Statement to the Community Hearing, Advisory Committee on Socially Responsible Investing, Columbia University
We come before you representing over five hundred signatures on a petition demanding that Columbia University "divest from all companies that manufacture arms and other military hardware sold to Israel, as well as from companies that sell such arms and military hardware to Israel." In registering to speak at this Community Hearing we submitted our website address (www.columbiadivest.org) where the petition signatories are listed.
Among the Domestic Manager Holdings as of October 14, 2002, we have identified for specific divestment the Boeing Corporation ($2,358,000) and General Electric ($3,869,460), the makers of Apache helicopters; Caterpillar ($1,306,965), the maker of the D9 Bulldozer; and Lockheed Martin Corporation ($583,800), maker of the F-15 and F-16 fighter jets. We further demand a detailed review of university portfolio holdings to determine if other companies whose equities are owned by Columbia also are manufacturers or sellers of arms to Israel.
Our petition began as a faculty initiative. Currently, the signers include 98 faculty, 236 students, and 203 staff, alumni and members of the community.
Our aim is peace and justice in the form of a political settlement to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. We seek a solution to a political and human problem that dates back over fifty years to the formation of the State of Israel. We seek a solution to a political and human problem that has had and, if not settled, will continue to have the gravest implications and repercussions for the world at large. Our petition to divest from arms manufacturers and suppliers to Israel is intended to bring moral pressure towards this goal of peace, justice and political resolution. We act at our own grass-roots level, within our own community--Columbia University--but the moral pressure we hope to build is intended ultimately to move the United States into principled and decisive action.
We recognize and respect the wide diversity of views on these issues and we invite and encourage discussion and debate. A first such occasion will be tonight, immediately following this Community Hearing and all are invited. Organized by the undergraduate club Turath, the event is titled, "Should Columbia Invest in Arms for Israel? A discussion of social responsibility, human rights, and the new divestment campaign." It is at Lerner Cinema Space, 8 P.M. To promote further discussion we will add important new educational materials to our website in the coming days.
Divestment campaigns currently are underway at a number of universities (Harvard-MIT, Princeton, Yale, California, Pennsylvania, Tufts, Cornell, Illinois, North Carolina-see the links on our website), but our campaign is different. It demands not a general divestment from all companies doing business with Israel but instead a targeted divestment from companies that manufacture and sell arms. We focus on a fundamental feature of the current conflict: the use of force against the civilian Palestinian population living under Israel's military occupation. The last two years have opened a new chapter in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and it is to this turn of events that we have reacted with our petition. In January 2001, with all who desired peace, we hoped for a successful outcome to the Taba negotiations between Ehud Barak and Yassir Arafat. But the new Bush administration failed to support the dramatic progress made in those negotiations and Barak decided to abandon them in the face of Ariel Sharon, who defeated him in the elections of the following month. The ensuing Israeli military re-occupation of West Bank towns and villages has been accompanied by stark new forms of brutality and by many documented human rights violations, and also by the illegal collective imprisonment of the civilian Palestinian population, who live under continuous curfews and are denied all freedom of movement, economic livelihood, and political future. It is this dramatic turn to the pursuit of a military solution together with the blocking of international efforts at mediation by the United States that we specifically condemn and address in our targeted divestment demands.
In our petition we state that "we categorically condemn the loss of any innocent life, Israeli or Palestinian." This statement reflects an overall condemnation of violence directed against civilians, whether organized by the state or by societal groups. Given our opposition to all forms of terror, our petitions seeks an end to a colonial-type occupation that reinforces the positions of those who see terror as a solution.
We do not broadly condemn Israel. Our criticisms of Israeli policies and actions are specific. We criticize the continued occupation and state-organized brutality against civilians. Our campaign addresses Israel and this particular conflict for three reasons: 1) Israel has a special relationship to the United States and is its largest aid recipient; 2) While in other cases of territorial expansion and occupation the United States has sometimes acted swiftly to sanction the occupier and end the occupation, in this case U.S. support for the occupying power has led to the longest continuing occupation anywhere in the world; 3) While in other major conflicts the United States has worked with its allies and the United Nations to bring the weight of international consensus to achieve a solution, in the case of Israel the United States stands alone in its opposition to any involvement by the UN and it fails to support the international consensus calling for a complete and immediate end to the occupation.
