Yale Israel Supporters Launch Anti-Divestment Petition

A heated debate over divestment from Israel intensified yesterday at Yale as a student group launched a petition denouncing the divestment campaign.

The petition, sponsored by the Yale Friends of Israel, claims that divestment would undermine Israel’s economy and fail to promote peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Posted yesterday at www.yaledontdivest.org, it responds to demands made last week by a group of students, faculty and alumni that the school terminate investments in corporations doing business in Israel.

In addition, another student group asked Yale President Richard C. Levin last Thursday to pledge that Yale will not divest from Israel. Levin has yet to respond.

Yale’s pro-divestment petition, pushed by the Yale Divest From Israel Campaign, alleges violations of the university’s own ethical investment policy—a policy stricter than that at Harvard and other rival universities. The campaign will pursue legal action if the administration ignores its petition, alumni spokesperson Rod Swenson said.

But Alan M. Dershowitz, Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard and a graduate of Yale Law School, said that companies in the Yale investment portfolio do business in many nations with repressive regimes.

“You can’t single out one country,” said Dershowitz, who is involved in Harvard’s anti-divestment petition, which has drawn nearly 6,000 signatures. “If you were to go through all of Yale’s investments in conflict-ridden countries, Israel would be the 107th worst on the list.”

“If this group takes legal action, they will become a laughingstock,” he added.

Dershowitz predicted that no university would actually divest from Israel, and said he would resign his position if Harvard did so.

Junior Noam Waldoks, co-president of Yale Students Against Divestment, said he is confident Yale will not divest.

“This whole illegitimate petition is just a chance to slander Israel’s name, and we are fighting so that it doesn’t happen,” he said.

Discussions about divestment have become increasingly common at Yale in the past week.

Yale Students Against Divestment has held a number of teach-ins on campus. Meanwhile, on Monday, Yale’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, another group supporting the divestment petition, created a mock “checkpoint.” Students dressed in Israeli soldier uniforms, carrying cardboard and plastic rifles, stopped students walking to class and shoved the rifles in their faces. According to the Yale Daily News, frightened spectators eventually called the police to the scene, but no arrests were made.

“We wanted to show students the kind of abuse that Palestinians have to deal with regularly,” said sophomore Sam Bernstein, a member of Students for Justice in Palestine. “You think it’s inconvenient not to be able to go to class, imagine how humiliating that must be to deal with on a more serious and regular level.”

“Just because I am anti-Zionist does not mean I am anti-Semitic,” added Bernstein, who is Jewish.

Students for Israel set up a counterprotest that afternoon, arguing that security concerns in Israel merited the use of checkpoints.

Some students said that the aggressive demonstration backfired. “They were shoving guns in my face—I found it aggressive and annoying,” said first-year Alexander Nemser. “It didn’t send me any political message.”

A similar demonstration took place in Harvard Square last February, when activists dressed in military fatigues re-enacted an Israeli checkpoint to protest Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem.

Some students have also questioned the credibility of Swenson, the spokesperson for the pro-divestment campaign.

Swenson, who graduated from Yale’s architecture school in 1969, founded both The Plasmatics, a punk rock band, and a live sex show in Times Square, according to the band’s website.

Articles about Swenson’s background have appeared in the Wall Street Journal’s Opinion Journal, after a Yale undergraduate forwarded them to the newspaper.

Reached last night, Swenson had not yet seen the Journal’s article, but he said that although he was involved in erotic theatre 25 years ago, he is best known today for his theoretical papers on planetary evolution.

“Ad hominems are exactly the techniques a person uses when they don’t want to cite real arguments,” Swenson said. “What is relevant here is what I want to do about war crimes, not what I did a long time ago.”

Yale’s pro-divestment petition was drafted by Francis A. Boyle, a law professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who is said to have begun the divestment movement in November 2000 with a speech at Illinois State University. Boyle served as a lawyer for the Palestinian Liberation Organization, according to Dershowitz.

“Boyle initiated this divestment movement at the request of the PLO—they are using him as their puppet,” Dershowitz added.