On Aug. 14, 2024, the Oberlin Board of Trustees rejected Students for a Free Palestine’s Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions-based proposal to divest from Israel and shared a response explaining why. I knew a bit about how the endowment worked beforehand, so I wasn’t surprised by the Board’s decision.  As explained in the response paper, which I highly recommend you read, divestment isn’t feasible, effective, or warranted.  If Oberlin divested, it would lose a ton of money without having any effect on companies’ decision to divest from Israel or on the Israel-Palestine conflict itself. Between the lines of their threshold argument is the most inflammatory thing in the response: there’s no genocide going on, and therefore nothing to warrant divestment.

This situation encapsulates the two main things I see when I hear people talk about divestment from Israel: good intentions and a lack of understanding. People don’t understand the power limits and responsibilities of the bodies they’re asking to divest from Israel, what divestment will actually do, or anything about the Israel–Palestine conflict itself. They just know that innocent people are dying in a vicious war and they want it to stop. This really gets to me, because I know from experience how painful and bewildering it is to try and do the right thing, but end up the bad guy who made things worse, with barely any understanding as to how you messed up so bad. I also recognize that if I wasn’t Jewish and hadn’t studied the Israel–Palestine conflict, antisemitism, and genocide studies, I might not be writing this article.

So, to help people do the good they want to do, I decided to put my writing skills and education to good use, and write this piece.

The Genocide Convention of 1948 says that genocide is illegal, defines it as certain acts which are “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” then goes on to list some of the ways genocide is done. The International Court of Justice ruled in January 2024 that Israel is not committing genocide against the Palestinians. In my opinon there is no intent, and intent is what defines genocide not the number of deaths or how they died.  Israeli officials have discussed their war goals and policies repeatedly in interviews, on social media, and on The Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security website, and nowhere does it say that their intent is to wipe out the Palestinians. Israel aims to destroy Hamas’ leadership and military capabilities, rescue the hostages, and secure the return of northern Israelis to their homes (which means dealing with Hezbollah), and it needs control of the Philadelphi and Netzarim corridors to do this.  Israel has also done a great amount to help the Palestinians civilians by establihing  humanitarian zones, pamphlets warning of attack, and aid such as food, water, and polio vaccines. Again, it is important to emphasize here that I’m not denying mass Palestinian deaths. Between Hamas using them as human shields and political pawns, Hamas hijacking most aid before it can reach the Palestinians, and Israeli bombing, tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians have died. “Not a genocide” doesn’t mean “everything’s fine” — things aren’t fine. It’s war, and however justified war is, it’s always brutal.

While there is no genocide in Israel-Palestine, there is certainly inequality. Palestinians are caught between a rock and a hard place. Israel makes it incredibly hard for them to get and maintain citizenship, is stingy with work permits, doesn’t recognize the Palestinian right of return, and has an extremist minority that wants Palestinians gone. On the other hand, Hamas is brutal, the Palestinian Authority is weak, and pro-Palestine movements like Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions often make things worse. I don’t support divestment, or anything BDS does, because in practice, it just causes more Palestinian suffering. For example, Soda tream had a factory in Mishor Adumim, an industrial park within the illegal Israeli settlement Ma’ale Adumim in the West Bank, until it closed in 2015 due to BDS pressure. A replacement factory opened in the Negev Desert within the Green Line.  Despite more than 500 Palestinians working at Mishor Adumim, only 130 work permits were issued for Ma’ale Adumim, and it’s a two-hour bus ride each way.  In July 2021, Ben & Jerry’s announced it would pull out of Occupied Palestinian Territory, which the U.N. defines as the West Bank and Gaza.  Hen Israeli, vice president of the main Ben & Jerry’s distributor in the West Bank, and Bassem Eid, an acclaimed Palestinian human rights activist, warned it would hurt Palestinian livelihoods. Thankfully, this didn’t happen. Ben & Jerry’s ensuing lawsuit with parent company Unilever ended with Unilever selling the Ben & Jerry’s rights to Israeli licensee Avi Zinger, which currently sells products in both Hebrew and Arabic in Israel and the West Bank.

Criticizing a country and wanting to level economic pressures such as boycotting, divesting, or sanctioning against it is completely fine. For example, to back up their claim that Zionism is a racist, colonial, European ideology supported by the Western powers, BDS references the 1917 Balfour Declaration and places it next to a 1917 quote from Arthur Balfour:  Four Great Powers supported Zionism, “right or wrong, good or bad”, over the “desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land”.  This setup implies that this quote is from the Balfour Declaration.  It isn’t.  The cited quote is from a letter Balfour sent Lord Curzon in 1919, a letter that also says “so far as Palestine is concerned, the Powers have made no statement of fact which is not admittedly wrong, and no declaration of policy which, at least in the letter, they have not always intended to violate.”  We see this in the actual Balfour Declaration and its parallel, the Hussein-McMahon correspondence, where Britain supports Jewish and Arab nationhood respectively in order to get the upper hand in WWI, and then played dumb when the two groups wanted their contradictory promises fulfilled. A final fact check here is that in reality, pre-1948 Zionism was the desire for self-determination in a Jewish state (with no location attached to the definition), founded out of fear of rampant European antisemitism like Soviet pogroms and the Dreyfus Affair; Palestine was chosen as the location for the state because it’s the Jewish ancestral homeland – the land they’re indigenous to. The worst part of all this is that well-meaning people just trying to educate themselves will come across BDS’ website, believe the untrue accusations based in skewed history and antisemitism, and then spread it via things like student divestment proposals and SFP.  Approving these proposals would only validate and spread BDS’ lies and antisemitism.

Above all, I’m against divestment because it creates this idea that to be pro-Palestine, you have to be anti-Israel. That kind of thinking is divisive and ineffective. Jews and Palestinians are both indigenous to the land, so they both deserve to be there.  Supporting one does not mean hating the other; more rights for one doesn’t mean less for the other.  With some law reform and more progressive leaders, Israel could be a phenomenal home to Jews, Palestinians, Bedouin, Druze, and more.  So, I ask everyone reading this to think for a moment:  Do you want to hurt Israel, or do you want to help Palestinians? Because if you want to help Palestinians, there are great ways to do so. You can take Asssistant Professor Matthew Berkman’s Israel–Palestine class (a great starting point), buy eSims, donate  money to individual or family GoFundMes, and, above all, be both pro-Palestine and pro-Israel.  Don’t view the conflict as Jews versus Palestinians.  View it as the Jews and Palestinians who want to live together in peace versus the Jews and Palestinians who don’t. The Israel-Palestine conflict will be solved if peace-minded Jews and Palestinians unite against the extremists — Hamas and the Israeli ultra-right — who benefit from them being divided and afraid.  To give yourself hope that this will work, look up organizations like Builders of the Middle East (ft. Luai Ahmed), the Oasis of Peace/Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam, the Hand in Hand Schools, Bassem Eid, and Tal Yaakov. There are people and organizations out there who offer genuine education and effective activism.

So come join us.