UCLA Student Union Promotes This Patently False Anti-Israel Libel

UCLA’s student government is pushing a ridiculous claim that flies in the face of easily verifiable facts in the public record.

By Yakir Benzion, United With Israel

The UCLA student government passed a resolution claiming Israel is committing “ethnic cleansing” against the Palestinians, the Jewish Journal reported over the weekend.

The college students had not only failed to do their homework, they promoted a libel that is clearly disproved by facts and history.

The student council passed a motion entitled “A Resolution Calling for the UC to Divest from War,” which was a backdoor attempt by the anti-Israel movement to promote the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) resolution passed by the UCLA student government in 2014, the Journal reported.

Jewish students on campus took issue with the resolution being tabled without any advanced notice, as Jewish groups had no idea they were being blindsided by the vote. In order to get radical students to support the move, the motion also invoked the lie that the Israeli government is committing “ethnic cleansing in Palestine.”

“We had no idea this resolution was coming up, and were not alerted by anyone ahead of time,” Aaron Ahdoot, president of Bruins for Israel Public Affairs Committee at UCLA, told the Journal. “The language of the resolution was not released ahead of the council meeting, making it impossible for any of the students to speak out on it.”

The allegation of “ethnic cleansing of Palestinians” by Israel is flat out false.

The reality is that since Arab areas fell under Israeli control in the 1967 Six Day War there are now more Palestinians living there than ever before in history.

And its not the Israelis who are saying so, but the the Palestinians themselves!

The Palestine Central Bureau of Statistics has for several decades tracked the Palestinian population. Their website officially recognizes that the number of Palestinians in Jerusalem is increasing to unprecedented numbers and overall there have never been so many Palestinians living in the Land of Israel, including Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem.

When Israel captured the territory in 1967, a United Nations study put the Arab population of Judea and Samaria at about 870,000 of whom 123,000 were in the Jerusalem district.

The Palestinians own numbers now show their population in the Jerusalem region alone grew to 320,809 in 1997 and is expected to reach 471,834 by 2021, while the Arab population of Judea and Samaria will hit 3.1 million – a whopping 400% increase!

How can there possibly be “ethnic cleansing” when the Palestinian population is not only increasing, but increasing at a massive rate.

“It’s not surprising that the resolution’s proponents hid it from Jewish and pro-Israel student leaders by not releasing the language ahead of time, preventing us from countering their inaccurate and one-sided rhetoric,” Rabbi Aaron Lerner, Executive Director of Hillel at UCLA, wrote in an email to community members. He added that the resolution “follows the familiar pattern of seeking to delegitimize Israel within broader language. The resolution was deliberately hidden from Jewish students, preventing them from engaging in the debate.”

Ricardo Vazquez, Director of Media Relations at UCLA, said in a statement to the Journal, “The UC system, including UCLA, has repeatedly expressed opposition to boycotting, sanctioning or divesting from Israeli institutions and remains firmly committed to that position.”