To show how peaceful they are, pro-Israeli student group/s this week (Tikvah I think, the student Zionist org) staged a counter-protest to Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP)’s Israeli Apartheid week events (part of a national event, http://apartheidweek.org/ )
I photographed the two events (with mobile phone). The thing that was most interesting is that the Israeli Peace people came down the plaza, away from their event to disrupt the SJP re-creation of an Israeli checkpoint, and complained to the university police that the SJP demo was blocking foot traffic, eventually making them move. To demonstrate the danger to pedestrians, Israeli Peace students kicked at/tripped over a mock fence (rope strung between posts) simulating the vast Israeli fences throughout the occupied territories. Why they had to come engage/disrupt the Palestinian event is beyond me – why not just have your own event, and let people speak their minds? I understand it must be very frustrating to them to see something they find so offensive, but the principle of free speech applies to all, even those with whom we disagree, and silencing the opposition is not exactly fair play and far from ‘peaceful.’ To be fair, nobody hit or attacked anybody that I saw, just levied the police. And the SJP demo was blocking foot traffic, although this is very common for demos at Berkeley and happened in the same place by another group just two days ago. The Israeli Peace event also had a significant number of what seemed to be non-students (i.e. middle-aged people), presumably community members. I understand that for many Jews, Israel feels like a representation of Jewishness and thus unassailable without slandering their own heritage as Jews, and further that violent Palestinian activists have left a legacy of fear and a feeling of defensiveness for many Israelis and Jews around the world. However, those things are not excuses to distract from the offenses that Israel as a state (not a “Jewish” entity but simply as a state) has committed/is accused of having committed, they are issues to be addressed separately. Just like a defensive young child, when accused of bad behavior, would say “well Jimmy did [something bad] too!” – that’s not the point.
The main messages promoted by the Israeli Peace event were one, that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, only place in ME with press freedom, has best human rights in ME, unlike the Arab nations; and two that Israel has offered/wants peace but “Arabs” have rejected it, they have no partner in peace etc. Again, you know, issues to discuss, but not directly responding to SJP’s points: that Gaza is in a deplorable state of hunger and poverty and filth, that the walls built disconnect families and people from their land, that Jews get rights non-Jews don’t, etc. I was encouraged to see Jewish supporters of Palestinian rights at the SJP event – human rights are human rights, and it’s not about Jews v. Arabs. It’s nice when people understand that.
Mostly what I saw was that the Israeli message was positive – peace signs, literally handing out flowers, playing music, etc, (except for when they got angry and came to disrupt the Palestinian event), and the Palestinian event was about the difficulties Palestinians face. Again, it comes down to PR wars and simply whose message is most palatable and effective to those walking by. I think that the SJP mock checkpoint was incredibly powerful – it was really hard to watch – but would have benefitted from more citations, like actual photos of checkpoints, monitors playing videos, etc. Because the Palestinian experience is so overshadowed by Israeli PR, it’s incredibly important for supporters of Palestinian rights to PROVE what they are saying at every turn – you’re asking people to question what they feel they already know and have heard all their lives. And I’m glad there is a Palestinian cultural event tonight, but it would be nice to see some of that on Sproul (campus plaza) as well – remind people of the positive and wonderful aspects of Palestinian and Arab culture. It’s hard to compete with a bunch of well-dressed kids in matching event t-shirts blaring Hebrew pop music and handing out flowers, talking about the shared heritage of the Jewish people and the incredibly warm feelings that Israelis harbor in their hearts toward peace.
Photos of the event at my mobile phone photo blog, http://jameskarlbuck.com/dailyshots/tag/israeli-apartheid-week/
(note: they had these banners for 1947, 1967, 2000 and 2007)
I am not a terrorist
(note: this is where the Israeli peace students harassed/disrupted the SJP protest, eventually making them move)
A few comments from around the web:
From Yaman Salahi (SJP leader and Cal student):
UC Berkeley student group Tikvah’s “Israeli Peace and Diversity Week” makes two claims about Israel that are simply not borne out by history. The first is that there is such a thing as Israeli peace, even in the wake of the recent Israeli massacres that killed over 1,300 people in Gaza and prompted Amnesty International to call for an arms embargo against Israel. The second is that the ethnocratic state of Israel embraces diversity. Neither could be further from the truth.
Israel is not a country of peace. It was founded after terrorist militias called the Irgun, Lehi, and Haganah gerrymandered a Jewish majority state by forcibly expelling non-Jews from the land that became Israel in 1948. … Read on
Somebody called “Pro-Israel Bay Bloggers” lists events from the Israeli side as:
From the Side of Sweetness and Light:
And the Palestinian events as:
From the Side of Darkness and Terror
Another good resource: Electronic Intifada
| The Electronic Intifada (EI), found at electronicIntifada.net, publishes news, commentary, analysis, and reference materials about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict from a Palestinian perspective. EI is the leading Palestinian portal for information about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its depiction in the media. [MORE] |
Israeliapartheidweek.org, put on by CAMERA, Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, which says it “takes no position with regard to American or Israeli political issues or with regard to ultimate solutions to the Arab-Israeli conflict. ”
Every March, extremists converge on campuses across the country. For a week or two, they strive to sow divisions, encourage prejudice, and incite hostility.
They come as part of “Israeli Apartheid Week,” a series of lectures, exhibits and events that single out Israel for fierce attack. Students are told the Jewish state is, by nature, a racist, colonial and oppressive state. They are told Israel should be boycotted, and even destroyed. They are told this by ideologues who distort facts about the country while ignoring genuine oppression in the Middle East and across the world.
One need look no further than the event’s title to understand its malignant nature. The canard that Israel is an apartheid state is an assault on the country’s very legitimacy. South Africa’s racist, apartheid regime was rightfully dismantled, and this campaign seeks absurdly to cast Israel — the Middle East’s most progressive state and only liberal democracy — as being guilty of similar policies and equally deserving to be dismantled.
Jerusalem Post op-ed:
‘As long as in this territory west of the Jordan River there is only one political entity called Israel, it is going to be either non-Jewish or non-democratic. If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, it will be an apartheid state.”
Those are the words of Ehud Barak, defense minister and former prime minister, at last month’s Herzliya Conference, the country’s highest-profile gathering of VIPs. Barak’s statement begs the question: Seeing that Palestinians in the West Bank haven’t been able to vote in Israeli elections since the occupation started in 1967, isn’t he saying Israel has been an apartheid state since then?
So, putting Barak’s statement in the context of this week’s news, should people really be so outraged that a few dozen colleges overseas are staging “Israel Apartheid Week”?
Myself, I prefer the term “colonialism” to “apartheid” when comparing Israel’s rule in the West Bank to other regimes in world history. There are important differences between the occupation and apartheid – for one, apartheid was based on race, the occupation is based on nationality. Yet there are important, obvious similarities, too, the main one being that in both apartheid South Africa and the West Bank, one group of people harshly, systematically and “legally” keeps another group of people down.
Anyway, however different from apartheid the occupation may be, it’s definitely more like apartheid than it is like democracy.
