Israel allies cheer BDS bill’s OK at Chi school

Both the pro-Israel and anti-Israel camps are celebrating the passage of a college campus divestment measure. That doesn’t happen too often, if ever. But for the pro-Israel side in this Chicago episode, the hope is that the student government legislation marks the start of a reframing of the debate on the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

On Feb. 15, the Undergraduate Student Government Association at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), unanimously passed a pro-BDS measure that does not single out Israel. The legislation asks the school’s Faculty Senate to support “divest[ing] fully from companies profiting from human rights abuses and violations of international law including in, but not limited to, Palestine, Syria, China, United Kingdom, U.S.-Mexico border, and Chicago.”

The original legislation, proposed by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and sponsored by the campus group UIC Divest, did single out the Jewish state.

UIC industrial design student Amitai Loew learned about the resolution days before an initial vote on the measure, quickly forming a group called UIC Coalition for Peace with fellow students Moshe Rubin and Chloe Schofield and “immediately created and posted an online petition to try and prevent it,” Algemeiner reported.

But according to Loew, “The meeting was a farce.” His organization was allowed 20 minutes to make their case against the resolution, while bill proponents denounced Israel for more than 90 minutes.

Even though it was outgunned, UIC Coalition for Peace was able to use UIC Divest’s argument that its bill was not “against Israel, but for social justice” in order to convince the legislative body to revisit the text of the resolution. Two days later, in the presence of a mediator, the resolution no longer singled out Israel and now includes the U.S.-Mexico border, the U.K., China, Syria, and Chicago.