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Divestment
Unmasked - The truth behind the divest-from-Israel campaign
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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 the divest-from-Israel
campaign that started on college campuses in the US 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 since they would have no easily accessible trading partners once the
British leave the Palestine Region which was until recently governed by the
fallen Turkish Ottoman Empire. The Arab League was an outgrowth of previous
unification efforts in the Arab world that 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 a campus campaign such as this has been attempted by
the Palestinians. In the 1980's, 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 80's 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 with the advent of suicide bombings.
While researching
these divestment / boycotts campaigns for Boycott Watch (www.BoycottWatch.org),
I came across a nearly forgotten law - the US Antiboycott laws of 1979 that are
administrated by the Department of Commerce which were 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 if not the spirit of the law.
I researched the law further and discovered it was 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,
yet 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, 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 80's campaign to create an
adult population that accepted the notion of a Palestinian state, the desired
results of the divest-from-Israel campaign in twenty years is their next
campaign - dismantlement.
Realizing this, I needed to get other groups
involved and in the campaign against the illegal divest-from-Israel campaign. I
first contacted the Zionist Organization of America (www.zoa.org) 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 in the matter.
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 and 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 also
initiated the legal challenge to the Presbyterian Church USA's
divest-from-Israel stance.
The ISM/PSM officially recognizes the
validity of 'armed struggle' in its own book 'Peace Under Fire' (page 20).
'Armed struggle' is what terrorist groups such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the
Palestinian Authority's own Fatah and Al-Asqa Martyrs Brigade terrorist groups
call terrorism to justify the murder of innocent men, women and children. As
such, the ISM/PSM is not the benevolent organization they claim to be. Rather,
it is an organization that tries to get non-Palestinians to participate in
their 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 mean time, Divestment Watch
(www.DivestmentWatch.org) was born to specifically concentrate on the illegal
divest-from-Israel campaign separately from the monitoring general boycotts. A
primary goal of Divestment Watch is to coordinate efforts and to challenge the
legality of the divest-from-Israel campaign that I created with Boycott Watch
(www.BoycottWatch.org).
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
contempt by the Arab League nations to 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 the destruction of the economy of a fellow democracy in
the US. 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 of Israel to the US, including terrorism, that divestment campaigns
will eventually be directed toward the US in the future. Clearly, the
divest-from-Israel campaign is not in the best interests of Israel or the
United States, and must be stopped.
Fred Taub
President,
Divestment Watch |
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