From Disvestment watch site

Introduction to Divestment Watch

Let's face some facts: The purpose of the Divest-from-Israel campaign is to hurt Israel economically. It is being sponsored by Palestinian groups in the United States and around the world as a form of economic terrorism. The campaign itself was created by a consultant to the Palestinian Authority who was, in his own words, key in the negotiations for an independent Palestinian state. The goal of the campaign is to destroy Israel's economy while claiming to negotiate for peace in good faith, which obviously undermines the entire peace initiative.

In essence, the divest-from-Israel campaign is a direct function of the Palestinian Authority, and is therefore a part of the official Arab League boycott of Israel, of which the Palestinian Authority is signatory.

It stands, therefore, in violation of US laws that protect countries that are friendly to the US from foreign boycotts, which is exactly what the Palestinian-based divestment campaign is. A foreign boycott is a state sponsored boycott, and the Arab boycott of Israel certainly fits that bill because it is an official function of Arab League member states.

The US law forbidding participation in foreign boycotts was created to prevent private citizens from creating de-facto foreign policy, since that is the domain of Congress and the President. The divest-from-Israel campaign is a form of boycott, and therefore illegal boycott. The purpose of this website is to give people the information they need to properly combat this assault on democracy, the free market economy and US laws that protect our allies.


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Divest-from-Israel campaigns have proliferated in the last two years, mostly on college campuses, but also in cities and towns, churches, businesses and non-profit organizations.

These movements have precedents, notably the illegal eight-decade Arab Boycott of Israel, the Zionism = Racism propaganda campaign that began in the mid-1970s with rise of Arab oil power, and worldwide calls to boycott the Jewish state since the outbreak of most recent violence in the Middle East.

Using the rhetoric (and claiming the mantle) of the anti-Apartheid movement of the 1980s, anti-Israel activists have tried to recruit universities, municipalities and other institutions to punish the Jewish state economically and to get these institutions to (wittingly or unwittingly) lend their name and reputations to further a propaganda agenda, singling out Israel as a racist, apartheid state alone in the world deserving economic sanction and separation from "decent" humankind.

The good news is that these movements have found little success. Not a single university has chosen to follow calls for divestment in companies doing business with the Jewish state, and the movement's first major foray into municipalities (the city of Somerville, MA) met with total failure.

Still, the goal of the divestment-from-Israel movement, and similar groups who use the vocabulary of human rights to attack the only democracy in the Middle East is to resurrect through endless attack the "Big Lie" buried a decade ago in the UN: that "Zionism equals racism."

Rabbi Jonathan Ginsburg