Activists from UC Berkeley discuss the controversy
With Israel Apartheid Week—and various pro-Israel counter-programs—underway on campuses nationwide, the Jewish campus world is abuzz with talk about Israelis, Palestinians, and how students should approach the conflict.
We spoke with five Jewish student activists from the University of California, Berkeley—one of the most volatile schools in the country when it comes to Israel and Palestine—and asked them each the same five questions about IAW and Israeli-Palestinian discourse:
- Tom Pessah, an Israeli graduate student in sociology, is a member of Students for Justice in Palestine—which organized IAW.
- Mahaliyah, who requested that her last name be withheld, is a student activist with Jewish Voice for Peace—which supports boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
- Simone Zimmerman, a sophomore, is a member of the pro-Israel J Street U–which advocates for Palestinian rights and a two-state solution.
- Arielle Gabai, a sophomore, is a campus Emerson Fellow with the pro-Israel group StandWithUs, and is an organizer of Berkeley’s Israel Peace and Diversity Week, which takes place at Berkeley alongside IAW.
- Gabriel Sassoon, a 2007 alumnus, was active with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee while at Berkeley and is the creator of Cal Palestinian Terror Week, a Facebook event meant to counter IAW.
Do you support Israel Apartheid Week? Why or why not?
Tom Pessah: I’m one of the organizers. We see it as a way of raising awareness of structures of separation and discrimination in Israel-Palestine, which are causing suffering to Palestinians and preventing their reconciliation with Israel.
We think that the core of the conflict is in a history of separation that is maintained today by Israel. That’s what apartheid means. It’s comparable with the way in which the government of South Africa created separation between populations.
Arielle Gabai: Definitely not. It’s a ridiculous thing to say Israel is apartheid. It’s hatred and violence and ignorance and everything we stand against.
Apartheid in South Africa was a specific instance in which there was racial superiority based on black versus white. That’s just not the case in Israel. All Israeli citizens have the same rights regardless of gender, race and religion.
Gabriel Sassoon: [Israel Apartheid Week] is using an outmoded colonial word for an established institutionalized racist policy in another continent to describe a completely different situation [in Israel]. That’s why I don’t support it. When you use the term apartheid the purpose of it only can be to provoke emotion and to influence your audience to come to a conclusion before they even think about the issues.
Israel is more than happy having well over a million Arabs in its established international borders, but when the Israelis talk about evacuating the West Bank, it has to make the entire area Judenrein. Is that apartheid, if you have to have an ethnically cleansed Palestine?
Mahaliyah: I support solidarity movements with people who are working to educate those who are not living in Israel-Palestine about the nature of Israeli apartheid, and the way that the system currently functions and affects real people. Do I support every single thing that’s said during that week? No.
I think it’s important to understand the historical context of the term and to not mesh together the specificities of the context in Israel-Palestine with South African apartheid. The political weight of that term is very important. The situation in Israel-Palestine shares many similarities with the apartheid system in South Africa. That’s not to say they’re the same thing.
Simone Zimmerman: I don’t support it. I think it tends to be really aggressive, and it portrays a really one-sided narrative. It’s meant to provoke and it’s meant to incite a lot of emotion without addressing the complexity of the issues.
That they call it Israel Apartheid Week speaks to the goals of the week. They don’t call it “Palestinian Liberation and Empowerment Week.” Words like “ethnic cleansing” to Jewish students symbolizes something that is so far from the reality for them that they cut themselves off from it.
What effect do you think IAW has on campus discourse on Israel and Palestine?
Simone Zimmerman: It shuts it down. A lot of students who are really passionate about the causes get charged about it. Students who are staunchly pro-Israel are preparing their responses and their counter-protests: how many lies [IAW organizers] are spreading, how they want to push Israel into the sea.
Mahaliyah: For some people it stirs up a lot of emotions. Its being a public week instigates a lot of discussion around the subject. Through the different emotions there’s a lot of pain but a lot of growth does happen through those difficult conversations.
Gabriel Sassoon: It distorts the discourse to stop the real issues from being discussed, to predetermine the audience’s beliefs about the issue. The pro-Palestinian movement has been extremely effective at painting itself as the victims when they are supported by a powerful Arab lobby. They’ve been very effective in convincing students that this is a black-and-white, right-versus-wrong scenario.
