Well, yesterday marked the end of the first week back from the inter-semester break. At this time, Auckland Uni holds a mini-Orientation week to “celebrate” the start of the second semester and to help new students find their bearings around campus. As with the “official” Orientation week at the start of the academic year, some of university’s clubs and societies set up tables in the quad and surrounding areas to advertise their presence and gather new recruits. Early in the week, passing time between lectures, I decided to have a look-see. There were the usual sporting clubs, a fair number of Christian/worship groups, the politicos (Act, National and Labour were slumped
together in one little nook!) and the usual esoteric semi-cults.
Lo and behold, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) were there too. I did not see them at the beginning of the year but they have been a continual presence at nearly every Orientation since the beginning of the second Intifada. The membership seems to be made up generally of Arab students and misguided, left-leaning white kids always eager to express solidarity with the latest certified “victim” group. Their Orientation tables are normally laden with such paraphernalia as photocopies of anti-Israel articles (not surprisingly, anti-Zionist Jewish authors seem to be in favour), “Free Palestine” t-shirts, divest-from-Israel petitions and Palestine-shaped key-wrings (“Palestine” as in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and everything behind the Green Line) among other things. Pasted on the wall behind the table are posters featuring the usual propaganda stock-images - a boy, rock in hand, confronting a huge tank; frail-looking women in head-scarves walking through a gauntlet of gun-toting Israeli soldiers; the dimensions of the so-called “Apartheid Wall”.
It was all there when I passed the table this previous week. I recognised an acquaintance of mine arguing with the girl behind the table over the one-sidedness of the display. I decided to stick around. Faced with the accusation of bias, the girl replied that her group was not in the position to give the Israeli side of the story, as they were a pro-Palestinian group. My acquaintance said that it was wrong to pretend that the other side does not exist, especially given the effect of Palestinian terrorism on the Israeli civilian population.
This sparked a barrage of the usual clichés. The girl claimed that SJP condemns the suicide bombings, but (and there is always a “but”) the Palestinians have suffered more casualties than the Israelis have, and therefore have an “unalienable right” to resist occupation (she would not elaborate on the meaning of “resist”). She then rattled through the standard list of erroneous accusations against of Israel: that it is a “colonial settler state” built on land stolen from an “indigenous people”, that as such it has “no right” to “self defence” (presumably because very act of its being there is an act of aggression), that the wall is there, not to protect Israel from suicide bombers, but to imprison the Palestinians while Israel grabs more land.
I decided to step in at this point, claiming that Israel was founded on land bought from landowners and later won in a war of self-defence. The girl and other group members who had since appeared chuckled to themselves, apparently taking me for a fool. One member then confronted me over the injustice of having one’s land stolen and being kicked out to make room for “Russians and Ethiopians”. The Palestinians didn’t have anything to do with the Holocaust, why should they pay for it? I felt tempted to bring up the 1947 UN Partition Plan, Haj Amin al-Husseini and the 1948 War in which both Jewish and Arab refugees were created, but any further argument would’ve led to a shouting match so I kept silent and listened.
Finally, my acquaintance brought up the issue of anti-Semitism in the Occupied Territories. The girl was quick to answer that Arabs were the true Semites in this conflict, while most Israelis are Europeans (thus making Israel a colony and those who live there morally irrelevant). Understandably, she was oblivious to the facts that “anti-Semitism” was a term coined in 19th Germany as a euphemism for “Jew-hatred” and that Israel’s population is composed mostly of Jews from Arab and Muslim countries who have never lived a day of their lives in Europe. She turned to the issue of the checkpoints, using them as an example of Israelis behaving like the Nazis who had persecuted the Jews. I jumped in again, telling her that only after Israel erects gas chambers in the territories can we talk about Nazism. This was met with another giggle of incredulity. One of the other members butted in, asking how I could expect the Palestinians to defend themselves from “Israeli aggression”. I answered that once the Palestinians reject terror there will no need to “defend themselves” (as he defined it). My acquaintance and I decided to leave it at that, and walk away.
Needless to say I felt I needed a good detox after this unsavoury exchange.
I had had dealings with the SJP in previous years. My first confrontation at an SJP table was with a European girl whose knowledge of the conflict was severly limited. It was far from a provocative discussion. The people at the table last week, on the other hand, were students who, being Arab and/or Muslim, had a more emotional attachment to their cause. While I admit that, as a Zionist, I too have invested my share of emotion in pro-Israel advocacy, I like to think there is no substitution for reasoned argument based on facts. I will admit freely that Israel is not always right, that it has made some mistakes in the past and that the Palestinians have a grievance. I look forward to the day when Israel ends its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and the Palestinians are able to live life without the humiliation of checkpoints and curfews and the Israelis can board a bus or sit down in a café without fearing for their lives. However, this withdrawal is conditional upon the Palestinians’ renouncing the terrorism that has led to the implementation of the measures that make their lives difficult. A wall can be pulled down, but lost lives cannot be restored.
To end off, here is an excellent article from Shalom Lappin, a liberal Israeli professor, on the fallibility of the “Israel as a product of European colonialism” argument:
Avoiding Distortions of History
