Discourse on Board’s Refusal to Divest Misses the Point
Cecily M
Illustration by Amit E
By now, news of the decision by Oberlin College’s Board of Trustees to reject a student proposal for the divestment of its endowment from companies enmeshed with Israel has been widely disseminated, dissected, and alternately disputed or affirmed. The Board of Trustees, according to the Editorial Board of the Oberlin Review, wasn’t gentle enough in the language used to justify its letdown of the 94% of students it surveyed who responded in support of divestment. Or, the decision was not a letdown but a safeguard for the College’s institutional integrity and, apparently, the welfare of the Palestinian people.
To divest, so the latter argument goes, would be to detract from more effective measures of relief for both Palestinians and Israelis to the detriment of both the aforementioned populations and our student body. Setting aside the false premise that divestment must come to the exclusion of accompanying or alternate forms of activism, the logic behind its practical ineffectiveness which was used by the Board to justify its decision and which neither article seemed to deny is itself based in an assumption that is equally flawed.
I don’t deny the logistical complications of enacting a divestment policy, nor the limited scope of such a policy’s immediate and tangible effects. I take seriously the Board’s claim that the liquidation of funds would “deprive Oberlin of the resources to provide financial aid and scholarship support to students, to compensate faculty and staff,” though I suspect that this deficit might be rectified by a reconfiguration of Oberlin’s fiscal priorities.
I take issue with the invocation of potential job loss in the West Bank and Gaza as a result of divestment as a cause of “Palestinian suffering” and a threat to Palestinian livelihoods to justify the rejection of a policy aimed at saving Palestinian lives and alleviating a suffering whose depths reach far beyond the immediate ramifications of unemployment. It seems rich to me that an article arguing the woeful misdirection of students’ pursuit of good intentions in their calls for divestment could so egregiously miss the point.
I am not so naive as to overestimate the extent, if any, to which divestment will materially lessen such suffering and bloodshed. But, at a College whose slogan is “one person can save the world” and whose Board has touted its decision not to divest as in alignment with its liberal arts mission, the argument that the limitations of enacting change limit the worthiness of its pursuit strikes me as a glaring hypocrisy. Should we all just resort to nihilism, then?
I often feel overwhelmed by the limitations of my own individual power, to the point that I worry that trying to exert it is futile. I’ve long thought that the most effective way for me to enact the change I want to see is to appeal to institutions whose power is greater than mine. It is gravely disappointing that an institution that purports to uplift its student body would negate both its own power and therefore the lesser power of its students as individuals in its refusal to heed their pleas for an actionable intervention into a crisis in the midst of which so many students feel powerless and look to their education for empowerment.
That change is worth striving for, regardless of the scope of its impact, is a matter of principle. That is a principle to which I thought that Oberlin College adhered. Not to fiscally support a government whose victims are not only casualties of war but include over 16,000 Palestinian children killed either via explicit targeting or criminal carelessness and whose latest attacks in Hezbollah evoked terrorist tactics in the indiscriminateness of their mostly civilian targets, is a matter of principle.
To the Board’s claim that divestment “would be taking a clear institutional stand on one side of a fraught and contested issue that . . . could constrain critical thinking [and] discourse,” I would counter that its refusal to divest constitutes a stance that is defined by its complicity with such state violence. I reject that because the Board does not invest directly into individual companies (a trivial degree of separation) but into investment funds who in turn invest in companies, it lacks the agency to disentangle itself from those companies that support Israel. I reject that the “small portion” of total investments in the funds that it would have to liquidate in order to divest is “unlikely to have any influence” on the funds and their management themselves. A small influence, yes, but an institution that champions incremental change must acknowledge that it is still meaningful.
This is a meaning that I have seen frequently distorted in campus discourse. The argument against divestment, that it reaffirms the divisive maxim that “to be pro-Palestine, you have to be anti-Israel” conflates an oppositional stance to Israel’s crimes with a dispute of its statehood. To be in favor of the alleviation of suffering of an oppressed people, one must be against the actor that has inflicted that suffering on them. That is neither Israeli citizens nor Jewish students but rather the Israeli government and those who are complicit in or fiscally support its abuse. Oberlin College has fumbled an opportunity to express its opposition to Israel’s oppression and to stand with its students in their modeling of the ideals that the College purports to uphold but has failed to enact.
