A group of faculty at Pomona College proposed a resolution demanding divestment from Israeli organizations and affiliates. The resolution is slotted to be discussed at the faculty meeting on May 2. Victor Silverman, Emeritus Professor of History at Pomona, sent an email to faculty in support of the resolution.
Below is Silverman’s letter, as well as the faculty motion.
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MOTION: In light of the US-enabled death and destruction in Gaza and the February 2024 student referendum on divestment, we urge the College, as part of a broader public ethical investment plan, to divest from corporations complicit with war crimes and other human rights violations committed by the Israeli government in Israel/Palestine. To this end, we ask the College to begin with removing direct investments in the 11 firms widely identified by Palestinian civic organizations: Barclays, CAF, Caterpillar Inc., Chevron, Elbit Systems Ltd., HD Hyundai, HIK Vision, Intel, JCB, TKF Security, Volvo.We seek a written and in-person report from the trustees’ investment committee regarding the status of this request no later than the first faculty meeting following the trustees’ October meeting.
Dear Colleagues,
I am deeply moved by the student activism on campus to stop Israel’s ongoing war against Palestinians. I am also impressed that the faculty will vote on a resolution calling on the College to divest from corporations supporting Israel’s war. I am confident that you will evaluate the resolution in the spirit of the peace that it is intended to foster. To that end, I hope that you will consider my words here.
Almost twenty years ago at the end of the semester in my HIST124 “The US, Israel, and Palestine,” a student asked me if I saw any hope in that dismal history for a reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians or, at least, for a peaceful resolution of their conflict. I recall answering that such an opportunity would only come if the US changed its role from Israel’s enabler, funder, and arms merchant to one that would seriously press Israel to compromise. But I added that the US would not change, and that Israelis were simply too powerful, while also too entrenched in their anger toward and fear of Palestinians, to shift on their own. Sadly, I was right.
For more than forty years, I have been involved in issues relating to Israel and Palestine. I have taught courses on the topic at Pomona and am a member of the Academic Advisory Council of Jewish Voice for Peace. I have published on questions of Jewish and Jewish-American history and identity. One of my retirement projects is a book chronicling the centuries-long journeys of my family of Sephardic Jewish exiles. I have also been the victim of antisemitism and, at the same time, slandered and doxxed for my views on the Middle East, a combination of prejudiced receptions that many Jewish student activists may be sharing today.
These experiences mean that I come to my thoughts about the problems of Israel and Palestine, antisemitism, race hatred and political repression not only based on my fundamental belief that never again should Jews, Palestinians, or any other people suffer genocide, but also after many years of study and involvement that has been political, intellectual and personal. I believe, as the great Palestinian intellectual Edward Said wrote in 1989, that “Palestinian and Jewish histories are … inscribed within each other; they cannot be separated, and they must be evaluated and acknowledged in moral terms, in terms of a future in which both peoples have the rights of survival and decent existence in a shared Palestine.”
I am sharing this personal perspective to emphasize that I speak not only as a member of the College community but also as a Jewish American who is deeply troubled both by the massacres of Israelis by Palestinians on October 7 and by the much greater brutality Israelis have wreaked against Palestinians since then, potentially a genocide committed with the support of my government and in the name of protecting Jewish people like me.
Since the 1960s, when the US became the main pillar of international support for Israel, the failure of our country to push Israel to compromise has worsened the conflict and reenforced the long-term Israeli goal of displacing Palestinians, a politics of “ethnic cleansing” motivated by the idea that it is impossible to live side-by-side with Arabs. The current result is the Israeli rationalization of what amounts to genocide in this horrific war in Gaza, that is, all the tragedy that we see in the media day after day. This one-sided US role also enables Israel to continue displacing Palestinians in the West Bank, rendering their lives unbearable and thereby fueling more violence.
Despite tremendous influence, US leaders, including our current and immediate past presidents, have failed to press Israel to end its illegal and unjust policy of settlement on Palestinian land or to stop its torture, repression, and indiscriminate killing of Palestinians. They have offered only the most nominal opposition as Israel created an ethno-religious apartheid state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, one in which full rights are “unique to the Jewish people” (to use the language of Israel’s 2018 “Nation-State Law”).
Our students, with the moral clarity of youth, have demanded that we act. They, along with the movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions, seek to counter the repeated failures of principle on the part of the US. It is now up to you to decide to answer that call: To declare if Pomona will press our country to play a more positive role than it has up until now, one based on the fundamental premise that all people regardless of religion have the same rights where they live, that Palestinian lives matter as much as those of Jews.
This resolution advances a statement of values, one that is central to the mission of this place to use its wealth wisely for the benefit of humanity as a whole. What you are considering will have a small impact but a significant one. Hopefully, you will help move us closer to the day when what I told my student can be proven wrong and, far more importantly, when Palestinians and Jews can live in peace together in that small precious land.
Best,
Victor Silverman
Professor Emeritus
Pomona College
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