Despite protests from students chanting “Stop the hate against the only Jewish state,” the University of California Student Association board, representing 233,000 UC students, passed a resolution Sunday to divest from Israel. The 9-1-6 vote was accompanied by another divestment vote, passed overwhelmingly (11-1-3), to divest from several countries—most notably the United States—for “human rights violations.”

With its passage of the Israel divestment resolution, UC joins UC Berkeley, UC Irvine, UC Los Angeles, UC Riverside and UC San Diego in promoting the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. The College Fix notes that the vote was described by progressives as a “landmark decision” because it involved multi-campus association.  

While the BDS movement has been promoted by many anti-Israel activists nationwide, the call for divestment from United States is an unusual one.

“The government of the United States of America is engaged in drone strikes that have killed over 2,400 people in Pakistan and Yemen, many of them civilians,” the “Resolution Toward Socially Responsible Investment at the University of California” states. “The government oversees, by far, the highest rate of imprisonment in the world, and racial and ethnic minorities are disproportionately targeted by law enforcement agencies, particularly for drug-related offences. 400,000 undocumented immigrants are held in detention centers every year, and millions have been deported since the current administration took office, and the government is directly supporting and propping up numerous dictatorships around the world with weapons sales and foreign aid.”

“This resolution aims neither to condemn entire countries, peoples, or communities nor to determine political solutions," it says, "but is solely aimed at ending our university’s support of governments that directly engage in and enable human rights violations."

The broad resolution included several other countries in its ban, calling on UC policymakers “to withdraw investments in securities, endowments, mutual funds, and other monetary instruments with holdings” from the governments of countries it deemed inhumane, including Brazil, Egypt, Indonesia, Russia, Turkey, Israel, Sri Lanka and Mexico.

Cornell University Law Prof. William Jacobson argued that UC’s resolutions simply highlighted the absurdity of the BDS movement (via the Legal Insurrection):   

“The U. Cal. student government has proven a point I’ve made repeatedly in terms of the academic boycott: If you are going to boycott Israel, then you need to apply those standards to the whole world, which will result in boycotting yourselves. I’m not glad that the Israel divestment passed, but at least it passed combined with a resolution which made the anti-Israel students and U. Cal student government look like fools.”

Meanwhile, the student activists who pushed for Sunday’s vote have vowed to take their divestment resolutions to the governing board of the University of California next.