In late January, Students Against Israeli Apartheid (SAIA) put up some posters on campus which accurately conveyed the racist and violent attitudes held towards Palestinians by certain Israeli political leaders. Yet, employing a hitherto unknown form of reasoning, Israel Awareness Committee (IAC) vice-president Michael Aarenau concluded that the placing of these posters “can only be described as a hateful smear campaign against any student who believes in a Jewish State.” Furthermore, he insisted that SAIA “seeks to quash all meaningful dialogue by launching hateful campaigns that push peace farther away and seek to delegitimize the State of Israel’s right to exist.”
Mr. Aarenau’s invocation of “peace” and “dialogue” is entirely cynical. The kind of peace which he and the IAC champion is the settler-colonial version, wherein Palestinians are required to stop demanding their rights and instead accept the status of defeated and lesser beings. Genuine peace, however, must be founded on respect, equality, and justice, none of which Israel offers to the Palestinians.
When SAIA exercises its democratic freedoms and draws attention to the brutality inflicted on Palestinians by Israel, this—rather than the criminal actions of Israel—is portrayed as preventing peace. And somehow, by speaking out on such crucial matters and encouraging others to think about them, SAIA is held to be suppressing rather than stimulating dialogue.
In reality, the IAC is not open to dialogue based on a frank, unfettered, and rigorous exploration of the issues at hand. Instead, since SAIA’s inception in the fall of 2008, the IAC and its parent organization Hillel have repeatedly acted to misrepresent, discredit, and silence it. Mr. Aarenau’s letter is merely the most recent iteration of this malevolent practice.
