This Week

Divest In Israel?

Activist to ask Ann Arbor to stop investing
in companies doing business in Israel.

HARRY KIRSBAUM

Stair Writer

A

2:4.4

A

11/30

2001

24

n Ann Arbor Jewish human rights activist
is hoping to persuade the Ann Arbor city
council to pass a resolution to divest the
city of investments it may hold in compa-
nies that do business in Israel.
But the city knows nothing about it.
To support the resolution, Blaine Coleman, on
behalf of his small ad hoc committee, contacted a
group of 11 Israeli Jewish intellectuals through the
Internet. The group replied by writing a letter for
Coleman tailored for presentation to the Ann Arbor
council, which, in 1986, passed an anti-apartheid
divestment resolution against South Africa.
"We hope you will remember the great good you
did for South Africa, and do the same for millions of
Palestinians today, who face similar racial and ethnic
strangulation, under the control of an extremely
powerful and militarized state," the letter stated.
"The 'Israeli democracy', which you hear so much
about, has absolutely no force when it comes to these
three million Palestinian people, who have now lived
under generations of Israeli military occupation.
"The Israeli military has nuclear weapons, countless
helicopter gunships and tanks, and billions of dollars
each year from the United States government. That
overpowering Israeli arsenal now faces a completely
helpless Palestinian civilian population, each person
sealed into his village by tanks and barbed wire."
Tanya Reinhart, a linguistics professor at Tel Aviv
University, one of the 11 who signed the letter, said
via e-mail, "We sent the letter to him with the
request that he pass it on to the city council when
the issue comes up on their agenda. As far as I
understand, the initiative is just at its first steps."
Ann Arbor Mayor John Hieftje said the letter is
news to him.
"I had no idea where this was coming from. I just
thought it_was out of left field," he said last week.
"We've had five or six calls from people asking if this
was on our agenda."
People may have found the letter on an electronic
Internet list, Reinhart said. At press time, no divestment
letter had been presented or placed on the agenda for
the next council meeting on Monday, Dec. 3. No word
has been given on when the letter would be-presented.
"We have to take human rights seriously,"
Coleman said through e-mail. "It's supposed to be
our mitzvah, right? The shuls should be enthused
about divesting. Every shul should have a divest-
ment committee. You see a modern, nuclearized
army locking down millions of helpless civilians into
ghettos, shooting down thousands of Palestinians.
You have to identify with the guys in the ghetto.
"Look how Jews were treated for centuries in Poland.
We were stuck in ghettos, couldn't expect any protec-
tion from pogroms, etc. Now it's happening to millions

of Palestinians. The least we can do is cut off the money
that allows it to happen — like in South Africa."
Reinhart said what the group hopes to achieve is
"obvious."
"If the international community unites, as it did
in the case of South Africa, it is possible to gradually
force an arrangement guaranteeing the rights and
security of all residents, as it turned out true in
South Africa," she said.

Standing By Israel

Jeffrey Levin, Jewish Federation of Washtenaw
County executive director, was angered by the letter.
"Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East
and one of America's closest allies in the world. It's

fighting its own war against terrorists, and it is, to say
the least, counter-intuitive to sever our ties to Israel, -
he said. "We should be strengthening our ties with a
country that shares so many of our values in a time
when the fight in the world is against terrorism."
When Jerome S. Kaufman, national secretary of the
Zionist Organization of America, read the letter online,
he said he thought the most logical response would be
to get a group of Israeli professors to refute the letter.
Kaufman, of Bloomfield Hills, contacted Dr. Ron
Breiman, chairman of Professors for a Safe Israel
(PSI), a large, nonpartisan organization of academics
supporting Israel, who wrote a rebuttal letter.
"The Israeli academics that wrote in support of
divestiture are a small and extreme minority, on the
fringe of Israeli politics," wrote Dr. Breiman. "Since
the publication of the pro-boycott letter in question,
its writers have been excoriated by individuals and
organizations across the spectrum.
"A boycott campaign would damage America's clos-
est friend in the Middle East even as she makes great
efforts for peace, harming the entire nation regardless
of political orientation, harming also the many Arabs
DIVEST on page 25

Delegitimizhig Israel

A smear campaign overseas, and one in the United States.

JAMES D. BESSER

Washington Correspondent

G.

eneva, Switzerland, and
Ann Arbor, Michigan,
may be a world apart,
but they now have
something in common: both are
settings for a reinvigorated effort to
undercut the legitimacy
of Israel.
The same folks
responsible for turning
this summer's Durban conference
on racism into an anti-Israel free-
for-all are getting set for an encore
performance in Geneva next
week.
And in college towns like Ann
Arbor, Arab and Muslim student
groups are using spurious compar-
isons with South Africa to discredit
Israel.
Neither effort alone will succeed,
but cumulatively, the campaign,
which also includes the movement
to charge Israeli Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon with war crimes, can
only make it harder to reach the
goal many boosters of these efforts
claim to support — genuine peace.
The central theme in both efforts
is this: Israel is the new apartheid
state, as illegitimate in its existence
as the South African government

whose blatantly racist policies pro-
duced revulsion around the world
and, ultimately, economic sanctions
that helped bring about its demise.
That was the message promoted
by the hijackers of this summer's
U.N.-sponsored racism conference
in Durban. The target wasn't Israeli
policy; it was an attack on the idea
of a Jewish state, and on
the Jews who support it
— portrayed as every bit
as contemptible as the
racists who supported the old South
African regime
The fact that the conference was
held in Durban added resonance to
the charge, exactly as protest plan-
ners had intended.

ANALYSIS

.

Fanning The Flames

Durban was a failure for Arab and
Islamic nations in some key
respects. The final conference docu-
ment ducked the "Zionism as
racism" charge, and Washington,
recognizing it for the farce it would
be, boycotted the meeting.
But the conference garnered
enormous media attention; the
anti-Israel slurs were repeated end-
lessly around the world. Respected
international groups raised few
objections.

That was enough to encourage
anti-Israel forces to move on to
Geneva, where a meeting of the
Fourth Geneva Convention sign-
ers will take place on Wednesday,
Dec. 5.
The convention, signed in 1949,
has met only once before; that
meeting, too, was convened solely
to take political swipes at Israel.
Countless wars have taken place
in those 52 years, countless atroci-
ties against civilians, but only Israel
has been singled out for censure by
having a special session called to
consider its actions.
The anti-Israel coalition will also
bring many of the same non-govern-
mental groups that sullied this sum-
mer's racism conference to Geneva.
The overall goal: a formal .
acknowledgement by the interna-
tional body that Israel is in violation
of the convention, and, outside the
official meeting, another anti-Israel
feeding frenzy.
There's nothing new in efforts to
use international organizations to
discredit Israel, as a long series of
unbalanced U.N. resolutions
demonstrates.
But there is a new vehemence in
the effort and a new sophistication.

ISRAEL on page 26