MONTREAL (JTA)— Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions resolutions that “actively campaign” against Israel run counter to the McGill University’s undergraduate student union constitution, the union’s judicial board agreed.
While the board decision, called a “reference,” still faces ratification by the Student Society of the McGill board of directors, the move on Wednesday is being hailed as a victory on a Montreal campus where BDS motions have failed to pass three times over 18 months.
The decision “is a clear signal that the SSMU understands the nature of BDS on campus,” said Patrick Benaroche of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs in Quebec.
The reference was the judicial board’s response to a complaint filed in March by a McGill student upset over the third BDS motion proposed at the university a month earlier. The student, Zev Macklin, considered the motion unconstitutional.
In its reference, the board stressed that it was not issuing a judgment, only an “advisory opinion,” and that the opinion allowed for condemning actions by nations – but not the nations themselves.
The union noted that its opinion may have been different had the pro-BDS motion restricted itself to calling on McGill to curtail its investment in countries cooperating in Israel’s occupation. But the motion also supported the overall aims of the BDS movement against Israel itself, the judicial board said.
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