Last night, UC Berkeley ASUC President Will Smelko vetoed ‘A Bill in Support of UC Divestment From War Crimes,’ a bill which called on the ASUC and the UC to divest funds from companies enabling war crimes in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, among other places, and which was passed by the student senate in a 16 to 4 vote one week ago today. Many of you may be angry at the decision and its unprincipled rationale, as are we. Such a decision, however, does not change the fact that 16 out of 20 student representatives voted on the side of divestment, doing so after careful consideration of the facts and a 6 hour student debate with overflow capacity – a debate the ASUC President chose to miss while justifying his veto by claiming a lack of sufficient debate on the topic. If he had chosen to attend, he would have witnessed the broad-based coalition working to advance human rights in Israel/Palestine and social responsibility within our school’s own investment portfolio. Now is a time to recognize that movement, a movement not just at UC Berkeley but at schools and institutions around the country and the world, and to redouble our efforts to end the Israeli occupation and reassert the need for an ethical investment policy.

At UC Berkeley’s campus, there will be a senate vote to override the President’s veto, to be held in the following weeks. We expect to win this vote, as only 14 votes are needed to override a veto and already 16 senators have stood against war crimes, Israel’s or otherwise. You can help prevent them from bowing to the pressure of the Israel lobby, which has been fierce and deceitful in its characterization of this bill, by

1) coming to the meeting to override Smelko’s veto (the date will be either April 7 or a following Wednesday – for updates see http://calsjp.org)
2) bringing your supportive friends and student group members
3) writing personal or organizational letters to senators (to senate@asuc.org, including ucbdivest@gmail.com in the bcc) when asked to do so in the weeks to come about why you support divestment as a tactic in general and in the case of Israel specifically (at this point, angry letters to the president do little and are discouraged).

Beyond this there is much to do in the broader public. This movement is not just about a victory for divestment at UC Berkeley. Rather it is more fundamentally about spreading divestment and the notion that all nations and corporations, including sacred cows like Israel, must be held to account for their gross violations of human rights, and that all people, Palestinians included, are deserving of basic human rights such as rights to life, property, freedom of movement, and a right to an education. Spread divestment to your church, your synagogue, your mosque, to other schools, to other institutions. And speak up in the press. Write a letter to the editor or an op-ed. Make the media know about the success at Berkeley and the successes to come. We’ll be in touch with next steps in the near future. Thank you so much for your solidarity.

Cal Students for Justice in Palestine

Dina Omar, The Electronic Intifada, 19 March 2010

Early yesterday morning, the University of California Berkeley Student Senate (ASUC) passed a bill to divest from companies that provide military support for the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Debate began the night before at 9:00pm and ended and six hours later when the vote was held at 3:00am. The session was attended by more than 150 students, educators and concerned community supporters, forcing the meeting to be relocated to a larger room. Never before has the senate chambers been so overcrowded, signifying the importance and interest in the issue of Israel-Palestine on the Berkeley campus. Ultimately, the bill passed with 16 senators in favor and 4 against.

During the debate, Rahul Patel, a Student Senator and supporter of the bill from the beginning, said that “In the 1980s the Berkeley Student Government was a central actor in demanding that the university divest from South African apartheid. Twenty-five years later, it is a key figure in shaping a nationwide movement against occupation and war crimes around the world.” He added that “Student Government can be a space to mobilize and make decisions that have a significant impact on the international community. We must utilize these spaces to engage each other about issues of justice worldwide.”

Emiliano Huet-Vaughn, a Ph.D. student in economics, co-author of the bill and a member of Berkeley’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), went to Gaza last July. He explained that the bill was informed by the devastation he witnessed as a result of Israel’s invasion of Gaza last winter, where civilian infrastructure was systematically targeted including schools, mosques, the education and justice ministries, Gaza’s main university, hundreds of factories, livestock, prisons, courts and police stations. Israel’s invasion resulted in the deaths of 1,440 Palestinians, including more than 400 children, and injuring another 5,380 Palestinians in Gaza.

The bill specifies two companies in particular, United Technologies and General Electric. It draws a direct connection between Berkeley’s investments in these companies and their products, used to indiscriminately attack civilians and infrastructure. Shoaib Kamil, a Ph.D. student in Computer Science explained that “We are not pushing for divestment from Israel. This bill is directed at US companies that enable attacks described as ‘war crimes’ in the Goldstone report.”

