The Comment Factory

“I’ve been quite taken a back by what is happening here,” the veteran South African Jewish Communist, ANC member, fighter against apartheid, and former government minister, Ronnie Kasrils, said. He was speaking at Toronto’s Israeli Apartheid Week in early March. “These university presidents, and your government, are locked in a time warp. They don’t get it. Being anti-Israel, or anti-Zionism does not in any way equal anti-Semitism.

“But this fact is lost with the presidents of various universities. It’s lost on the Jason Kenney’s. They still hold on to that notion if you “cry wolf,” and say this is anti-Israel and therefore anti-Semitic, that this will still carry any weight. And what I say in dialogue with Zionists, is that around the world this claim is really something that is now over. It is finished. Finito.”

Kasrils could have been referring to his month-long wait to get a Canadian visa, which cost an extraordinary $1,600 South African Rand despite a letter of invitation from CUPE (Ontario). But he was actually talking about the fact that everywhere he spoke at Israeli Apartheid Week events – Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, and Vancouver – and in other locations, organizers experienced a clamp-down.

In an open letter to these institutions, Toronto’s Educators for Peace and Justice outlines numerous attempts to silence debate. They’re glaring:

• Statements from 19 university presidents in the summer of 2007 to foreclose debate on the academic boycott of Israel, citing “academic freedom.”
• Visits to Israel by eight university presidents in the summer of 2008, with no equivalent outreach to Palestinian institutions.
• Efforts to ban the use of the term “Israeli Apartheid” at McMaster University in February-March 2008, overturned only through a campaign of protest.
• Discipline against students involved in peaceful protests for Palestinian rights at York University in March in 2008.
• Attempted discipline against a faculty member who addressed a rally against Israeli Apartheid at York University in 2008.
• A pattern of cancellation of room bookings for meetings concerning Palestinian rights at the University of Toronto and York University in 2008.
• The use of fees to cover security costs to impede campus meetings about Palestinian rights.
• The imposition in February 2009 of an exorbitant fine of $1000 on Students Against Israeli Apartheid, plus an additional fine of $250 against the group’s spokesperson, by the York University administration.
• The censoring by the administration of Carelton University of a poster advertising Israeli Apartheid Week on the basis that it could incite others to violate the Ontario Human Rights Code.
• The disciplining of a professor at the University of Ottawa who has been outspoken in his support of Palestinian Human Rights.

The gross inequality experienced daily by Palestinians has appalled the world – but not our government, or the administrators of many of Canada’s universities. (YouTube “Canadian University Complicity in Apartheid.”)

Of all places this is happening on University campuses. Freedom of inquiry must be a cardinal principle of democratic, quality education – as is accessibility. What do paternalistic and hostile attitudes towards students by administrators and governments contribute? The rights of youth and students should unquestionably include organizing free from administration and outside restrictions and interference.

This new heavy-handed approach, disregarding freedom of speech and academic freedom alike, is desperate. Last year, Hillel tried to ban a pamphlet in the University of Toronto library published by a Communist Party. Quote:

“The most typical example of the unity of racism and chauvinism is Zionism – weapon of world reaction, shock force of anti-communism, enemy of the national liberation movement of the Arab people, and foe of working Jews all over the world.”

No wonder the Palestinian solidarity struggle is an issue of great prominence in the Canadian youth and student movement. The young people who spend hours organizing, making banners, and fighting censorship are boisterous: loud, noisy and insistent, because they have justice on their side.

They can lack restraint, but never energy. They tend to march with seven league boots and take no prisoners. Some find this spirit a little offsetting.

Get used to it.

Five years ago Israel Apartheid Week kicked-off its first event in Toronto. Now it happens in over forty cities internationally. As Kasrils said, “This movement is building a wonderful pillar of resistance. What we’re doing here is vital. And we must never stop until Palestine is free.”