March 9, 2009: Crossing the line from criticizing Israel to antisemitism

By Michael Regenstreif

This issue of the Bulletin went to press just before Israel Apartheid Week (IAW) was held on the campuses of many North American universities, including Carleton University and the University of Ottawa. Events like IAW give rise to the question of when and how criticisms of actions taken by the Israeli state cross the line into antisemitism.

Policies and actions of the Israeli government – like those of any government – are fair game for criticism. Criticizing an Israeli government policy or action is not inherently antisemitic.

However, it has become painfully obvious that some of the anti-Israel activity we see is antisemitic. MP Irwin Cotler, a former justice minister and long-time human rights activist, points to a new kind of antisemitism masquerading as anti-Zionism. Whereas traditional antisemitism was directed at the rights of Jews to live as equal members in whatever society Jews were present, the new antisemitism is directed against Israel as “the collective Jew among the nations.”

In his keynote address to the Inter-parliamentary Coalition for Combating Antisemitism conference in London last month, Cotler described three types of this new antisemitism.

The first is genocidal and is manifested by governments like Iran’s threatening to wipe Israel off the map, terrorist movements like Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and Al-Qaeda whose covenants “call for the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews wherever they may be,” and even religious fatwas “where Jews and Judaism are characterized as the perfidious enemy of Islam.”

The second is ideological and is manifested by demonizing Israel as a racist, apartheid or Nazi state. This ideological antisemitism masquerading as anti-Zionism seeks to delegitimize Israel as a state. Here at home, this kind of antisemitism seeks to tarnish pro-Israel activists with guilt-by-association. This is the kind of thinly veiled antisemitism Jewish students are often faced with on campus.

Legalized antisemitism is the third type. “Here,” said Cotler, “antisemitism simultaneously seeks to mask itself under the banner of human rights, to invoke the authority of international law and to operate under the protective cover of the UN.” The 2001 UN antiracism conference in Durban, South Africa that turned into an antisemitic hate-fest was a manifestation of that antisemitism.

The follow-up to the Durban conference is scheduled to be held next month in Geneva. Canada was the first democracy to conclude that the so-called Durban II conference would likely be another antisemitic hate-fest and pulled out. Israel soon followed. The Obama administration has reached the same conclusion and cancelled U.S. participation. Don’t be surprised if some of the major European democracies also pull out in the coming weeks.

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On Page 13, we have a news report about the Israel boycott resolution passed by the Ontario University Workers’ Coordinating Committee of CUPE (Canadian Union of Public Employees) Ontario. The resolution, spearheaded by CUPE Ontario president Sid Ryan, a long-time anti-Israel activist, will be presented to the CUPE Ontario convention in May.

This resolution, aimed at cutting ties between universities in Ontario and Israel, is watered down from what Ryan was pushing in January when he said, “Israeli academics should not be on our campuses unless they explicitly condemn the university bombing and the assault on Gaza in general.” That demand, so similar to the McCarthyism that destroyed the careers and lives of so many on the left in the 1950s, was too extreme even for the CUPE Ontario committee, which passed the diluted version.

The resolution does not – at least not yet – speak for CUPE Ontario. It remains to be seen whether Ryan will be able to convince the broader membership to support the boycott. It certainly does not speak for CUPE National.

A couple of days after the committee passed its resolution, a statement was released by Paul Moist, CUPE’s national president. “CUPE National would like to state that it does not support the resolution passed by the Ontario University Workers Coordinating Committee of CUPE Ontario on February 22, 2009. The views expressed in the resolution are those of a small number of CUPE Ontario members. The resolution does not represent CUPE National policy.”

Should the resolution pass at CUPE Ontario’s May convention – and there’s no guarantee that it will – it will not be binding on any university. Despite the loud and sometimes intimidating voices of a few professors and students, our universities do understand that peace, progress and a better world will come through openness and collaboration, not boycotts and closed doors.

Israeli universities do cutting-edge research in many areas, including medicine, technology and the environment, and we are likely to see more collaboration between Canadian and Israeli universities in the years to come. To paraphrase from Hillel Ottawa’s week of campus activities last month, expect more references to ‘Israel, a partner’ in the future.

