Divestment wars: Fighting For the Moral Highground. (Part One)

Before Iran-Divestment: Divest from Israel...

Five years before neo-cons and AIPAC launched their campaign to get the nation's state pension funds to divest from companies doing business with Iran, the `divestment movement' here in the United States had a distinctly different tone and tenor to it as exemplified by the following opening to a petition:

"We. the undersigned are appalled by the human rights abuses against Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli government, the continual military occupation and colonization of Palestinian territory by Israeli armed forces and settlers, and the forcible eviction from and demolition of Palestinian homes, towns and cities. We find the recent attacks on Israeli citizens unacceptable and abhorrent. But these should not and do not negate the human rights of the Palestinians"

It is quotes like these that seemed to have shaken Abe Foxman, ADL Executive Director, Alan Deshowitz, the good folks at AIPAC and the Rabbical Council of America to their very foundations.

Thus began the text of the Joint Harvard-MIT Petition for Divestment from Israel which sent shock waves through the university, academia as a whole and the nation. The movement was riggered in large measure by the opening of the Second Intifada and the fading hope that the Oslo Peace Process would preduce any tangible results. The call for Harvard to divest its investments in companies doing business with Israel, coupled by a campaign to cut military aid to Israel, shook Israel's supporters throughout the country to their core. The university Israel-divestment campaign had begun two years earlier across the country in Berkeley California. A national divestment conference there had attracted 450 participants nationwide. By December, 2002, some eight months after the major Israeli military incursion into the West Bank and Gaza, Operation Defensive Shield, more than 50 universities throughout the country had active Israel-divestment movements.

Already nervous by the growing grassroots empathy for Palestinians living under Israeli Occupation who had suffered terrible losses in `Desert Shield', Israel's more ardent supporters did not sit idly by in face of this challenge. As Will Youmans describes it, after the editorial board of the UCLA student newspaper endorsed divestment from Israel, US Congressman Henry Waxman immediately responded with a letter to the editor opposing the initiative. A month later 71 California state legislators introduced a bill opposing the divestment initiative specifically calling on the University of California to "reject calls to divest its pension funds that are invested in companies with ties to Israel." Not to be outdone by the legislature, then California Governor Gray Davis condemned the take over of a campus building at UCLA as `anti-semitic' and issued a pro-Israeli statement `as long as I am governor of this state, we will continue to stand side by side with our friends in Israel both in business and in friendship'. As Youmans points out - Israelis invest $162 billion in California and Israeli companies have over 200 offices there, many in Silicon Valley. Although the Israel-divestment campaign was mostly contained within universities, it did spill over into some communities where town and city councils considered anti-divestment resolutions.

And then the Israel divestment movement began to gain support among a number of Protestant churches, among them the Presbyterian Church and the United Church of Christ. When, in July 2004, the Presbyterian Church at a national convention called for studying selective investment of companies doing business with Israel as a way of pressuring Israel to dismantle settlements and withdraw from the territories the concern among Israel's supporters turned to panic, nothing short of that. One might argue that this was one of the most painful blows Israel's supporters in the United States have ever suffered. A psychological dam burst. Decades of work trying to construct Jewish-Protestant dialogues and cooperation in which support for Israel was a key element seemed to have been undermined. While some of the damage has been repaired as Presbyterians seemed to back off from the divestment issue a bit, one senses that a psychological barrier had been pierced from which, in the long run, there will be no return even if its ultimate impact has yet to be fully felt. A new kind of dialogue was taking shape.

Particularly upsetting to Israel's supporters were the parallels the Israel-divestment movement made between Israel and South Africa, between the Israeli Occupation of the 1967 territories and South African Apartheid. This was especially difficult to swallow for those who held a somewhat pristine and romanticized view of Israel's relations with the Palestinians. For to label the occupation as `apartheid' or even `apartheid like' is to raise the spectre of racism, a prospect many American Jews simply refuse to consider where it concerns the Jewish State. Among many mainstream American Jewish groups, there still exists a kind of psychological bubble concerning Israeli practicies in the territories where, despite all the evidence to the contrary, they simply cannot believe that Israel is committing the crimes of which it is accused. It is a powerful ideological-psychological position that resists rational arguments and facts. But it can't last forever (or perhaps I should say more honestly, I don't believe that it can last forever, maybe it can?).

Israel Divestment No, Iran Divestment Yes

Almost immediately, the Anti-Defamation League jumped into the fray as did the Jewish student organization Hillel. Nay, more than that, much of the mainstream Jewish Community nationwide participated and as they had done repeatedly since 1948 (and before) defended Israel, right or wrong. Although much of their information concerning the Israel-divestment campaign has been taken down from the ADL's website, the ADL were major players in the effort, largely successful I might add, to defuse the university anti-Israel-divestment wave (at least this time). Soon the campaign was smeared with the `anti-semitic' brush, and the equation that criticizing Israel is a form of anti-semitism - already around for some time - gained substantial steam. The likes of Abraham Foxman, David Horowitz and Alan Deshowitz joined forces in this common effort to stem the tide of criticism of Israel which emerged with more force nationwide than anytime (that I can think of) in the past forty years.

