I’ve just had an interesting email from one of the students involved in opposing the last Divestment motion at the LSE, which was rejected a few weeks ago.
What happened was this. The first motion was rejected by the Students’ Union. It was then slightly amended and re-submitted to the next Union meeting. It became clear that the Palestinian Society was simply going to keep re-introducing the motion until a Divestment motion was passed.
Union meetings tend to suffer from turnouts which are relatively low, compared to the size of the student population. Eventually, issue-fatigue sets in. At some point or other, the Palestinian Society would be likely to get lucky.
Rather than engage in this sort of facile trench warfare, the opponents of the Divestment motions decided instead to raise money for an Israeli charity called Save a Child’s Heart which performs heart surgery on children from Palestine and from many many other countries.
The LSE students raised £1000 for the charity.
It is difficult to think of a more appropriate answer to those amateur politicians,
and their facile and grandstanding motions. Better to do something constructive, than engage in symbolic political battle with those who are interested only in torpedoing any genuine negotiated settlement between Palestinians and Israelis.
