“Bringing down Israel really will benefit everyone in the world, everyone in society,” Lara Kiswani told UC Berkeley graduate students. To those who did not share her belief, she later went on to add, “As long as you continue to be on that side, I’m going to continue to hate you.”
Hate. What a painful, divisive and ugly word. Yet it stirred no objections from the University of California graduate students. They came for an “educational” panel sponsored by the BDS Caucus of UAW 2865. BDS stands for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel. It includes a boycott of Israeli academia.
UAW 2865 is the union that represents all teaching assistants across the University of California – from Berkeley to LA to San Diego. Its leadership endorsed the boycott of Israel. Members will vote on the boycott Dec. 4. Kiswani was invited to Berkeley to “educate” members in advance of the vote. What she provided was an education in hate.
Teaching BDS is the union’s policy, according to its leaders. The union’s leadership affirmed, “We have a responsibility as educators to both learn about and teach the … struggle of the Palestinian people for liberation from settler-colonialism and apartheid.” They allocated thousands of dollars to the effort. At UCLA, they invited Michael Letwin who has said that all of Israel is occupied Palestine.
Dissenting voices are shunted. Seven pro-BDS events were hosted, co-sponsored and promoted by the union at UCLA. How many events featured an anti-BDS speaker? Exactly zero. Many respected voices in the academic and labor communities are appalled by the boycott. The union refused to sponsor or even alert members to hear a single one.
Anti-BDS voices have no place in our union. The union’s refusal to expose members to a single anti-BDS voice should not be surprising. Their policy is to boycott every Israeli university and academic association. This is a direct effort to shut out idea-makers. It has a secondary, more pernicious effect of delegitimizing Israel and Israeli scholarship, stigmatizing Israeli scholars and their supporters and intimidating would-be dissenters. Many of my colleagues at UCLA have expressed unwillingness to speak out against this intimidation for fear of professional or social repercussions. The BDS movement wants to limit the discourse, and it is succeeding.
Our union sacrifices its own values in service of BDS. On principle, and on second thought, the Union’s refusal to air discrepant opinions is shocking. A union that prides itself on democracy and on protecting the rights of minorities has forsaken both sets of commitments. For the first time, our union is taking a stand to stigmatize a minority on the basis of national origin. Despite protests to the contrary, it is not possible to boycott the entire commercial, academic and cultural output of a country without stigmatizing the people from that country. Our union, which has taken principled stands to protect other minorities from stigmatization, is doing violence, not only to its own members, but to its own values by adopting BDS.
Should I risk marginalization to justify Israel’s existence, extol Israel’s contributions to society and academia, laud Israeli academia for upholding the values we only profess or point out the lies and slander upon which the BDS campaign is based? In keeping with the spirit of the boycott, I won’t trot out any of the lines promoted by the Israeli government. Instead, I will only quote the BDS movement, itself.
For those who think BDS is a means to promote peace, read its guidelines: “Events, projects, or publications that are designed explicitly to bring together Palestinians/Arabs and Israelis so they can present their respective narratives or perspectives, or to work toward reconciliation … (are) morally reprehensible forms of normalization that ought to be boycotted.”
BDS does not represent our values. It mocks them.
I believe the more you know about BDS, the more you’ll want to vote “No” on Dec. 4.
For more arguments against BDS, visit www.informedgrads.org.
Saidoff is a UCLA graduate student of political science.