As 60th Anniversary of Israel Nears, Questions on Campus About Achieving Peace

A cacophony of loaded phrases and dialogues cluttered campus bulletin boards last week, as flyers promoting Columbia Palestine Nakba Week were posted side-by-side with flyers advertising the impending Israeli independence day as well as some calling for open discussion about Israeli-Palestinian relations among students.

This week’s 60th anniversary of Israel’s independence has brought tensions among student groups on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the fore, illustrating the challenges that come with attempts at dialogue on the issue even several thousand miles from the Middle East.

The groups have programmed events to mark the anniversary with similarly reflective goals, only to find that their messages are not necessarily compatible. Last week, three Arab and Palestinian student groups—the Arab Student Association, Filasteen, and Turath—co-sponsored a five-day series of events, including Palestine Culture day, a faculty panel, and a screening of the film Occupation 101. Columbia’s chapter of Hillel will celebrate Israel’s 60th birthday this Wednesday.

While the groups profess their willingness to engage in earnest dialogue, it seems the largest obstacle to their efforts is how to begin. According to student leaders, this is rooted in a lack of trust and a solid foundation for discourse.

Jacob Shapiro, GS and JTS ’10, president of the pro-Israel political committee LionPAC (and former Spectator associate editor) reacted to Nakba Week via a letter published in last Thursday’s Spectator. Shapiro offered a “private meeting among representatives of our organization to initiate discussions” in an opportunity to “heal the division.”

But Saifedean Ammous, a board member of ASA and SIPA ’09, said LionPAC’s offer is disingenuous and restrictive.

The language and terms used to characterize this occasion can also hamper attempts at conversation. For example, pro-Israeli students said that they are offended by the use of the word “Nakba”—an Arabic word translated into English as “catastrophe”—to describe the founding of Israel.

“It’s not just the term ‘Nakba.’ It’s ‘ethnic cleansing,’” Shapiro said. “It’s those loaded terms that I feel are not meant to accurately describe the situation, and they’re obviously not focused on the goal of peace.”

But Ammous said that using words other than “ethnic cleansing” and “apartheid” would sugarcoat the realities of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories. In a letter addressed to LionPAC that ran in Spectator, Ammous and Columbia alumnus Omar Khalifa wrote they are not willing to “accept a McCarthyist dictation of what language we are allowed to use.”

Reaction to the LionPAC letter also shed light on divisions within the pro-Palestinian groups.

Maher Awartani, another board member of ASA and SIPA ’09, expressed skepticism about LionPAC's letter and criticized LionPAC for not approaching ASA before the start of the Nakba events.

Though students involved in LionPAC said they saw the letter as a genuine effort to reach out, they said such efforts were spurned by the response the letter received.

“We [LionPAC] believed in order to, first of all, garner a response from their side that would open this up to the community as the community deserves, we thought that the open letter was the best means to do this,” said Jordan Hirsch, CC ’10, a former LionPAC officer.

Both sides agree that campus awareness of the issue must become more constructive, but say a sense of mistrust keeps them constantly at bay.

When ASA invited controversial speaker Norman Finklestein to Columbia four years ago, “there was a very conscious and very strong and very centrally mobilized attempt to drown out any voice that speaks against Israel in any way on campus,” Ammous said. “I think this is gone now.”

Awartani said he has not spoken with members of LionPAC, but said he is skeptical about the sincerity of pro-Israeli organizations in general. “90 percent of the time, they are actually not ready to talk,” he said. “They say they are ready to talk, but they are not [ready to] really understand and engage and not just to repeat the same Zionist manifesto that they memorized.”

But Shapiro responded that it was his group that made overtures to dialogue.

As the conflict rages on both in the Middle East and in Morningside, peace seems a desirable end, but the question becomes on whose terms such peace will be defined.

david.xia@columbiaspectator.com