You Will Not Be Alone

The Nation Editor's Note: What follows is the text of a speech Professor
Butler will give on Wednesday, April 14, to the students of the
University of California, Berkeley. On March 18, Berkeley's Student
Senate voted 16-to-4 to divest from General Electric and United
Technologies because of their role in harming civilians as part of
Israel's illegal occupation and the attack on Gaza. A week later, the
Senate president vetoed the bill. The bill's opponents have been waging
a fierce campaign of misinformation; student senators have been flooded
with letters and Alan Dershowitz may visit the campus. More information
about the bill can be found here.

Let us begin with the assumption that it is very hard to hear the debate
under consideration here. One hears someone saying something, and one
fears that they are saying another thing. It is hard to trust words, or
indeed to know what words actually mean. So that is a sign that there is
a certain fear in the room, and also, a certain suspicion about the
intentions that speakers have and a fear about the implications of both
words and deeds. Of course, tonight you do not need a lecture on
rhetoric from me, but perhaps, if you have a moment, it might be
possible to pause and to consider reflectively what is actually at stake
in this vote, and what is not. Let me introduce myself first as a Jewish
faculty member here at Berkeley, on the advisory board of Jewish Voice
for Peace, on the US executive committee of Faculty for
Israeli-Palestinian Peace, a global organization, a member of the
Russell Tribunal on Human Rights in Palestine, and a board member of the
Freedom Theatre in Jenin. I am at work on a book which considers Jewish
criticisms of state violence, Jewish views of co-habitation, and the
importance of 'remembrance' in both Jewish and Palestinian philosophic
and poetic traditions.

The first thing I want to say is that there is hardly a Jewish dinner
table left in this country--or indeed in Europe and much of Israel--in
which there is not enormous disagreement about the status of the
occupation, Israeli military aggression and the future of Zionism,
binationalism and citizenship in the lands called Israel and Palestine.
There is no one Jewish voice, and in recent years, there are increasing
differences among us, as is evident by the multiplication of Jewish
groups that oppose the occupation and which actively criticize and
oppose Israeli military policy and aggression. In the US and Israel
alone these groups include: Jewish Voice for Peace, American Jews for a
Just Peace, Jews Against the Occupation, Boycott from Within, New
Profile, Anarchists Against the Wall, Women in Black, Who Profits?,
Btselem, Zochrot, Black Laundry, Jews for a Free Palestine (Bay Area),
No Time to Celebrate and more. The emergence of J Street was an
important effort to establish an alternative voice to AIPAC, and though
J street has opposed the bill you have before you, the younger
generation of that very organization has actively contested the
politics of its leadership. So even there you have splits, division and
disagreement.

So if someone says that it offends "the Jews" to oppose the occupation,
then you have to consider how many Jews are already against the
occupation, and whether you want to be with them or against them. If
someone says that "Jews" have one voice on this matter, you might
consider whether there is something wrong with imagining Jews as a
single force, with one view, undivided. It is not true. The sponsors of
Monday evening's round table at Hillel made sure not to include voices
with which they disagree. And even now, as demonstrations in Israel
increase in number and volume against the illegal seizure of Palestinian
lands, we see a burgeoning coalition of those who seek to oppose unjust
military rule, the illegal confiscation of lands, and who hold to the
norms of international law even when nations refuse to honor those
norms.

What I learned as a Jewish kid in my synagogue--which was no bastion of
radicalism--was that it was imperative to speak out against social
injustice. I was told to have the courage to speak out, and to speak
strongly, even when people accuse you of breaking with the common
understanding, even when they threaten to censor you or punish you. The
worst injustice, I learned, was to remain silent in the face of criminal
injustice. And this tradition of Jewish social ethics was crucial to the
fights against Nazism, fascism and every form of discrimination, and it
became especially important in the fight to establish the rights of
refugees after the Second World War. Of course, there are no strict
analogies between the Second World War and the contemporary situation,
and there are no strict analogies between South Africa and Israel, but
there are general frameworks for thinking about co-habitation, the right
to live free of external military aggression, the rights of refugees,
and these form the basis of many international laws that Jews and
non-Jews have sought to embrace in order to live in a more just world,
one that is more just not just for one nation or for another, but for
all populations, regardless of nationality and citizenship. If some of
us hope that Israel will comply with international law, it is precisely
so that one people can live among other peoples in peace and in freedom.
It does not de-legitimate Israel to ask for its compliance with
international law. Indeed, compliance with international law is the best
way to gain legitimacy, respect and an enduring place among the peoples
of the world.

