The Role of Canadian University Campus Communities in the Ongoing Struggle for Palestinian Human Rights

By Clare O’Connor, graduate student at York University

This event tonight directly exposes that the conflation of Zionism and Judaism is false. Instead of talking about why I’m an anti-Zionist Jew, a position that can be explained simply by noting that I’m a person who believes in social justice, I’d like to speak about the role of Canadian university campus communities in the ongoing struggle for Palestinian human rights. To do so, I think it’s important to provide some background.

The Al-Aqsa Intifada in 2000 inspired extreme criticism of Israel on University campuses around the world. En masse, students organized to resist what can be described most accurately as Israel’s colonization of Palestine and regime of Apartheid against the Palestinian people.

Student resistance in Canada was strong enough that coverage of criticism of Israel worked its way into mainstream media, and Canadian general public opposition to Israeli aggression began to grow. This surge of criticism and resistance was seen as a threat to pro-Israel organizations in Canada, which provide imperative financial and ideological support for the Zionist project.

In late 2002-early 2003, the “Israel Emergency Cabinet,” composed of prominent Canadian Israel advocates and corporate tycoons (including Israel Asper, CEO of CanWest Global; Gerry Schwartz, co-founder with Asper of CanWest Global and CEO of Onex Corporation; Heather Reisman, CEO if Indigo/Chapters Books; Brent Belzberg, owner of Torquest Partners; Sylvain Abitbol, president and CEO of NHC Communications Inc, to name a few), devised a strategy to suppress this surge of criticism. They founded the Canadian Council for Israel and Jewish Advocacy (CIJA), which is a board of 18-22 individuals who now coordinate something called the National Jewish Campus Life initiative. After its formation, the National Jewish Campus Life initiative promptly brought together pro-Israel campus organizations, including 30 Hillels – Hillel being an international Jewish campus organization - to form the “Canadian Federation for Jewish Students.” Note that the terms Zionism and Israel appear nowhere in the titles of these new projects, but they all come out of the work of the “Israel Emergency Cabinet.”

Hillel@York, claiming to represent all Jewish students, consistently denies their exclusively Zionist militaristic stance, despite their coordination of an “Israel Defense Forces Appreciation Day” in 2003, their IDF paraphernalia t-shirts, their exclusion of non-Zionist Jewish students, their persistent reactionary efforts to discredit anti-Zionist criticism, their advertisement of a "Video Conference with an Israeli army unit" last month, and the list goes on. The lack of open-mindedness among Hillel@York members is such that at a recent public discussion event at York entitled “Zionism, Social Justice and the Jewish Community,” a self-described “progressive” Hillel member made the delusional racist claim that Palestinians should think of Gaza as a castle instead of a prison.

What’s important about the persistence of Zionist agendas on Canadian campuses is not, for me, the problem of being excluded from the so-called “Jewish community” because of my anti-imperialist politics. The problem, I believe, is that Zionist campus advocates have in their political reserves not just plenty of money, but the historical struggle of Jews against Nazism and general anti-Semitism. This historical struggle is referred to quite effectively, as we know, to discredit and demonize all critics of Israel. To be clear, Jewish struggle during the Nazi holocaust was a horrific struggle, and the genuine anti-racist work undertaken by Jewish people in response to their oppressors must be honored and remembered. Zionism, however, is not an example of a genuine anti-racist project. It never has been.

Appropriation of historical Jewish struggle as a central aspect of Canadian pro-Israel campus advocacy is extremely powerful though, and many students, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, have a hard time finding a point of entry into well-informed critique of Israel. So we see today a population of young Jewish Canadians adopting right-wing, racist, neo-colonial politics because those are the only politics that are compatible with Zionism and Israel. So Hillel@York members are increasingly showing up at leftist, anti-war, anti-imperial events that are not Palestine/Israel-specific, to disrupt and oppose such events. Those Hillel members who express concern about the Middle-East conflict are encouraged to undertake self-congratulatory, band-aid solution, philanthropic projects, which distract all participants from the reality of the situation in the Middle-East and provide a comfortable alternative to direct action political resistance. Young Jewish people are being forced to abandon the Jewish history about which they should be proud, that being the history of Jewish resistance to all forms of oppression inflicted upon any people.

Zionist ideology and rhetoric is particularly entrenched at York University. Strangely, this might be a positive thing. If we can continue Palestine Solidarity work at York, where the highest levels of administration are loaded with powerful pro-Israel advocates, where they have tried everything from expelling students to inviting Toronto Police onto campus to assault and arrest peaceful student activists, where official disciplinary offices ignore explicitly racist Zionist propaganda, if at York we can maintain a fight against Canadian pro-Israel forces, we might just be winning.

For more information on Israel Advocacy in Canada, read “AIPAC North,” Parts 1-3, by Dan Freeman-Maloy.

Statement

The Role of Canadian University Campus Communities in the Ongoing Struggle for Palestinian Human Rights