In the spring of 2010, the U.C. Berkeley campus was captivated by a debate in the student government about a resolution that sought to get the U.C. Regents to divest from two U.S. based companies—General Electric (GE) and United Technologies (UT)—which manufactured weapons used by the Israel military in Operation Cast Lead. Drawing on debate recordings, statistical data representing what was said during the debates and who said it, the literature emerging from the debates, and ethnographic observations, this paper asks how Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) initiatives, which seek to hold the state of Israel to account until it complies with international law, function in American institutions of higher education specifically, and within neoliberal moral economies more broadly. Twenty-eight hours of debate were recorded covering the span of three public hearings at which over 250 students, faculty, and community members voiced their positions concerning the divestment initiative. These public hearings were the longest, sustained debate about university divestment from Israel in a public forum in the United States, and they spurred similar initiatives across campuses nation wide revealing similar rhetorical strategies and discourse patterns. Situating these debates within the Habermasian public sphere, this paper focuses on how certain discoures were made possible and others foreclosed, as well as how this dynamic changed over the course of the three hearings. I argue that although the divestment initiative took a hyper-rational approach to make a specific claim—that war crimes were committed by the Israeli military in Gaza in the winter of 2008-2009, and further, to highlight the complicity of two U.S. based weapons manufacturers which university had direct-investment holdings in—it was clear that by the second divestment hearing the terms of the debate had shifted and the conversation was curtailed away from war crimes and weapons manufacturers and towards the affective responses of students about the resolution. Testimonies concerning how students claimed to feel about divestment, their emotional wellbeing, and their anxieties about their identity took center stage while initial discussions about war crimes and corporate investments were buried. In conclusion, I offer thoughts on how discourse about Israel/Palestine is generated or inhibited in the United States public sphere and what discursive limits does looking at these divestment debates reveal about the institutional, interpersonal, and psychological barriers to structural change and also, perhaps, political transformation?