The Goldstone commission and report, led by respected South African judge Richard Goldstone, was authorized by the United Nations to investigate accusations of war crimes during Israel’s invasion of Gaza. The final report, submitted to the UN Human Rights Council last September, found that both Israel and Hamas committed war crimes and called for both to conduct investigations. However, the Goldstone report was particularly critical of Israel’s actions, especially the deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure by the Israeli military.

The ASUC has control over their $1.7 million budget and the bill calls for a committee to investigate the investments by the ASUC and the University of California Regents to ensure that no monies are invested in companies that are complicit in war crimes. Divestment will likely be implemented first by the ASUC. However, getting the Regents to recognize and implement the students’ call will be a more difficult task because students have little representation in the Regents’ decisions.

Ibrahim Shikaki, a Visiting Scholar from Palestine, spoke in favor of the bill although he did not feel that it was written from the Palestinian perspective. Shikaki explained that “If this were a Palestinian bill it would have mentioned my grandfather’s land that was stolen from him, or my friend who was shot ten feet in front of me … or my aunt who for weeks was denied travel to Egypt for cancer treatment.”

Mahaliyah Ayla O, a gender and women’s studies major and Jewish member of SJP, voiced her surprise after the bill was passed. Ayla O said “It is not that complicated, we should not support corporations that manufacture weapons to oppress people.”

Last year, the ASUC passed a bill establishing a sisterhood relationship between UC Berkeley and the three universities in Gaza: Al-Aqsa University, Al-Azhar University and the Islamic University of Gaza. With the passage of this divestment bill, Berkeley students are taking a stand against Israel’s human rights violations and war crimes and continue Berkeley’s commitment to being on the vanguard of student activism. In 1986, UC Berkeley was one of the first universities to call for a comprehensive divestment from companies that traded with or had operations in apartheid South Africa.

Dina Omar is a UC Berkeley alumni and a member of Students for Justice in Palestine. She currently works as the Membership Coordinator for the Arab Resource and Organizing Center.

The photograph above is an AP photo of a Palestinian boy who is waiting by his sick brother’s side with a manual air pump, for fear of the power going out and disabling the child’s electric respirator.

That is only a small glimpse of the reality for the powerless–in more than one sense of the word–in Gaza, as shared by Rory McCarthy in The Guardian.

He writes:

Israel said its closure of the Gaza strip was intended to halt the firing of makeshift rockets by Palestinian militants into southern Israel.

Yet Israel’s stark new policy has meant no fuel or food aid has come into Gaza since last Thursday. Large parts of the overcrowded strip had no power, leaving it without lights and heating, closing bakeries and forcing hospitals to rely on generators and their own limited fuel reserves. As night fell nearly all Gaza City was in darkness. Simply put, it was “collective punishment,” said the European commissioner for external relations, Benita Ferrero-Waldner.

Osama Nahal, a paediatric doctor in the European hospital’s special care baby unit, looked resigned. “Politics is politics, but the care of human beings must be away from politics,” he said. His unit now has 10 newly-born patients, of whom two are on ventilators.

Amira Hass from Ha’aretz has written a column detailing the dismal conditions of life in Gaza due to the Israeli-imposed embargo on electricity, fuels, and many foods and medicines.

Gaza Strip residents yesterday moved from worrying about the electricity cuts of the previous 40 hours to worrying about a water shortage. The municipality needs electricity to bring water to homes and the houses need it to pump water to the roof tanks.

Hence 40 percent of Gaza Strip homes – 600,000 people – had no running water yesterday, the Palestinian water authority said.

Oxfam International said yesterday that unless diesel and fuel supplies were resumed immediately, all the Strip’s water pumps could stop working today. The non-governmental organization also warned of the sewage system’s collapse in the absence of diesel.

“Without electric power we can manage somehow, without bread too,” says a resident of the Nasser neighborhood in northern Gaza. “It’s cold enough to prevent the food from going bad and we try to open the refrigerator as little as possible. The kids grumble but they can learn to live without the computer. But without water?”

