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Divestment Unmasked
By Fred Taub
February
2, 2005
 Proponents will tell
you they want to bring peace to the world, but the leadership looks at it
differently. The story involves government plots to wage a secret war and the
private citizens who are unwittingly carrying out the will of brutal foreign
dictatorships, while the evil leaders sit back and gloat at the fruits of their
labor. No, I'm not referring to the plot of a paperback spy novel, rather to
the divest-from-Israel campaign that started on college campuses in the United
States and is now extending to businesses and municipalities.
Our story begins in 1945, four years before Israel
was born, when the Arab League formed and officially declared its boycott
against the Jews and the forthcoming Jewish state. Their idea was to isolate
Israel economically, in hopes that such actions would starve out the Jews, who
would have no easily accessible trading partners once the British left the
Palestine region. The Arab League was an outgrowth of previous unification
efforts in the Arab world, which also included a boycott of Jewish interests in
the region as early as 1921. In fact, the boycott and its underlying hatred of
Jews was one of the unifying factors that created the Arab League. A common
enemy among warring factions can be a powerful motivator.
We fast-forward to the Clinton administration era,
when the Palestinian Authority was negotiating the borders of a proposed
Palestinian state. Francis Boyle, a US professor from Indiana, was working as a
consultant to the Palestinian Authority's negotiating team and publicly
proposed what he termed "a divestment campaign against Israel". His idea
furthered the Arab boycott of Israel by specifically trying to draw students
into creating small campaigns on their campuses to get their universities to
not do business with Israel. This later included an academic boycott that
excludes Israeli universities, professors and their research. Boyle suggested
that while a single campus campaign would have little effect, having many US
campuses adopt the campaign would increase the impact of the overall campaign.
This was not, however, the first time such a campus
campaign had been attempted by the Palestinians. In the 1980s, the General
Union of Palestinian Students created a campaign to make people comfortable
with the concept of a Palestinian state. The results of that campaign are being
felt today, because the former college students of the '80s are now adults with
their own families, many of whom see the creation of a Palestinian state as a
good thing.
Enter the year 2000. A new generation is
on campus, and the campaign of a generation ago is no longer needed because the
Palestinian state every Israeli once feared is now being negotiated. The
proponents of a Palestinian state, one would have thought, should be happy and
working toward their new state with the goal of peace. After all, they now have
what they said they wanted. But that is not what is happened. Suicide bombers
and other terrorist attacks are being carried out against Israelis on a daily
basis. The rhetoric has progressed and so has the terrorism.
While researching these divestment / boycotts
campaigns for Boycott Watch, I came across nearly forgotten legislation - the
US Antiboycott laws of 1979, administrated by the Department of Commerce and
enacted to prevent foreign governments from imposing their foreign policy on
the US. When creating the law, Congress reiterated that creating foreign policy
was their domain and that they did not want de facto US foreign policy created
by individuals. Yet, that is the goal of the divest-from-Israel campaign.
People are trying to impose the foreign policy of Arab League countries on the
United States; a clear-cut violation of US Antiboycott laws.
I researched the laws further and discovered they
were primarily being enforced on exports, forbidding countries from requesting
declarations that no parts of goods being sent to Arab countries originated in
Israel and the ships used to transport the goods did not dock in Israel. This
law is being circumvented by requesting positive statements of origin, such as
a declaration that the products are entirely US made, thus still guaranteeing
no Israeli products will enter Arab countries.
The
specific goal of the divest-from-Israel campaign is to carry out and further
the Arab boycott of Israel, which has the overall goal of destroying Israel
economically. Non-Arab students and others who support the effort are told that
their participation is for humanitarian reasons ? the fight against oppression
of innocent people by Israeli soldiers - yet they fail to mention that shooting
rifles at the tanks of any army is not healthy. Iraqis who shoot at US troops
seldom live to tell about it either.
