The eighth annual Israeli Apartheid Week kicked off at Ottawa’s universities March 5.
The week runs March 5 and is meant to support the Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign.
The BDS campaign was started as a call from 170 Palestinian political parties, organizations, and trade unions to boycott goods produced in illegal settlements in the West Bank of Israel and to adopt socially responsible investment policies, according to the BDS movement’s website.
IAW Ottawa is organized jointly by Students Against Israeli Apartheid (SAIA) at Carleton and Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR) at the University of Ottawa.
IAW organizers are hosting film screenings and panel discussions at Carleton and the University of Ottawa throughout the week, which will end March 9 with a night of music, poetry, and dance at St. Brigid’s Centre for the Arts.
Similar weeks are organized in cities and universities across Canada.
“With Israeli Apartheid Week . . . one of the main goals is to spread awareness about the struggle of the Palestinian people,” said SAIA member Samantha Ponting.
“I think there is a lot of misinformation in society, on our campuses as well. I think we would really like to challenge the discourse around the struggle of the Palestinian people.”
At an IAW forum held at the University of Ottawa March 5, Deena Gamil, a founding member of the Socialist Popular Alliance Party in Egypt, spoke about the Egyptian uprising and its role in the Palestinian conflict.
“I never thought that the BDS campaign would, in such a short period of time, be so influential,” Gamil said.
“I hope we can have something like that in Egypt. It’s pretty interesting, efficient and successful.”
Dylan Penner, a member of Independent Jewish Voices, which is a co-sponsor of IAW Canada, said there’s a moral responsibility to divest because of the “injustices that are taking place.”
Divestment sends a message and makes a point, said Penner, who was on the Canadian Boat to Gaza last summer.
At Carleton, students proposed a referendum question to the Carleton University Students’ Association, which reads “Do you support Carleton University adopting a binding socially responsible investment policy that would require it to divest from companies complicit in illegal military occupations and other violations of international law, including but not limited to: BAE Systems, Northrop Grumman, Motorola, and Tesco Supermarkets?”
SAIA has been lobbying administration to divest from these companies since 2010.
A date for the referendum has not been set.
As part of the week, SAIA is holding an information table in the Unicentre.
Right next to them is a table set up by the Israel Awareness Committee (IAC).
“Our goal for this week is to really promote Israel’s place in the world as well as show that Israel wants peace and we support a two-state solution,” said IAC member Alexandra Izso.
“[We are trying] to put the conflict into perspective so students can make their own decisions.”
She said the apartheid week was “creating a really toxic environment on campus that has really shut down the conversation regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
“Being pro-Palestinian, pro-Israeli are not mutually exclusive. You can be both,” Izso said.
Ponting said SAIA uses the word “apartheid” because they don’t “want to sugar-coat anything.”
“We want to call the situation what it is,” she said. “So for us it is about reclaiming the discourse of the issue, and also recruiting people to join the struggle.”
