The veto of a controversial U.C. Berkeley divest-from-Israel resolution stands — which means the bill has effectively been killed, at least in its current form and perhaps only temporarily.
A motion to reconsider a vote that had failed to overturn ASUC President Will Smelko’s veto went nowhere April 21, as U.C. Berkeley student senators failed to reach a consensus after more than five hours of discussion, the Daily Californian student newspaper reported.
After debating the controversial resolution, including two hours in a closed session, the Associated Students of University of California senators ultimately decided upon a new plan: to write and submit a new resolution, the Daily Californian reported.
The senators tried to place that new (not yet written) resolution on the April 21 agenda, hoping to send it to a committee on April 26, but after much verbal sparring, no agreement was reached and the resolution was not added.
As for the motion to revisit the veto vote, no vote was ever taken. So while the resolution seemed to meet its demise last week, when proponents fell two votes shy of a two-thirds majority needed to overturn the veto, it appears that vote could still be reconsidered.
On April 15, at the tail end of a boisterous all-night meeting, 12 out of 20 student senators voted to overturn Smelko’s veto. Thus, Smelko’s veto stood, and the previously passed and highly controversial resolution — urging ASUC and the U.C. Board of Regents to divest from two U.S. companies supplying war materials to Israel — seemed to be dead.
However, about 90 minutes before the April 15 meeting eventually adjourned around 6 a.m., proponents of the resolution kept the debate alive by calling for a motion to reconsider the vote on the veto.
The motion didn’t go through that morning, but it did raise havoc. With people fatigued and wanting to go home to sleep, the motion was tabled for a future meeting (which turned out to be on April 21).
“It was sad and upsetting that after such a tolling night, people still dragged the meeting on, filibustered and repeated points that made the meeting go longer,” said student senator Sandra Cohen, one of seven senators who voted to uphold the veto. “Nothing was accomplished in those last hours.
“It’s pretty clear that [the resolution] won’t be overridden,” Cohen added. “When I talked to people, it didn’t seem like anyone was willing to change their votes.”
The original vote on the resolution, cast in the early-morning hours of March 18, was 16-4 in favor. Four weeks later, four senators changed their stance when considering Smelko’s veto, and the vote to overturn was 12-7 with one abstention (14 votes were necessary to overturn).
U.C. Berkeley student Matthew Taylor, a proponent of the resolution and member of the campus’ Students for Justice in Palestine, said in an e-mail that while the veto was upheld, the hundreds who turned out in support of divestiture showed “a consensus building on this campus and around the world that Israel must end its occupation of Palestinian land.
“If and when [the resolution] eventually passes, the divestment bill will benefit the Israeli people,” Taylor went on, “as it would help build the necessary pressure to force Israel to end the occupation, just as divestment-related political pressure helped end South African apartheid.”
Nearly 500 students, faculty and community members
converged for the much-anticipated meeting, which began around 8 p.m. April 14 and continued for more than nine hours.
Due to the unexpected turnout, the meeting had to be moved twice, first from Eshleman Library to the Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union Multicultural Center, and then to the Pauley Ballroom.
“If this bill was about any other country, we would not have a room packed this full tonight,” student senator Huda Adem was quoted as saying in the Daily Californian, U.C. Berkeley’s student-run campus newspaper.
The resolution was deemed “anti-Israel” by many on campus, in the local Jewish community and beyond — including Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel and famed attorney Alan Dershowitz, who both issued statements denouncing the measure.
In essence, the resolution took aim at the university’s reported investments of $135 million in two U.S. companies, General Electric and United Technologies, that supply Israel with electronics and weapons to carry out alleged war crimes.
Prior to the April 15 vote, more than 50 speakers on both sides of the issue addressed the student senate, including Holocaust survivors, writers of the bill, U.C. Berkeley rhetoric professor Judith Butler and Israel’s Consul General to the Pacific Northwest, Akiva Tor.
Tor, who stayed until the meeting’s adjournment, said that although the presence of an Israeli diplomat at a student senate meeting was “unusual,” he wanted to indicate to the senators that their actions tread “beyond student politics” and “have ramifications in the real world.”
In his remarks to the senators, Tor defended Israel as a “decent state” and noted Israel’s desire for a two-state solution. “This resolution harms our capacity to get there,” Tor said.
In advance of last week’s meeting, Berkeley Hillel worked tirelessly to inform the student senators about the complexities of the Israel-Palestinian conflict, using one-on-one meetings and teach-ins.
Among the thousands of pro and con e-mails they were bombarded with, student senators also received a single letter speaking out on behalf of Hillel with signatures from 40 rabbis from the greater Bay Area, local philanthropist Richard Goldman and Jewish organizations such as AIPAC, the Anti-Defamation League and the S.F.-based Jewish Community Relations Council.
“It’s very clear where we stand,” Rabbi Adam Naftalin-Kelman, executive director of Berkeley Hillel, said before the meeting. “Hillel is an organization that has a deep connection with Israel and wants to foster that not just with Jewish students, but with all those on campus.”
The meeting’s initial respectful nature gradually deteriorated, said Julie Bernstein, director of campus and community programs for the JCRC, giving way to moments of hissing and booing. Some students, she added, waved Palestinian flags.
“People got nasty,” said Bernstein, who stayed until the meeting ended near dawn. “It became so obvious to me that this was impacting the students. This is their pain. They have to go sit with each other in class, be taught by the same professors and sit in the café next to each other.”