When a Palestinian-American activist heard that the UCF Student Government was introducing a resolution to prevent the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, she assembled a group to oppose it.
It is a predominantly Palestinian human rights movement aimed at pressuring the country of Israel to comply with international law and end its occupation of Palestine, according to the Palestinian BDS National Committee’s website.
Rasha Mubarak, a national political strategist and local activist, mobilized a team comprised of Jewish allies, UCF students and alumni, and black and brown immigration groups to appear at back-to-back senate meetings to make their voices heard.
Mubarak said an anti-BDS resolution would unfairly curb Muslim and other immigrant students’ rights to free speech, and that it goes against the spirit of UCF.
“For a student governing body — whose peers include Palestinian students, people of color, and black and brown activists who are part of the voting block that helped them get elected and trusted them to not only represent them but to protect them — to present a resolution that would suppress and suffocate these communities’ rights to boycott and further marginalize them is the complete opposite of the golden rule that exists at UCF,” said UCF alumna Mubarak.
SG Government Affairs Coordinator Zak Myers said a resolution, unlike a bill, does not change statutes or allocate funds. Instead, it serves to reflect a sentiment shared by the governing body of an institution — in this case, UCF’s.
At a time where universities around the U.S. are taking pro and anti-BDS stances, UCF SG held first reading to pass Resolution 52-05, which is “opposing the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement at the University of Central Florida.”
SG proposed the resolution under the same breath that it proposed, and later passed, the controversial Fiscal Bill 52-60, which voted to allocate $17,875 of student money to fund the right-wing political commentator Ben Shapiro to speak at the main campus and six UCF Police Department officers.
Mubarak and her group showed up to protest the resolution at the senate committee meeting on Feb. 6, the same night that another group of demonstrators also showed up to protest against the Ben Shapiro bill.
The proposer of the bill, Sen. Ben Rembaum, said amid so much controversy, he and the senate decided to postpone the anti-BDS resolution indefinitely — also known as “PPI” or “kill” the resolution — before the senate committee meeting even took place.
Although Myers has said that SG is meant to be a strictly nonpartisan entity, some students said they feel like SG is leaning in a clear direction.
“At this point, every time SG makes a ‘tough decision’ that ends up being contrary to our ‘core beliefs,’ I’m disappointed but not surprised,” said Shahaan Khan, director of political affairs for College Democrats at UCF. “The recent direction SG has taken with the bills they’ve been processing has been worrying.”
SG supporters of the resolution said it was intended to be a stand against discrimination as a whole on campus.
Rembaum, a 20-year-old sophomore economics major, said the resolution was proposed in response to a rise in anti-Semitic attacks around college campuses in the U.S., though not specifically at UCF.
“Even though this resolution says ‘Anti-BDS,’ it also targeted all forms of discrimination that go on in college campuses,” Rembaum said. “In my eyes and other people’s eyes, the people within the [BDS] movement at certain campuses caused discrimination and sometimes it caused violence, and I did not want that to happen to UCF.”
On the night of the resolution’s first hearing, Rembaum presented a slide show with images of an anti-Semitic white supremacist display that was reported on campus. The image showed the words, “LOVE not HATE,” with a swastika in place of the “O” for “LOVE,” and a Star of David in place of the “A” for “HATE.”
This confused Seema Azim, a UCF alumna of Afghan descent who attended the second hearing with Mubarak’s group.
She said the BDS Movement stands against the country of Israel’s politics to deny Palestinians their right to exist, not against the people of Israel or of the Jewish faith. Unlike white supremacy, which does.
“It was kind of clear that people of the senate did not really understand what BDS was,” Azim said. “There were no Palestinian voices being considered, so all in all, it was a very one-sided approach. One-sided being that they believe BDS to be a discriminatory movement, which it is not.”
Rembaum, who said he joined UCF SG to serve as a voice for students, said he had not considered the other side of the argument when he’d presented the resolution.
He said that when he realized the resolution would do more harm than good, he began to change his mind.
“I wasn’t able to talk to them about it beforehand because I don’t know many people in that community, and it’s hard for me to reach out to people I don’t know,” Rembaum said. “After hearing their concerns on the senate floor, after talking to them, after senate meetings and hearing their voices, I decided to kill the resolution.”
Myers, who cosponsored the resolution, said it was meant to be preventative.
“Not so much on UCF’s campus, but in a lot of other campuses around the country, we have seen a spike in the boycott divestment and sanctions of Israel, and just because a problem hasn’t been super present on our campus, that doesn’t mean that it’s not happening in other places or that it can’t happen at UCF,” Myers said.
Myers also said the stance was supposed to be a pro-peace and pro-Israel act of support for the UCF Jewish community, and should not be seen as anti-Muslim.
“BDS is almost inherently discriminatory, so I think that a lot of times there’s a lot of confusion with people who are pro-BDS,” Myers said. “Just because we’re doing something for the Jewish community does not mean the exact counter to that is something that is negative toward the Muslim community.”
But Grayson Lanza, a UCF alumnus of Jewish descent who attended the meetings as part of Mubarak’s group, said that standing for Israel does not necessarily mean standing for such a diverse community as the whole Jewish population.
He said anti-BDS resolutions and laws purposely weaponize Jewish identity in order to push a separate agenda.
“Israel is often improperly associated, either in bad faith or by genuine misunderstanding, as representative and associative with all Jews,” Lanza said. “But not all Jews are Israeli, and historically, we were not for the most part, either. [They] claim it is to fight anti-Semitism; however, it is honestly anti-Semitic to conflate Israel with all Jews.”
In the end, when the demonstrators spoke at the committee, the senate assured them that they had already decided to kill the resolution and there was no need for further concern.
Mubarak, Azim and Lanza all said they still felt uneasy. Azim said she felt it would undermine first amendment rights to free speech for some students, in contrast to the Ben Shapiro bill, which passed namely on the arguments from supporters that it protects conservatives’ rights to free speech.
“It’s scary because it kind of makes students — including me — feel like your entire school stands against your rights to express your concerns with human rights violations, and that’s not a nice feeling,” Azim said. “Standing up for oppressed populations already is isolating enough, and it can be marginalizing with a resolution like this on top of it. It would likely push students to not even talk about these things.”
That was Lanza’s main point at the committee meeting that evening.
When he spoke, he made sure to stress the importance of SG including the entirety of the UCF community into these decisions — not just the few closest to them.
“One of the most significant issues with the resolution was that there was zero effort from proponents of the resolution to discuss the matter with the UCF Palestinian community or the Orlando Palestinian community as a whole,” Lanza said. “These conversations so, so often erase Palestinians, and there is absolutely no denying that. Regardless of your opinions, Palestinians are the ones who suffer from the conflict the most.”
Mubarak recognized not adopting the resolution was good news but addressed the heavy responsibility of setting a premise on such dangerous rhetoric, arguing that it promotes xenophobia among students.
She said she fears for the future of UCF under divisive management and said she exhorts the student governing body to take accountability to heart.
“When you introduce language like that, it takes seconds to further disenfranchise these communities,” Mubarak said. “As leaders, yes, you have power, but it is within you to decide if you want to divide or unify. And you have taken a stance to send a message of division, and within that division comes hate and violence against these communities.”
