Judy Rebick and Alan Sears,
National Post, Tuesday, March 10, 2009

These past few weeks have seen an unprecedented attack on free expression on
our university campuses. The poster announcing Israeli Apartheid Week was
banned at Carleton, University of Ottawa and Wilfred Laurier University.
B'nai Brith took out advertisements urging university presidents to ban
Israeli Apartheid Week. Immigration and Multiculturalism Minister Jason
Kenney and Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff have denounced the event. Jason
Kenney also threatened to pull funding from immigration settlement programs
administered by the Canadian Arab Federation on the basis of their record of
advocacy for Palestinian rights.

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.

In a statement before the United Nations, General Assembly president Miguel
D'Escoto Brockman argued for the use of the term "apartheid" to describe
Israeli policies: "I believe it is very important that we in the United
Nations use this term. We must not be afraid to call something what it is.
It is the United Nations, after all, that passed the International
Convention against the Crime of Apartheid, making clear to all the world
that such practices of official discrimination must be outlawed wherever
they occur."

The attempt to shut down Israeli Apartheid Week rather than debate the
applicability of the term fits with a long history of silencing depictions
of the realities of Palestinian life. The discussion of Israel and Palestine
is bound to be uncomfortable and heated, at least until a just peace is
accomplished. At the very least, it needs to be governed by basic
commitments to free speech and universal standards of human rights. This is
only possible if we recognize that the normalization of free expression
around Palestinian rights is a fundamental condition for open discussion and
debate.