Along with
divestment, the Palestinian Authority has also been promoting a complete
economic blockade of Israel in Malaysia and a general boycott of Israeli
products in Europe. This economic warfare campaign is being carried out while
the Palestinian Authority is claiming to negotiate for peace in good faith with
Israel for the creation of a Palestinian state. One can hardly call this
back-handed approach to achieving peace benevolent. Rather, it can best be
summed up as economic terrorism. If Israel does not acquiesce to the desires of
the Arab League, i.e., vanish, then the boycott in all its forms will continue
indefinitely.
The Arab League has not placed any
end-goal to their boycott other than their greater goal of the complete
destruction of Israel. Similarly, the divest-from-Israel campaign is not
scheduled to end with the creation of a proposed Palestinian state, as its
non-Arab proponents are led to believe. Rather, it will continue indefinitely
as part of the Arab boycott of Israel. Like the '80s campaign to create an
adult population that accepted the notion of a Palestinian state, the desired
results of the divest-from-Israel campaign will be felt in twenty years, in the
next campaign ? dismantlement.
Realizing this, I
needed to get other groups involved against the illegal divest-from-Israel
campaign. I first contacted the Zionist Organization of America, because of
their ability to work with Congress on issues vital to Israel and because ZOA
National President, Morton A. Klein, is the kind of person who will not rest
until the job is done. Our efforts resulted in the ZOA getting a letter signed
by 20 members of Congress to the Department of Commerce requesting an
investigation into the matter of the illegal boycott of Israel.
While the ZOA was working on the Congressional
letter, Boycott Watch and the ZOA each challenged the legality of the
divest-from-Israel campaign to the Department of Commerce. We also sent letters
detailing the legal issues to Duke University, which was about to sponsor a
conference by the Palestinian Solidarity Movement / International Solidarity
Movement in furtherance of the divest-from-Israel campaign. Together, we
initiated the legal challenge to the Presbyterian Church USA's
divest-from-Israel stance, as well.
The ISM/PSM
officially recognizes the validity of "armed struggle" in its own book Peace
Under Fire (page 20). "Armed struggle" is the term terrorist groups - such as
Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Palestinian Authority's own Fatah and Al-Asqa
Martyrs Brigade - use for terrorism, to justify the murder of innocent men,
women and children. As such, the ISM/PSM is not the benevolent organization it
claims to be. Rather, it is an organization that tries to get non-Palestinians
to participate in furthering its terrorist ideology by implementing economic
terrorism, instead of suicide bomber terrorism. ISM/PSM supporters are
unwittingly supporting terrorists and their ideology while trying to advance
peace in the Middle East. Despite their good intentions, the non-Arab
divestment advocates have been tricked into violating US Antiboycott laws by
people whose primary goal is the destruction of Israel using the creation of a
Palestinian state as a tool of their hostilities.
In
the meantime, Divestment Watch was born to specifically concentrate on the
illegal divest-from-Israel campaign separately from the monitoring of general
boycotts. A primary goal of Divestment Watch is to coordinate efforts and to
challenge the legality of the divest-from-Israel campaign with Boycott Watch.
Challenging the divest-from-Israel campaign is not
just to protect Israel. The US is a target of the campaign as well. Imposing
the foreign policy of foreign countries on the US demonstrates the contempt of
the Arab League nations for the United States. Recruiting Americans to press
their foreign policy agenda on the US is reminiscent of Soviet and Nazi
attempts to infiltrate the US government.
Foreign
countries should not be allowed to dictate US foreign policy, nor should we
allow foreign countries to advocate in the US for the destruction of the
economy of a fellow democracy. Such actions are clearly against the best
interests of the US. The success of Israel's economy has a direct impact on the
US economy, because Israel is a key developer of new technologies, including in
medicine, computers and even space exploration; not to mention that it is the
democracy and free-market-economy example for the Middle-East.
There is little doubt that, considering how Arab
League countries have exported their manifestations of hate for Israel to the
US, including terrorism, divestment campaigns will eventually be directed
against the US. Clearly, the divest-from-Israel campaign is not in the best
interests of Israel or the United States, and must be stopped.
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