An Israeli student at Cornell University wrote in the student-run Cornell Daily Sun about the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) resolution that is being debated in Cornell’s Student Assembly.
Shir Kidron, a senior at Cornell, explained her April 7 op-ed that in 2009, when she was 12 years old, a rocket from the Gaza Strip struck her home Gedera and killed her dog Rosie.
“The story of my home in Gedera is not unique,” Kidron wrote. “It resonates with tens of thousands of Israelis who have been under a constant threat of rockets from Gaza over the past 18 years. According to the Israeli Center for the Treatment of Psychotrauma, 40 percent of the children in the Israeli border town of Sderot suffer from PTSD. This is what happens when, at any moment, you could be given only 15 seconds to run for shelter.”
Kidron argued that “the reality is not easy for both sides.”
“On the Israeli side, we live in fear of rocket attacks, suicide bombers and stabbing attacks,” Kidron wrote. “On the Palestinian side, the civilians are living under Hamas rule dealing with poverty and population density while the Palestinians in the West Bank are living with the presence of the Israel Defense Forces. Their society is plagued by a corrupt Palestinian government and relentless terrorist groups.”
Kidron warned that the BDS rhetoric is becoming “more extreme” on Cornell, pointing to a February 20 letter from Cornell Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) to Cornell President Martha Pollack that accused Israel of “apartheid” and “ethnic cleansing.”
“As an Israeli citizen who has paid the price of violence, and as a Cornell student cognizant of the civil and human rights of the Palestinians, I plead you: Stop this extreme, one-sided and violent attempt at delegitimizing me and my country,” Kidron wrote. “Promote genuine dialogue that will lead to a real improvement in the lives of both Israelis and Palestinians. Don’t fall for the shallow rhetoric of the BDS movement, which takes one of the most complex geopolitical mazes in history and forces it into the unfitting settler-colonial narrative.”
The resolution calling on Cornell to “divest from companies participating in the human rights violations in the Israeli occupation of Palestine” was hotly debated during a March 28 public forum at the Student Assembly; the assembly will bring up the resolution again in its upcoming April 11 meeting.
Pollack announced her opposition to the BDS movement on March 1, writing in response to Cornell SJP that BDS “places all of the responsibility for an extraordinarily complex geopolitical situation on just one country and frequently conflates the policies of the Israeli government with the very right of Israel to exist as a nation, which I find particularly troublesome.”
