For those of us not yet convinced, the recent Gaza invasion made clear the disproportionate nature of Israel’s response to provocation and the dismal conditions under which many Palestinians live. The sanctions, brutal violence, and targeting of civilians are inexcusable. But the crux of the issue is human suffering, not the moral characters of Israel or Hamas. Vilifying the aggressor is not an effective response to a conflict in which thousands of victims lie between two violent extremes.
Israeli Apartheid Week has taken an already divisive international issue and used it to create an antagonistic environment on campus. IAW is about furthering the views of its organizers rather than facilitating an open discussion on the topic, which is one that many students do care about. The organizers cannot be wholly blamed in this regard—there are also those who have been baited into an equally extreme response.
And campus media have to shoulder some of the blame, too. After all, it’s pretty clear that many of the tactics used—including the name “Israeli Apartheid” itself—have been chosen to attract maximum media coverage by playing to our known weakness for stories involving conflict, a good photo, and an easy phrase simplifying a complex situation.
Whatever IAW’s original purpose, the nickname that this weeklong series of events has taken among the student body is telling: that any week of the year should be known as “Hate Week” demonstrates a profound failure on the university’s part.
Inevitably, university policies will be treated as part of the conflict. However, this is just the kind of problem that policy—or policy alone—cannot fix. Treating this as a policy issue exacerbates the problem. By “failure on the university’s part,” we refer not only to university administration, but to all of us. Hate Week exemplifies how easy it is to get carried away with the conflict between students and university governance—a conflict that so often becomes a matter of eye-for-an-eye justice. Ontario campuses can become battlegrounds: offences invite counter-offences from other groups (witness the advertisement battles that take place in this newspaper and on campus lamp posts). Passersby get dragged in trying to return overdue books to the library.
It’s a strange situation given that universities aren’t states, they’re universities. We can appreciate that those who hand out fliers for hours in the bitter cold are trying to help educate students about this issue—no easy task on a notoriously apathetic campus, especially during this time of year when we have enough information to process as it is. The question is this: Israeli Apartheid Week has been around since 2005, so how much have we learned?
Hate Week proves that merely providing a free space for open discussion cannot create discussion itself. Unfortunately, the free space is what we’ve been focussing on for a while now. The failure to make effective use of public forums results in two sides (though in reality, we know there are an infinite number of sides on the issue of Israel-Palestine) yelling at one another, neither listening to what the other is saying.
The role of the university in our society is a place for informed and open discussion, free from dogma and intimidation. That some students don’t feel welcome to participate in that discussion, or simply avoid certain buildings so that they won’t be asked to take sides, is a clear signal that we as a community have deviated from that role.
The first step toward a solution is inviting other groups on campus to organize an alternative to IAW. The point would not be to initiate a third firing squad, but to avoid the tactics and rhetoric of Hate Week altogether. If these events are organized by groups with no obvious connection to Israel or Palestine, all the better. The participation of such third-party groups would hopefully emphasize the multiplicity of views available. Anything that can be done to dissolve the tension that usually accompanies IAW is a plus.
