singled out Israel and by association Jewish students, but also one that all students can relate to in one way or another.”
Schofield reported that Jewish students were “harassed” during the debate. The picture that emerges from this and other reports about the Chicago BDS vote is that Israel has become a synonym for “Jews” and that attacks on Israel on campus are now actively and regularly thinly veiled attacks against Jewish students.
“There were anti-Israel chants in the room along with Jewish students being harassed to the point they needed to be escorted by campus police to safety,” Schofield said, adding, “No student should ever feel unsafe on their campus but through the passage of even this neutral resolution, it has happened at UIC. People can find ways to spin the facts to support messages of hate, but I will always be proud of the work that was done. And, done by students this legislature was intended to intimidate, but were instead the ones who created something positive out of it, even if the other groups don’t want to acknowledge that.”
Is this Stockholm syndrome or merely a survival mechanism? Does boycotting Israel really become less injurious, or more palatable to a Jewish student on US campuses when the companies included are also cited for selling sophisticated weapons to other countries as well?