Divestment vote fails at Wisconsin school

MILWAUKEE, Feb. 10 (JTA) — It normally would be stressful for a freshman to try to tell even one member of a university faculty what to do. But Molly Fields, a pre-business freshman at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and the publicity chair of the small Jewish Student Organization there, said “I wasn’t scared” when she addressed the faculty senate at its meeting on Feb. 1. “I knew I was at home” and that the senate members “wanted to hear from a Whitewater student,” she said. And so she told them that the resolution they were considering — which had been brought to the campus by two Arab students from Madison — was “very anti-peace” and aimed to “dehumanize, demoralize and delegitimize” the state of Israel. Her effort, in coordination with Jewish faculty members there, apparently paid off. According to Paula Simon, executive director of the Milwaukee Jewish Council for Community Relations, who attended the meeting, the faculty senate “resoundingly defeated” the resolution by a voice vote. This resolution called for the UW System’s board of regents “to divest from Caterpillar, General Dynamics, General Electric, Lockheed Martin, Northrop-Grumman and Raytheon based on evidence of the active role these companies play in enabling Israeli forces to engage in practices that violate international law and the human rights of the Palestinian people.” The resolution came from a “University of Wisconsin Divestment from Israel Campaign” being mounted by Al-Awda Wisconsin and the Alternative Palestine Agenda. This effort appears to be led and staffed primarily by Fayyad Sbaihat and Mohammed Abed. They are apparently students at UW-Madison, and both have written in Madison publications accusing Israel of “ethnic cleansing” and building an “apartheid wall on Palestinian land.” However, the divestment campaign’s defeat at Whitewater was preceded by an earlier victory. At UW-Platteville, a smaller school — it has 5,800 students to Whitewater’s 10,540 — the faculty senate voted 7 to-6 in favor of the resolution on Jan. 25. The senate’s chair, Mark Evenson, cast the tie-breaking vote. That could make UW-Platteville the very first university campus in the country whose faculty government has approved a call for divestment of university funds from Israel. But although Simon said she found the Platteville event “very troubling,” she also said that it was “an isolated case.” In general, she said, “Divestment efforts at campuses across the country have been dismal failures.” In any event, in the end the action is likely to have little effect. UW Board of Regents President Toby Marcovich said that the board has already voted “not to get involved” in any divestment from Israel effort. “We don’t divest on a political basis,” Marcovich said. “We do it if there are true human rights violations.” The divestment from Israel campaign “was not convincing” to the regents, he said. Moreover, there appears to be no other such effort on other UW System or other university campuses in the state, according to Simon. Advocates for the resolutions at both schools contended that the issues they were concerned about were human rights and Israeli government policies, not an effort to promote anti-Semitism. “I would be more than happy to do the same thing for Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran or China,” said Zohreh Ghavamshahidi, chair of the women’s studies department at UW-Whitewater and a faculty senate member who brought the resolution to the body. “It has nothing to do with nationality or religion,” she continued. “It has to do with the policy of the government [of Israel]. Those people who say it is anti-Semitic want to shut every voice speaking against the government policies of Israel.” Evenson, who teaches Spanish and Latin American literature at UW-Platteville, described himself as a “human rights activist” who has “done similar things”about Latin American countries. He also maintained that he was influenced by knowing that “there are a lot of Israeli human rights activists condemning some actions of Israeli forces” in the administered territories. Nevertheless, Jewish faculty members at both campuses said it was clear to them that the proposal was an attack on Israel. Rea Kirk, associate professor of education at UW-Platteville, furnished a copy of her speech to the faculty senate, to which she does not belong. “A more balanced approach would be to condemn emotional and physical violence on both sides of this issue,” she said. Jonathan Ivry, assistant professor of languages and literatures at UW-Whitewater, said that at first he felt “fairly confident that the faculty would recognize that this was a very one-sided and clearly an anti-Israel proposal.” Then “it passed in Platteville, so we got nervous.” But the Jewish faculty members also said that these resolutions do not mean that any kind of general anti-Israel animus exists on these campuses. Thomas Drucker, instructor of mathematics and computer sciences at UW-Whitewater and an informal advisor to the small Jewish Student Organization there, said, “I think there is very little hostility here. I think there is a fair amount of ignorance.” In fact, as an institution, the university’s administration “has been positive in its support of the Jewish Student Organization.” Vic Levy, instructor in UW-Platteville’s school of education, said he didn’t think that university is “a hotbed of anti-Semitic or anti-Israel thought.” In fact, it is a campus very concerned with diversity, whose students “go all over the world” and that has an exchange program with a traditionally black university in Mississippi, he said. However, Levy said that the UW-Platteville faculty is a liberal group in a conservative and rural area, and its members “decided they wanted to make a statement and they did.” But “of all the rotten government things around the world, why they had to do this, I don’t know.”