Since early 2003, 44 Duke professors have signed a petition calling on the University to withdraw investment from "all companies with military ties to Israel." The petition-which also includes the signatures of 161 students, 21 staff and 39 alumni as of Dec. 15, 2005-outlines a series of demands for Israel to meet before Duke might reinvest, including compliance with or acceptance of several United Nations resolutions and a "viable, internationally recognized state acceptable to the Palestinian people."
These faculty owe an apology and explanation to the rest of the University, the United States, the state of Israel and the Palestinian people they purport to be assisting. They have fallen for a shameful, intellectually dishonest ruse perpetuated by academics who seek to vilify Israel through a campaign of disinformation.
As of Sept. 26, the nationally-circulated petition for divestment-which has been criticized by President Richard Brodhead in 2004, former President Nan Keohane in 2003 and the administrations of many other universities over the past three years-was still online at www.dukedivest.org with an active link allowing Duke affiliates to sign the petition.
According to the domain lookup site www.whois.sc, the petition domain was last updated on Sept. 26. I personally call on the 44 professors whose names still appear to disassociate themselves from this document.
The document's most recognized signer-Noam Chomsky, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor of linguistics and leading anti-Zionist-has himself disavowed the petition. "I am opposed and have been opposed for many years, in fact, I've probably been the leading opponent for years of the campaign for divestment from Israel and of the campaign about academic boycotts," he said at a Nov. 25, 2002 address at Harvard University, as Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz recalls in The Case for Israel. Elaborating that divestment is meaningless and "wrong in principle," Chomsky seems to admit in as many words that he signed and spearheaded the document purely out of malice.
Chomsky and others have since referred to the divestment movement as a gift to extreme Zionists, distracting attention from actual issues involving the Middle East.
Why, then, have 44 Duke professors taken his red herring so seriously?
The petition claims to represent the interests of the Palestinian people, though it is little more than a smear job on Israel. The petition does not mention a word of the enormous good Israel has done for Palestinians: How, as Dershowitz writes, Israeli Palestinians enjoy a life expectancy greater than in any other Arab nation due to nationalized health care; how Israel offers a culture of tolerance for Palestinian and other homosexuals, unlike any other Arab nation; how the Israeli Defense Forces receive an intense ethical training, expose themselves to extreme casualties in efforts to minimize Palestinian casualties, and face strict scrutiny from Israel's supreme court.
The five conditions the petition itself demands of Israel have either already been met or are so outrageously ambiguous, arbitrary and na've as to be meaningless. The phrasing of the conditions is misleading and inaccurate. For example, the petition first calls for "compliance with United Nations Resolution 242, which notes the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war, and which calls for the withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from occupied territories."
This statement is false. Israel is in fact already in compliance with Resolution 242, which the U.N. passed after Israel single-handedly defeated Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq in the 1967 Six-Day War. As Dershowitz-who himself helped negotiate the resolution as a young lawyer-writes, the controlling phrase is the resolution's specific call for withdrawal from "territories," not "all the territories." The cosignatories intentionally agreed on this particular turn of phrase so as to allow later negotiation of which territories would be returned-as Israel attempted to do at Camp David in 2000. Even more importantly, Israel has in fact returned most of the land it occupied in 1967. Israel returned "all the captured territory sought by Egypt when Egypt terminated all claims of belligerency against it," Dershowitz writes. "Israel also returned land claimed by Jordan as part of the peace agreement with the Hashemite Kingdom."
In a similar fashion throughout, the petition falsely encapsulates political documents of enormous complexity. It is unimaginable to me that most, if any, of the petition's signatories have actually bothered to read these U.N. resolutions. To analyze them in context, as above, simply requires more space and attention span than most newspapers allot. The petition in fact depends on its signers' ignorance. By combining out-of-context references to the "United Nations Committee Against Torture 2001 Report" and Article 49, Paragraph 6 of the Fourth Geneva Convention with a general tone of vilification toward Israel, the document leaves its reader with an absurdly simplistic, shallow misperception of Middle East complexities. It is far easier to paint broad brushstrokes against Israel than to conduct the crucial but tedious fact-checking-which critics then perceive as the desperate nit-picking of a losing side-to learn the truth.
There is no moral reason for any person to sign or continue to promulgate such a hateful, manipulative, and utterly false document. Duke students, alumni and staff may perhaps be excused. But the 44 professors, men and women who have devoted their lives to the scholarly pursuit of truth, cannot. "Any moral person who is aware of the true facts would not sign a petition singling out Israel for divestiture," Dershowitz writes. "Those who signed it are either misinformed or malignant. There is no third alternative."
Andrew Gerst, a former managing editor of Towerview, graduated from Trinity in 2006. He now lives and works in Washington, D.C. His column runs every other Wednesday.
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