Of course, we could argue on what political forms Israel and Palestine
must take in order for international law to be honored. But that is not
the question that is before you this evening. We have lots of time to
consider that question, and I invite you to join me to do that in a
clear-minded way in the future. But consider this closely: the bill
you have before you does not ask that you take a view on Israel. I
know that it certainly seems like it does, since the discussion has been
all about that. But it actually makes two points that are crucial to
consider. The first is simply this: there are two companies that not
only are invested in the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and
peoples, but who profit from that occupation, and which are sustained in
part by funds invested by the University of California. They are General
Electric and United Technologies. They produce aircraft designed to bomb
and kill, and they have bombed and killed civilians, as has been amply
demonstrated by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. You are
being asked to divest funds from these two companies. You are NOT being
asked to divest funds from every company that does business with Israel.
And you are not being asked to resolve to divest funds from Israeli
business or citizens on the basis of their citizenship or national
belonging. You are being asked only to call for a divestment from
specific companies that make military weapons that kill civilians. That
is the bottom line.

If the newspapers or others seek to make inflammatory remarks and to say
that this is an attack on Israel, or an attack on Jews, or an upsurge of
anti-Semitism, or an act that displays insensitivity toward the feelings
of some of our students, then there is really only one answer that you
can provide, as I see it. Do we let ourselves be intimidated into not
standing up for what is right? It is simply unethical for UC to invest
in such companies when they profit from the killing of civilians under
conditions of a sustained military occupation that is manifestly illegal
according to international law. The killing of civilians is a war crime.
By voting yes, you say that you do not want the funds of this university
to be invested in war crimes, and that you hold to this principle
regardless of who commits the war crime or against whom it is committed.

Of course, you should clearly ask whether you would apply the same
standards to any other occupation or destructive military situation
where war crimes occur. And I note that the bill before you is
committed to developing a policy that would divest from all companies
engaged in war crimes. In this way, it contains within it both a
universal claim and a universalizing trajectory. It recommends
explicitly "additional divestment policies to keep university
investments out of companies aiding war crimes throughout the world,
such as those taking place in Morocco, the Congo, and other places as
determined by the resolutions of the United Nations and other leading
human rights organizations." Israel is not singled out. It is, if
anything, the occupation that is singled out, and there are many
Israelis who would tell you that Israel must be separated from its
illegal occupation. This is clearly why the divestment call is
selective: it does not call for divestment from any and every Israeli
company; on the contrary, it calls for divestment from two corporations
where the links to war crimes are well-documented.

Let this then be a precedent for a more robust policy of ethical
investment that would be applied to any company in which UC invests.
This is the beginning of a sequence, one that both sides to this dispute
clearly want. Israel is not to be singled out as a nation to be
boycotted--and let us note that Israel itself is not boycotted by this
resolution. But neither is Israel's occupation to be held exempt from
international standards. If you want to say that the historical
understanding of Israel's genesis gives it an exceptional standing in
the world, then you disagree with those early Zionist thinkers, Martin
Buber and Judah Magnes among them, who thought that Israel must not only
live in equality with other nations, but must also exemplify principles
of equality and social justice in its actions and policies. There is
nothing about the history of Israel or of the Jewish people that
sanctions war crimes or asks us to suspend our judgment about war crimes
in this instance. We can argue about the occupation at length, but I am
not sure we can ever find a justification on the basis of international
law for the deprivation of millions of people of their right to
self-determination and their lack of protection against police and
military harassment and destructiveness. But again, we can have that
discussion, and we do not have to conclude it here in order to
understand the specific choice that we face. You don't have to give a
final view on the occupation in order to agree that investing in
companies that commit war crimes is absolutely wrong, and that in saying
this, you join Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Christians and so many other
peoples from diverse religious and secular traditions who believe that
international governance, justice and peace demand compliance with
international law and human rights and the opposition to war crimes. You
say that you do not want our money going into bombs and helicopters and
military materiel that destroys civilian life. You do not want it in
this context, and you do not want it in any context.

