Israeli 'lawfare'? Hasbara group in Canada human rights complaint

Hasbara Fellowships Canada has alleged that the student and faculty associations at the Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT) and Durham College(DC) discriminated against the group by denying it a table during Social Justice Week last March.

“There are few cases in Canadian campuses of such egregious and open discrimination such as Hasbara Fellowships Canada has experienced,” said Robert Walker, the group’s Canadian director, in a statement.

But Mariam Abonokerah, a UOIT-DC student association executive, said Hasbara Fellowships Canada was denied a table during the event because it is an outside group and the request to participate did not come from a student.

“There [weren’t] any students that were requesting representation from Hasbara at the time,” Abonokerah told The New Arab.

She said the allegation of discrimination is part of an attempt to silence discussions on campus of Israeli human rights abuses against Palestinians, and the work of student group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), in particular.

“Its main goal is to instil a culture of fear among Palestinian students and activists that are trying to organise and exercise their right to free speech to promote [boycott, divestment and sanctions],” said Abonokerah, who also supports the work of SJP.

The student association at UOIT-DC passed a motion in support of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement in January 2016.

Launched by Palestinian civil society groups in 2005, BDS aims to assert pressure on Israel to end its occupation of the Palestinian territories, grant equal rights to Palestinian citizens of the state, and grant the right of return to Palestinian refugees.

“I think the main reason that we are being targeted is because we are promoting BDS,” Abonokerah said.

Hasbara is seeking a public apology from the student and faculty associations, which it wants disseminated in local and student media, and it is demanding to be invited to give a public presentation on campus

What are Hasbara Fellowships?

Hasbara Fellowships Canada has filed a complaint with the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal, a body that hears discrimination complaints under the Human Rights Code and offers a settlement ruling.

Hasbara is seeking a public apology from the student and faculty associations, which it wants disseminated in local and student media, and it is demanding to be invited to give a public presentation on campus. It also wants any discriminatory policies rescinded.

“This step we are taking is a clear message to universities and colleges across Canada that Jewish students can rely on our full support, and that the time for legal action has arrived,” Walker said in a statement.

Launched in 2001, Hasbara Fellowships is a pro-Israel campus group that offers a subsidised trip to Israel to encourage university students to “become an empowered advocate for Israel”.

About 3,000 students from across more than 250 college campuses have received Hasbara Fellowship training to date, the group states. It expanded into Canada last year, hiring Walker as its first Canadian director.

The programme is affiliated with Aish International, a pro-Israel outreach group headquartered in the Old City of Jerusalem.

On its website, Aish International – also known as Aish HaTorah – states that it co-founded the Hasbara Fellowships programme in cooperation with Israel’s Foreign Ministry.

“This organisation was created by the Israeli foreign ministry and they’re trying to target students that don’t have as much power as they do, so that is pretty stressful for us and it puts a lot of pressure on us,” Abonokerah said.

According to Hala Elatawani, SJP president at UOIT-DC, the students are “an easy target” because they are physically isolated from other schools in the Greater Toronto Area.

“The fact that Hasbara was created by the Israeli foreign ministry shows how much power they have over students,” Elatawani said.

Pro-Israel organisations around the world are employing what they describe as “lawfare,” or the use of legal methods to assert pressure on anyone working to hold Israel accountable

Israel using ‘lawfare’

Pro-Israel organisations around the world are employing what they describe as “lawfare,” or the use of legal methods to assert pressure on anyone working to hold Israel accountable for violating Palestinian rights.

Israeli legal group Shurat HaDin, for instance, uses the legal system “to counter boycotts against Israeli companies and academics,” while New York-based The Lawfare Project seeks to combat BDS by passing federal and state legislation across the United States.

Israel has also pushed governments abroad to draft legislation that will criminalise BDS.

In 2014, the Israeli and Canadian ministries of foreign affairs signed a Memorandum of Understanding pledging to oppose “boycotts of Israel, its institutions, and its people”.

Canada and Israel are “deeply concerned by efforts to single out the State of Israel for criticism and isolate the State of Israel internationally including calls for a boycott of the State of Israel, for the divestment of investments, and for sanctions to be imposed on Israel,” the MoU reads.

“The selective targeting of Israel reflects the new face of anti-Semitism,” it continues.

In line with the MoU, Canada’s parliament passed a symbolic motion in February condemning all Canadian groups and individuals in favour of BDS and described the movement as “anti-Israel” and “a form of discrimination”.

According to SJP’s Elatawani, these attacks on BDS are used to silence Palestinian voices, and Hasbara Fellowships Canada “engages in strategies that intimidate pro-Palestine activists and prevent them from speaking out”.

She said she hoped that despite the pressure, the student and faculty associations at UOIT-DC would defend the students’ decision to support BDS.

“We ask that our institutions respect our autonomy,” Elatawani said. “We hope that they will stand up against this form of bullying and intimidation and support the students.”