UC professors join call to divest in companies supplying Israel

The divestment drive borrows a page from the popular anti-apartheid campaigns of the 1980s, when students and professors persuaded universities to sell millions of dollars worth of holdings in companies that did business with South Africa.

``Apartheid is one form of occupation and domination, and what's happening in the West Bank and Gaza is also occupation and domination,'' said L. Ling-chi Wang, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of California-Berkeley. But critics say that comparing Israel to South Africa under apartheid is deeply disturbing, and fear the ``South Africanization'' of the Palestinian cause will widen the already volatile gulf between pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian student groups on many college campuses.

``It's a massive misinformation campaign that won't help the conflict or the suffering of the Palestinians,'' said Laurie Zoloth, director of the Jewish Studies program at San Francisco State and an activist in the anti-apartheid movement.

``But these are the ways that academics wage war. To turn the struggle of apartheid, and that language, against the people of Israel, and to have it done by Jewish faculty in particular, is an extremely disturbing trend in the American left.''

As of Tuesday afternoon, the petition, available at http://www.ucdivest.org, had been signed by 141 professors, many of whom teach at the Berkeley campus. The UC system employs 7,599 tenure-track faculty members.

The campaign calls for U.S. and UC divestment until the withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from the occupied territories, the end of the use of torture and of building new settlements, and it calls for Palestinian refugees to either return to their former lands or be compensated for their losses.

So far, the petition does not list specific companies that will be targeted. The ``UC Faculty Divestment Campaign'' was announced Tuesday afternoon at a news conference held at the Berkeley campus's Faculty Club.

A Berkeley student group called Students for Justice in Palestine began organizing its own divestment campaign last year. On April 9, SJP kicked off a national divestment movement, and demonstrations were held at 40 college campuses across the country. Faculty support has lent some credibility to their effort.

``The professors came to us after our April 9 action,'' said Hoang Phan, a doctoral student in the English department who is active in SJP. ``We recognize that divestment doesn't come quickly, but South African divestment didn't come quickly either. It's a big project.''

In Cambridge, Mass., about 400 people -- including faculty members like linguist Noam Chomsky, students and alumni -- have signed a joint Harvard-MIT Petition for Divestment in Israel, at http://harvardmitdivest.org/.

By contrast, hundreds more have signed a counter-petition, which is also circulating on the Internet at http://harvardmitjustice.org/.

``The divestment petition does not support peace negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians -- indeed, the word `peace' does not even appear in it; it does not support the citizens of Israel in the face of an endless stream of suicide bombings,'' says the counter-petition.

Investment analysts warn that while divestment campaigns can be politically popular on campus, they are hard to implement.

``You have a sizable group of students and professors who are very supportive of Israel,'' said Simon Billenness, a senior analyst at Trillium Asset Management, an investment firm. ``There was no faculty on the other side who supported South Africa and, politically, that makes this very different.''