Part of me wants to joke--where would international human rights be
without the Jews! We helped to make those rights, at Nuremberg and again
in Jerusalem, so what does it mean that there are those who tell you
that it is insensitive to Jewishness to come out in favor of
international law and human rights? It is a lie--and what a monstrous
view of what it means to be Jewish. It disgraces the profound traditions
of social justice that have emerged from the struggle against fascism
and the struggles against racism; it effaces the tradition of
ta-ayush, living together, the ethical relation to the non-Jew
which is the substance of Jewish ethics, and it effaces the value that
is given to life no matter the religion or race of those who live. You
do not need to establish that the struggle against this occupation is
the same as the historical struggle against apartheid to know that each
struggle has its dignity and its absolute value, and that oppression in
its myriad forms do not have to be absolutely identical to be equally
wrong. For the record, the occupation and apartheid constitute two
different versions of settler colonialism, but we do not need a full
understanding of this convergence and divergence to settle the question
before us today. Nothing in the bill before you depends on the seamless
character of that analogy. In voting for this resolution, you stand with
progressive Jews everywhere and with broad principles of social justice,
which means, that you stand with those who wish to stand not just with
their own kind but with all of humanity, and who do this, in part, both
because of the religious and non-religious values they follow.

Lastly, let me say this. You may feel fear in voting for this
resolution. I was frightened coming here this evening. You may fear that
you will seem anti-Semitic, that you cannot handle the appearance of
being insensitive to Israel's needs for self-defense, insensitive to the
history of Jewish suffering. Perhaps it is best to remember the words of
Primo Levi who survived a brutal internment at Auschwitz when he had the
courage to oppose the Israeli bombings of southern Lebanon in the early
1980s. He openly criticized Menachem Begin, who directed the bombing of
civilian centers, and he received letters asking him whether he cared at
all about the spilling of Jewish blood. He wrote:

I reply that the blood spilled pains me just as much as the blood
spilled by all other human beings. But there are still harrowing
letters. And I am tormented by them, because I know that Israel was
founded by people like me, only less fortunate than me. Men with a
number from Auschwitz tattooed on their arms, with no home nor homeland,
escaping from the horrors of the Second World War who found in Israel a
home and a homeland. I know all this. But I also know that this is
Begin's favourite defence. And I deny any validity to this defence.

As the Israeli historian Idith Zertal makes clear, do not use this most
atrocious historical suffering to legitimate military
destructiveness--it is a cruel and twisted use of the history of
suffering to defend the affliction of suffering on others.

To struggle against fear in the name of social justice is part of a long
and venerable Jewish tradition; it is non-nationalist, that is true, and
it is committed not just to my freedom, but to all of our freedoms. So
let us remember that there is no one Jew, not even one Israel, and that
those who say that there are seek to intimidate or contain your powers
of criticism. By voting for this resolution, you are entering a debate
that is already underway, that is crucial for the materialization of
justice, one which involves having the courage to speak out against
injustice, something I learned as a young person, but something we each
have to learn time and again. I understand that it is not easy to speak
out in this way. But if you struggle against voicelessness to speak out
for what is right, then you are in the middle of that struggle against
oppression and for freedom, a struggle that knows that there is no
freedom for one until there is freedom for all. There are those who will
surely accuse you of hatred, but perhaps those accusations are the
enactment of hatred. The point is not to enter that cycle of threat and
fear and hatred--that is the hellish cycle of war itself. The point is
to leave the discourse of war and to affirm what is right. You will not
be alone. You will be speaking in unison with others, and you will,
actually, be making a step toward the realization of peace--the
principles of non-violence and co-habitation that alone can serve as the
foundation of peace. You will have the support of a growing and dynamic
movement, inter-generational and global, by speaking against the
military destruction of innocent lives and against the corporate profit
that depends on that destruction. You will stand with us, and we will
most surely stand with you.