They’re not interested in what Israel can do to compromise and come to a peaceful settlement with the Palestinians and the wider Arab world. It’s one state for one people and zero states for the other
Tom Pessah: We find that it has opened up discourse. People have asked us, “What does apartheid mean? Why do you use it?” This has shed light on different policies of separation and discrimination. I think most Israelis are unaware of the fact that Palestinians are de facto barred from living in most of the state even if they are citizens.
Arielle Gabai: It breeds hate and targets the Jewish community specifically. There have been cases where students have had to deal with physical abuse.
It doesn’t lead to a peaceful solution at all. Israel Peace and Diversity is about educating people about what’s going on in Israel. Their basic goal is to delegitimize the state of Israel.
What do you think is the most productive way to talk about Israel and Palestine on campus?
Arielle Gabai: Education. Really talk about what’s actually going on. What are people doing to solve this issue? What is Israel doing to work toward peace?
Simone Zimmerman: To sit down and have conversations with people who disagree, who are willing to listen to each other. Both sides are entrenched in their narrative. They both think the other side is hateful liars.
On Berkley’s campus we have Israel Apartheid Week and our very far-right Israel group has created an event called Israel Peace and Diversity Week. This Peace and Diversity Week is so offensive to Palestinians. It’s a diversion from the issue of occupation. It’s trying to refocus this victimhood narrative on the Jews.
Tom Pessah: I think just having a conversation. People are afraid of an open conversation on Israel and the actual suffering of people on the ground. The conversation on Israel tends to stay on the abstract level of identity and there’s not enough discussion of actual policies.
Mahaliyah: If the goal of the conversation is to say your point and not really listen, that would look very different from someone whose intention is breaking down terminology and moving beyond this illusion that we have to agree with a political system because of our national, ethnic or religious background.
It depends on the mind-state of the people who are involved, how open they are to stepping outside of their own experience and considering what it might be like to have someone else’s experience.
Gabriel Sassoon: You need to educate the general campus community about what good-faith activism means. You need to assess whether the people talking to you are genuine in the views they’re putting forth or whether there’s more behind it.
The key to discussing this issue is that Israel is currently the only democracy in the Middle East. Hopefully that won’t be the case for long.
Have you approached those with whom you disagree to discuss IAW?
Gabriel Sassoon: Frequently. When I’ve tried to engage in good-faith debate, because I’m pro-peace and pro-human rights, from that perspective I don’t see a genuine good-faith desire to correct human rights abuses in the Middle East. They almost start believing their own propaganda.
Tom Pessah: We see ourselves as just as pro-Israel as they are. There’s many more than two sides. There are many groups on campus. There have been many people who used to define themselves in that camp, transformed their views and came around to seeing it our way.
Simone Zimmerman: I haven’t had any one-on-one conversations about “This is what Israel Apartheid Week means to me” from a Palestinian perspective. From talking to Jewish students who I have political disagreements with, they see Apartheid Week as hate speech and they feel threatened by it. They don’t see any truth in what Students for Justice in Palestine is trying to say.
Arielle Gabai: There have been multiple conversations. They’re very clear on their message. Their message is hate. They don’t want dialogue. They don’t want to talk about peace. They want to talk about apartheid and how Israel shouldn’t exist.
Mahaliyah: I’ve been involved in many different kinds of spaces around this conflict. I’ve been most effective in intimate conversations with people. In a public setting I can’t communicate very well. We can be screaming at each other in a public but in a calmer environment we’re able to get to the core of what we’re yelling about.
There are some things that are brought up that are disheartening. A student just told me that she was anti-Arab, that she maintained a racist ideology. Because of that, she didn’t care because this land was her birthright.
What could be done to decrease tension over Israel and Palestine on campus?
Mahaliyah: End the occupation. Make a radical change from where this tension is coming from. Tension on campus is one thing, but living within a system of apartheid, occupation or ethnic cleansing is totally different.
Arielle Gabai: Have open dialogue and actually talk about Israel, talk about the issues, talk about what Israel has done for peace.
Gabriel Sassoon: The pro-Israel community—and that should include all pro-democracy activists on campus—needs to stop reacting to pro-Palestinian hysteria, and they need to develop their own agenda. The way to improve the situation is to talk about human rights and free speech and democracy, and how we can foster a respect for human rights in the Middle East.
Tom Pessah: The main issue for us isn’t discomfort on campus. The main issue for us is suffering in Israel-Palestine. If people in Gaza don’t have clean drinking water, that’s a bigger issue than if two groups on campus don’t speak to each other. What we’re doing is not killing anyone.
Ben Sales is the editor in chief of New Voices. He graduated from Washington University in St. Louis in 2009.