Israeli military incursions into the West Bank in March and April of 2002 involved serious human rights violations and war crimes documented by Amnesty International ("Israel and the Occupied Territories: Shielded from Scrutiny-IDF violations in Jenin and Nabulus," Nov. 4, 2002). These included, and I quote from the Amnesty Press Release, "unlawful killings; torture and ill-treatment of prisoners; wanton destruction of hundreds of homes sometimes with the residents still inside; the blocking of ambulances and denial of humanitarian assistance; and the use of Palestinian civilians as ‘human shields.'" An earlier Human Rights Watch report on Israel's re-occupation of Jenin (5/02) concluded, "Israeli forces committed serious violations of international humanitarian law, some amounting prima facie to war crimes." The tools of these crimes and violations included American-made Apache helicopters, Caterpillar D9 bulldozers and F-15 and F-16 fighter jets. Prior to the March-April incursions, Human Rights Watch also issued a report (4/02) documenting "the IDF practice of coercing civilians to assist military personnel and operations, a serious violation of international humanitarian law." For further, updated references we recommend two sites, Electronic Intifada (www.electronicintifada.net) and B'Tselem, the Israeli Center for Information on Human Rights in the Occupied Territories (www.btselem.org). The latter documents current settler disruptions of the Palestinian olive harvest, the use of live ammunition in curfew enforcement, and the violation of a High Court of Justice injunction against the use of human shields, the so-called "neighbor procedure." Israel is in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention which protects civilians in times of war and under occupation. Israel's dramatic recent expansion of illegal settlements and seizures of Palestinian property in the occupied territories of the West bank and Gaza represent a continuation of years of defiance of UN Resolution 242 of 1967, which affirms the principle of the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war. This Resolution called for, and we again call for the withdrawal of Israeli forces and settlers from all occupied territories. For recent documentation on the accelerated "land grab," see the B'Tselem report of May 13, 2002, "Land Grab: Israel's Settlement Policy in the West Bank."
President Bollinger intervened in response to our petition on November 7, 2002, in the form of a "Current Communication from the President's Office," the text of which appeared as the lead item on the Columbia University website (see now "Columbia News"). We think President Bollinger acted wrongly, for several reasons.
1) He has prejudiced the process. He states, "There are procedures established at Columbia for considering proposals of this sort. Anyone can submit a proposal to the University's Advisory Committee of Socially Responsible Investing for resolution." (We were duly registered to appear at the Community Hearing by October 30.) But a chief executive must not express his opinion preemptively while a matter is still under review at a lower level. It is like a president or a governor speaking out while a court case is underway. We protest to the members of the Advisory Committee that their role and authority have been undermined and compromised.
2) His action will suppress debate. It is hypocritical to say Columbia should have free and open debate when the chief executive has come out for one side in such a hostile and exaggerated fashion. What of employments, opportunities, tenure cases, etc.? Some faculty, students, staff and alumni now will be reluctant to express themselves. President Bollinger must retract his "communication" and return to a position of neutrality to create the open field for the debate he advocates.
3) He has characterized documented human rights offenses as merely "alleged." In this situation of starkly disproportionate power and of blanket refusals by the Israeli military to provide any responses to investigators' questions, all there can be are documented instances, not the lawyer's court-proven facts. What we have at hand are careful and detailed reports by such independent groups as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch (with both SIPA Dean Lisa Anderson and Gary Sick, Acting Director of the Middle East Institute on its board) and B'Tselem, not to mention the official reactions of the US State Department.
4) President Bollinger also states that the analogy to Apartheid is "grotesque and offensive." We disagree. On the one hand, we invoked the anti-Apartheid divestment campaigns of the 1980s only for their procedural precedent in declaring "our hope that moral pressure from the international community could be an effective means of encouraging political transformation." On the other hand, there is an ongoing tradition of Israeli, South African and other scholars who have pursued the analogy on substantive grounds. Earlier than Bishop Desmond Tutu's well-known July 14, 2002 statement (on our website), and before the June, 2001 "Not in My Name" letter to a Pretoria newspaper by two prominent Jewish leaders of the movement against the South African apartheid state (see our website), a famous book by Israeli social scientist Uri Davis, Israel: An Apartheid State (London: Zed, 1987), already had posed the question. Earlier still, in 1973, the distinguished French scholar Maxime Rodinson published a book with the title, Israel: A Colonial-Settler State? (New York). On September 20-21, 2002, the Institute of African Studies at Columbia University organized a conference on "A South African Conversation on Israel and Palestine," involving participants from South Africa, Israel and Palestine. The conference concluded that the analogy was illuminating in aspects but inexact as a whole. At the same time participants were convinced that contemporary Israel had much to learn from the post-Apartheid transition in South Africa.
