Students demand divestment, this time targeting Israel

Other actions have followed suit: establishing a mock refugee camp, creating an effigy of Ariel Sharon, demolishing Palestinian homes, and occupying a building. To date, the group has collected more than 5,000 student signatures on its petition for divestment.

The university's response to SJP's formal divestment request, made nearly a year ago, has been stony silence.

Berkeley chancellor Robert Berdahl rebuked the checkpoint demonstration, claiming it created an environment hostile to some students.

Indeed, SJP's divestment drive runs up against frequent accusations of anti-Semitism and the active resistance of Jewish student groups. University officials privately express doubts about the SJP's chances of success, citing active opposition behind the scenes by Jewish faculty and administrators.

But SJP also counts Jewish students among its members. And groups such as Jews Against the Occupation and Jews for a Free Palestine have endorsed the divestment campaign and have participated in SJP actions.

A more formidable obstacle may be the intricacies of divestment itself. The university's portfolio has grown from $9 billion during the South Africa campaign to $54 billion today.

That money is directly tied to pension funds for 136,000 employees of the University of California, as well as operating funds for some of the most renowned research facilities.

There is enormous pressure to ensure that financial priorities are the chief criteria in investment decisions.

The university regularly receives divestment requests, most recently by groups opposed to regimes in Burma and Tibet. Shares in individual companies have occasionally been sold off, but only when there were good financial reasons, says Trey Davis, spokesman for the UC regents. Since the South Africa decision, the regents have not considered any large-scale divestment.

"In these conditions, it's really not feasible to operate on the sole basis of social-responsibility issues," Mr. Davis says.

Galvanizing support is also challenging because the plight of Palestinians seems more remote to many students than did that of the South African blacks, which had special resonance in a country with its own history of racial segregation.

"You need broad support to win in a movement like this," says Phil Gasper, a professor of philosophy at Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, Calif., and a former antiapartheid activist. "At that time, it was clearer to a broader group of people what was going on. They understood that apartheid was an abomination. But the American media don't portray Israel that way."

SJP has been able to get past that problem to some extent. Neither Shingavi nor Ms. Weir is Palestinian, and less than a quarter of the group's core members are even of Arab descent. Success, therefore, will largely depend on the group's ability to portray the Palestinian cause as a universal one.

Delegations from schools all around the US came to the Berkeley campus in mid-February for the first national conference hosted by the SJP. Nearly 500 students of various ethnicities and political affiliations attended the seminars on divestment research, media outreach, civil disobedience, and organizing strategies.

SJP-style demonstrations have already been replicated at campuses such as Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and the University of Michigan, where students staged a mock refugee camp recently.

Today, protest demonstrations are planned on a number of campuses, and Berkeley's SJP is expected to announce that the divestment campaign is going national.

"The feeling [at the February conference] was very hopeful," says Tamer Douara, a representative from the University of California at Davis.

"Like we've taken a nebulous movement, given it shape, and taken it nationally. Now, in the spirit of Berkeley, we'll march on to that goal."

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