A marathon meeting of the UC Berkeley student senate has ended without taking final action on an Israeli divestment bill.
The resolution, which calls on Berkeley to divest from two corporations that do business with the Israeli military, was passed by the ASUC senate a month ago by a wide margin, but vetoed by president Will Smelko a week later.
Today’s meeting began last night and continued for more than twelve hours. The resolution was brought to a vote just before dawn, at which time the override effort failed, but supporters quickly passed a motion to reconsider and resumed debate. A few minutes after seven this morning senators voted to table the discussion until the senate’s next meeting.
The tally of the override vote, as reported on Twitter, was 12 in favor, seven opposed, with one abstention. Fourteen votes are needed for passage.
It appears that one of the bill’s supporters voted “no” in order to set up the motion to reconsider, suggesting that override proponents fell just one vote short.
The resolution became the focus of intense international attention in the weeks since it was approved by a 16-4 margin in mid-March.
It was embraced by professor Noam Chomsky, activist Naomi Klein, and South African bishop Desmond Tutu. In an open letter to the student supporters of the bill, Tutu said that they were “helping to pave [the] path to a just peace” in the Middle East, and urged them “to stand firm on the side of what is right.”
Meanwhile Jonathan Kessler, leadership development director of the conservative pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC, pledged at a recent AIPAC conference that the group would “beat back” the resolution by ensuring “that pro-Israel students take over the student government.”
“This is,” Kessler continued, “how AIPAC operates in our nation’s capitol. This is how AIPAC must operate on our nation’s campuses.”
The resolution will be taken up again at next Wednesday’s ASUC senate meeting.
studentactivism.net 
6 comments
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April 15, 2010 at 10:38 am
sarah
I’m so disgusted with AIPAC. What place do they have in trying to influence a student-driven democratic process? How do they justify openly promising to manipulate a system they are not a part of for their own gain? This is why the “pro-Israel” movement is slowly starting to lose support. This is why young Jews, like me, want nothing to do with these people.
April 15, 2010 at 1:07 pm
BDS Austin
Anyone who feels sorry for Israel is delusional beyond belief. Israel steals and steals and kills and kills the land and people of Palestine, who respond with peaceful demonstration against the apartheid wall that cuts off their villages from their ancestral lands. Israel is a pariah state which has little resemblance to a democracy. No wonder it is becoming increasingly despised around the world because of its greed and brutality. There will never be peace for Israel so long as it denies equal rights to its non-Jewish citizens, and continues to occupy and brutalize its neighbors in Palestine. The BDS movement is working, as it worked in South Africa. Israel has only one friend left in the world, and even the United States is becoming tired of zionist whining and begging. There is already a single state, controlled by Israel. The world will not stand idly by while Israel continues playing the victim while killing thousands of women and children, as it did in Lebanon and Gaza. Free Gaza. FreePalestine.
April 15, 2010 at 6:07 pm
zunguzungu
A friend who was there said that speakers in favor of upholding the veto were uniform in refusing to discuss facts, instead emphasizing over and over again that they felt unsafe at Cal because of the resolution, and that was the approach they talk. This quote from the Daily Cal gives a taste of that rhetoric:
“Rabbi Adam Naftalin-Kelman, the executive director of Berkeley Hillel, said he felt overriding the veto would be detrimental to the Jewish student population at UC Berkeley because students told him they would feel unsafe and uncomfortable being a Jewish student on campus.”
April 15, 2010 at 6:20 pm
John Greek Tsous
Free Palestine.
April 15, 2010 at 6:26 pm
zunguzungu
These were the talking points.
For example:
April 15, 2010 at 9:46 pm
GK
What’s sad is that in synagogues and religious schools across America, young Jews like myself are taught that an attack on israel is an attack on the Jewish people. Jews are so skittish as it is (based on recent and not-so-recent history of anti-Semitism) that we are quick to feel attacked, especially on the most sensitive topic in Judaism: the state of Israel. As a young Jewish woman who has visited Israel twice and hopes to live there after college graduation, I actually feel it is my duty to criticize the Israeli government and call for an inclusive and socially just Jewish state. I wish more of my peers felt the same way.
Growing up in Silicon Valley, most of my friends were Israeli-Americans (their parents or themselves were born in Israel). Quite a few of them returned to the IDF. I have tried and failed to have a non-emotional debate with them about Israeli government policies because it comes down to a question of security. Both sides have experienced so much violence, it’s really just a vicious cycle at this point.