January 26, 2009: ‘If somebody was sending rockets into my house’

By Michael Regenstreif

As this issue of the Bulletin went to press, Israel’s three-week war with Hamas in Gaza seemingly came to an end when Israel said its goals had been met and declared a ceasefire.

Hopefully, the guns, bombs and rockets will remain silent.

As many of the speakers noted at the Ottawa Jewish community’s solidarity rally with Israel on January 8 – one of many rallies held in cities across Canada that evening – the loss of every innocent life in this war, Palestinian and Israeli, was a tragedy.

The Palestinians had such a tremendous opportunity to further their society when Israel withdrew its settlers and military from Gaza in 2005. Their leaders could have seized the opportunity to begin building a prosperous economy that would have lifted their people out of the terrible poverty they’ve known for too many generations. Instead, they fought what amounted to a civil war, resulting in Hamas seizing control from the Palestinian Authority.

Houses and other buildings and farms and greenhouses for growing food – left behind by the departed Israeli settlers – were not put to use by the Palestinians; they were destroyed. Imagine, in a society where too many children don’t get enough to eat, farms and state-of-the-art greenhouses that could have been used to feed their children are destroyed. Instead of building an economy, Hamas built rockets to terrorize nearby Israeli communities like Sderot and sent a terrorist squad into Israel to kidnap Gilad Schalit.

Last March 31, a delegation from Sderot came to Ottawa. They met with politicians on Parliament Hill during the day and with the Jewish community in the evening at the Soloway JCC, where they described what life in their community was like under the constant rocket attacks from Gaza.

In a conversation over dinner that March evening, Eeki Elner, one of the Sderot visitors, told me that, as a child of Holocaust survivors who came to Israel as refugees, he understands the terrible plight of the Palestinian refugees and fully supports the principles of trading land for peace and the two-state solution with the Palestinians.

“But Sderot is not in disputed territory,” he said. “The rocket attacks on Sderot are an attack on the very existence of Israel.”

Clearly, Israel could not allow the rocket attacks to go on forever. As Barbara Farber said at the January 8 rally, “It’s an unconscionable way to live.”

And as then-presidential candidate Barack Obama said on a visit to Sderot last summer, and reiterated this month less than two weeks before his inauguration, “If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I’m going to do everything in my power to stop that. I would expect Israelis to do the same thing.”

By the start of the war, the range of the Hamas rockets reached far beyond Sderot, which lies close to the Gaza border. As Marty Davis tells us in his report on Page1, his community of Ashkelon, about 10 miles from Gaza, became a regular target of Hamas rockets. So, too, did the much further away Beer Sheva.

That is the sad state of affairs that brought Israel into the war with Hamas and to its terrible consequences for so many innocent people.

Obama has now begun his tenure in the Oval Office. As Thomas Friedman wrote January 13 in his typically astute New York Times column, the focus of Israel, and the Obama team, “should be on creating a clear choice for Hamas for the world to see: Are you about destroying Israel or building Gaza?”

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Sid Ryan, the president of CUPE Ontario and long-time anti-Israel activist, wants Israeli academics banned from Ontario universities, unless they explicitly denounce the Gaza policies of the Israeli government (presumably in a way that meets his standards).

Would Ryan apply such a ban to Israeli Arabs or just Israeli Jews? Beyond issues of discrimination, any such ban would mean the utter abandonment of the principles of academic freedom to which our institutions of higher learning are supposed to aspire.

But don’t assume that Ryan speaks for CUPE. Paul Moist, the national president of CUPE, says “such a resolution is wrong and would violate the antidiscrimination standards set out in the CUPE constitution. I will be using my influence in any debates on such a resolution to oppose its adoption.”

I don’t suppose we should hold our collective breaths waiting for Ryan to propose the banning of Palestinian academics from Ontario universities unless they explicitly denounce the Sderot-Ashkelon-Beer Sheva policies of Hamas.