Cal State Long Beach is the latest U.S. campus where student government has chosen to take a side in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by adopting a resolution calling for their school to divest from firms doing business with the government of Israel.
Members of the Long Beach campus’ student legislature voted 15 to 7, with one member choosing to abstain, in support of a resolution demanding the campus and its affiliates drop investments in military contractors and other firms that have supplied Israel’s government.
The resolution’s supporters maintained that holding investments in the targeted firms amounts to the campus being itself involved in what they describe as human rights abuses against Palestinians.
“I haven’t heard from a single Palestinian student, that they don’t think this will help them,” Yasmin Elasmar, one of the student government members who put forward the resolution, said during the meeting.
“People are silenced, and we are giving them a voice by voting for this,” she added.
Student government leaders adopted the resolution after hearing spirited remarks from more than 50 people who argued on both sides of the issue. The resolution’s opponents contended singling out Israel’s government for condemnation amounted to anti-Semitism and proceeded from a one-sided view of the conflict that ignored past Israeli peace overtures.
“I don’t want to feel unsafe on campus because I’m Jewish and I support the Jewish state,” student government member Sofia Musman said during Wednesday’s meeting.
The Long Beach campus’ student government is formally known as Associated Students Inc. and the part of its legislature that handles resolutions like the one approved Wednesday is its Senate.
One of the student senators who put the resolution forward, Yasmeen Azam, said the intent was not to challenge anyone’s Jewish identity nor anyone’s belief in Zionism, but to make a statement about the campus’ investment policy.
Cal State Long Beach spokeswoman Terri Carbaugh confirmed before students cast their vote that the CSULB 49er Foundation holds direct investments in Raytheon and Northrop Grumman, two of the companies named in the divestment resolution. The foundation, which manages private donations given to support the Long Beach campus, has other invests in an Standard & Poor’s 500 index fund that includes holdings in other firms named in the student government’s new resolution.
Other campuses where students have adopted similar resolutions include UCLA, UC Berkeley and Stanford, according to the resolution. Internationally, pro-Palestinian activists’ calls for institutions to use economic means to pressure Israel’s government are known as the BDS movement. The acronym stands for boycott, divestment and sanctions, and its demands include Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Golan Heights and Gaza Strip as well as the right of Palestinians who lost their homes as a result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War to return to Israel.
Campus president Jane Close Conoley had previously asked student government members to refrain from joining the BDS movement. She put her name to an April 26 letter raising concerns that supporting BDS carries the risk of increased anti-Semitism and in her view the BDS movement has grown out of elements who deny Israel’s right to exist instead of pursuing a two-state solution in which Israelis and Palestinians eventually have their own countries.
