Insider Scoop: Outside organizations have been puppeteering CUNY Apartheid Divest from the start!
Speaker: So here’s just a brief timeline about the campaign. It officially launched in November 2016. What’s funny?
Audience: It brings back memories.
Speaker: What’s up?
Audience: It brings back memories.
Speaker: Yeah? Me too. November 2016, we launched it as Hunter College Apartheid Divest. And February 2017, we held a major interfaith event on divestment at Hunter with Jewish Voice for Peace, both the Islamic Movement for Justice and Friends of Sabeel North America, it’s a Christian solidarity organization.
In March 2017, we actually attempted to introduce it. So this year we have to introduce it to the University Student Senate (USS). Last year we also attempted to introduce it, but instead to Hunter College student government, it ended up failing because the student government was very unresponsive to our own requests. We would send them emails, go in person to the office and just to request a meeting with them.
The depth of deception and dirty politicking during CUNY University Student Senate (USS) BDS vote unravels. Listen how SJP, with the help of a few powerful org’s, lied and manipulated 500,000+ CUNY students:
Speaker: So here’s just a brief timeline about the campaign. It officially launched in November 2016. What’s funny?
Audience: It brings back memories.
Speaker: What’s up?
Audience: It brings back memories.
Speaker: Yeah? Me too. November 2016, we launched it as Hunter College Apartheid Divest. And February 2017, we held a major interfaith event on divestment at Hunter with Jewish Voice for Peace, both the Islamic Movement for Justice and Friends of Sabeel North America, it’s a Christian solidarity organization.
In March 2017, we actually attempted to introduce it. So this year we have to introduce it to the University Student Senate (USS). Last year we also attempted to introduce it, but instead to Hunter College student government, it ended up failing because the student government was very unresponsive to our own requests. We would send them emails, go in person to the office and just to request a meeting with them.
At one point I got yelled by the student government president telling me that she doesn’t have time to meet with me. Right. So we ultimately decided to postpone it to the next year, which was this year.
Audience: Were you a student senator when you introduced it or
Speaker: I’m sorry?
Audience: Were you a student senator?
Speaker: No. 2017 I wasn’t. I was the senator like 2017/2018. In October 2017, we renamed the campaign to Apartheid Divest CUNY, so now it became CUNY wide. And November 2017, we had divestment week of action. So, you know, like we have Israeli apartheid week we also made divestment week of action in November of 2017. Professor Rabab Abdulhadi from University of … San Francisco? Yeah? Is that what it’s called? San Francisco?
Now things kind of escalated. So what happened was we were planning at Hunter to actually introduce it to the local student government at Hunter in April. And then, you know, through my own conversations with John from the University Student Senate … John is the chair of the CUNY wide University Student Senate. And he basically suggested to me that we don’t even introduce it to Hunter, that we take it on to the University wide level and have USS itself vote on a resolution and he sounded very optimistic. He said, you know, there’s an 80% chance that it’s gonna pass and it’s gonna be very easy and, you know, they all support me, they’ll just do whatever I say.
And things sounded very hopeful. I mean, I just took his word. And I sent him the resolution and he added it to the agenda and, you know, we were planning to just show up at the meeting and we were expecting the resolution to be voted on and fast. But things did not end up turn this way at all. The night before the scheduled date of the resolution, the Zionists actually found out about it. And I honestly don’t know if they actually knew about it before even that day, if they didn’t. I’m not part of the USS so I …
Audience: …I was only vice chair…so otherwise there was delegates, no one knew about it.
Speaker: Yeah, they didn’t even tell you.
Audience: No. I had the resolution given to me weeks ahead. [inaudible 00:15:56]
Speaker: Oh, you did?
Audience: He did because I brought this up with him when I first got elected. I told him that I wanna do a BDS.
Speaker: Yeah.
Audience: So the resolution. And he’s like, “Oh, I already have somebody working on it at Hunter”….because I have a concern with it…
Speaker: Yeah, but that’s the concern is that he didn’t even share it with the senate itself. And today no one knew anything about it. He just listed it on the agenda and was expecting people to vote on it the day of, without even sending them the resolution before. And the night before the projected date of the voting, there was a Zionist from Brooklyn College it was president of the student government there. He found out that this resolution was gonna be discussed and then he told everyone. All Zionists knew about it nationwide and then all of a sudden you had a website called No Divestment CUNY just show up out of nowhere.
