BU students quiet on Mideast conflict

This is the first in a series of two articles discussing the campus reaction to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

It’s a conflict that has killed more than 1,500 people since September 2000, pitting society against society, religion against religion and nationalist aspiration against nationalist aspiration.

Despite being approximately 10,000 miles away, the Palestinian-Israeli violence has dominated the headlines of American newspapers and been a centerpiece of debate among the country’s politicians and in America’s Jewish and Muslim communities.

Yet, even as college students across the country have taken sides on the issue, Boston University has been relatively quiet over the past 26 months.

Campuses like University of California at Berkeley, San Francisco State University and Harvard University have seen clashes between supporters of Palestinians and Israelis heat up to the point of violence over the past two years. Speakers on both sides have been demonstrated against, students have demanded their universities divest from Israel and a Hillel House has even been vandalized.

But BU has seen no such action and a meager level of discussion in general. Events were scattered throughout last year, but the number paled in comparison to the activity at some other schools.

Pro-Israel and pro-Palestine activities hit their peak last spring, highlighted by several near-violent incidents at several schools across the country.

At the University of California at Berkeley, confrontations between especially active pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli groups filled the headlines of the school’s student newspaper throughout the semester. The school’s Hillel House, the main Jewish organization on campus, was reportedly vandalized in the melee, and verbal confrontations bordered on violence several times last year.

Pro-Palestinian students also staged a sit-in at an auditorium on the campus in 2000, preventing former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from speaking. Last month, when former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak spoke at UC-Berkeley, more than 200 people demonstrated outside, according to The Daily Californian.

Activity after a pro-Israel rally at San Francisco State University made headlines across the country in May as well. Pro-Israel students doing post-rally cleanup were surrounded by pro-Palestine students, who had just participated in a counter-rally nearby. The two sides exchanged verbal blows for several minutes, as police stood between them and faculty members watched from the sidelines, according to reports. Pro-Israel leader Dennis Dubinsky told The Washington Post after the rally that some pro-Palestinian students were yelling slogans like, ‘Hitler should have finished the job.’

The conflict between student groups has been well-documented at other campuses as well. The largest recent movement has been to call for campuses to divest in Israel, or sell off Israeli investments, which caused early-semester controversy at Harvard. Harvard President Lawrence Summers called the movement anti-Semitic, a statement to which many Harvard students disagreed.

Members of the divestiture movement from numerous colleges and universities convened in October at the University of Michigan to draw up a unifying petition.

The situation at campuses across the country prompted several presidents of top universities to write and the American Jewish Committee to distribute a petition urging campus leaders to sustain ‘intimidation-free’ environments, specifically naming pro-Israel students as examples of victims of such intimidation. More than 300 university presidents, including BU Chancellor John Silber, signed on to the letter, despite some controversy over its wording.

Yet, even with large populations of both Jews and Arabs on campus, BU students have, for the most part, stayed out of the fray. Aside from a handful of events and rallies, BU students have remained relatively inactive on the issue.

Most of the activity on campus happened toward the end of first semester last year and last semester, when both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine groups organized major events and as the fighting in the Middle East reached its most serious levels. The Boston University Students for Israel was re-formed at the end of the fall semester and pro-Palestinian students began to organize as well.

In early December, the newly re-formed BUSI held a candlelight vigil outside BU’s Hillel House to remember the victims of a suicide bombing in an Israeli café. Pro-Israel students organized again early in the spring semester for a rally promoting democracy in the Middle East and calling for an end to terrorism.

The most heated campus activity on the issue, however, came late in the spring semester, as pro-Palestinian groups held a week-long series of events promoting an end to Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and decrying Palestinians’ treatment by the Israeli government. The week included a number of events, including a documentary about Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and several panels discussing different aspects of the conflict.

Members of the Arab Students Association and Islamic Society of Boston University, among others, centered in the George Sherman Union Link throughout the week with detailed maps and pictures of Palestinian victims, along with constant, and sometimes heated, discussion of the situation with pro-Israel and pro-Palestine passers-by.

Most of the week’s events were attended not only by pro-Palestinian students, but also by pro-Israeli students, often turning post-event discussions into contentious debates between the two sides.

