Op-ed: Divestment and democracy

Disclaimer: David Westby is a layout editor and former production director for the Daily. He is not involved in the Daily's editorial processes.

 

The Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senate’s April 9 resolution, which calls for divestment from four corporations that benefit from the expansion of practices of occupation by the Israeli state, has sparked rabid debate on campus. Opponents of the resolution are crying foul play, citing the vote’s proximity to Passover as a mockery of the democratic process. Scott Geldzahler’s April 10 op-ed in the Daily interprets the passing of the resolution as the death of democracy at Tufts, a shady vote that “disenfranchised hundreds of Tufts students.”

There is a deep irony at play when opponents of a measure that proposes divestment from Israel call for a defense of democracy. In fact, it is antithetical to the very idea of democracy to withhold some rights as exclusive to members of a certain ethnicity or religion. Travel to Israel is considered a 'right of birth' to any Jew throughout the world, while at the same time, movement within the state is heavily restricted for non-Jews, many of whose families have lived there for generations.

Thus, the resolution was written precisely to establish democratic rights. It calls for divestment from companies with economic ties to a nation-state that is by definition non-democratic.

We would argue, too, for an intense critical suspicion of an op-ed that asks you to set aside “anyone’s thoughts about the merit or demerit of the resolution” while dismissing the resolution out-of-hand as a “non-solution” and a “grandiose statement.”

The resolution is anything but an empty statement. It is a call for economic action as a response to an anti-democratic and systemic marginalization of people under the modern world’s longest-standing military occupation. But for opponents of the resolution, the disconcerting issue at hand is process and dialogue.

The subtle bait-and-switch performed in Scott's op-ed is neither an invention of the author nor unfamiliar to those of us who have spent time on campus. Nearly any method of protest or disruption by students on campus who make a political demand is usually and repetitively critiqued first on account of its supposed disregard for dialogue and propriety or as betraying some sense of civil respect. The implication is always that protests, resolutions and disagreement should only be voiced at the convenience of the status quo.

Even more troubling is the constant conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. Without minimizing the very real currents of anti-Semitism at play in the United States today, it is important to acknowledge this distinction.

Criticizing the state of Israel for systemic legal inequalities based on religious distinctions is not anti-Semitic. Indeed, the resolution was written by and supported by many Jews. The allegation of anti-Semitism distracts from its political demand in the same way superficial lamentations about process and dialogue do.

TCU didn’t attack democratic values on April 9, it gave them a chance.