PRO-PEACE, PRO-ISRAEL, ANTI-DIVESTMENT AT STANFORD

In January, 2007, SCAI (Students Confronting Apartheid in Israel), a newly formed student group at Stanford, launched a campaign urging Stanford University to divest from Israel. This effort is the latest incarnation of a nation-wide campus divestment campaign effort initiated in February, 2001, by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a student group at the University of California, Berkeley, in conjunction with the San Francisco chapter of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. A year later the movement began to spread to other universities, including the University of Michigan, Yale, Princeton, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but has failed in each case. The presidents of numerous universities have openly and clearly opposed these divestment efforts; Columbia’s president described the alleged comparison between Israel and South Africa “grotesque and offensive.”

SCAI’s effort mirrors prior campaigns by implying a false analogy between Israel and Apartheid South Africa, and by singling out Israel as responsible for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, rather than acknowledging the suffering of both Israelis and Palestinians throughout this conflict and the need for both parties to work together to resolve the conflict.
For more information, click here for a copy of the full response to divesment (as given to the ASSU).
Or, for a quick list of relevant facts, click here.

The petition below was created based on the need to clearly express:

• Opposition to the outrageous and false implication that Israel – the only democracy in the Middle East – is an apartheid state;
• Profound disappointment that SCAI has brought inflammatory, counterproductive rhetoric to Stanford, thereby inflaming discourse at Stanford which is out of  character with the traditional high quality of discussion at this University;
• Support for strategies that promote Israeli-Palestinian peace, rather than efforts, such as the divestment campaign, that derail progress towards peace.
   

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