For many Canadians, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is anything but clear. Today, however, the Arab Students Collective (ASC) at U of T launches “Israeli Apartheid Week,” an event which the group hopes will leave no doubt in the minds of students as to who’s right and who’s wrong.
By equating the Israeli government with apartheid, the brutal system of racial segregation employed by the South African colonial government until 1994, it appears the ASC is trying to draw a clearer moral picture of the Middle Eastern conflict.
“Israel is indeed an apartheid state,” said Nadia Dar, spokesperson for the ASC. “In South Africa it was white dominating black; in the Palestinian case it’s Jews dominating the Arab population.” According to Dar, Israel is in violation of the United Nation’s International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, which it defines as “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining dominion by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them.”
Dar draws many parallels between Israel and apartheid-era South Africa. She said that the Israeli government has denied Palestinians the right to reclaim the land that they held before they were displaced by the creation of the Jewish state in 1948. She calls Arabs living in Israel “second-class citizens” who are effectively prohibited from owning 93 per cent of the land, and says that hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees live in “open-air prisons” similar to the squalid and segregated Bantustan settlements created by the South African government to house racial undesirables.
According to the U.N., there are close to 4.5 million Palestinians refugees in the Middle East. “Their land has been stolen,” said Dar.
“Palestinians and Jews living in the West Bank have different-coloured I.D. cards,” said Dar, “Palestinians have different licence plates than Jews do. Palestinians live under military law and Jews in the West Bank live under civilian law.”
Jon Jaffit, spokesperson for U of T Zionist organization Betar Tagar, said that such laws are necessary to identify potential militants originating from Arab enclaves.
“Israel is a state at war,” he said. “It’s attacked every day, and thank God some of [the attacks] are thwarted. So yeah, on identification cards there are differences.”
So where, you might ask, are U of T’s academic experts on the region on the issue of ‘Israeli apartheid’? Predictably, they’re split. Jens Hanssen, assistant professor of Middle Eastern and Mediterranean history at U of T, believes the policies of the two governments are “comparable.” According to him, the founders of both nations “were driven by a civilizing mission to an allegedly barren, hostile land they considered their ancestral homes” where “their treatment of native inhabitants was marked by discriminatory citizenship, property and immigration laws. Both regimes relied on a cheap native labour population which they internally displaced into townships.”
Sharon Green, professor at the department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations, strongly disagrees.
“The use of the term ‘Israeli apartheid’ is not only fictitious, but is a form of slander against the Jewish state,” she said. “Shame on U of T for allowing it!”
“Israeli Apartheid Week” will see about a dozen speakers giving lectures every night until Friday, and topics include such controversial titles as “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine and the Right of Return.” Last year, Israel supporters showed up at many of the events and disrupted proceedings.
Betar Tagar will be attending to protest what Jaffit calls the “anti-Semitic” and “hateful rhetoric” being presented. One of Betar’s main objections to the ASC stance is that the collective advocates for a single-state solution, unlike the plan favoured by Israel and most western countries calling for the creation of an Arab state separate from the Jewish nation. “The solution to the occupation is a one-state solution, just as in South Africa,” said Dar. “We believe in a secular democratic state regardless of race or religion.'”
But because the majority of people in the Israel-Palestine region are Arabs, any single democratic state comprised of Israel proper and the occupied territories would certainly elect Arabs to power, and the Jewish state would effectively cease to exist. Because of this, Jaffit sees the single-state solution as the denial of the Jewish people of their right to self-determination.
Dar dismisses charges of anti-Semitism as unfounded. “We are against the Israeli state and Israeli apartheid; we are not against the Jewish faith,” she said. “It’s a very important distinction.” Uri Davis, one of the more prominent speakers at the event, is himself Jewish.
Another accusation made against the ASC is that they support the Palestinian resistance in whatever form it takes, including suicide bombings against Israeli citizens. When asked if she finds such action acceptable, Dar skirts the question.
“It’s not a matter of acceptable or not acceptable,” she said. “The point is to understand they’re resisting a brutal occupation. The point is…to tackle the root cause, and the cause is Israeli apartheid.”
