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.
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