A dangerous campaign

Itake offense to the tactics of the Princeton divestment campaign. This campaign, urging the University to withdraw investments from corporations doing business with Israel, does not aim to educate a population toward making an informed political decision, but rather uses misleading quotes and graphic posters to quickly sway a large number of people to support the Palestinian cause, and to incite anti-Israel sentiment.

The use of Archbishop Desmond Tutu's quote — "I am a black South African, and if I were to change the names, a description of what is happening in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank could describe events in South Africa" — is misleading. Tutu, a South African priest, was awarded the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize for leadership in the non-violent anti-apartheid campaigns. What many people do not realize is that the anti-apartheid movement has historically been tied to the Palestinian movement. Both the African National Congress (ANC), the political umbrella organization of black liberation in South Africa, and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) received financial support and arms from the Soviet Union and its allies during the Cold War. The ANC has long considered the PLO, along with independence movements throughout the world, including Fidel Castro's revolutionary campaign, to be brothers in the struggle against the white Western oppressor.

Brotherhood in liberation also motivates South African President and ANC leader Thabo Mbeki to refrain from criticizing Robert Mugabe's government in neighboring Zimbabwe, home to government-supported violent invasions of white farms, and a recent election that did not come close to the democratic standards of international observers. If ending human rights violations is your goal — as it is for Princeton's divestment campaigners — look no further than Zimbabwe where the government supports violent attacks on individuals simply because they are white, and political rights are at the whim of the president. But Mbeki's tacit support of Mugabe for the last several years is generally understood as support of a fellow liberation fighter, in the tradition of the ANC and the PLO.

I do not in any way intend to vilify Tutu, whose leadership in the anti-apartheid movement was great, and whose insistence upon non-violence helped reduce the expected casualties of the South African transition to democracy. I do, however, hope to raise awareness that Tutu's quote, the maxim of Princeton's divestment campaign, should be taken with a grain of salt: the knowledge that Tutu himself is no impartial observer.

Leaders of Princeton's divestment campaign probably adopted this quote because of the moral weight they believe Tutu possesses. It was likely predicted, and not incorrectly, that attaching the name of a Nobel Peace Prize winner, a religious leader and an anti-apartheid leader could add moral weight to their own cause. People uninformed about the Palestinian-Israeli situation, or those on the fence about the conflict, might be swayed by the name of a man who once had his own moral position validated by an esteemed international institution, the Nobel organization. This is why Tutu's quote adorns the posters around campus.

Tutu's quote provides a convenient support for comparing the current situation in the Middle East to apartheid South Africa. However, the divestment campaign has failed to substantiate this comparison with information. According to the April 3 'Prince,' when a student "asked those behind the table to support their claim that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is similar to the struggle against apartheid, they asked him to go away." The campaigners want to elicit support for the Palestinian side but are not providing the education or information upon which one should base that support. The divestment campaign wants the University to support the Palestinians because Tutu said the Israelis are morally at fault. Furthermore, the fact that university divestment campaigns nationwide are aware that actual divestment is improbable — as Salah Husseini of the University of Michigan noted in the April 8 issue of The New York Times, some campus leaders say divestment itself is not really a goal of the campaign — indicates that the campaigns are primarily aimed at influencing public opinion, rather than creating real change. The use of Tutu's quote demonstrates the decidedly anti-Israel slant of that campaign.

The current increase in anti-Semitism makes the divestment campaign's blatantly anti-Israel message particularly disturbing. Recent anti-Semitic violence worldwide, including bombing of a Paris synagogue and fire or bombing of a half-dozen others in France, is understood to be a response to the tension in the Middle East. The last two weeks' anti-Semitic events in Europe mark the worst such activity in the region since World War II. The exercise of violence against Jewish people and destruction of non-political, Jewish religious institutions, such as synagogues, as a response to Israeli political action, implies that perpetrators draw a direct link between Israeli politics and Jews. Certainly, some Israeli citizens and politicians act from a religious belief in the Land of Israel as the Biblical homeland of the Jewish people; however, to commit violence against Jews worldwide represents an assumption that all Jews hold the same belief and is thus anti-Semitic.

The divestment campaign's use of misleading advertising is dangerous: relying upon Tutu's quote to portray Israel as morally at fault promotes the uninformed anti-Israel sentiment that contributes to anti-Semitic violence in Europe the likes of which we thought we buried a half-century ago. Julie Straus is a Wilson School major from Potomac, Md. She can be reached at straus@princeton.edu.