Israel Apartheid Week turned into Israel awareness week

At the beginning of each year, Jewish university students are confronted with the challenge of responding to Israel Apartheid Week (IAW), a malicious and mendacious anti-Israel propaganda campaign run by the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement and its fellow travellers.

We have just come to the end of the latest round of IAW activities, along with the counter-campaign run by the South African Union of Jewish Students (SAUJS) with the support of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD) and South African Zionist Federation, Israeli student activists from the organisation Stand With Us, and our Christian allies.

This year’s SAUJS campaign was again thoughtful, innovative, and exceptionally well run. It revolved around the theme of people claiming back their narrative, as encapsulated by the hashtag #OwnYourTruth/#OwnOurTruth, showing the diversity of what Zionism means to different people. SAUJS also turned the standard BDS “Zionism = racism” canard on its head by running a #unitedagainstracism initiative. This generated a large number of tweets showing the reality of Israel’s diverse, multifaith, racial, and ethnic society.

IAW isn’t about fostering education and debate, but rather demonising and defaming the Jewish state. It also seeks to silence, sideline, and discredit anyone attempting to put forward a different perspective. SAUJS hasn’t engaged in such smear tactics in response. Instead, it has developed a campaign which emphasises dialogue and education over boycotts and intimidation, the aim of which isn’t to delegitimise other points of view but to understand the realities of the situation and discuss possible ways forward. This has proven to be strikingly effective, and such was the case this year. Clearly the average student is more responsive to an approach based on nuanced, informed discussion as against one portraying one side as being so irredeemably evil as to make any debate unnecessary. This receptiveness was also evident in the positive response to the SAJBD’s recent webinar on the United Arab Emirates-Israel Abraham Accords. Because of all these efforts, IAW this year was again largely a non-event, for which SAUJS and everyone else involved can be warmly commended.

Timeless lessons from the Haggadah

While the biblical story of Exodus focuses on the liberation of the Jewish people from slavery and their birth as an independent nation, its underlying themes are universal and have specific resonance for South Africa. In 2014, the SAJBD Gauteng Council held a special Freedom Seder, bringing political and religious leaders, members of the media, and civil society together to celebrate 20 years of South African democracy in the context of the Pesach narrative. Since then, a number of such events have been held countrywide, providing a distinctively Jewish vehicle through which we join fellow South Africans in celebrating the attainment of freedom in our country. At the time of writing, preparations were being finalised for a national, virtual Freedom Seder to take place on Wednesday evening, 24 March.

I take this opportunity to wish you all a chag Pesach kasher v’sameach. May we all enjoy being with family and friends at a time when we rejoice in our heritage and pass those traditions on to the next generation.

• Listen to Charisse Zeifert on Jewish Board Talk, 101.9 ChaiFM, every Friday from 12:00 to 13:00.