February 22, 2010: Israel Apartheid Week is not about working for peace

 By Michael Regenstreif

 Israel Apartheid Week (IAW) is coming soon to a campus near you.

Carleton University and the University of Ottawa will be among campuses in about 40 cities worldwide on which fervent anti-Zionist groups will be hosting speakers and performers and showing films aimed at delegitimizing the State of Israel during the first week of March.

I believe strongly in the need for Israel and the Palestinians to continue working toward a peace agreement and a two-state solution that will allow both sides to live peacefully and securely, free from repression and free from terrorism. There are Israelis and, yes, Palestinians who are working toward that goal and I applaud their efforts.

But IAW is not about working toward peace or solutions in the best interests of the Palestinian and Israeli peoples. It is a propaganda week in support of destroying Israel’s right to exist.

Apartheid was a system in which only the minority white population of South Africa enjoyed all political and state power. The majority Black population was denied the vote and all other manner of democratic and human rights. South African-style apartheid is not the system in place in Israel.

Israel is a western-style democracy in which all of its citizens have an equal vote. Arabs are elected to the Knesset and serve in the diplomatic corps and the judiciary (including the Supreme Court). Arabs are students and professors in Israeli universities and patients and doctors in Israeli hospitals. Israel has a free press and Arabic is an officially recognized language there.

To be sure, Israel is not a problem-free society – what country is? – but, it is not an apartheid regime.

Vanessa Redgrave, long a pro-Palestinian activist, agrees. Redgrave – who used the 1977 Academy Awards ceremony as a platform to denounce Israel – now recognizes Israel as a legitimate democracy and points out that referring to Israel as an apartheid regime is counterproductive to peace and to justice for the Palestinian people.

“If attitudes are hardened on both sides, if those who are fighting within their own communities for peace are insulted, where then is the hope? The point finally is not to grandstand but to inch toward a two-state solution and a world in which both nations can exist, perhaps not lovingly, but at least in peace,” wrote Redgrave last October in The New York Review of Books.

I suppose it’s ironic that the IAW opening event this year is being held at Carleton’s Azrieli Theatre. The venue was endowed by, and named for, David J. Azrieli, an Israeli-Canadian businessman, architect and philanthropist. A past-president of the Canadian Zionist Federation, Azrieli is a Holocaust survivor who fought in the 1948 War of Independence. As a developer, Azrieli has been active in both Canada and Israel. Among the other facilities that bear his name is the massive Azrieli Center in Tel Aviv.

You’d think that IAW organizers might want to avoid the symbolism of holding their event in a theatre named for such a staunch Israeli-Canadian Zionist.

There really isn’t anything to be gained in trying to shut down IAW activities or in arguing with IAW activists. You can’t have rational discussions with ideologues. And the pro-Israel student leaders at Carleton and uOttawa understand this.

The focus of pro-Israel students needs to be on the great majority of their fellow students who not already enveloped by anti-Zionism. The pro-Israel students also understand this and that’s why they’re holding their own series of positive events this week – Israel, A Partner Week.

February 8, 2010: Jewish community quick to respond to the people of Haiti

By Michael Regenstreif

I don’t usually deal with the same topic two issues in a row. Sometimes, though, the topicality of the subject matter demands follow-up. Such is the case of the crisis in Haiti following the massive earthquake that struck the impoverished Caribbean country on January 12.

Because of the Bulletin production schedule, my January 25 column was written on January 15, just three days after the disaster wrought so much damage and took such a heavy human toll. Much of the world had already begun responding to the emergency there – and the Jewish world, in Israel and in the Diaspora, was in the vanguard of those responding to the emergency.

In that column, I noted that the Jewish Federation of Ottawa had reacted quickly to the situation in Haiti and established a Haiti Earthquake Relief Fund so that members of our community could direct their donations to the emergency relief efforts.

Ottawa’s Jewish community began responding immediately. In the first two weeks – this column is being written on January 28 – the fund received more than $37,000 in donations, funds that will be matched by the federal government and allocated to Canada’s relief efforts in Haiti.

The emergency in Haiti will be ongoing for months, indeed years, to come as that country – the poorest in the Western Hemisphere before the earthquake – rebuilds from the devastation. Donations to the Federation’s Haiti Earthquake Relief Fund are still welcome and much needed. Visit jewishottawa.com or call 613-798-4696, ext. 232 to make a donation.

The Federation’s fund, like similar funds set up by other Jewish federations in Canada, is being channelled through United Israel Appeal Canada to IsraAID, the highly regarded coordinating body of Israeli and Jewish organizations active in development and relief work around the world. IsraAID has been at the forefront of relief efforts in Haiti over the past several weeks.

Israel, as noted, was among the first countries to respond to the dire situation in Haiti after the earthquake. The Israeli response included an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) emergency field hospital that, according to many media reports, was the most impressive and effective medical facility operating in Haiti in the days after the earthquake.

Interviewed from Haiti on CNN, Dr. Nancy Snyderman, a surgeon who is the chief medical reporter for NBC, said that the emergency treatment being provided by the international aid teams was basic and primitive.

It was only at Israel’s emergency field hospital, she said, that advanced, sophisticated medicine was being practised, and where the most difficult cases were being brought.

For moving accounts of the work done in Haiti by the Israelis, see the story on page 10 that features an interview with Dr. Ofer Merin, the chief of the IDF field hospital, and the journal entries on page 16 written by Arele Klein, a ZAKA paramedic dispatched from Israel to Haiti.

I mentioned in my previous column that one of the Jewish Community Campus employees feared for the life of her sister who was in Haiti and couldn’t be reached in the days after the earthquake.

I can report now that, days later, she was finally able to reach her sister who was safe.