Fifth divestment vote in six years stalls after 10-hour meeting
A proposed anti-Israel resolution from the student senate at a California public university failed this week after a dozen senators left and did not come back to the drawn-out meeting.
The Associated Student Senate at the University of California, Santa Barbara, had proposed to “divest from companies that profit from alleged human rights violations in Israel and Palestine,” but that vote did not come to pass after 12 student senators walked out of the meeting around 5 AM.
The meeting had been going on for over 10 hours; this was the fifth attempted of the Associated Student Senate to divest in six years, according to The Daily Nexus.
A disagreement among the senators regarding “a specific element of the resolution, one that would have altered the number of ‘yes’ votes needed for the resolution to pass,” resulted in a “prolonged standoff that divided the Senate nearly in half.”
Subsequently, “the meeting abruptly ended just after 5:00 a.m., when Internal Vice President (IVP) Jasmine Sandhu announced that there were no longer enough senators to vote on the resolution.”
From the report:
The resolution calls on UC Santa Barbara, the A.S. Investment Advisory Committee, the UC Treasury and the UC Regents to withdraw investments from companies “that provide military support to the occupation of Palestinian territories.”
Investing in companies like General Electric, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, which sell military equipment to Israel, shows “implicit support” for the killing of Palestinian civilians, the resolution states.
Eighty-nine speakers took the podium at public forum on Wednesday, the vast majority of them speaking about the issue of divestment and the Israel-Palestine conflict at large.
But the Senate never got to an actual discussion about the conflict. Instead, the senators fell into a disagreement after Ali Suebert, the A.S. attorney general, told the Senate at public forum that the resolution would be a “positional” and not “directional” piece of legislation.
A positional resolution “endorses, sponsors, or supports a group’s actions or events,” according to A.S. Legal Code. Typically, the Senate uses these resolutions to adopt an official stance on an issue.
A directional resolution, meanwhile, “directs members of A.S. Personnel, Boards, Committees, and/or the Senate to specific duties” and usually moves to create an actual effect.
Suebert pointed to individual parts of the resolution’s language, including a phrase about companies “profiting from human rights violations,” to justify her judgment that the resolution called for adopting a position.
“Throughout the night, various votes to move the meeting forward stalled at 13-12. As a result, the Senate wound up discussing only the nature of the resolution itself and not its contents,” The Nexus reports.
MORE: Divestment resolution passes Ohio State student government on secret ballot
IMAGE: Andrey Popov / Shutterstock.com
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