Apartheid libel arrives

Editorial

On the bright side, academic freedom remains vibrant and active on Canadian campuses. In this country, as in Israel but too few others, students are free to make asses of themselves.

This week marked the annual intellectual atrocity known as "Israel Apartheid Week." This is when otherwise intelligent, informed Canadian students are asked to believe that Israel – not Syria, Saudi Arabia or Iran, but Israel – is a state resembling apartheid-era South Africa.

On campuses across Canada, Jewish students are courageously defending truth and Israel against slanders of the most obscene sort. Apartheid, because some people clearly need a refresher, was the legal apparatus of racial demarcation that institutionalized white supremacy and black subjugation in South Africa before 1994. Anti-

Israel extremists are applying the term to Israel, apparently based on Israel's desperate attempts to prevent jihadists from exploding themselves among crowds of Jews. To fail to note that there is a world of difference in both cause and substance between these two historical situations is to insult Israelis, South Africans who fought for freedom and the reader. The apartheid libel is used against Israel for two reasons: because too many people in this busy world are unable to grasp complexity and because associating Israel with something as atrocious as apartheid is the quickest entree to accepting that Israel should cease to exist.

The worst abomination in this construction is not what it says about Israel, of course, but the way the cultural appropriation of the South African experience is abused by self-proclaimed social justice advocates.

In South Africa, the African National Congress fought for – and has succeeded in creating – a multiracial, pluralistic democracy. In Palestine, both Hamas and the vaunted "moderates," Fatah, seek a Jew-free state with varying degrees of theocracy and the promise of kneecappings or far, far worse for political dissenters. While Israel is the target of this week's activist atrocities, by far, the worst intellectual assault taking place on campus this week is against the ideals of South Africa's hard-fought democracy.

On Sunday, a South African Communist party politician will speak at the main branch of the Vancouver Public Library, predictably lambasting Israeli policies as being as bad or worse than the old days of South Africa. Like others of his form, he can be expected to overlook the facts, such as the diametrically opposed intents of the South African freedom movement, on the one hand, and the stated intent of both Hamas and Fatah to wipe the Jewish state from the map, on the other.

While this speaker, Ronnie Kasrils, was a member of the Mandela government, he is no more authoritative a voice on Israel and Palestine than any of the other wild-eyed fanatics, like Norman Finkelstein, who have trotted through our city recently. While it is a favorite strategy of the anti-Israel movement to feature Jews with massively unrepresentative ideas (even while accusing Jews of "monolithically" and "unquestioningly" supporting everything Israel does), it is a form of prejudice to give Jews more (or less) credence than any other speaker. And merely because this one has a South African accent should add little legitimacy to his words – he is a lonely voice in the Jewish world and does not represent South Africa any more than, say, Elizabeth May, the Green party leader, speaking in South Africa, would accurately represent a Canadian consensus.

Among those helping to perpetrate this week's nonsense is one of this community's own congregations. Ahavat Olam, which has done some good work in bringing Jewish and Muslim people together, welcoming gays and lesbians into full participation in Jewish life and working on countless projects for tikkun olam, has become increasingly associated with an extreme position on the Middle East. The event the congregation sponsored recently with Jeff Halper could be perceived as falling within the Jewish tradition of healthy debate. But to associate with those who are debasing both Israel's decades-long struggle for justice and peace, as well as defaming South Africa's pro-democracy anti-apartheid movement through association with a Palestinian movement that seeks to eradicate all Jews from Palestine, if not Israel, steps out of bounds. The apartheid libel against Israel is a despicable misrepresentation and it is intellectually indefensible. To see Jews lining up behind it is a disgrace to so many of our traditions, most of all our dedication to intellectual truth and rigor.

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