The Boycott Fails at Berkeley

If an effort at the country's most-liberal college to divest from companies that do business with Israel can't work, where could it?

And if you can't make it at Berkeley....

Hussein Ibish writes about the BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) movement with a jaundiced eye, and sees the failure of BDS proponents at Berkeley to ram through a measure calling on the school to divest from two companies that do business with Israel's military as proof that BDS is a hopeless cause:

I think UC Berkeley is an interesting test in the opposite way that BDS proponents suggest: I don't think it would be a tremendous and astonishing achievement to get UC Berkeley to go along with this idea. In fact, really it should not be difficult for such ideas to spread throughout the Bay Area. And I think that's probably the limit, more or less, of its potential area of effectiveness in the United States, with some other, much smaller, pockets of extreme liberalism excepted. So the real test is not whether it can succeed at UC Berkeley against all expectations, but rather whether it will fail there against those same expectations, or at least my own well-informed understanding of what those expectations ought to be.