Last night, the Cal Berkeley student senate, after an initial 12-7-1 vote to uphold ASUC President Smelko's veto, the senate tabled the bill and will reconsider it next week. Link. Meaning, as of now, there will be no divestment resolution from Berkeley. The following block quote summarizes the procedural history to this:
A divest from Israel resolution passed last month by the U.C. Berkeley student senate... On March 24, Associated Students of the University of California president Will Smelko vetoed the measure urging U.C. Berkeley and the U.C. Board of Regents to divest from two U.S. companies supplying war materials to Israel.
Link
Some Background
Last month, the Associated Students of the University of California, the ruling body of Cal, voted 16-4 to divest from stocks that do business in Israel. The resolution was titled "A Bill In Support of UC DIVESTMENT FROM WAR CRIMES." You can read the Bill here. The resolution called for all student-controlled funds to be divested from two US companies (General Electric and United Technologies) that supply military equipment and other products to Israel.
After the passage of the Resolution, the president of ASUC vetoed the resolution, calling it "ill considered."
Controversy surrounded both the passing of the resolution and its veto. Notables on the left, such as Noam Chomsky, Naiomi Klein, Jeffrey Blankfort, and Prof. Richard Falk supported the divestment. Most noteworthy for many, Archbishop Desmond Tutu also supported the resolution. Nobel Peace Prize laureate Tutu is famed for his leadership in the struggle against South Africa's former Apartheid regime and for his support for human rights. He wrote:
The same issue of equality [as with our struggle against Apartheid] is what motivates the divestment movement of today, which tries to end Israel’s 43 year long occupation and the unequal treatment of the Palestinian people by the Israeli government ruling over them.
Jewish groups such as Hillel, the ADL condemned the resolution. The Wiesenthal Center protested Tutu's support for the divestment vote, saying
The divestment campaign at Berkeley is not an exercise in freedom, but an act of solidarity with tyrants and terrorists," said Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Wiesenthal Center. "To compare the State of Israel with South Africa under apartheid is both insulting and dishonest," he continued.
Such is the disparity of position between those who represent the pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli camps.
Editorial
As the initial vote for the resolution was 16-4, and vote to sustain the veto of the bill 12-7, some members of the senate evidently experienced a change of heart between last month's vote and yesterday's vote. At present, we can only speculate as to the reasons behind that change. Perhaps voting for a resolution as opposed to voting to override a presidential veto weighed heavily on the parliamentary dedicated amongst the senate. I suspect more political considerations, though, carried the day. Berkeley came under heavy pressure from various pro-Israel groups and many alumnus.
It appears that, for the moment, even the widely left UC Berkeley community refuses to analogies Israel to Apartheid, as Mr. Tutu has and some on the Pro-Palestine side do.
Perhaps it is because things like this week's execution by Hamas of men accused of collaborating with Israel erodes the legitimacy of Tutu's framing of the conflict. Or perhaps it is because of statements like this:
People are scared in this country [the U.S.], to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful - very powerful. Well, so what? For goodness sake, this is God's world! We live in a moral universe. The apartheid government was very powerful, but today it no longer exists. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pinochet, Milosevic, and Idi Amin were all powerful, but in the end they bit the dust.
– Demond Tutu, 2002. link