Jewish students at Georgetown University are preparing for a pro-Palestinian conference that has created unrest at other U.S. campuses in recent years. The Palestine Solidarity Movement will hold its fifth annual conference on the Georgetown campus from Feb. 17-19, to demand that colleges divest from Israel and from corporations with financial connections to the Jewish state.
In response, the an umbrella organization for Jewish groups has been working with Georgetown students to produce their own events. Aaron Goldberg, associate director of the Israel on Campus Coalition, said there will be programs with public officials, forums with Israeli and Arab diplomats, and a pro-Israel cultural program.
Last month, University President John DeGioia told the faculty at his annual “town hall meeting” that he does not support divestment from Israel. His statement came shortly after he visited the Jewish state to meet with his Israeli counterparts about increasing cooperation between their universities and Georgetown.
“Divestment is a useless idea,” said Georgetown senior Jonathan Aires, chair of the school’s spring pro-Israel festival. “It’s a non-starter and almost a total majority of the students on campus understand that. President DeGioia’s statement did nothing but reaffirm that.”
But the university has run into criticism for accepting a $20 million grant — the second-largest single gift in the school’s history — from Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdulaziz al Saud late last year.
This is the same Saudi prince who offered $10 million to then-New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani for the families of uniformed victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Giuliani spurned the offer when he learned that the prince had linked the terrorist attacks to U.S. support for Israel.
Erik Smulson, assistant vice president for communications at Georgetown, where Jews make up about 10 percent of the overall student population of 6,500, said there is no connection between the prince’s gift and the university’s decision to allow the conference onto its campus. He said the Palestine Solidarity Movement has the right to hold the conference under the university’s free speech and expression policy.
The annual conference has spawned concern among pro-Israel activists in past years, but has rarely become the spectacle that Jewish groups have feared. Taking a lesson from past experiences, student activists at Georgetown say they are not overreacting to the Palestinian group’s presence.
The Palestine Solidarity Movement is an umbrella organization for college groups in the United States and Canada. Student spokesman Nadeem Muaddi said the group does not endorse or condone violence, but seeks divestment from Israel. “We don’t endorse, we don’t support and we don’t condone any violence, no matter who is perpetrating it,” said Muaddi. “We focus on boycotting and divestment strategies because we feel they are the most peaceful strategies for a fair and just solution in the Middle East.”
He said he hopes for more than 600 people to attend, including students, young professionals, and people from communal and religious organizations. Muaddi said there were about 500 last year; Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld of Ohev Sholom Talmud Torah Congregation in Washington countered that the conference never attracts more than 150 people.
In the past, the Palestine Solidarity Movement was more radical, and refused to condemn violent acts against Israelis. One of the group’s guiding principles, adopted in 2002, states “as a solidarity movement, it is not our place to dictate the strategies adopted by the Palestinian people in their struggle for liberation.”
Earlier this winter, however, the group voted to abandon the guiding principles, as they were no longer necessary to its goals of expansion, Muaddi said.
Despite the movement’s ostensible shift toward peaceful rhetoric, Jewish leaders are concerned that the group invites radicals to its convocations on some of the most prestigious American campuses. It is also committed to ending all U.S. aid to Israel and to upholding the right of return of all Palestinian refugees to Israel, according to the movement’s Web site.
“This is a far-left organization in sympathy with radical Palestinian nationalism, and with the use of violence against Israeli citizens,” said Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum, a Philadelphia think tank. He warned that the group goes “way beyond the pale for acceptable discourse.”
No public universities have divested from Israel to date, but the movement has made headway with some Protestant churches. The Presbyterian Church USA has called for divestment from the Jewish state.
In 2003, plans for a divestment conference at Rutgers University led to an “atmosphere of intimidation” on campus, said Danielle Joseph, then-student director of religious and ritual affairs at Rutgers Hillel.
“It was intensely difficult to be an openly pro-Israel Jew on campus, and sometimes, even Jewish,” she said. Joseph said it was commonplace to see posters all over campus equating Zionism with racism.
The conference was later moved to Ohio State University.
Speakers at the Georgetown conference include Sue Blackwell of Birmingham University, who led the academic boycott of Israel last year in Great Britain.
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