BDS Failures Continuously Amassing

While we never hear it honestly from our daily news sources, and we hear about the Academic boycotts and the BDS (Boycott Divestment and Sanctions) campaign against Israel, the divestment strategy in particular has been failing in this past decade.

Across college campuses, SJP (Students for Justice in Palestine) attempts to divest from the Israeli economy, and only the Israeli economy, in order to ‘bring it to its knees’, but intelligent college students see right through it. Unfortunately, the divestment campaign has succeeded at UC Riverside and Wesleyan University, but many more campuses have seen the light and have condemned or fought back against these insidious attempts to destroy the Jewish State.

The student government does not have the power to control university investments. What they are actually doing is voting on whether or not to draft a referendum recommending to the administration that they divest from companies ‘profiting from the Israeli Occupation’. This is entirely symbolic and has no economic success across the board; no university, even where this has passed, has taken it up. In fact, Israel’s GDP, since the creation of the BDS campaign, has doubled.

BDS has been active on college campuses since 2005, with the divestment campaign being central for the past five years; in the last 10 years or so, there has been zero financial success on the university level in the divestment campaign.

Depicted above is Sodastream, one of the key items typically targeted by the malevolent BDS campaign (and an amazing product).Furthermore, this year alone, both the student governments of the University of New Mexico and the Loyola University of Chicago passed divestment referendums, which resulted in a reversal for the former and a veto for the latter. Understanding that the pro-Israel community had no ability to defend its position, and realizing the flawed argument, the Graduate and Professional Student Association (UNM) reversed its divestment resolution. Furthermore, last month, the Associated Students for the University of Mexico voted down a similar resolution.

Fortunately, these are not isolated cases: 

1. At the University of California Davis Campus, divestment failed, narrowly, but was defeated nonetheless.
2. At Cornell University, the Divestment Resolution was firmly tabled indefinitely by a vote of 15 in favour of its permanent removal from the agenda of the student government.
3. The University of California at Los Angeles has come to be one of the most contentious universities for the Israel debate. On May 14^th, 2014, UCLA released a statement condemning SJP’s attempts to silence pro-Israel leadership. Furthermore, at UCLA, the divestment campaign was defeated in February of 2014 by a vote of 7:5 after alumnus Ben Shapiro related BDS to anti-Semitism.
4. At UC Santa Barbara on April 11, 2013, after a marathon hearing lasting 14 hours, the BDS resolution was again defeated. At UCSB, the referendum was defeated by a margin of 11:10:1.
5. At the University of Michigan, students braved intimidation and anti-Semitism in order to defeat a BDS resolution. At UM, it was considered taboo to be pro-Israel, an absurdity that died with the defeat of a vicious BDS referendum on March 27^th, 2014, by a vote of 29-9.
6. On March 22, 2014, Arizona State University was added to the list of schools where the resolution had been tabled indefinitely. Though the resolution had amassed nearly 500 signatures, the student government saw through the blatant attempt to destroy the Jewish State and condemned SJP.
7. At San Diego State, with little press coverage, a divestment resolution was defeated in April of 2014. There has been very little coverage thus far regarding this defeat of divestment.
8. At Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the resolutions were defeated before they were even brought up. Brought to the attention of university officials by pro-Israel students, any talk of immoral divestment was quickly shut down by university officials.
9. At the University of Washington, on May 21, 2014, a divestment resolution was destroyed in a vote of 59:8:11. This was even with a call to begin the discussion on Passover, thereby preventing a Jewish student presence in the debate. Pro-Israel blogger Elder of Ziyon said, “This wasn’t just a defeat – this was a rout. This year was supposed to be the year of divestment. The BDSers planned to pass many resolutions at universities across the country, and they targeted the most liberal and sympathetic campuses they could. In nearly every case, they lost. The fact that it happened in one of the most leftist areas of the country, near where Rachel Corrie lived, speaks volumes on how BDS has lost steam in places it formerly appeared to be dominating.”

Continue reading here:

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/bds-failures-continuously-amassing/

Contributed by CAMERA Intern Seth Greenwald, Sophomore at Clark University