A first-time visitor to Israel need only walk down any street in any city, travel in any intra- or inter-urban bus, shop in any mall or local market, read any of the numerous daily newspapers, watch even a few moments of television or sit at any café, to see for himself or herself, that the country is decidedly not an apartheid state.
Israel is very visibly and quite literally a multi-cultural, multi-racial, vibrant democracy. In fact, it is the only democracy in the entire Middle East. This, of course, is the other inconvenient truth that so many people around the globe, and especially, the haters of the very notion of a sovereign Jewish state, prefer to ignore. Sadly, this very patent truth has not been enough to stop dead in its tracks the equally patent, vastly pernicious lie that the Jewish state is an apartheid state.
Indeed, as CJN reporter Sheri Shefa notes in this week’s paper, the campaign to perpetuate the apartheid calumny on campuses around North America and beyond appears to be gaining momentum. It is now in its fourth year.
This week, on campuses in Toronto; Montreal; Ottawa; Peterborough, Ont.; New York; Oxford, England; London, England; Norway, Johannesburg and, fittingly, Durban, South Africa, a cunning and, it must be said, malicious agglomeration of groups and individuals is peddling tainted propaganda under the perverse banner of Israel Apartheid Week.
The halls, walkways, theatres and public squares of the campuses where the apartheidists scream their anti-Israel hatred cannot be a pleasant place for anyone, let alone for those who believe that it is right and just that there be a state for the Jews too on this earth.
Thus we commend our students. They did not merely surrender the terrain of their campuses to let falsehoods and lies cling to their fellow students like vines of suffocating ivy to the crevices and fault lines of the masonry. Despite the hostile atmosphere and oppressively noxious climate in which many students found themselves this week, they rose on behalf of the Jewish state. They rose on behalf of truth.
To be sure, a number of different Jewish student organizations fought the apartheid lie. Each organization chose the means appropriate to its own credo and philosophy. For example, a spokesperson for Hillel said that its programming “is trying to take the attention away from the negative activities and put the focus on celebrating Israel and being proud of Israel.” A spokesperson for Hasbara Fellowships said, “We want to remove the connection that modern-day students have to the word apartheid and Israel.”
Just as an army melds a blends of corps to assert its ultimate strength as a fighting force, so it seems, did the various Jewish student organizations this week.
They deserve our praise and our thanks.