I enrolled at University of Wisconsin four years ago, brining a few transfer credits from Madison Area Technical College. I enrolled directly in the chemical engineering program (ChE). I was sure about chemical engineering because I was unsure about what I wanted to do. ChE perhaps offers the widest range of career choices; that seemed to fit me well. I also had an appetite for technology.

Having spent the previous couple of years in Madison, I observed a lack of knowledge of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. I decided to reach out to the student body and educate them about the region with which I am most familiar and which coincidentally provided most of the world’s news headlines.

I co-founded, with a few others, a student organization to spread information about Palestine and Israel. Since we started it, I have worked on different programs with Al-Awda, the Palestine Right to Return Coalition. After a period of classical education, films and lectures, we adopted a divestment from Israel project. In short, calling for UW to eliminate investments it has in companies dealing with Israel. I did my best, through this column, to explain the ABCs of our divestment efforts and other activities regarding the conflict.

The divestment campaign is modeled after another at UW campuses in the late ’70s that led a national movement to divestment from apartheid era South Africa, eventually contributing to the fall of the racist regime. The parallels between Israel and the apartheid regime are glaring and numerous, however, this campaign provoked unprecedented resistance and controversy.

Some individuals, including a few on this campus, feel the South African remedy should not be applied to Israel, and Israel should not be held accountable for committing crimes like those the world rushed to stop in South Africa, Bosnia, East Timor or Darfur.

I have often wondered how Israel could enjoy such far reaching and one-sided support in this country. I later came to realize that supporters of Israel are an alliance of the misinformed and the morally bankrupt.

Most of those who remain defensive of Israel, or even indifferent toward her, are largely uninformed or fed skewed propaganda about the conflict. This is the type that sees the conflict in terms of the previous month’s suicide bombing. This group, for the most part, does not truly understand the Israeli state’s apartheid nature.

The second group, smaller in number yet well equipped, is made up of the morally bankrupt, Israel’s most zealous supporters. They know, and very well understand, the inherent racism and ethnocentricity that is at the heart of Israel as a Jewish-only state and how that entails oppression of the native population and expropriation of land and resources as a measure of slow ethnic cleansing, yet they still support it, and even advocate a more vicious, expansionist agenda.

This group is setting itself up for a major disappointment. Unless it distances itself from Israel, as it is well on its way to becoming a pariah state, it will soon find the world with a new view of it: advocates of one of the present time’s most hideous crimes.

Increasingly, individuals and institutions are breaking away from the curse of intimidation that hovered over this topic for a long time and are learning that criticizing Israel has no anti-Semitic implications. They are standing up against human-rights violations in the same way they did in South Africa and other places where racism and ethnic cleansing have in the past visited.

Refusing to allow any more crimes to be committed in their names and with their tax money, they are setting Israel up for additional scrutiny, well-earned by the disproportionate and undeserved aid it gets from their government, advocated by the morally bankrupt cadre.

My column has been read by a few and a few others despised it. It is not necessarily the correct view, but it is one you hardly hear. Those who objected to it were outraged by the fact that this often under-represented view is getting a hearing.

The work I have done outside the classroom has kept me from my course work. In ChE, this proved problematic. However, and though it was in the spirit of educating my fellow students, I am the one who learned the most from this process, and should I get a fresh start, I would do it all over again.

Fayyad Sbaihat ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in chemical engineering.