Gdalit Neuman: Insidious anti-Israel propaganda has corrupted our universities
As a lifelong student and educator, I've been in academia and the arts for the last quarter-century. I was a witness to the first Israeli Apartheid Weeks at York University in the early 2000s. I've followed, and fought, the anti-Israel obsession of CUPE 3903 (York University's contract faculty union), including introducing a motion to stop them from manipulating their platform to promote non-labour issues on campus. It didn't take.
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Days after the October 7 massacre in Israel by Hamas and other Gazan groups, the York Federation of Students (YFS), York University Graduate Students' Association (YUGSA) and the Glendon College Student Union (GCSU) celebrated the atrocities as ''land-back' actualized' and Palestinian 'resistance against their oppressors' in an abhorrent pro-Palestinian public statement, which is still online.
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CUPE 3903 is particularly notorious for its anti-Israel stance. In late January 2024, its Palestine Solidarity Working Group and the union's education committee published 'A Toolkit on Teaching Palestine,' which included a martyr's poem and asked teaching assistants and university instructors to 'divert this week's tutorials to teaching on Palestinian liberation.'
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More recently, CUPE 3903 promoted off-campus anti-Israel radicalization sessions, including an event organized by the problematic Palestine Youth Movement to 'unpack Canada's entanglement with global imperialism and subsequently the occupation of Palestine.'
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It also advertised to members an April 24 fundraising party that raised money for the Toronto Community Justice Fund, which helps cover the legal costs of over 100 pro-Palestinian arrestees in the area. Among the beneficiaries are the 11 vandals who, in 2023, plastered an Indigo bookstore with posters of CEO Heather Reisman and splashed them with red paint, a response to Reisman's scholarship program for discharged members of the Israel Defense Forces who have no family supports in the country.
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The issue goes far beyond student groups and labour unions on campus, however. As first- and second-generation anti-Israel activists grew and graduated from students to faculty and beyond, they took their terrible ideas with them. Jump forward 25 years and the consequences can be felt at Canada's Congress for the Humanities and Social Sciences, organized by the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences. It's the country's largest gathering of academics, hosting numerous annual conferences of scholarly organizations under one roof, and during one week.
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