University of Wisconsin Student Government to Vote on BDS Resolution Accusing Israel of ‘Apartheid, Genocide’

The student government of the University of Wisconsin–Madison is preparing to vote on a resolution to endorse the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, a measure for which Student for Justice in Palestine (SJP), the Young Democratic Socialists of America, and the Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC) have tenaciously lobbied for several weeks.

The resolution, which if passed would call on the university to divest from Israel, accuses the Jewish state of “apartheid, genocide, and militarized violence … at the intersections of race, gender, religion, disability, and socioeconomic status.” It also compares Israel’s conduct in its defensive war against the terrorist group Hamas to the Rapid Support Forces of Sudan (RSF), a notorious paramilitary group responsible for a slew of war crimes and premeditated mass casualties of civilians.

Pushed by anti-Israel activists, the resolution demands that University of Wisconsin divest its holdings in BlackRock, a global investment organization over which anti-Zionists and conspiracists obsess because of its investments in Israeli bonds, valued at $65 million, and manufacturers of military weaponry and technology.

“The UW System invests at least $1 billion into various BlackRock index funds,” the resolution says. “The UW System pays account, asset management, and miscellaneous fees to BlackRock to manage the index funds, the amount of which is a proportion of the total funds invested, in addition to having investments in BlackRock.”

According to The Daily Cardinal, the university’s official campus newspaper, the measure has prompted concerns about the resolution’s potential effect on civil dialogue, as well as its emanating from SJP, which, as The Algemeiner has previously reported, largely led the campus assault on Jewish civil rights amid the war in Gaza by bullying, harassing, and assaulting students who support Israel. The resolution failed to advance to a vote when the student government considered it last Wednesday, even as SJP and its allies pressured the body to limit comment from the student body because the “proportion of Zios [sic] rises as the speaker list goes on.”

“Zio” is an antisemitic slur brought into prominence by former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. While the term, derived from “Zionist,” has generally been deployed by white supremacists and other far-right extremists, it has more recently been used as well by anti-Israel activists on the progressive far left to refer to Jews in a derogatory manner.

“This resolution would completely shut down the important conversations that are being had on campus,” Erika Klein told the student government during the public forum held on Wednesday, according to The Daily Cardinal. “Students who have connections to Israel, including Israeli students and Jews, will feel unsafe and worried to speak out for fear of social consequences.”

Additionally, UW Madison’s administration has noted that, as a public university, the institution cannot boycott Israel anyway, as state law bars government entities from doing so. During the forum, the Cardinal said, UW Madison’s dean of students, Christina Olstad, said the SJP resolution is in “direct conflict” with the law.

Formally launched in 2005, the BDS movement opposes Zionism — a movement supporting the Jewish people’s right to self-determination — and rejects Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish nation-state. It seeks to isolate the country with economic, political, and cultural boycotts. Official guidelines issued for the campaign’s academic boycott state that “projects with all Israeli academic institutions should come to an end,” and delineate specific restrictions that its adherents should abide by — for instance, denying letters of recommendation to students applying to study abroad in Israel.

Leaders of the BDS movement have repeatedly stated their goal is to destroy the world’s only Jewish state.

The national SJP group, which has been linked to Islamist terrorist organizations, has publicly discussed its strategy of using the anti-Zionist student movement as a weapon for destroying the US.

“Divestment [from Israel] is not an incrementalist goal. True divestment necessitates nothing short of the total collapse of the university structure and American empire itself,” the organization said in September 2024. “It is not possible for imperial spoils to remain so heavily concentrated in the metropole and its high-cultural repositories without the continuous suppression of populations that resist the empire’s expansion; to divest from this is to undermine and eradicate America as we know it.”

The tweet was one comment in a series of revelations of SJP’s revolutionary goals and its apparent plans to amass armies of students and young people for a long campaign of subversion against US institutions, including the economy, military, and higher education. Like past anti-American movements, SJP has also been fixated on the presence and prominence of Jews in American life and the US’s alliance with Israel.

On the same day the tweet was posted, Columbia University’s most strident pro-Hamas organization, whose institutional recognition was revoked, was reported to be distributing literature calling on students to join the Palestinian terrorist group’s movement to destroy Israel during the school’s convocation ceremony.

“This booklet is part of a coordinated and intentional effort to uphold the principles of the thawabit and the Palestinian resistance movement overall by transmitting the words of the resistance directly,” said a pamphlet distributed by Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), an SJP spinoff, to incoming freshmen. “This material aims to build popular support for the Palestinian war of national liberation, a war which is waged through armed struggle.”

Other sections of the pamphlet were explicitly Islamist, invoking the name of “Allah, the most gracious” and referring to Hamas as the “Islamic Resistance Movement.” Proclaiming, “Glory to Gaza that gave hope to the oppressed, that humiliated the ‘invincible’ Zionist army,” it said its purpose is to build a global army of Muslims.

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.