This was the speech given by Tom Pessah, an Israeli Jewish student of conscience, at the before the U C Berkeley senate's historic divestment vote. During one of the largest and most moving senate meetings in anyone's memory, dozens of students stayed up till four in the morning during finals week to debate a bill concerning the UC Regents' investments in two companies—General Electric and United Technologies—which produced aircraft and helicopters that were used in IDF attacks on civilians in Gaza.
Good evening everyone,
My name is Tom Pessah. Fifth year sociology grad student here at Cal, I’m Jewish Israeli, I’ve been a board member of Students for Justice in Palestine for four years. I’m one of the co-authors of the bill, but this was a collective effort and I contributed much less than several other people.
I’d like to start with two quotes, representing two traditions.
'לא תעמוד על דם רעך, אני ה'
“lo ta’amod al dam re’acha, ani adonai”
Thou shalt not stand against the blood of thy neighbour: I am the LORD (Leviticus 19:16)
We are not permitted to stand aside as others suffer. That is a sin.
The second quote is from a Berkeley tradition:
"There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part.
"And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop.
"And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all." – Mario Savio, Sproul Hall Steps, December 2, 1964.
As an Israeli student I travel back and forth, and I was in Israel during the winter break of last year, during the attack on Gaza. Like other Israelis I sincerely opposed the ongoing rocket attacks on Israeli towns like Sderot and Ashkelon during the previous years. But like many, I was appalled to realize my government had decided to solve this problem by killing masses of civilians.
In Israel we are brought up to think that Arabs always kill on purpose, and Israelis always kill by mistake. For them it’s malice, but for us it’s always collateral damage: we try but we always seem to miss. Over the war it became clear to me that the extent of the ongoing killing, the systematic nature of the destruction of school after school, bakery after water purification facility, the nature of the weapons used—weapons which disperse, like small flachette metal arrows that fly in all directions, and phosphorus bombs which slowly burn the skin, or direct rockets shot at specific parts of infrastructure facilities, leaving Gazans without access to drinkable water to this day—all these convinced me that the high civilian death toll was no accident. 123 Israeli minors died in Eight years of attacks since the beginning of the second Intifada, compared to some 313 Palestinian children who were killed in the course of several weeks, at a fixed rate of 17.2 children per day.
People all over Israel came out and protested—832 Arab Israelis were arrested and threatened for protesting non-violently. Jews and Arabs marched down the streets of Tel Aviv chanting “yehudim, aravim, mesrarvim lihyot oyvim”—Jews and Arabs refuse to be enemies. Even in the cities attacked by rockets some came out and said that killing civilians on the other side was not a solution. This is a photo of friends of mine outside an army base, holding up a sign that says to the pilots “the blood of children is on your hands”.
Here’s where the Berkeley part comes in: we have succeeded through meticulous research, over many months, to establish a causal link between the investments of the UC Berkeley regents, two American companies,General Electric and United Technologies, and some of those civilian deaths. Amnesty International’s report mentions three paramedics in their mid 20s—Anas Fadhel Na’im, Yaser Kamal Shbeir, and Raf’at Abd al-‘Al—who were killed in the early afternoon of 4 January in Gaza City as they walked through a small field on their way to rescue two wounded men in a nearby orchard. A 12-year-old boy, Omar Ahmad al-Barade’e, who was standing near his home indicating to the paramedic the place where the wounded were, was also killed in the same strike.
Amnesty International went to the scene of the incident with the two ambulance drivers who had accompanied the paramedics and who had witnessed the attack and met the child’s distraught mother and found the remains of the missile that killed the three paramedics and the child. The label read “guided missile, surface attack” and the USA is mentioned as the weapon’s country of origin. This AGM 114 Hellfire missile, usually launched from Apache helicopters.
There were many paramedics who died during the attacks—we screened footage during one of our events from a film shot during the war, entitled Shooting an Elephant.
These claims are disputed by the Israeli army, but they are corroborated by a long series of reports—Goldstone, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Israeli organizations like Breaking the Silence, Palestinian organizations like the Palestinian Center for Human Rights... There is a group of Israeli organizations who have simply called for investigations to be held by someone other than the army, since the army to date has convicted a grand total of one soldier for stealing a credit card during the operation, more than a year ago.
Senators, you have an opportunity tonight to make a historical decision in a very proud Berkeley tradition. We are not asking for much, just for an expression of your opposition to investments in these American arms manufacturers. This bill is not about the Bible, or about the Talmud. It is not about Hebrew poetry, or Israeli folk dancing—it’s about two American arms manufacturers who have been profiting from the death of children. It would be deeply offensive to me to assume Jewish or Israeli values somehow depend on defending American arms manufacturers. I implore you: have a heart: do not stand aside, do not be neutral. Take a stand.
לא תעמוד על דם רעך
“lo ta’amod al dam re’acha”
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