The beauty of establishing a Palestinian state backed and established by a consortium of Arab states, Israel, and the U.S. is that it presents potential answers to the moral, existential, and security problems of how productively to resolve the war in Gaza. It conceivably provides a way forward for Israelis and Palestinians to coexist between the sea and the river. It should also end student protests in the U.S. and across the world. What the proposal being gestated by U.S., Arab, and Israeli negotiators lacks, however, is any undeniably easy way for the current right-wing Israeli government to embrace such an imaginative advance. As of this morning, too, Israel and Hamas are far apart in bartering to release hostages in exchange for an end to the Gaza attacks.
Arab governments, crucially Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), seek an "explicit path" leading to a Palestinian state. Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu -- beholden as he is for his government's and his own personal survival on support from at least two rabidly anti-Palestinian far-right cabinet members -- cannot as yet agree to such an outcome. But he also absolutely needs and desires affirmation from the Saudis and the others. Creating an "explicit path" leading to a Palestine that has a real body and some substantially greater heft and independence than now exists would also allow Israel to partner with an Arab-backed initiative to restore order and stability in Gaza. (The northern half of the Strip is "largely lawless and gang ridden," with Israel's military exercising almost no control. Moreover, according to Cindy McCain, head of the UN's World Food Program, northern Gaza is experiencing "full blown famine.")
Clearly, to achieve the utopian objectives being discussed in Jerusalem, Riyadh, Washington, and elsewhere regarding the future of Gaza requires magical thinking that can then be converted into something workable -- a very tough sell. But it is the only possibility currently being mooted that can extricate Israel from its massive information war losses, retrieve some of its eroded legitimacy globally, and end a war that (despite Netanyahu's repeated threats to invade Rafah and finish the justifiably anti-Hamas repulse) cannot conceivably be concluded solely with military force. Indiscriminate bombing of southern Gaza will hardly help Israeli win. Only resolving the overall Palestinian issue and very precise and very carefully calibrated pursuit of Hamas into its underground tunnels beneath Rafah will accomplish lasting gains for Israel. And it needs U. S. and Arab aboveground collaboration to achieve such goals while simultaneously legitimizing its efforts by proceeding along an explicit path toward a Palestinian state.
Campus-occupying student protesters everywhere, even as far away as Australia, have been aroused by the over-the-top number of non-combatant casualties caused by the Israeli scourging of the Gaza Strip in the six months or so since the Hamas-perpetrated atrocities of Oct. 7, 2023. Relentless flattening of most of northern Gaza, compounded by the difficulty (the hindering?) of food relief supplies led to a humanitarian disaster that was bound -- eventually -- to arouse a student protest movement on behalf of the underdogs and in response to the untold suffering of the people of Gaza. That marks the critical loss of the information war from Israel's perspective largely because of the articulated attitudes of Netanyahu and his implacable "extermination"-minded associates. The same variables make war termination and hostage exchange difficult.
Students in the U.S. want their universities and colleges to cut ties to Israeli universities and to cease investing in Israel through their endowment managers. They want to end American corporate operations that support the Israeli war effort. Students at Portland State University seek to cut ties to Boeing because -- presumably but not definitely -- Boeing has sold war-enhancing equipment to the Israeli Defense Force (IDF). Other campus demands have included divestment from American concerns with a presence in Israel, perhaps such as Cisco, Intel, Motorola, Applied Materials, and Hewlett Packard. McDonald's, Coca-Cola, Hershey, are there too. Offshore, exploiting natural gas deposits -- is Chevron. In total, there are about 2,500 American companies in Israel employing 72,000 local people, many of whom are Arab Israelis and some of whom are West Bank Palestinians. Full divestment would deprive Arabs as well of Israelis of profitable employment opportunities.
Moreover, American university endowments hold only a small sliver of Israeli or any national assets. Pension funds could be much more influential, but even if such more significant investors than universities pressured Israel, their combined importance could still be ignored by Netanyahu. Students are using the wrong tools to attack the wrong targets.
Brown and Northwestern Universities, and Vassar College, have successfully and gently punted the divestment requests and tented occupations, promising discussions that will continue after graduation ceremonies this month and well into the autumn. That was the smart way forward, substituting effective conflict resolution for police intervention. The more embattled institutions, with encampments persisting, will have to reach some similar forms of convergence to bring a peaceful conclusion to a turbulent and disruptive spring.
What the students will eventually understand is that divestment is the wrong objective. Relieving the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza will not come from divestment. Nor will calls for a free Palestine. Much more potent would be a demand by students that humanitarian assistance for Gazans be quadrupled (or more) and that their universities find ways directly to engage in initiatives to alleviate starvation and medical and schooling catastrophes in Gaza, in the West Bank, and (as I wrote Thursday) in desperately needy places like Sudan. Universities and their students can help educate Gazans and Palestinians directly. Engaging in that manner is better than cutting ties.
