SAUJS rises above IAW Holocaust slur

JORDAN MOSHE

In both Johannesburg and Cape Town, the pro-BDS lobby and the SA Union of Jewish Students (SAUJS) ended the week engaging constructively on university campuses.

Rising above the provocation, SAUJS students took the 14th annual IAW event to new heights of engaged debate, amid considerable tension. They issued a response to the despicable Anne Frank slur on social media and ended the week by sitting with members of the Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC) to talk through issues affecting both sides of Wits.

Last Thursday, students found the flyers. Although the flyers were not distributed by the PSC itself, the group praised the flyers on social media, saying they included “amazing art work from one of our members”, identified as Nuraan Khan.

In a statement shared online, Khan claimed that the flyers drew “attention to the fact that the same racism, hardship and oppression that was faced by Jews during Nazi times is being repeated in modern times”.

Responding online, SAUJS expressed its disgust at the initiative and criticised the appropriation of a Jewish symbol for the BDS campaign. “Anne Frank has become an iconic symbol for the Jewish people and indeed the world,” wrote Rachel Raff, national chairperson of SAUJS, and Yanir Grindler, the SAUJS chairperson at Wits.

“She is someone whose personal tragedy is also representative of the greater tragedy of the more than one and a half million children who were murdered during the Holocaust for no other reason than that they were Jewish.

“No possible comparison can be drawn between these atrocities and what is happening in the Middle East – and the PSC are well aware of this. Manipulating her memory as a cheap publicity stunt for a flailing PSC IAW campaign is unacceptable. It is a gross form of cultural appropriation of a figure that is symbolic of the plight of the Jewish people.”

However, in the same statement, they went on to declare that they would not allow this occurrence to derail their determination.  “The PSC is clearly goading us, and SAUJS will not give them the satisfaction of rising to the bait. Rather, we will continue to run our ‘Dialogue not Division’ counter-campaign, with the aim of fostering civilised dialogue and promoting greater understanding on the Israeli-Palestinian question, regardless of pernicious attempts by the other side to divert us from this course.”

And they did. On Friday morning, an almost unprecedented moment occurred as members of the PSC sat down to engage in dialogue with SAUJS members at Wits.

“The PSC came to the SAUJS side looking to provoke us,” Raff explains. “We put out chairs and told them that in order to have a discussion, both parties have to be seated. If we stand, it looks like confrontation and not a discussion.

“We proceeded to discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A lot of personal stories were shared about both sides’ experiences in the conflict.

“Our engagement with PSC was an unprecedented victory. When designing the campaign, engaging in dialogue was our ultimate objective. Jewish students had a voice, which in previous years had faltered or been silenced. At last, it was used to engage with the broader student audience on campus and finally, with the PSC.

“The week’s overall success was tremendous. We created a space where students felt safe, while mounting an effective campaign promoting truth, peace, compromise and dialogue in stark contrast to uninformed hatred and bias spewed by BDS.”

SAUJS used a humorous approach in addressing ugly graffiti that appeared towards the end of the week. They amended slurs by posing with printed signs alongside the graffiti. ‘Stop Israel’ became ‘Stop Israel being cool’

At the University of Cape Town, similar encouraging developments transpired, despite the initial discovery of a stolen Israeli flag that had been vandalised and strung up in front of Jameson Hall, bearing the spray-painted words “Blood on your hands – Apartheid Israel”.

Each day of IAW, different artistic exhibitions were displayed by SAUJS on the UCT campus. “Each exhibition was a conversation piece and provided a real eye-opener for those students who did not know much about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” explains Nicole Lee, director of SAUJS Cape Town.

Students were particularly fascinated by the ‘Free Palestinians from Hamas’ exhibition.

“Some had never heard of Hamas before, nor its role in Palestinian suffering. This exhibition piece provided for some interesting engagements. The real highlight, however, was the live graffiti performance by Cape Town artist Falko on Thursday afternoon.

“His images of peace and harmony got the attention of everyone walking by and really took the focus away from the Palestine Solidarity Forum’s annual IAW lunch time rally.”

Wits’ deputy dean of student affairs, Jerome September, said of IAW: “We are encouraged by the levels of proactive dialogue that ensued between the various student groups, as evidenced on the last two days of last week. This lays a sound foundation for future engagements

September added that the university would respond to the acts of vandalism that were committed and the flyers that were circulated. “The university noted the various alleged acts of vandalism [graffiti on university property] and the complaints received in respect of the Anne Frank artwork. All complaints, together with the evidence submitted, have been referred to Wits Protection Services and the university’s legal department for investigation and possible disciplinary action.”