Israeli Apartheid Week

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Israeli Apartheid Week is an annual series of university lectures and rallies held in February. It began in Toronto in 2004 and, by 2008, had spread to campuses in over 20 cities around the world including cities in the United States, Canada, Israel, the West Bank, South Africa, England[1][2]

Orna Hollander of Betar Canada called for supporters of Israel to stand up to the event telling Canadian Jewish News that "The strategy has been… from an organized community end, to not lend credibility, to be quiet about it, not bring press around it… Four years later, I think we definitely learned that we can keep our heads in the sand, but it’s going to go on with or without us. [IAW organizers] very much control the PR and rhetoric on campus, and its time to stand up and take responsibility,” [3]

In 2008, supporters of Israeli democracy countered the event with "Islamic State Apartheid Week" organized by the Hasbara Fellowships and endorsed by Betar. [4]

"We want to remove the connection that modern-day students have to the word apartheid and Israel and refocus it to the countries that we think really exemplify the definition of apartheid, being a policy of separation and segregation. Through a week which encompasses the themes of gender, sexual and political apartheid, we hope to get out a new message,"[5]

"International Israeli Apartheid Week is one of many symptoms of the unjust double standard that the international community has applied to Israel since its birth. Critics target Israel's Law of Return for Jews as an "apartheid" policy while almost identical citizenship laws in countries like Germany and Ireland go unnoticed." says Gary Yavlevev of the Daily Californian [6]

Israel's ambassador to Canada, Alan Baker, denounced Israeli apartheid week as "crude propagandism, pure hypocrisy and cynical manipulation of the student body."[7]

In 2007, the event spread to New York University, Columbia and Hunter College in New York City.[8] The David Project, organied meetings the same week opposition to the characterization of Israel as an apartheid state and the American Jewish Committee denounced the apartheid week saying "the specter of apartheid should not be raised in any form," the director of the American Jewish Committee's Koppelman Institute on American Jewish-Israeli Relations, Steven Bayme, said.[9]

Binyamin Rister, a Jewish student at CUNY, attended one of the events and asked panellists “Do you support terrorism?” He politely repeated the same question after panellists refused to answer and was forcibly removed by security as a result and assaulted. According to Front Page Magazine "One officer continued holding him by the neck on the outside escalator and repeatedly banged Rister’s head against the wall as the escalator descended. Then, before they reached the bottom, the guard threw Rister head first down the remaining steps, injuring him severely enough to be taken to the hospital in a neck brace.[10]

Aside from the New York Sun, the mainstream media said very little.[11]