Divestment now: passing the torch.

• Author: Pleasant, William
• Position: War and War Hysteria

Last year, students at the University of California-Berkley initiated a drive to force their institution to divest its holdings in companies with business ties to the government of Israel. This grassroots response to Israeli military subjugation of the Palestinians won an immediate and widespread following. Opposition to US foreign policy in the so-called Middle East is mounting. Neither the Democratic nor Republican Parties will touch the issue beyond delivering vacuous moral platitudes about violence and peace. The student-led divestment movement is poised to intersect opposition to the US political and financial blank check afforded the Israelis and bring the entire US foreign policy strategy under mass, strategic criticism.

Easy but superficial parallels can be drawn between today's anti-Zionist divestment movement and the anti-apartheid movement nearly 25 years ago. Forged in the wake of the summer 1977 Soweto youth uprising, the US student-led South African liberation movement took hold of major university campuses across the country. But in 1977, there was little support for the anti-apartheid movement, even among Black elected officials and pundits. It was generally dismissed as an obscure, "foreign" issue. Moreover, the South African opposition movement was fractured into numerous sectlets and thoroughly infiltrated by BOSS, the apartheid secret police. When confronted with the student demand that universities withdraw their financial support of apartheid, university officials generally sneered that they had fiduciary responsibilities to the institution. In plain talk, that meant that the institutions would not even consider relinquishing their lucrative stockholdings in the slave labor-fueled South African economy.

But in the space of 10 years, after much more blood in the streets of South Africa and as a consequence of the dogged determination of student and Black radical activists to take the divestment movement off campus and into the streets, universities, labor unions, religious organizations and even state governments purged their portfolios of the offending apartheid stocks. Being anti-apartheid became chic among Democratic Party hacks like New York Governor Mario Cuomo and Congressman Charlie Rangel, after Jimmy Carter's daughter Amy allowed herself to be arrested for demonstrating at the South African Embassy in Washington, DC. Even corporations like Ford Motors fell over themselves to put the best face possible on their exploitation of Black South African slaves through the Sullivan Principles, a weird combination of public relations hype and reform apartheid, allegedly hatched and made kosher by the deceased Black American preacher Leon Sullivan. As US institutional political support for apartheid crumbled, South Africa's herrenvolk settler regime sank into the dustbin of history. The new divestment movement seeks the same result on the shores of the Eastern Mediterranean.

The swiftness with which the pro-Israel establishment and University of California officials pounced on the anti-Zionist divestment activists is a clear signal that the government's commitment to the current Middle East policy is greater in magnitude and depth than its love affair with anticommunist Pretoria at the height of the cold war in the 1980s. Indeed, a student-led anti-Zionist movement can succeed in breaking the back of...