With a strike at York University stopping the school term in its tracks for weeks, I found myself walking empty corridors with an unsought sense of nostalgia.
York on strike reminded me of campuses in a certain country bordered by the Mediterranean and Dead seas, a country where people eat chick-pea-based edibles, work in high-tech industries and maul the language of the Bible. When I e-mailed my brother in Be’er Sheva that I was temporarily off-schedule because of a university strike, his response was quick and terse: “Your kidding! Sounds like Israel!”
Other Israelis responded similarly, recognizing something known and familiar in the faraway and snowy Ontario campus. Israeli universities frequently contend with shutdowns because of striking students, professors or adjunct instructors and must extend the academic year well into the summer months.
So you would have thought that the striking union might feel some “solidarity” with Israel, or with their university cohorts. As public opinion began to mount against the union and in sympathy with the more than 50,000 students left without instruction and without recourse, you might have thought the union would feel some kinship with the one country in the Middle East where truly free unions flourish.
But no, the leadership of the striking union, in the midst of negotiations and rallying its members, found time to post a condemnation of Israel for its assault on fellow unions and a university in Gaza, and to call for a right of return for Palestinians “all over the world” and a “boycott” of Israel, while noting that the views of the leadership “do not necessarily reflect those of the membership” that it was trying to rally together in solidarity. Leaving aside the regional politics, it struck me as odd, and perhaps even counter-productive, for the union to feature a potentially divisive issue when it most needed to present a united front.
At the same time, the head of the Ontario division of the Canadian Union of Public Employees introduced a proposal to ban Israeli professors from teaching at Canadian universities unless they publicly denounced their government. Under pressure due to widespread condemnation for this assault on the principle of academic freedom that is the lifeblood of a university, the union head retreated to focus not on individual professors but on Israeli institutions, echoing CUPE national in calling for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. The national president condemned what he termed Israel’s “disproportionate response” to rocket fire from Gaza. CUPE in British Columbia went further, stating that “illegal Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories” was “the primary cause” of both Israeli and Palestinian casualties, and it called for a one-sided ceasefire on Israel’s part.
Given Israel’s union-friendly atmosphere, and given, too, that Israel offers the broadest rights for women, gays, and political dissidents in the region – causes the unions espouse – one might wonder, why don’t these unions embrace Israel?
One answer lies in the admittedly Marxist ideology of the unions’ leadership. Some years ago, I asked a Marxist colleague why the far left argues so vehemently against Israel rather than taking up its cause. She responded that early on, Marxists had great hopes that Israel would fulfil the vision of a true socialist culture, characterized by the collectivist ethos of the kibbutz movement. But, she said, not only had the kibbutz movement moved from its early collectivist roots, the state itself did not turn into a socialist entity. Its transmutation from a model inspired by the Russian Revolution to the consumerist, bourgeois model of the West was seen by Marxists as a betrayal.
I wonder, too, whether it’s Israel’s very evolution as a democracy that rankles the revolutionaries on our continent. There is a long history of “revolutionary” intellectuals justifying massive destruction and the ensuing chaos as necessary vehicles for desired change. In the early 1950s, the French writer Albert Camus incurred the wrath of some French Communists and Marxists when he took issue with their glorification of violence committed in the name of “rebellion” against oppression. Camus understood that some of his “revolutionary” cohorts had betrayed the very ideas of social justice that initially motivated them, justifying the very oppression that they set out to oppose.