Students also flooded the editorial pages of The Daily Free Press in early-March in response to a pro-Palestine letter by campus pro-Palestine activist Mike Figa, now a College of Engineering senior.

Still, most events attracted few more than 60 or 70 students, a tiny amount for a university that, by some estimates, boasts a Jewish population of nearly 4,000 and a total undergraduate population of around 15,000. Though BUSI still mans informational tables in the GSU Link every Thursday, this semester has seen a return to the relatively quiet campus discussion that marked the conflict’s first year and a half.

‘I think the dialogue has definitely died down a little since last year,’ said former BUSI President Hillel Bavli. ‘It’s not as intense this year in terms of action in Israel.’

Aside from a Noam Chomsky lecture that packed Jacob Sleeper Auditorium and prompted a BUSI-organized pro-Israel demonstration outside, campus events relating to the subject have been few and far between this semester.

The two sides have differing perspectives on how ripe the campus environment is for discussion of the subject. While pro-Israel students said they have been working hard to promote the subject, pro-Palestine students said debate has lacked.

Rabbi Joseph Polak, director of BU’s Hillel House, said though discussion has lacked at times, when it has taken place it has been ‘civil.’

‘I think it’s civil people talk to each other,’ Polak said. ‘The conversation, whenever it takes place, is civil, with a lot of live and let live kind of a mentality.’

BU Students for Israel Treasurer Jackie Belkin, a College of Arts and Sciences junior, said dialogue isn’t necessarily lacking campus activists simply put a great deal of effort into making programming sensitive. She said BUSI focuses on sensitivity toward pro-Palestinian groups in putting together events and thinks pro-Palestinian groups do as well.

‘A huge amount of preparation for activities is making sure we’re very sensitive to the other side and not going to hurt anyone’s feelings or make anyone feel uncomfortable,’ Belkin said. ‘There are so many people with so many different views even within our group that we have to make sure we’re not making anyone feel uncomfortable and we’re not being insensitive.’

BUSI’s mission makes BU’s discussion of the situation less adversarial than other campuses, according to BUSI President Jessica Rosenraich.

‘We’re not out there to bash the other side or bash people who oppose Israel,’ Rosenraich said. ‘The fact that we’ve been sensitive has contributed to a more peaceful environment at BU.’

For more than a decade, BU students have carried a reputation of apathy, and the very ‘live and let live’ mentality that Polak described is what Arab Student Association President Dana Kadrie said cuts campus dialogue down. She said many students are uninformed about foreign affairs in general and are not knowledgeable about Arab culture and points of view, making stereotyping common and forcing any dialogue to start at a very basic level.

‘When coming here to talk about where you’re from or who you are, you get a lot of weird questions,’ Kadrie said. ‘We’ve gotten everything from do you ride camels, do you have a telephone to are you a terrorist, are you oppressed and beaten and not have rights.’

Pro-Israel activists also said their main goal is to educate the BU student body rather than to strike up political furor. Rosenraich said she encounters disinterested BU students often.

‘We seem to find that people at BU just aren’t very interested or don’t happen to know much,’ she said. ‘We want to bring that to students at BU we want to educate them so they can make an opinion of their own.’

Faculty attitudes may also contribute to the lack of action.

Figa, one of two BU students to travel to the University of Michigan divestment convention, said though no BU students have yet drafted a divestment proposal, the problem may lie more with faculty attitudes than student preparedness.

‘The atmosphere at BU is pretty tough,’ he said. ‘Teachers don’t want to step out of line and join something like that, so it’s hard to get it started.’

But Polak, who has been on campus for more than 30 years directing the largest campus Jewish organization, said students’ dedication to the classroom has prevented them from taking a more active role in the conflict. During his time at BU, he said, he has seen a transformation among the students, from full-time partiers to full-time studiers. That transformation has also prevented many students from devoting large amounts of time to the subject, he said.

‘The student that we now have is a highly organized, driven studier,’ Polak said. ‘I have not seen this kind of person in such numbers, and when you have people so driven to do well, to get those grades, then they’re not going to have a lot of time.’