UC Irvine passes resolution to boycott Israel despite repealing one last year

The student government at the University of California, Irvine has passed a resolution calling for the boycott of any company which works with Israel, Jerusalem Post reports.

The resolution claimed that it "is in no way related to Judaism" and simply opposes apartheid. The student government further claimed in the resolution that they "stand in full solidarity with Jewish communities across campus, the nation, and the world."

The resolution specifically names "Lockheed Martin, United Tech, Boeing, G.E., HP, Caterpillar, Ford, Hyundai , Cemex, Raytheon, 3M, Northrop Grumman, Perrigo Company, Atlas Copco, and BlackRock" as companies which the student government should divest from due to their work with Israel.

It ultimately passed 19-3.

The resolution falsely states that Israel "refuses to give the 4.5 million Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza access to [coronavirus] vaccines." In reality, the Palestinian Authority has largely rejected coronavirus vaccines from the Israeli government and wishes to handle its own response to the virus. Israel will be providing vaccines to thousands of frontline healthcare workers in the West Bank and Gaza, however.

UC Irvine had previously passed a resolution supporting the boycott, divestment, and sanction (BDS) movement against Israel, but it was repealed by the student government in the 2019-2020 school year. The new passage of the resolution undoes the previous repeal, stating that it was "hastily written to dismiss the voices of the students."

BDS became a popular movement on many college campuses in the late 2000s and early 2010s as Israel fought a series of wars in the Gaza Strip, many of which received widespread press coverage around the world.

Proponents of the movement compare it to the boycott of South Africa while it was still under white minority rule. South Africa was known to have segregated everything from housing to bathrooms to water fountains while denying their black people the right to vote. Arab citizens of Israel, meanwhile, have full rights under the law to participate in the country's democracy and frequently become elected members of the Knesset, Israel's parliament.

Opponents of the BDS movement often argue that it constitutes an antisemitic singling out of the Jewish state for boycotts reminiscent of the Nazi boycotts of Jewish goods in the 1930s. BDS supporters rarely engage in boycotts against other human rights abusers such as China, which is committing an ongoing genocide against their Uyghur minority population.

Opponents of BDS also dispute the claims of "apartheid" in Israel and argue that more context is needed to understand the conflict in the West Bank and Gaza than proponents of BDS are willing to offer.

The UC Irvine resolution, for example, specifically mentioned the bombing campaigns of the Israeli government in the Gaza Strip but never made mention of Palestinian terrorism or Hamas rocket fire against Israeli civilian targets.

With the passage of the resolution, UC Irvine becomes the second last of the University of California schools to pass a BDS resolution with only UC Santa Barbara holding out.