Eventually the vote got taken out of the agenda. John was panicking, he was messaging me all night, asking me what to do. I’m like, “Why are you asking me, bro?” But he was asking me for advice on what to do and eventually it was like, “Oh, this is a scandal, I need to remove it from the agenda.”
Yeah. Then we also still attended the meeting because we already expected a lot of Zionists to be at that meeting. They sent like 40 people at once to go to that meeting and we tried to mobilize a lot of people to come. So we also had a presence. We had about, I would say, 20 people from our side be there. So it got postponed until the next meeting, which was two weeks after, or three weeks after, right? It was three weeks?
Audience: Two or three weeks…yeah. Wait, for it to be on the agenda for the plenary?
Speaker: For the plenary meeting?
Audience: Yeah, it was a month. It was a month because we were supposed to schedule a civic council meeting
Speaker: I remember it was three weeks after, so that meant it was on May 5th, actually.
Audience: Yeah.
The CUNY University Student Senate (USS) Divest campaign continues. Listen to the campaign timeline unfold:
Speaker: We actually have a tried to do this, since 2016. We reached out to CUNY law, to City College, to Brooklyn College, to at least those, even to John Jay and none of them responded back. None. They just seemed uninterested to work on this campaign. We had an idea to from a committee, committee from all schools. Basically, the proposal was to have two delegates from each school to be on this committee and then, since no one responded back, it remained just under PSA organized.
Audience: Who would you want to be on the committee? The delegates, you want them to be. Is that SJP or just from the campus?
Speaker: Did you mean student government delegates or SJPs?
Audience: No. I meant students who are passionate about this cause.
Speaker: So, SJPs? Okay.
Audience: They don’t have to be members of SJP, but if they are….
Speaker: But how would they be passionate about Palestine if they’re not in a Palestine student group?
Audience: Some don’t …
Audience: Some campuses don’t have SJPs. We can find them.
Speaker: Unless you have one. Right. For sure! That’s a great idea…. We can work on that. It’s up to each school, right? Something we can collaborate on, right, and it’s very important for us to collaborate collectively. We don’t want just one school leading the campaign. We want this to be a collective effort of people from every school as much as possible, right?
What are CUNY Divest and SJP’s plans for the next year? Listen in as we provide you a front row seat PART 1 OF 2:
Speaker: But something we should actually continue to pursue. When we reached out to schools, this was a year ago. So, who knows? Maybe in the next year they’re gonna be more open towards working on this, right? And we can also rely on your support and your outreach to the people you know too, right?
So, hopefully we can try to combine as many schools as possible into this campaign, right? But see, I feel like we should develop a concrete specific plan that details what we want to get, right? And make sure that there are not any loopholes in our output and that there are not mistakes. Especially because any mistake can be exploited by the Zionists and can lead to the misdirection or the delay or the postponement of a vote. And that’s why it’s important for us to make sure that we have everything on track as much as possible, right? Every single goal.
So, I like the idea of the referendum and the thing is, we can’t have a CUNY wide referendum, because it’s up to every school to have the referendum. So, maybe next year, we can lobby Hunter College to have their own referendum on the divestment.
CUNY Divest and SJP’s future NY Divestment collusion PART 2 OF 2
Speaker: Now, I don’t think that it has to be voted on or passed, but some initiative for it to gain more attention, and gain more support, and gain more momentum around campuses, around CUNY. So, do we have any suggestions on a path to take for the next year regarding divestment at CUNY?
Audience: Is there, just to guide the discussion, is there a particular … like on what scale are you thinking university wide, or local; because that would help set the tenor of discussion.
Speaker: Maybe both. Honestly I don’t see why not do it at both levels, target USS but also target our own local governments, you know?
Audience: From Lehman the ISO this past semester….We had meeting on Palestine, which was our most attended, most engaging meeting, so in terms of a base of students on campus, I think the intrest is in Palestinian Liberation, I think is on the campus. The problem is that it’s a matter of recruiting students by getting them involved, like the ISO at Lehman College doesn’t have many students. I don’t see personnel wise how we would be able to do that.
Speaker: Okay, in this case maybe your campus can focus on the university level, then our campuses can focus on the local level, so this way we’re doing both, and we’re also filling in the gaps.
Audience: Right.
Speaker: And we’re also pushing the campaign as much as possible. You see two different angles.
Audience: Why don’t we try to get our allies involved, like Hunter PSA, Divest CUNY, SJP City College, all the other allies, how do we get them on board and also to work with us in decision making? And support us.