By Michael Regenstreif
Many will recall the offensive poster used to advertise the so-called Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) in 2009. While the argument could be made that IAW posters are always offensive, that year’s version was particularly offensive, coming just after Israel’s Operation Cast Lead aimed at stopping the incessant rocket fire from Hamas and other terrorist groups in Gaza, which was constantly targeting communities like Sderot in Southern Israel.
The poster read “Israeli Apartheid” while showing an Israeli helicopter shooting a missile directly at a small Palestinian child holding a teddy bear and standing alone behind the walls of Gaza.
The implication of the poster was unambiguous: Israel deliberately targets Palestinian children. An allegation that is patently untrue.
The poster was propaganda created to deceive and to offend – and, by association, to cast pro-Israel students as supporting a racist regime that murders innocent children. Several universities – including Carleton University and the University of Ottawa – recognized the poster for what it was and banned it from their campuses.
The Carleton chapter of Students Against Israeli Apartheid (SAIA) brought a complaint against its university to the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario, alleging the university’s actions were unjustified and discriminatory and, as noted in the judgment in the case rendered by the Tribunal last month, almost four years after the incident, “motivated by an anti-Palestinian animus, and a preference for concerns expressed by Jewish students over the rights of Palestinian students and their supporters.”
In his judgment – which can be read in its entirety at tinyurl.com/SAIA-Carleton – Michael Gottheil, the Tribunal adjudicator, dismissed the complaint brought by SAIA against Carleton, noting there was no evidence of anti-Palestinian bias on the part of the university (all of the IAW activities scheduled on campus were allowed to take place) and removal of the posters, which had been posted without the required approval, was reasonable in that they had been posted without approval, which is contrary to university regulations.
Gottheil rejected the SAIA claim of preferential treatment of Jewish students over Palestinian students and their supporters, noting SAIA “presented very little direct evidence to support its claim of differential treatment, and no direct evidence that ancestry, ethnic origin or place of origin were factors in the respondent’s decisions to remove or ban the posters.”
Gottheil also noted the university’s concern that the posters were contributing to the highly strained atmosphere on campus at the time. Gottheil quoted Carleton SAIA leader Ben Saifer, who said the posters were “provocative and meant to be provocative.” Several incidents of harassment of Jewish and students had been reported and some Jewish students were feeling threatened because of the poster.
“I am satisfied,” Gottheil wrote, “that [Carleton University] had a good faith concern about student safety, and the possibility that the situation on campus might further deteriorate. Its evidence that the number of reported hate-reacted incidents was unprecedented in Carleton’s history was not challenged. ... The reported incidents, if true, were sufficiently serious to raise concerns by the university’s Equity Services department, and warrant a response.”
The boundaries of freedom of speech have become a complicated issue in society – and, particularly, it seems, on university campuses in recent years. While universities should be places of rigorous debate on important issues – including the Israeli’s conflict with the Palestinians – the term ‘Israeli apartheid’ and the boycott, divestment, sanctions (BDS) movement are not meant to encourage debate or find solutions to the conflict. They are simply meant to demonize and delegitimize Israel in order to shut down debate.
In a letter to the New York Review of Books (October 22, 2009) rejecting a boycott of Israeli films at the Toronto International Film Festival, veteran pro-Palestinian activists Vanessa Redgrave, Julian Schnabel and Martin Sherman dismissed the term “apartheid regime” to describe Israel.
“We oppose the current Israeli government, but it is a government. Freely elected. Not a regime. Words matter,” they wrote.
“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.”
While there are people and supporters of goodwill on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide who are earnestly trying to move toward a two-state solution, the IAW crowd and the aligned BDS movement are, sadly, not among them.
This year’s edition of IAW is set to take place on Canadian university campuses in early-March.