As Nicholas Kristof wrote last week, "Are [the] encampments...actually helping Gazans?" He also wanted the protesters to acknowledge that Hamas is a misogynistic, homophobic, antisemitic, terrorist organization holding hostages. It has been, as he says, "a catastrophe" for Gazans. Is that the outfit with which the very best of our university students wish to be allied? Kristof favors a deep student engagement with the Middle East, with Palestine and Israel, not a ceasing of contact.
Students can more directly improve the world by favoring engagement, direct action in the troubled areas, and raising funds for all kinds of relief efforts. Divestment, as I well know from my days on the anti-apartheid front line (having been banned and declared a prohibited immigrant for many years by white-ruled South Africa and Zimbabwe), is unproductive, even meaningless. As we discovered during the anti-apartheid struggle, pulling socially responsible U.S. companies out of South Africa mattered hardly at all. All doing so accomplished was substituting South African owned concerns, with much poorer employment conditions and pay scales, for American companies who had far better approaches to employee relations than the local firms to which they sold or ceded their businesses.
Furthermore, it was not divestment or disinvestment that ultimately in 1989 convinced President Frederik W. de Klerk to spring Nelson Mandela from prison, unban the African National Congress, and commence the negotiations that led to South Africa's independence in 1994 under black rule. No, what influenced de Klerk (as he told me himself on two occasions) was the fact that U. S. banks, led by Chase Manhattan, had ceased providing revolving 90-day liquidity support for South Africa. Led by the chair of that bank, South Africa could no longer borrow in its customary manner and therefore could not be assured of keeping itself afloat.
American universities are not well positioned to persuade banks all over the world to deny normal rollover lending to Israel's government. Indeed, today's Israel is not as precariously financed as South Africa was in the 1980s.
De Klerk also understood, as his predecessor Pieter W. Botha did not, that the only way forward to a future South Africa was to strike a meaningful transitional bargain with the ANC, and especially Mandela. As I wrote many times in the 1980s, Mandela had become white-ruled South Africa's jailor, not the other way around. There could be no future for whites in South Africa without Mandela's consent and approval. Now, thirty years on last month, South Africa is still struggling. But that is a different story about which I will write before its major election on May 29.
Protesters may believe sincerely that their efforts now are analogous to the student antagonism to apartheid in the 1980s. But that would be false. Punitive segregation was an abomination in an African majority nation. So is the end product of what Israel has done in its excessive repulse of Hamas, but not the need for a post-Holocaust home for a people endangered and persecuted across the world. Moreover, the calls for a free Palestine ignore two realities: that the existing al-Fatah government of Palestine is wildly dysfunctional and corrupt. Further, Israel — the Holocaust refuge — is steadily under existential attack from Iranian proxy militias like Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, as well as Hamas. There can be no effective "free Palestine" without both a multi-Arab state concord and a halt to Israeli illegal settlement building in the West Bank.
If Netanyahu and his co-conspirators can be marginalized or by-passed, and if the new coalition with Arab states can miraculously be cemented, then there is a promising path forward for Israel, for the West Bank, and for Gaza. It could conceivably even result in the exodus of Hamas' hard-core, dangerous, leaders from Gaza without the necessity of more bombardments and needless civilian deaths.
That last point is critical. Unless Yahya Sinwar and his associates leave Gaza and are relocated to Doha, Israel will not feel safe and non-Hamas Gazans will be at risk. Arab pressure could bring that about. But then Netanyahu (or a replacement) would have to be sincere about preparing an "irreversible" path for Palestine's statehood.
So right in so many ways, professor....I still am utterly appalled by Israel banning Al Jazeerah ... what's next? The WSJ? NYT? .... That is in no sense a characeristic of any nation aspiring to call itself a democracy. Sad......also do NOT want Israel to become an apartheid-era South Africa. I just remember when Nelson Mandela first came to the US after his release from prison. I traveled the whole way with him as his speechwriter...including a truly remarkable moment at Liberty Hall in Philadelphia when President Clinton welcomed Manedela and de Klerk ! Oh my....can we ever envisio such a moment now with Israel & whoever may lead Gaza ??
So right in so many ways, professor....I still am utterly appalled by Israel banning Al Jazeerah ... what's next? The WSJ? NYT? .... That is in no sense a characeristic of any nation aspiring to call itself a democracy. Sad......also do NOT want Israel to become an apartheid-era South Africa. I just remember when Nelson Mandela first came to the US after his release from prison. I traveled the whole way with him as his speechwriter...including a truly remarkable moment at Liberty Hall in Philadelphia when President Clinton welcomed Manedela and de Klerk ! Oh my....can we ever envisio such a moment now with Israel & whoever may lead Gaza ??
(REPEATING to share as a note !)