Cornell Students Renew Call for Israel Divestment

The Cornell Daily Sun recently featured an opinion piece written by three students calling on Cornell to divest its endowment from Israeli companies.

Like many other universities across the globe, Cornell is no stranger to the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign aimed at Israel. In the spring of 2014, an actual resolution calling for divestment was brought to the Student Assembly, but it was tabled.

This op-ed, however, renews the call at Cornell after the Board of Trustees adopted new guidelines for determining what to do with university endowment investments that are politically contentious or inspire the wrath of Cornell’s student and faculty body. These new guidelines allow for divestment when a company’s actions are found to be “morally reprehensible” and were used to reject a call for divestment from the fossil fuel industry.

It was only due time that Cornell students began using the “morally reprehensible” threshold to target Israel for divestment.

According to the authors of the op-ed, Cornell should divest from “several corporations which directly and indirectly profit from Israel’s 48-year occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.”

The authors do not realize that the underlying premise of their argument is false because no such occupation exists. No Israeli military presence exists in Gaza, as it is controlled solely by the terrorist group Hamas, and the West Bank is a disputed territory where Israel maintains only a limited military presence for security concerns.

Three members of Cornellians for Israel (CFI), a campus pro-Israel group, wrote a letter to the editor in the Daily Sun responding to this call for boycotting Israel. However, their argument against the boycott was weak and flawed, even at times conceding to the pro-BDS side.

The best way to counter the movement to boycott Israel is to explain the true obstacle to peace between Israel and its neighbors. The conflict has never been about territory. Peace efforts have failed because Israel’s neighbors have refused to accept the Jewish state’s right to exist. Palestinian leadership under Arafat and Abbas have repeatedly rejected offers for a two-state solution.

There is no doubt that there are very poor economic conditions in the Palestinian territories. Proponents of BDS pin this on Israel, but ignore how the suffering of the Palestinian people is actually due to Hamas and the Palestinian Authority directing all of their resources towards the elimination of Israel rather than the prosperity of their own people. Israel has been forced to use heightened security procedures because of the constant threat of Palestinian terrorism from the West Bank, which was at its height during the Second Intifada. Since the West Bank security fence was constructed, terror attacks drastically declined. In addition, the use of checkpoints have been necessary to prevent the smuggling of weapons into Israel. None of these security procedures amounts to any sort of systematic discrimination, rather it is an unfortunately necessary response to the Palestinian terror threat. Any nation has the right to protect its citizens from terrorist attacks.

Hamas is a terrorist group whose charter indicates its intention of committing a genocide of the Israeli population. It has fired over 11,000 rockets at Israeli civilians since 2005. Israel cannot ignore these unprovoked attacks and so takes the necessary actions to defend itself. At times, these defensive actions involve retaliatory airstrikes or ground raids, and the sometimes high civilian casualties in Gaza have been the unfortunate result of Hamas’ use of its military in civilian populations and human shields, as the members of CFI pointed out. The high death tolls experienced in Gaza are the tragic result of the morally reprehensible actions of Hamas terrorists.

The characterization of Israel as an apartheid state could not be further from the truth. Palestinians are granted full civil rights under Israeli law. Palestinians vote in Israeli elections and serve in the Israeli Knesset. There are approximately 1.5 million Arab citizens of Israel, enjoying equal rights. These Arabs have more rights and opportunities within Israel than they would have in virtually any Muslim-majority country. Moshe Katsav, the former President of Israel, was sentenced to prison by a Palestinian judge. This is only possible in a liberal democracy. It is a terrible insult to South Africans who suffered under apartheid to make such a comparison. There is no need to cite avowed opponents of Israel in order to disprove this false accusation.

Israel is clearly not guilty of “morally reprehensible” actions. Yet, regardless of that fact, movements similar to BDS are not the appropriate response to unethical practices. When the company Sodastream surrendered to BDS pressure and closed its only plant in the West Bank, many Palestinians lost their jobs. Palestinians are supposed to be the beneficiaries of the BDS movement, but in reality have become the victims of it.

In fact, it is more accurate to label the BDS movement as morally reprehensible for singling out a liberal democracy for intense international scrutiny, while giving a free pass to repressive regimes around the world.

While one can recognize mistakes Israel has made in the past and might make in the future, there is no reason to apologize for Israel when fighting back against BDS, as the second op-ed by CFI members unfortunately do in several occasions. In order for the BDS movement to be defeated, pro-Israel advocates need to make strong arguments against this highly deceitful, destructive, and anti-Semitic movement and expose to everyone that BDS only serves as an obstacle to peace.