Conference on Israel is "Anti-Zionist Propaganda"

By SHERI SHEFA, Staff Reporter

Thursday, 02 July 2009

TORONTO — Last week’s three-day York University-sponsored conference on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was met with three days of protests from concerned members of the Jewish community who feared the event would promote an anti-Israel agenda.

According to UJA Federation of Greater Toronto and Canadian Council for Israel and Jewish Advocacy (CIJA), when the latter organization assigned three people to attend Israel-Palestine: Mapping Models of Statehood and paths to Peace, their fears were confirmed.

“The conference devoted virtually no time to suggestions about an invigorated peace process and concentrated instead on Israel as a military machine determined to dominate the Palestinians,” the organizations said in a joint statement.

“There was no discussion of terrorism or Israel’s security needs and there were no speakers who presented an Israeli centre-left or centre-right perspective. The assumption that Zionism and Israeli society are based on violence and racism predominated.

“At one panel discussion, ‘Zionists’ were blamed as the cause of domestic violence perpetrated by Palestinian men against Palestinian women. At another, some participants questioned the sanity and integrity of an Israeli presenter. Speakers who defended Zionism were often jeered and heckled and virtually all of the publicly available material was anti-Israel.”

B’nai Brith Canada called the conference “a blatant exercise in anti-Zionist propaganda"

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