As students “whose passions in the conflict run deep,” we felt compelled to respond to Professor Judith Taylor’s article. Her op-ed piece (The Varsity, Jan. 27) named women’s participation as the key to ending the Israel-Palestine conflict and argued for female agency within the formal Mid-East peace process and in the work of solidarity activists in North American universities. While sexism remains a live issue in the 21st century and women’s involvement in politics should be strongly encouraged, Professor Taylor emphasizes that issue at the expense of the larger context of the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine.
Taylor locates the source of the conflict in what she implies as the masculine tendency towards violent behaviour. She evens goes so far as to suggest that the male participants are “committed to the conflict – nurturing it, feeding it, living for its continuation,” which is offensive to both the Palestinians and the Israelis who daily suffer the effects of the occupation. The association of maleness or masculinity with violent behaviour in order to explain the conflict also carries with it the sexist mode of reasoning that the Israel-Palestine conflict is the result of the inherent tendency of men to engage in violence. This diverts our attention from the actual source of the bloodshed: the occupation, a word noticeably absent from Taylor’s piece.
By avoiding this central issue and asking anti-Zionist activists to “try to understand the…hopes, investments, and pain” of the Israeli occupiers of Palestine and their supporters, Taylor implies that the suffering and, most importantly, the responsibility for the current situation is evenly divided between the Israelis and the Palestinians. While we do not wish to downplay the anguish experienced by Israeli citizens, Israel’s illegal invasion and continued occupation of Palestinian territory, marked by regular home demolitions, harassment at checkpoints, and egregious human rights violations, is clearly the root cause of the conflict. Because she ignores this crucial aspect and attempts to locate the grounds of the struggle in the supposed masculine tendency towards violence, Taylor fails to see the acts of violence perpetrated by Palestinians, most notably the ghastly suicide bombings, as those of a population driven to despair by the brutal and criminal occupation which they have endured for almost forty years.
Taylor criticizes a protest planned by the Arab Students’ Collective (ASC), stating that they seem “to be baiting Jewish students” and plan on “violent interaction” at this demonstration. This accusation is ironic in the light of the contemptible behaviour of Zionist activists at Monday’s first event.
Taylor’s misconceptions about campus activism aside, her tendency to blame Mid-East violence on something other than the occupation itself is the main flaw in her argument. Her sexist and misguided analysis of this conflict ultimately serves to blur the line between oppressor and oppressed, disproportionately laying the blame on the victim. Finally, to address Taylor’s interest in female representation in social movements at U of T, our experience with the ASC reveals that it is an organisation in which “women’s voices [often] lead.”
