Palestine by Richard Falk

Author:Richard Falk
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781935982470
Publisher: Just World Books
Published: 2014-08-04T16:00:00+00:00

Divestment at the University of California, Santa Barbara

April 16, 201318

A few days ago I spoke to a student audience in support of a divestment resolution that was to be submitted for adoption at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB). This petition was narrowly defeated in the UCSB Student Senate, but this series of efforts to urge several campuses of the University of California to divest from corporations doing a profitable business selling military equipment to Israel represents an encouraging awakening on the part of American youth to the severe victimization of the Palestinian people by way of occupation, discrimination, refugee misery, and exile, a worsening set of circumstances that has lasted in its various forms for several decades and shows no signs of ending anytime soon.

Ever since the Nakba of 1948, neither traditional diplomacy nor the United Nations nor armed struggle have been able to secure Palestinian rights. As time has passed, Palestinian prospects are being steadily diminished by deliberate Israeli policies: establishing and expanding unlawful settlements, “ethnic cleansing” of East Jerusalem, constructing a separation wall (which the World Court found in 2004 was being unlawfully built on Palestinian territory), building a network of Israeli-only roads, maintaining a dualistic system of laws that have an apartheid character, widespread abuse of Palestinian prisoners, and systematic discrimination against the Palestinian minority living within Israel’s pre-1967 borders.

Israel has been consistently defiant in relation to international law and the UN and has refused to uphold Palestinian rights under international law. Given this set of circumstances, which combine the failures of diplomacy to achieve a fair peaceful resolution of the conflict and the unwillingness of Israel to fulfill its obligations under international law, the only viable option consistent with the imperatives of global justice is a blend of continuing Palestinian resistance and a militant global solidarity campaign that is nonviolent, yet coercive.

The Palestinian struggle for self-determination has become the great international moral issue of our time, a successor to the struggle in South Africa a generation ago against its form of institutionalized racism, the original basis of the international crime of apartheid. It is notable that the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court designates apartheid as one type of crime against humanity and associates it with any structure of discrimination that is based on ethnicity or religion—not necessarily a structure exhibiting the same characteristics as were present in South Africa. Increasingly, independent inquiry has concluded that Israel’s occupation of Palestine is accurately considered to be a version of apartheid and hence an ongoing crime against humanity.

It is against this background that divestment initiatives and the wider BDS campaign take on such importance at this time, especially here in the United States where the governing authorities turn a blind eye to Israel’s wrongdoing and yet continue to insist on their capacity to provide a trustworthy intermediary perspective they allege to be the only path to peace. This claim goes back to the aftermath of the 1967 War and is more definitively linked to

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