Natalie Delgadillo: Political stances overshadow student government ethics

If there’s anything I’ve learned from watching student government, it’s that rational, respectful conversations about opposing viewpoints are always to be hoped for and rarely to be had.

At least, I’m still hoping.

But the unfolding drama around Avi Oved, last year’s Undergraduate Students Association Council internal vice president and the current student regent-designate nominee for the University of California, has made it hard to maintain any sort of optimism.

The controversy is yet another case in which a conversation about divestment is cloaked inrhetoric about campaign finance and conflicts of interest. Both of those are totally legitimate concerns for anyone who’s interested in the transparency and efficacy of student government – and yet they never seem to materialize except in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian debate on our campus.

If there’s one thing the drama says to me, it’s that conversations about the ethics of student government leaders are all too often not about ethics at all. The question of whether to push the UC to divest from companies that profit off of the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank has completely taken over the discussion in student political spaces. Even questions about campaign donations and conflicts of interest are now embroiled in the emotional and deadlocked conversation about divestment.

The accusations against Oved illustrate that crossing of wires pretty clearly. They’re varied and confusing, sort of about his integrity as a student government officer but mostly about how issues like divestment are wielded as weapons in student politics, brought up over and over again in a myriad of ways that shroud other important conversations we should be having about student government.

At a June 28 University of California Student Association meeting, a student from UC Riverside alleged that Oved received a donation from Adam Milstein, a prominent supporter of pro-Israel organizations, during his run for internal vice president in the 2013 election. At first, the issue seemed to be that he received the donation but did not disclose it in his campaign finance report – until it quickly became apparent that Oved was not required by the election code to report any donors to his campaign and candidates in the past generally have not done so.

Then, the issue seemed to be primarily about conflict of interest. A screenshot of an email between Oved and Milstein showed Oved thanking the founder of the Adam and Gila Milstein Family Foundation for his “generous donation” and saying he was excited to “represent the Jewish community and the ideologies of Israel” in student government. The email, some students held, showed that Oved was beholden to outside interests with a powerful pro-Israel political stance.

After Oved verified that he wrote the email, UCSA recommended that the regents postpone his appointment pending a further investigation.

But students are left to wonder – an investigation about what? Even if Milstein did donate to the campaign, and it’s seeming more and more likely that, directly or indirectly through Hillel at UCLA, he did, there is nothing in election code bylaws stopping him from doing that. Oved has always been vocally pro-Israel and openly against divestment. Nothing he wrote in the email about defending that position should have surprised anyone. Milstein’s decision to support a candidate who shares his political views does not constitute a conflict of interest.

We can and should still talk about the moral implications of private donors funding student government campaigns. But that’s not what we’ve been talking about here, with Oved and his political stances at the forefront.

In no way do I want to delegitimize concerns some students have about Oved’s rather vocal and polarizing political stance on divestment – they are allowed to voice concerns about their representative’s politics and how those politics might play out when that representative takes office.

But must we have these conversations around leaked emails and secret donations and sensationalist intrigue about something that was never a secret? Do we have to talk about divestment in order to talk about student government ethics?

If people want to discuss Oved’s stance on divestment and his position on Israel, let them. They should. But they shouldn’t talk about it in a way that manufactures controversy and prevents us from having a real, rational conversation about how we should fund student government elections.

As much as some students may be insisting otherwise, this conversation is not primarily about campaign finance. It’s about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and it’s about divestment. It’s about Oved and where he has always stood in this debate.

I’m tired of that conversation. It goes nowhere and gets nothing done.

Let’s make this about something we have a chance of discussing with some amount of respect and decency. Let’s stop pretending we’re talking about student government ethics and actually talk about them.