Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, December 2003, page 74-76

Campus Activism

Rutgers Hosts Third Divestment Conference

Amidst a storm of controversy, including Zionist attacks and internal disagreements, New Jersey Solidarity (NJS) hosted the Third North American Conference of the Palestine Solidarity Movement (PSM) in New Brunswick, NJ, Oct. 10 to 12, 2003.

Despite a tense start, however, a successful conference ensued. After a welcome by NJS president Charlotte Kates, the opening plenary featured Elias Rashmawi of the Free Palestine Alliance (FPA), who described to the audience of several hundred how the steadfastness of Palestinians inspired the American movement to continue even while under attacks like those aimed at the NJS-sponsored conference. He vowed that the PSM—an umbrella group that grew out of the original Berkeley divestment conference—would fight Israeli apartheid just as solidarity movements fought apartheid in South Africa and Jim Crow laws in the American South. Palestine, Rashmawi added, was not about statehood—“a meter here and a mile there”—but about insistence on identity, and rejection of enslavement. “Solidarity is international and unconditional in both directions,” he adjured his listeners, explaining that those around the world who stand with Palestinians must take their lead from them.

Sara Flounders of the International Action Center (IAC) praised NJS organizers for staying the course in the face of an onslaught—including death threats—faced by no previous conference, and drew parallels between the crises faced by the Bush and Sharon administrations as they both faced unanticipated resistance.

Lamis Deek, an organizer with Al-Awda New York, said that, like Palestine, the solidarity movement lives on despite Zionist attacks. Divestment, she reminded the audience, had been a powerful tool bringing the apartheid South African state to implosion.

The struggle for Palestine, she continued, did not begin three years ago, but 55 years ago—“not on a Green Line, not when the state of Israel was declared, [but] when Israel razed 500 [Palestinian] villages.”

Finally, musing over the label of terrorist, Deek wondered where the media were when Fares Odeh was killed, or when the grandmother cried over the destruction of her 100-year-old olive trees, or when Rachel Corrie was crushed under the Israeli bulldozer.

The next morning’s plenary session featured Carl Messineo of the Partnership for Civil Justice (PCJ); Eyad Kishawi of the FPA and the San Francisco based Divestment Resource Center; well-known author and activist Tariq Ali of Stop the War UK; and a message from Ibrahim Akawi, a 1948 Palestinian who resides inside present-day Israel, and who was denied a visa to attend the conference.

Messineo opened the session by describing his experience at a checkpoint on a trip to Gaza in 2002, shortly after Israel’s spring invasions. He spoke of heat and dust, armed guards, and miles and miles of a mass of humanity waiting—not just delayed or inconvenienced, but often forced into a life-or-death situation, as medical supplies deteriorated, livestock suffocated, and patients died in ambulances. To call Israel a democracy, he stated, is to “ratify the violence of transfer.” People, not boundaries or sovereignties, have human rights, Messineo asserted, and no nation can be founded on the deprivation of human rights.

Akawi’s message addressed the situation of Palestinians “inside.” Zionism, he averred, is based on two myths. The first was the denial of the Palestinian people—the famous “people without a land for a land without a people,” which resulted in brutal ethnic cleansing, including the changing of place names to eradicate all traces of the people who lived there. The second myth, according to Akawi, is the hypocrisy that Israel is both a Jewish state and a democracy. Israel has no constitution, Akawi reminded the audience, no defined borders, and some of its “Basic Laws” are fundamentally biased. As an example of the latter, he cited the Law of Return, which decrees that a baby born of Jewish parents anywhere in the world can automatically have Israeli citizenship, but that babies born in Israel to Palestinian parents do not have that right. Moreover, the Jewish National Fund—which controls 97 percent of the land in Israel—denies Palestinians who live there the right to buy land. Like Messineo, Akawi concluded that a Palestinian mini-state without the right of return would be meaningless.

Kishawi, noting the goal of conference-goers to bring justice through divestment from Israel, asked, why Israel? Answering his own question by describing Israel as a racist exclusionary state, he advocated equal rights and equal resources—whether Palestinian or Jewish immigrant—as the vision toward which divestment was working.

As the morning session’s final speaker, Tariq Ali argued that, if the U.S. media wanted the Palestinian resistance to use nonviolent methods, divestment should be much more widely discussed. However, he added, if the U.S. really wanted an end to the situation it could cut aid to Israel—or even threaten to—and bring about an immediate solution. Ali accused Israel of having a vicious regime that would fight to the end, but which was dependent on U.S. dollars to do so.

On his visits to the U.S., Ali said, he was shocked by the media treatment of Israel and Palestine, adding that we should all be “grateful that Fox News didn’t exist during the Third Reich.” But, he cautioned, all of America’s mainstream press was part of the problem, and any foreigner visiting the U.S. would think the only things wrong in Israel or Palestine were Hamas and suicide bombers. Ali wondered aloud why Edward Said had never been invited on network talk shows, and why the U.S. print media were too scared to print what was even published in the Israeli press.

