Diana Buttu, the former legal advisor for the Palestine Liberation Organization negotiations team, told students that they should become more involved in the discourse surrounding Palestine’s bid for statehood at a presentation held at Morse Auditorium Tuesday.

“When I was in school 20 years ago we were debating whether Palestinians were people, whether they had rights, whether they even existed. The debate going on now is different,” Buttu said.

Butto, a Palestinian-Canadian lawyer, said that Palestine’s recent efforts to negotiate with Israel have failed. With 85 percent of Palestinians living on 17 percent of the land allotted to them by Israel, Buttu said that students are the key to ending the ongoing “apartheid.”

Buttu said that ending “apartheid” in Palestine, like that in South Africa, would require three measures: legal, diplomatic and boycotting.

“You need all three legs to end apartheid and we don’t have that yet . . . There’s so much energy on campus, students are not restrained the way that the people with careers are. It’s a question of raising awareness,” Buttu said.

In an interview after the lecture, Nael Musleh, who graduated from the College of Engineering in 2009, said he was born in Palestine and lived under occupation. He said that Buttu should have addressed what to do within Palestine as opposed to outside of the territory.

“I think she focused too much on what to do outside of Palestine. Palestinians need to be educated in a different manner,” Musleh said. “Sometimes resistance is the only way to make change, but we need find a solution in other ways.”

The Palestinian youth could mobilize by networking with people elsewhere in the world, he said.

“I had to explain to my cousin what networking was. They don’t know that, but they understand that there’s another world,” Musleh said.

Students for Justice in Palestine treasurer Kareem Chehayeb, a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences, said that people need to understand the importance of protecting the rights of Palestinians.

“People need to understand that Palestinians need to be treated as human beings. Even I, as an American citizen, get stopped at airports and questioned for 15 minutes,” Chehayeb said.

During the question and answer session, SJP President Zena Ozeir said that Buttu facilitated a spread of awareness.

“I was surprised with the amount of people that attended from other activism groups on campus,” Ozeir, a CAS junior, said. “The message is really reaching out to people that aren’t usually activists.”