David: It's back to school time and so we decided to have a special campus edition of BDS WATCH WATCH.
Sam: For those who don't understand that joke, BDS WATCH would be a way that a lot of the Jewish media would talk about Palestinian solidarity activism happening on campus.
David: Over the past year, a lot of money and focus has been put into the push on US campuses against the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel. A new organization was created called the Campus Macabees with $50 million behind them, Hillel had it's first all-staff BDS training last summer, the Jewish National Fund - which already gives $9 million each year to campus advocacy - is now adding $5 million and is going to be giving more each year, the Jewish Federations are diverting millions to this, it's becoming a real focus of Israel advocacy in the country.
Sam: And how this information is being conveyed is interesting because on the one hand there's this message of 'everything's all right, don't worry - the BDS movement is marginal, Palestine solidarity activists are marginal,' and on the other hand there are all these groups popping up and all this money being allocated to fighting it. It's kind of a message of, 'don't worry about it, but we're focusing a lot on it.'
David: Yeah, and we're seeing this here now too. A lot of this money is starting to come north with the expansion of Hillel in Toronto into a provincial structure, the Hasbara Fellowships organization just hired it's first Canadian director, and--
Sam: What's Hasbara Fellowships?
David: So Hasbara is an Israel advocacy organization. There have been a few chapters on Canadian campuses in the past but they've been autonomous and operating independently. But in the United States, there's a centralized structure called Hasbara Fellowships. They recently hired their first Canadian director and they're going to be expanding centralized chapters onto campuses across Canada over the next year.
Sam: Right, so in the Canadian Jewish News article about this hiring, written by Janice Arnold, there was literally the contact information for this fellow, whose name is Robert Walker. At the end of the article which was basically a press release about this hiring, she says, 'if you want to get in touch with him, here's his email,' which normally doesn't happen in standard journalistic practice.
David: It's definitely something the entire institutional Jewish community seems to be behind. Robert Walker said that over the next year, he hopes to have over 25 campuses over the country receiving money from Hasbara Fellowships, so it's definitely indicative of where things are going here.
Sam: And like I said before, it's interesting because on the one hand there's this concern, there's 'we're hiring new people, we're beefing up training resources and ways of countering BDS on campus.' And then on the other hand you have articles like Paul Lungen's in the Canadian Jewish News last week, "Hillel and CIJA Say Situation Has Improved for Jewish Students."
David: Well the thing is that from their perspective, it's kind of correct. To give you a bit of context of how things have been changing over the last year in terms of the fight on campuses against BDS - following Concordia University's successful introduction of a pro-BDS motion last year, there's been an intense push and a lot of money spent to prevent this from happening again. In January of last year, Trent University's student association passed a motion revoking a previous policy adopting BDS, at the University of British Columbia in March the student government voted against a BDS measure, that same month McGill's student society voted against a BDS measure, and then in April at the University of Regina the students union repealed a BDS measure passed the previous year. Now this school year so far, just this month, the University of Toronto student union board of directors voted against bringing a motion in support of BDS to their annual general meeting.
Sam: One thing that I think is relevant to point out though is that while this is happening, BDS as a tactic (in solidarity with struggles for liberation in Palestine) looks like it's actually gaining more traction in Canada and the US.
David: It's true, and it seems like the institutional Jewish community has realized that campuses were the sites a lot of these ideas spread from. Like Israeli Apartheid Week started at University of Toronto campus and a lot of the ways BDS emerged as a successful tactic here was situated on campuses. But in terms of the Canadian context to the pushback, we're seeing a restructuring as well. You're seeing Hillel, which is a campus Jewish organization, completely prioritize the issue of BDS. Half of their 20-person organization in the Greater Toronto Area are now working specifically on Israel advocacy and nothing else and they're supporting other Hillels around the country in restructuring to do the same thing.
Sam: There's also the revamped Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs website. If you look through it, it has an 'issues' section and there's a tab focused specifically on campuses that starts with the article, 'Concerned About Campus? So Am I.'
David: Yeah, so David Cape, the CEO of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, published an article on their website that talked about the strategy that they viewed as successful for fighting BDS on campuses. It had three different sections to it and one of the three points was focusing on faculty rather than students. They formed something called the Canadian Academics for Peace in the Middle East which is a CIJA-affiliated body of professors that has provided support for a lot of students around the country in confronting what they call 'anti-Israel attitudes' on campus.
Sam: The part that I found the most difficult to read was the way David Cape - and I guess this happens across the board - but uses the language of safety. And this ties in to what we were talking about earlier about BDS Quebec, where somehow Jewish feelings take precedent in this context. And David Cape and CIJA are exclusively concerned about Jewish students feeling 'comfortable.'
David: Yeah, there's a lot of appeals to issues of comfort and issues of safety but when you look at the reality of how these battles are playing out on campus, it's just disproportionate. Specifically at McGill, you had buses bringing in students from Westmount to hand out flyers and give oranges that were supposedly grown in Israel to people who were voting on the BDS measure before they went inside. You had thousands of dollars spent at the University of British Columbia just on posters while on the other side you have these grassroots student groups that are just mobilizing with as many people as they can find on campus. And beyond that, you increasingly have a national pro-Israel infrastructure descending onto every campus debate about BDS that are outspending the opposition and are appealing to their institutional connections. You had city council in Montreal actually coming out in opposition to the BDS measure at McGill, you had articles written in the Montreal Gazette. And one of the strategies David Cape outlines on the CIJA website is creating long-term relationships with university officials - flying people to Israel, creating institutional links between people at the university and pro-Israel groups. So this is increasingly becoming a centralized effort by the institutional Jewish community in Canada.