While some said the U.S. occupation of Iraq was just about oil, Ali argued that one should not fall into a trap of analyzing the situation only on the basis of economics. The occupation of Iraq was a demonstration of U.S. power for the Arab world, the Far Eastern bloc and Europe, he argued, as well as a favor for the neocons, who in turn wanted to do a favor for Israel.

Israel, Ali pointed out, is the only Middle Eastern state with weapons of mass destruction. He accused the U.S. of actually working to stop the democratization of the Arab world because oligarchies were easier to work with. It was worth remembering, Ali said, that the empire was not all-powerful, and that growing understanding and resistance around the world could mount a serious challenge to U.S. hegemony.

Predicting that the resistance would grow, Ali amused the audience when he described how ordinary Americans were surprised by Iraqi resistance, as though “all Arabs, in their spare moments drinking tea, turn to one another and say, ‘if only the Americans would come and occupy us.’”

He concluded by saying that Palestine was the last colony in the world, that Palestinians only ask for equal rights, and that as long as Palestine is occupied, there will be no peace.

Following a variety of early-afternoon workshops, conference-goers and community supporters staged a rally on the Rutgers University campus. The gathering was heavily infiltrated by Zionist rabble-rousers seeking to divert attention to themselves.

Given the controversy and tension surrounding the conference, however, it was a coup that it occurred at all, and NJS considered the rally successful as well.

A final short plenary on Oct. 12 included Altaf Hussein of the Muslim Student Association (MSA), former Weatherman Brian Flanagan, and Laila Al-Arian who addressed the audience by telephone regarding the plight of her father, Prof. Sami Al-Arian, a U.S. political prisoner in Florida. While many attendees had left by Sunday afternoon, those who remained clamored that the scheduled workshops not be scrapped, thereby allowing particularly moving testimony to the plight of refugees by renowned Palestinian artist Samia Halaby, among others.

—Sara Powell

Michael Moore at Georgetown

Academy Award-winning director Michael Moore stopped by Georgetown University Oct. 10, on the second day of his 35-city tour to promote his latest book Dude, Where’s My Country?, a follow-up to his best-selling Stupid White Men. After keeping 500 students and community members waiting for over an hour and half because of flight delays, Moore finally arrived to the excitement of the restless audience, which immediately gave him a standing ovation.

A Catholic by upbringing, Moore looked around Georgetown’s ornate Gaston Hall with its religious imagery and expressed skepticism about the Christian values of the current administration.

“Their policy is in conflict with their religion,” Moore said, asking how Republicans can support sending Americans to war to the benefit of a few large corporations, such as defense contractor Halliburton.

“These kids in the Army offer to risk and give up their lives to defend us,” he said. “This is an incredible gift to those who don’t serve, and I find it despicable and immoral to take their good faith and use them so that Bush and his associates can enrich themselves.”

Moore then cynically suggested that Halliburton slay one mid-level executive for every U.S. soldier killed in Iraq, arguing that, because the company was profiting from American deaths in Iraq, it also should be willing to sacrifice.

The American public, he went on, is tired of what Moore called the Bush White House’s “serial lying.” When voters are angry, they respond, the author and filmmaker said, citing the California recall of Gov. Gray Davis as a case in which citizens took action to oust a politician who was not performing well. The reason President Bush did not comment on the recall, Moore explained, is because he fears a similar “recall” will take place next November.

One reason Bush may remain in office next year, Moore cautioned, is because the Democratic Party “is the most miserable, pathetic excuse for a party.” While the majority of Americans are generally liberal on major issues like minimum wage and the environment, he said, Democratic candidates tend to be “wishy-washy” on their views and depend on poll results to develop their platforms.

Moore then discussed the status of civil liberties post-Sept. 11 and the Justice Department’s handling of the war on terror. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, Moore said, the FBI wanted to probe the hijackers’ backgrounds to see if they had purchased any guns, but Ashcroft immediately ordered them to stop. Apparently, Moore speculated, the attorney general was concerned about the “Second Amendment rights of the dead hijackers” while he was “rounding up hundreds of Arab Americans without any charges.”

Another case in which the administration has caved into special interests, Moore said, was when the tobacco industry successfully lobbied to remove lighters and matches from the list of items banned by the Federal Aviation Administration.

During the question-and-answer session which followed Moore’s remarks, one student suggested that, in going to war on Iraq the United States “did the right thing for the wrong reasons.”

“We rarely do the right thing,” Moore responded. “Saddam Hussain was in part our creation. We supplied him with $1 billion in weapons [in the past]. I think we created a much worse situation, and we went about it in the dumbest way possible. Iraq was a country that was decimated by 12 years of sanctions, so what was the rush?” he asked.

Bush owes the international community an apology, Moore concluded, and must give the oil in Iraq to the Iraqi people.

—Laila Al-Arian