“In the last 3 years I have several times declared hopefully that young people are going to lead us; and I have been premature. I did it at Columbia University in an article for New York Magazine in ’07, I did it at Brandeis University in The American Conservative that year too. On both occasions I was blown away by the diversity of the progressive student movement on campus: that identity politics meant nothing to these kids; Jews intermingled with Muslims and Asians in a cohesive manner, and no one gave a s**t.Well now I am saying the same thing about the Hampshire divestment and betting that I will be right. This is a shot that will be heard ’round the nation. It is no wonder that Dershowitz called the students in a threatening manner as soon as they had taken the action: Dershowitz and I recognize the huge symbolic meaning of this stroke. For years divestment had been stopped dead by then-President Lawrence Summers’s attack on it at Harvard, saying it was “antisemitic in effect if not intent,” or words similar, which caused rightthinking gentile faculty to steer away from the issue like a plague. Then it was stopped among the Protestant churches by endless legal wrangling, again with the threat of being labelled antisemitic hanging over their heads.

Those Protestant churches tabled and couldn’t adopt simple measures that limited the divestment to companies doing business in the Occupation! The evil occupation, with its crazy settlers and pogroms–and that’s all the Hampshire initiative applies to, the companies that helped to kill Rachel Corrie! So let us be clear, This is a huge moral stroke. And who is responsible: not Protestant churches or Middle East Studies professors, but an organization of committed students, many of them Jews, who will not be intimidated by anyone, their own administration or Alan Dershowitz. Bless them and honor them!

A few other observations must be made. According to one of those students, in this comment on Indypendent, when Hampshire College first divested from Apartheid South Africa years ago, “the Administration did what it could to distance itself from the situation then, too, with then-President Adele Simmons calling it a ‘big non-issue.'” And today when you visit Hampshire, they brag on that hammer blow! And this will happen again. We and Hampshire will look back on the bravery and independence of Hampshire students as we look back on the bravery of the Wilmot Proviso, or of Harriet Beecher Stowe, or of Congressman Abraham Lincoln when he introduced anti-slavery legislation in Congress in 1848– in these hammer blows of free and unafraid people, others were summoned to the great task at hand!

Again: Dershowitz knows this as well as I do. He is a great advocate. He knows he must stop this now, and blacken the Hampshire initiative, so that no signal goes out to others that It is OK to do this thing. But Dershowitz is too late. The students hung up on him and laughed. Generational forces are at work. He is 70 years old and is advocating for the evil settlement program that even the American government knows is a disaster, that even Gary Ackerman, the Israel Lobby’s main man in the House, or one of them, has lately condemned as settler “pogroms”  (language first employed by me, then later by Jeffrey Goldberg).

Dershowitz employed a traditional Jewish intimidation tactic, calling the Jews and reminding them of their loyalty to the Jewish family. But it didn’t work. These were Hannah-Arendt-Baruch-Spinoza Jews who feel loyalty first to the human family…”

From PhilipWeiss.org.

Comment:

Surely Jewish people aren’t the only ones who employ the “intimidation tactic of reminding people of their group loyalties”? Seems like I hear some of that from Indian friends whenever I write anything that “makes India/Indians look bad” to the West. It’s a natural concern and normally, I wouldn’t leap to the conclusion that there was “intimidation” involved at all, but knowing Dershowitz’s extremely abrasive ad hominem style of argument, there probably was in this case.