“Under current military orders in the West Bank, the following activities are defined as threats to the security of Israel: putting up political posters, writing political slogans, participating in demonstrations and belonging to any political party.”

Interestingly enough, what counts as exercising first amendment rights in the United States counts as a “security threat” in Israel–if you’re Palestinian. A recently published report by law students from Stanford and Berkeley conducted in the field in 2006 reveals a number of startling facts about the status of Palestinian prisoners in the Israeli legal system.

Some of the most startling information:

• At least 765 of the currently 9,493 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons are “administrative detainees” meaning that they are “held on secret evidence, do not have a right to a trial, and can be held for six-month periods that can be renewed indefinitely.” Furthermore, all “Palestinians detained by the Israeli military can be barred access to a lawyer for 90 days and held without being charged for 188 days.”
• Lawyers cannot have private interviews with their clients, and are only able to visit their clients “a few days each week,” “in violation of Israeli prison ordinances.” All confidential documents must be given to prison guards in order to reach the client. Furthermore, lawyers from the West Bank and Gaza cannot visit their clients, who are illegally held in prisons within Israel, “without permission from the Israeli military,” which is nearly impossible to get, especially for lawyers from Gaza.
• “Lawyers from the West Bank and Gaza can neither represent clients in Israeli civil courts nor appeal military court decisions to the Israeli High Court.”
• “Because it is so difficult for lawyers to visit prisons, the majority of client interviews are conducted at the military courts in the minutes before a prisoner’s hearing begins.”
• Military courts are not required to “publish the decisions of military judges,” and no justification is required other than stating that “their approval of a detention order was based on ‘secret evidence.’”

These factors and a number of others are covered in great depth in the final 29-page report, which can be downloaded here. There is also a shorter summary in a recent edition of CounterPunch, which can be downloaded here.

The information in these reports challenges the notion that Palestinians can receive a fair trial in the Israeli court system–both military and civil–and also exposes the Israeli legal system for what it is when it comes to Palestinians: a tool of the occupation.

Ali Waked in Yedioth Ahronoth reports the following regarding Shin Bet Chief Yuval Diskin’s recent claim that 1,000 “terrorists” have been killed in Gaza in the past 2 years:

The B’Tselem organization expressed its surprise over Diskin’s remarks, saying that according to its figures, 816 Palestinians were killed by the IDF in that same period, including 150 minors, 48 of them under the age of 14.

Security sources later corrected Diskin’s remarks, saying that 810 terrorists were identified among the casualties, which included civilians.

“Does Yuval Diskin include five-year-old Maria Okal, eight-year-old Aya al-Astal, nine-year-old Yehi Abu Slamia and his five-year-old brother Nasrallah among the list of terrorist?” organization officials asked. “Does the Shin Bet chief refer to the blood of these and other children as the blood of terrorists?”

The Palestinian organizations also refer to 1,000 people killed in two years, but according to them, most of the casualties were civilians. According to Samir Zakkut of the al-Mezan Center for Human Rights in the Gaza Strip, the data presented by Diskin were untrue.

Josh Reubner of the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation writes:

Today, two movements for the promotion of human rights in Sudan and Palestine seek to emulate the successful role played by boycotts, divestment, and sanctions in achieving democracy and equality in South Africa. The two movements, however, have received radically different receptions on Capitol Hill. This double standard testifies to official Washington’s selectivity when it comes to promoting human rights around the globe and its tendency to overlook the faults of its allies while using human rights as a pretext to punish its adversaries.

On December 31, President Bush signed into law the Sudan Accountability and Divestment Act of 2007, which was passed unanimously by Congress earlier in the month. The bill, sponsored by Sen. Chris Dodd, authorizes state and local governments to divest their holdings from corporations that profit from dealings with the Sudanese government and immunizes mutual fund managers from lawsuits for doing the same.

Seth Freedman at The Guardian writes:

It’s easy to claim that the pen is mightier than the sword from the safety of a university lecture hall, or a middle class soiree in a suburban dining room. However, in the bandit country that is Hebron, the adage rings somewhat hollow, as I found after spending a day out on patrol with Temporary International Presence in the City of Hebron (TIPH). What I saw during my six-hour shadowing of the dedicated yet ultimately toothless members of the TIPH team made me question the wisdom of their presence in the troubled city.