Israel Apartheid Week is No Hate Fest

These past few weeks have seen an unprecedented attack on free expression on our university campuses...

Nevertheless, Israeli Apartheid Week has proceeded. These attacks have little to do with the reality of Israeli Apartheid Week. While most university administrators and event organizers have not been intimidated by false charges of hate and anti-Semitism, unfortunately the mainstream media has failed to cover the events.

The demand that this week of panel discussions and cultural events be shut down is grounded in the assertion that Israeli Apartheid creates an atmosphere of anti-Semitism on campus. B'nai Brith labels it a "hate fest," while Michael Ignatieff states "IAW singles out one state, its citizens and its supporters for condemnation and exclusion, and it targets institutions and individuals because of what and who they are--Israeli and Jewish."

This is unfair and completely untrue. The organizers of Israeli Apartheid Week are committed to freedom of speech and to working against all forms of oppression, including Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and other forms of racism or discrimination based on religion, nationality, gender or sexual orientation. Israeli Apartheid Week judges Israel by the same standards as all other states, in terms of violations of international law and human rights abuses. These accusations of anti-Semitism are designed to shut down discussion of Palestinian rights by blurring the boundary between criticism of the State of Israel and attacks on the human rights of Jewish people.

Michael Ignatieff argues, that the use of the term "apartheid" to characterize Israel "goes beyond reasonable criticism into demonization."

The term "apartheid" is defined specifically in the Article 7 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court as "inhumane acts ... committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime."

Israel has built a wall that not only separates it from the West Bank but separates families from each other within the West Bank. It has blockaded Gaza and then assaulted the mostly civilian population causing more than 1,000 deaths, 400 of them children. Arab citizens of Israel have fewer rights than Jewish citizens. It is at the very least legitimately debatable whether the Israeli state fits the criteria of apartheid. The term has been applied to Israel by former U. S. president Jimmy Carter, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Israeli writer Uri Davis.  cont'd