Unable to sustain itself in the face of considerable and coordinated pressures, the Israel-divestment campaign lost stem after a few years. It is not entirely dead in the water but seems to have lost much of its energy for the moment. Its decline dovetails very nicely with the rise of divestment campaigns of a different political character.

In the interim, AIPAC, the ADL and some of their neo-con allies shifted gears, went on the offensive and began to put together divestment campaigns of their own. Taking advantage of the post 9-11 anti-Arab, anti-Moslem hysteria gripping the country and President Bush's targeting Iran, Syria and North Korea as an `axis of evil', mainstream Jewish groups they joined forces most especially with Frank Gaffney and the Center for Security Policy to begin a series of divestment campaigns in a bid to re-gain the moral high ground and put Israel's critics on the defensive. Given their vast supply of money and scores of schooled political operative and connections in what might be called `the old structures' (political parties, legislative bodies, media) it wasn't much of a contest in the end.

The rules of the game `so to speak' - as I have come to understand them - are interesting.

As long as divestment focused on Israel or Israeli-related economic interests, Israel's more zealous supporters cried `foul, unfair'! Any initiative that called on Congress to cut US military or economic aid to Israel, or that suggested the US using sanctions against Israel to pressure it to withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza, were greeted with a chorus of howls and increasing accusations of anti-semitism. Initiatives that called for divestment were similarly aggressively opposed and rejected. Indeed for some groups, like the ADL, the very basis for any kind of cooperation around Middle East issues has been a rejection of putting any economic or political pressure on Israel. To work with many mainstream Jewish groups one must renounce such campaigns. Thus when the Presbyterian Church called for limited sanctions against Israel to pressure it to dismantle West Bank settlements, it caused nothing short of a fury in mainstream Jewish circles that still has not abated.

But if cutting aid and funding to Israel, supporting divestment schemes that target Israel are considered taboo Israel's US supporters were not adverse to turning this practice on its head when it came to Iran (and Sudan). Indeed they applied exactly the same perscriptions they so deplore concerning Israel to Iran and Sudan. To bridge this obvious moral and political contradiction (which was done without skipping a moral beat) it has been expedient, if not a necessity, to characterize Iran as nothing short of a modern version of Nazi Germany. And this has been done with a vengeance. Granted there is much to criticize the Iranian regime for in the way of human rights violations, but there is that old saying about the vulnerability of people living in glass houses. Iran's short comings - they do exist - are exagerated as is its threat to either the Middle East or the United States. Israel's short comings are either minimized or in many cases outright denied. Selective memory at its most blatant.

The Iran divestment movement dovetails with the Bush Administration plans to attack Iran, which Scott Ritter a few days ago in Denver made clear is still very much alive. This, in turn, is a part of the Bush Administration's plans to create a `new Middle East' free for multinationals of all sorts to exploit at their will. Amplifying the `myth of the Iranian Threat' bears many similarities to the `myth of the Iraqi threat' that was built up before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Iran: Second On A Long List?

The current divestment issue didn't start with Iran but with the Sudan. Iran is second on the list. Some PERA pension fund supporters have wondered openly `who's next?'. They are right to post the question as these state divestment campaigns have probably just begun. Given the success of the first two - Sudan and Iran - other campaigns (Syria, North Korea, who knows where else) will most likely follow.

Sudan was an interesting and strategically clever country to target first. The main forces driving the campaign, mainstream Jewish groups in conjunction with some Black organizations and Gaffney and his neo-con friends accomplished a number of goals, first among them pressuring many state legislatures to mandate their state pension funds to divest from companies doing business with the Khartoum regime. Other accomplishments included:

• the Sudan divestment campaign strengthed sometimes strained ties between mainstream Jews and some mainstream Black groups that are naturally concerned with human rights violations in Africa. In the same light, a fair number of labor and human rights organizations - looking at Sudan's record - were coaxed on board.
• the campaign exposed the corruption and repressive nature of the regime in Khartoum, with its Arab-Islamic fundamentalist leadership
• although rarely admitted, the campaign complicated China's attempts to build long range energy relationships with the Sudan and embarrassed it as a country not concerned with human rights. In so doing, this campaign aided US strategic goals in Africa which are more and more in competition with the Chinese
• also not generally admitted, the campaign against the tragedy unfolding in Darfur Province - questionable whether it can be called a genocide, but clearly crimes against humanity have been committed - takes some world's attention off of the Israeli Occupation at a time when defending it on any moral grounds has pretty much evaporated. Specifically, as world wide pressure was mounting against the establishment of the wall on Palestinian territory, the Sudan crisis diverted attention from Israel's record to the crisis deepening in Darfur. The more attention on Darfur, the less on the West Bank and Gaza.
• finally the very success of getting state legislatures to divest from Sudan opened a whole new wave of momentum towards targeting the Iran with the same `medicine'.

No doubt, the Sudan sanctions were a dry run for the currne Iran-divestment campaign. Who will be next?

To be continued...

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