by Students Against Israeli Apartheid
Student leaders at Carleton University have abandoned their moral leadership by choosing to celebrate and promote the Israeli government and its human rights abuses.
Earlier this month, the Israel Awareness Committee (IAC) hosted an event for students featuring Israeli wine, which was attended by current and future CUSA executives, as well as CUSA Councilors.
The purpose of the event was to promote closer ties to the Israeli government. Implicitly, the event sanctioned the Israeli state’s ongoing practices of occupation and apartheid. The event was attended by the Israeli Embassy and organized by the IAC, which refers to itself as “the official voice for Israel on campus.”
During the fiftieth year of the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, in the midst of rapid settlement expansion and only one week after the Israeli government adopted a new law expropriating private Palestinian land, it is shocking that student leaders felt it was appropriate to show their support for those actions by networking with the Israeli Ambassador over wine and cheese.
It is also disturbing that the event featured Israeli wine, when the Israeli wine industry is complicit in the ongoing military occupation of the West Bank and the theft of resources, including farmland and the monopolization of water. Wine that is produced from grapes grown in illegal settlements is practically impossible to distinguish from wine produced in Israel proper, as settlers have a variety of means to conceal the origin of their products.
Regrettably, this is not the only recent incident of CUSA executives lending legitimacy to Israeli apartheid. Over the holiday break, the CUSA Vice President of Finance went on a heavily subsidized trip to Israel as part of a “young leaders” program led by the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA). This program mirrors those in South Africa during apartheid, when the South African Embassy and other organizations brought scores of politicians and community leaders on free propaganda tours of the country. These individuals would often return as new supporters of South Africa and would push back against calls for boycotts and sanctions.
This month, the Israeli government hosted a similar propaganda tour to Israel for NFL players with the intention to turn them into “ambassadors of goodwill for Israel.” Courageously, more than half of the delegation backed out of the trip after Seahawks’ Michael Bennett stated his refusal to be “used” in this way. We only wish that our CUSA executives had the same courage.
It is as unconscionable now as it was then for anyone to let themselves become propagandists by aligning with an apartheid regime. How can anyone in good conscience support a government that currently denies full political and civil rights to nearly five million of the people under its control?
When Palestinians finally win their freedom, history will remember harshly how our student leaders stood alongside the Israeli state, an unjustifiable and flagrant violator of human rights and international law.
This article first appeared in Vol. 9, No. 5 (February/March 2017).