We are confident, however, that President Bollinger's intervention will not inhibit proper deliberation on the part of the Advisory Committee on Socially Responsible Investing. Our demand for targeted divestments arises from a substantial segment of the Columbia community, individuals deeply concerned about the use of military equipment against the civilian Palestinian population. We believe divestment by Columbia will help build moral pressure towards a peaceful solution, political rather than military, to a conflict with global significance.
My Rights, Our Power: A Joint Campaign Launched in Palestine to Raise Awareness on Women’s Fundamental Human Rights
Date posted: March 09, 2019
By UN Women
1_March 2019, Ramallah – On the occasion of the International Women’s Day (8 March), a week-long joint campaign “My Rights, Our Power” was launched today in Palestine to raise awareness on women’s fundamental human rights. The joint effort, with participation from over 30 national and international partners from civil society organizations, media outlets, and international development agencies, targets youth, women, and men in various geographic areas in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza to promote women’s human rights in Palestine.
The campaign comes at a crucial moment when the anticipated adoption of the Family Protection Bill is at a standstill, raising concerns among national and international stakeholders about the consequences of such delay on safeguarding women’s fundamental human rights in Palestine. According to the Palestine report of the International Men and Gender Equality Survey (IMAGES), nearly one in five Palestinian men (17 percent) surveyed said they had perpetrated act of physical intimate partner violence against female partners, while 21 per cent of women surveyed reported having experienced such violence.
“Family violence, usually committed by a family member who has social or economic power over others in the family, causes enormous pain and suffering to all members of the family, especially the women and children,” said a spokesperson from civil society, which has vigorously initiated the development of the Family Protection Bill (FPB), and has strongly pushed its adoption since 2004.
“The violation of women’s human rights manifests in various levels and should be also understood from economic, cultural, and social aspects,” the spokesperson added, highlighting the lack of opportunities and freedom of choice, as well as limited access to justice and services that women in Palestine still experience.
The joint campaign aims to raise awareness of the general public, especially youth, women, and men on women’s fundamental rights in line with international standards and embedded in the Family Protection Bill draft endorsed by the previous Cabinet at the end of December 2018. Five key messages, addressing women’s right to a life free of violence, right to achieve justice and seek help in case of violation of such life, as well as the right to equal opportunities and right to make one’s own choices, will be distributed through various channels such as radio, social media, helpline (121), outreach activities, and on-site events. The closing event of the joint campaign will take place on 8 March in Jerusalem and will celebrate women’s achievements using TED-style talks, followed by art performances.
“My Rights, Our Power” joint campaign is part of the global International Women’s Day 2019 campaign under the theme of “Think equal, build smart, innovate for change”. The theme focuses on innovative ways in which we can advance gender equality and the empowerment of women, particularly in the areas of social protection systems, access to public services and sustainable infrastructure, echoing the theme of the 63rd session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW 63) taking place in New York on 11-22 March 2019.
The participating organizations of the “My Rights, Our Power” are (in alphabetical order): 17 Palestinian women’s organizations represented by Al-Muntada (coalition), British Consulate-General, Business Women Forum, CARE International, Consulate General of Sweden, Consulate General of Belgium, EUPOL COPPS, EU Representative Office, FAO, General Union of Palestinian Women, Government of Japan, CowaterSogema/GROW Project, International Labour Organization, Italian Agency for Development Cooperation, Ma’an TV, MIFTAH, Netherlands Representative Office, Nisaa FM, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Palestinian Working Woman Society for Development, Palestinian Family Planning and Protection Association, Representative Office of Canada, Representative Office of Denmark, SAWA, Sawasya II, Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation, Sports for Life, Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, Representative Office of Norway, UNDP, UNESCO, UNFPA, UNICEF, UNOPS, UN Women, Women's Centre for Legal Aid and Counseling, Women’s Studies Center.
For more information, please contact Eunjin Jeong at UN Women via eunjin.jeong@unwomen.org or 059 2321 308, Majd Beltaji at UNESCO via m.beltaji@unesco.org or 059 4501 506.
