News that Tufts University was the latest to join an ignominious list of schools at which student governments have voted to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel prompted yet another round of shock and calls for action from parents and alumni.
In a particularly obnoxious move, Tufts’ Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter engineered the vote to occur just before Passover, thus blindsiding many Jewish defenders of Israel who had already headed home for the holiday. Those individuals were told to submit questions via Google if they couldn’t attend the proceedings.
The balloting — undertaken in notably secretive style, with photos and recordings prohibited to conceal the identities of individual delegates and their votes — wasn’t even close. Seventeen students voted in favor, with six against and eight abstentions.
With the vote, these Tufts students opted for punishing Israel — for allegedly being an apartheid regime — and called on several corporations to end their economic activity with the Jewish state.
Israel, of course, is flourishing economically — and not a single American college or university has acted on the recommendations of radicalized student governments to boycott the Jewish state. And the apartheid smear is a trope of global anti-Israel propagandists, which is belied by the realities of Israel’s diverse, democratic and progressive society.
But fairminded people are right to be dismayed by the bigoted BDS attacks against Israel, and their potential to poison the academic community with lies about the Jewish state. Therefore, defeating these attacks is important.
A key question is why such measures succeed on some campuses, but fail on many others — or never come up at all on the roughly 4,000 US college and university campuses. There have been (according to the AMCHA Initiative’s documentation) just over 100 such measures introduced in total over the last five years on 54 separate campuses, with slightly fewer than half passing.