UC Berkeley Divestment Task Force
UCB Students for Justice in Palestine

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Published on Wednesday, March 31, 2010 by CommonDreams.org

On March 18, continuing a long tradition of pioneering human rights campaigns, the Senate of the Associated Students of the University of California, Berkeley (ASUC) passed “A Bill In Support of UC DIVESTMENT FROM WAR CRIMES.” The historic bill resolves to divest ASUC’s assets from two American companies, General Electric and United Technologies, that are “materially and militarily supporting the Israeli government’s occupation of the Palestinian territories”-and to advocate that the UC, with about $135 million invested in companies that profit from Israel’s illegal actions in the Occupied Territories, follow suit.

Although the bill passed by a vote of 16-4 after a packed and intense debate, the President of the Senate vetoed the bill six days later. The Senate is expected to reconsider the bill soon; groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace are asking supporters of the bill to send letters to the Senators, who can overturn the veto with only 14 votes.

Here is the letter I just sent:

Dear members of the ASUC Senate,

I am writing to urge you to reaffirm Senate Bill 118A, despite the recent presidential veto.

It comes as no surprise that you are under intense pressure to reverse your historic and democratic decision to divest from two companies that profit from Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory. When a school with a deserved reputation for academic excellence and moral leadership takes such a bold position, it threatens to inspire others to take their own stands.

Indeed, Berkeley–the campus and the wider community–has provided this kind of leadership on many key issues in the past: not only Apartheid in South Africa but also sweatshops in Indonesia, dictatorship in Burma, political killings in Nigeria, and the list goes on. Time and again, when the call for international solidarity has come from people denied a political voice, Berkeley has been among the first to answer. And in virtually every case, what began as a small action in a progressive community quickly spread across the country and around the world.

Your recent divestment bill opposing Israeli war crimes stands to have this same kind of global impact, helping to build a grassroots, non-violent movement to end Israel’s violations of international law. And this is precisely what your opponents–by spreading deliberate lies about your actions–are desperately trying to prevent. They are even going so far as to claim that, in the future, there should be no divestment campaigns that target a specific country, a move that would rob activists of one of the most effective tools in the non-violent arsenal. Please don’t give into this pressure; too much is on the line.

As the world has just witnessed with the Netanyahu government’s refusal to stop its illegal settlement expansion, political pressure is simply not enough to wrench Israel off its current disastrous path. And when our governments fail to apply sanctions for defiant illegality, other forms of pressure must come into play, including targeting those corporations that are profiting directly from human rights abuses.

Whenever we take a political action, we open ourselves up to accusations of hypocrisy and double standards, since the truth is that we can never do enough in the face of pervasive global injustice. Yet to argue that taking a clear stand against Israeli war crimes is somehow to “discriminate unfairly” against Israelis and Jews (as the veto seems to claim) is to grossly pervert the language of human rights. Far from “singling out Israel,” with Senate Bill 118A, you are acting within Berkeley’s commendable and inspiring tradition.

I understand that there is some debate about whether or not your divestment bill was adopted “in haste.” Not having been there, I cannot comment on your process, though I am deeply impressed by the careful research that went into the decision. I also know that in 2005 an extraordinarily broad range of Palestinian civil society groups called on activists around the world to adopt precisely these kinds of peaceful pressure tactics. In the years since that call, we have all watched as Israeli abuses have escalated dramatically: the attack on Lebanon in the summer of 2006, a massive expansion of illegal settlements and walls, an ongoing siege on Gaza that violates all prohibitions on collective punishment, and, worst of all, the 2008/9 attack on Gaza that left approximately 1,400 dead.

I would humbly suggest that when it comes to acting to end Israeli war crimes, the international response has not suffered from too much haste but from far too little. This is a moment of great urgency, and the world is watching.

Be brave.

Yours sincerely,

Naomi Klein

Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist and syndicated columnist and the author of the international and New York Times bestseller The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism , now out in paperback. Her earlier books include the international best-seller, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (which has just been re-published in a special10th Anniversary Edition ); and the collection Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate (2002). To read all her latest writing visitwww.naomiklein.org

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

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?”

Al-Jazeera has collected reactions to the Israeli embargo on Gaza from leaders around the world, including Benita Ferrero Waldner, the European Union external relations commissioner, who said that Israel was pursuing “collective punishment” against 1.5 million innocent people in Gaza.

The EU commissioner warned that neither the closure of Gaza’s border nor the deadly air raids and incursions of the past week would bring Israel security from rockets fired by Palestinian armed groups.

“Only a credible political agreement this year … can turn Palestinians away from violence,” she said.

The InterPressService gives us the sad story of Mustapha al-Jamal, who in light of the Israeli embargo of fuel, electricity, and most medical supplies to Gaza, is going door-to-door to find appropriate medicine for his sick son. Furthermore, Israel has refused medical treatment to Mustapha’s son (no suitable hospitals exist in Gaza) because they believe his oxygen tank is–you guessed it–a “security risk.”

Seventy-six-year-old Mustapha al-Jamal goes door to door, looking for help in finding medicines for his son.

At home, the 53-year-old son Yahya al-Jamal lies back, staring at the ceiling. By his side, an oxygen cylinder keeps him going for now.

“My son’s condition continues to worsen,” Mustapha says. “We’ve been waiting two months for the medicines.”

Last year Mustapaha’s 44-year-old daughter, a mother of six, died of breast cancer. She had been recovering, but the Israeli siege blocked supply of medicines, and no one could then save her.

Mustapha sees the same happening again. Yahya’s cancer started in his kidney, spread to his right lung, and now affects his liver.

Twice, on Jul. 20 and Oct. 2 last year, Yahya was allowed passage to Sourasky Medical Centre in Tel Aviv. On the second visit the hospital agreed to give the family 28 tablets worth 35,500 shekels (9,000 dollars).

Transfer to an Israeli hospital now could give Yahya medication and hope again, but Israeli officials have refused passage for medical care, citing the oxygen cylinder as a ’security risk’.

Contrary to international humanitarian law, the Israeli army has cut off electricity and fuel supplies to the 1.5 million people living in the Gaza Strip as “retaliation” to homemade projectile attacks that have caused mainly property damage in remote areas of Israel.

According to Ma’an News Agency:

Most of the Gaza Strip’s 1.5 million residents are spending the night without electricity as an Israeli-imposed blockade enters its fourth consecutive night.

The Gaza Strip’s only power plant shut down on Sunday due to a shortage of fuel.

“At least 800,000 people are now in darkness,” Derar Abu Sissi, general director of the plant, told reporters on Sunday night.

Supplies of food are running out, and the water and sewage systems are on the brink of collapse.

Fourteen extremely ill patients from the Gaza Strip who were denied permits on to enter Israel for medical treatment either in Israel, Jordan, or Egypt lost an appeal to the Israeli High Court of Justice on Tuesday, according to Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) in Israel, who took the appeal to court.Time is critical for these patients, most of whom have cancer. Early medical intervention is often a matter of life or death in cancer cases.Israeli state attorneys argued that the patients do not need to enter Israel through Erez crossing, but should instead go to Egypt whenever the Egyptian border crossings are opened.

However, Physicians for Human Rights argued, nobody knows how long it will be before either Kerem Shalom or Rafah border crossings will be open again.