This semester, a group of Brown students launched a campaign condemning the policies of Israel and demanding the University's withdrawal of all investments from that country. Having read Anti-Racist Action's open letter to President Ruth Simmons, I'm upset by several of its contentions.
The first is the claim that our university should operate under some ill-defined notion of democracy. Let us be clear: Brown is not a democracy. We have some of the organs of democracy - student government, for example - that advocate to the administration and try to work under the ideals of transparency and accountability. Brown, however, is a nonprofit corporation. As such, President Simmons has no obligation toward the above virtues, except in dealing with our boards of fellows and trustees. We should feel privileged to go to an institution that allows students to serve on University and advisory committees, including the Advisory Committee on Corporate Responsibility in Investing, at all.
Brown cannot and should not allow all of its decisions to be made by the entire student body, as the ARA asserts. This would be not only impractical, as I doubt many have or would care to have a working knowledge of many University activities, but also wholly unnecessary and imprudent. I love democracy and demand transparency from government, but Brown is a corporation whose long-term solvency is based on its endowment. Our institution should refuse to allow any and all spectators to look at its investment choices, for those investments are the private actions of a corporation which students do not own, but rather attend.
The United Nations - sponsored World Conference on Racism did, in fact, speak against Israel's policies under the Barak government as ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. However, this same conference failed to mention human rights abuses in China, Rwanda or any place in the Arab world. Just because the opponents of Israel, including ARA, are well organized, does not necessitate that they are in the moral right. Their campaign seems limited, as they call for the University to single out Israel among the nations of the world.
I'm not particularly pro-Israel or pro-Palestine; I'm just against a movement whose sole purpose is economic warfare against a sovereign state. I think we can have a vigorous debate about whether it was moral to create Israel in the first place, and certainly whether its foreign and defense policies are just. However, that dialogue is not created by a kind of movement based more on rhetoric than reasoned argument.
Suggesting that the policies of Israel are a system of apartheid, to describe its actions as genocide, to characterize its procedures as crimes against humanity, are charges that are both thoughtless and odious. Stating conclusions without explaining how you got there does not amount to intellectualism, but rather a destruction of true fact-finding.
Although the politics of the region are complex and contentious, in the eyes of the world community there is no question as to whether Israel has a right to exist. That question has been settled wholly in the affirmative. I find it likely that soon there will exist an independent Palestinian state, which shall curb most of the world's lasting apprehension over this conflict. Whether or not that happens, we must not, as so many do, see this issue as one side being in the right while the other is necessarily wrong.
The pragmatic reality of the situation is that neither party is innocent in the Middle East, and both sides have spilled blood, and had blood spilled. The question now is how we can get all the parties to the negotiating table, and address the other questions of greatest importance - those of Palestinian statehood, the removal of the wall, the problems of refugees, how to recognize the national aspirations of both of these peoples and how the United States can play a positive role in the process. These questions should drive our debate, one in which reasonable people can passionately disagree. But as Jeffrey Garten and Anthony Kronman, the deans of the schools of management and law at Yale have written: "Those now campaigning for divestment from Israel contribute not at all to this debate. Their distortions of fact, hyperbole of expression and lack of moral judgment must be rejected with the same decisiveness that we embrace the cause of peace and the reasoned, careful and patient search for a pathway to it."
I respect the ARA's right to academic freedom that allows them take any position they'd like; however, I can say that I disagree with them. I find the movement to be insidious and tantamount to racism itself. Divestment seems less about human rights, and to be more a tool to perpetuate armed conflict in which there are no winners or losers, a conflict in which Brown as an institution cannot choose sides.
Herald Copy Editor Zachary Townsend '08 is a member of the Special Committee to find Zac Townsend a Girlfriend.
