The continuing campaign to get the University of Wisconsin System to divest from companies doing business with Israel suffered another defeat this week, this time at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The campus’ Teaching Assistants’ Association — a union of some 1,800 voting members representing some 3,000 graduate students who are teaching assistants and project assistants, according to a member at the organization’s office — voted to amend and reword a resolution that had called for divestment from Israel.
The new resolution, according to a report in the Daily Cardinal student newspaper, called on the UW System to divest from companies that have military contracts with oppressive regimes around the world, and did not mention Israel by name.
Mark Goldberg of Houston is a Jewish member of the TAA. He and several other Jewish members, including Jewish Law Students Association president Elizabeth Herman, organized against the resolution, encouraging people to attend the meeting and publishing a long letter to the editor in the April 12 Badger Herald, the other campus student newspaper, criticizing the resolution.
In a telephone interview with The Chronicle Wednesday, Goldberg said had felt “upset” when he first heard about the resolution last month, and when he saw it first introduced at a TAA general membership meeting on March 15.
“It was not historically accurate nor in line with what is going on in the region now, with a move for peace and a two-state solution,” Goldberg said.
Herman, from Long Island, N.Y., added that she didn’t understand why the TAA, which doesn’t have a contract with the university at present, was “spending time discussing Israeli policies.”
But the result of Tuesday’s vote satisfied them both. “I think [the new resolution] really gets at the complexity of history and what human rights means in general,” said Goldberg.
Said Herman: “Whatever the TAA wanted to do, I was fine with it as long as it was not finding ways to demonize Israel with the resolution.”
In the end, a non-Jewish member of the TAA, Jake Gates, proposed the amended resolution at the meeting, and did so before the Jewish students were able even to speak; and it was accepted and approved quickly, said Herman.
The originator of the resolution was Mohammed Abed, who is a member of the Al-Awda/Palestinian Right to Return Coalition. This organization has been the prime sponsor and organizer of the Wisconsin Divestment Campaign.
This effort so far has managed to obtain a call for divestment from the faculty senate at the UW-Platteville campus on Jan. 25; but it failed with the faculty senate at UW-Whitewater on Feb. 1.
The students had kept in touch with Greg Steinberger, director of the Hillel Foundation University of Wisconsin, and Paula Simon, executive director of the Milwaukee Jewish Council for Community Relations, on this matter.
Steinberger said he was pleased with the result. “The TAA has allowed itself to worry about issues important in its labor struggle, and not be distracted by a very small group of extremist students with a specific anti-Israel agenda,” he said.
Simon praised the Jewish TAA members for “stepping up, organizing themselves, developing the response they felt was appropriate…. Their voices were significant and they made a huge difference.”
And she pointed out that this event was one more sign that “divestment initiatives do not resonate” with most groups in the country. “They’ve failed at city councils, they’ve failed at university campuses … They don’t represent the mainstream sense of how to resolve these issues,” she said.
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