A Campus War over Israel

Student activists want colleges to sell stock of firms doing business with Israel. Is that anti-Semitism?

BY RICHARD LACAYO

AT the University of Texas, a small group of students is taking an unusual interest in the school's investment portfolio. Once a week, about 10 meet to look it over.

They are not hunting for stock tips. What they are hunting for is companies that do substantial business with Israel. Students sympathetic to the Palestinian cause have been circulating a petition around the Austin campus since July, calling on the university to sell off the stock of those firms.

"You hear President Bush calling Ariel Sharon a man of peace," says Andy Gallagher, a member of Students for Justice in Palestine. "Then you start looking at the facts, and it plays on your soul."

At a time when Israeli tanks have repeatedly rolled into the West Bank in response to terrorist bombings, a new kind of pro-Palestinian college activism is spreading. Guerrilla theater is one of the tactics.

At the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Michigan and the University of California, Berkeley, students dressed like Israeli soldiers have set up mock checkpoints on campus to "harass" students playing Palestinians.

But the chief focus of anti-Israel feeling is the divestment campaign, which has been gaining momentum -- and opponents. Petitions for divestment have circulated at more than 50 campuses, including Tufts and Cornell.

In the University of California system, more than 7,000 students and faculty members have signed. A pro-divestment group at Princeton has singled out 16 companies as targets, including General Electric, IBM and McDonald's.

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