According to professor Uri Davis, when pro-Israeli intellectuals talk about the Jewish state, “nobody lies, but they hardly ever tell the truth.”
Davis, a Jewish Israeli citizen and the founder of the Movement Against Israeli Apartheid in Palestine, spoke on Tuesday as part of the U of T Arab Students’ Collective’s second annual “Israeli Apartheid Week” (IAW).
Although the week’s events have been largely without incident so far, at least one person voiced his or her feelings over the event by stealing the three IAW banners hung in the Sid Smith lobby on Monday night.
“People spent hours making these banners. They were a long term investment that we could have used into the future,” said Ahmad Shokr of the ASC. “Our group is deeply distressed about this incident. We feel it’s an unprecedented and very low attempt at disrupting our ability to organize the students.”
Campus police are reportedly investigating the alleged theft, and have interviewed several students, none of whom belong to the ASC. Aside from the missing banners, Shokr says there have been some attempts to disrupt the ASC’s tabling at Sid Smith, such as students obstructing the booth and refusing to move.
IAW has presented an event each evening of this week exploring an aspect of the claim that Arabs in Israel are subject to systematic oppression deeply entrenched in the country’s legal framework, similar to that of apartheid in South Africa.
Davis attempted to debunk the notion that Israel is “the only democratic state in the Middle East.”
Lia Katz, Public Relations Coordinator for Jewish student group Hillel, does not see the similarity.
“There is no validity to that claim,” she said. “You can find examples of [Arabs’] equal political rights, equal voting rights, and equal rights in electing [Arabs] to parliament. You didn’t find that in South Africa.”
Both Hillel and Zionist campus group Betar Tagar have released statements condemning IAW. Hillel called IAW’s central claims “untrue and malicious,” adding that the event “undermines the interfaith dialogue we at Hillel strive to promote.”
Betar Tagar expressed their opposition to the event in stronger terms, condemning its “genocidal rhetoric” and saying it is “calculated to create tensions between Jews and Arabs on campus.” They further said the event “trivializes the suffering of millions of black South Africans under a true apartheid regime” and ignores human rights abuses in Arab countries.
Based on comments and questions from the crowd, although IAW has been billed by the ASC as a chance to create dialogue in the university community, the majority at the event had clearly already made up their mind about Israel. Miriam Levine, a master’s student at U of T, expressed one of the few dissenting opinions when she suggested to Davis after his lecture that the restrictions placed on Palestinians were necessary for the security of Israel. The idea was not popular with most of the crowd.
“I definitely sensed animosity,” she said. “Some guy in the audience said some choice swearwords to me as I left.”
Most of the dialogue between dissenting opinions at IAW so far seems to have taken place away from the lectures themselves, in the Sid Smith lobby where the ASC has set up its booth this week. There, a steady stream of students has engaged in lively debate with ASC members.
Davis’s talk about Israeli apartheid sought to explain the lack in Israel of certain restrictions that defined South African apartheid, such as restrictions on voting rights and what he called the “petty” instances of separate washrooms and drinking fountains for whites and blacks. Davis believes the absence of such blatant segregation in Israel functions to mask the different rights afforded Jews and non-Jews.
“There is no petty apartheid in Israel,” he said, “and it is the absence of a petty apartheid that is the crucial plank of the projection of Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East.”
It’s this rationale that allowed him to argue that, while Israel’s supporters are telling the truth when they say that Israeli Arabs are allowed to vote freely in elections, this right actually obscures what he said are massive restrictions placed on Arab civil rights-such as a lack of rights over land ownership.
The debate over land is perhaps the central one for the supporters of the notion of Israeli apartheid, and its complexity alone can be daunting.
“Arabs are ghettoized in 2.5 per cent of the land, but 20 per cent of the population is Arab,” Davis said. “They are not allowed to build on 97.5 per cent of the land.” Because the vast majority of the country’s land is owned by either the government or the non-profit Jewish National Fund, who do not sell land, Arabs cannot buy it.
But Jon Jaffit, spokesperson for on-campus Zionist group Betar Tagar, said that Jewish citizens are also unable to buy the majority of Israeli land.
“Only five per cent of the land can be bought by Jews,” he said, “because the JNF owns (the rest). But anyone can rent land from the JNF.”
According to Davis, however, Arabs are only permitted to lease land from the JNF for a term of three years, which denies them official occupancy under Israeli law. In contrast, the regular term of a JNF lease for a Jewish citizen is 49 years.
IAW will end two weeks of campus events advancing controversial claims, one that Islam’s radical factions are increasingly dangerous and oppressive, the other that the state of Israel has racist policies regarding its Arab population. Last week, Betar Tagar presented “Know Radical Islam Week” in direct response to last year’s IAW.
IAW will wrap up on Saturday.
