Brandeis Students for Justice in Palestine hosted its annual Israeli Apartheid Week from Monday through Thursday last week but encountered several instances where their posters and banners were taken down across campus. A small group of students who oppose the apartheid narrative about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict also created a banner which hung across from an SJP banner near the Rabb Steps. The pro-Israel banner is still hung on the Rabb Steps as of Monday night, while the SJP banner has disappeared.

In a phone interview with the Justice, SJP coordinator Guy Mika ’17 described Israeli Apartheid Week as “a means to educate people about the situation in Palestine and what is happening to the Palestinian people. The main things that it’s trying to argue … is that the situation in Palestine is not necessarily a conflict, and it’s not a symmetrical thing between two sides, but rather that we have here a situation of an oppressive state and an oppressed people.”

Israeli Apartheid Week featured two main events this year — while four were planned, difficulties obtaining rights to the film “The Wanted 18” and coordination difficulties for a planned public performance limited the scope of the week. On Monday, Palestinian poet Remi Kanazi recited some of his works in the Shapiro Campus Center, followed by a conversation about campus activism in solidarity with Palestine. At SJP’s weekly meeting on Tuesday, the group hosted a discussion called “Palestine at the Intersection of Global Struggle.” Mika told the Justice that he and fellow SJP members spoke “about what Palestine mean[s] for people around the world and how the struggle for the Palestinian people figure[s] into the struggle for other people for self-determination and for rights. The relationship between that and the United States and the United States and Israel.”

In addition, SJP posted a banner near the Rabb Steps which they had first made for last year’s Israeli Apartheid Week. However, the banner was twice removed — first on Saturday and then again on Thursday. According to Mika, on Saturday “they tried to put it somewhere else, and a friend of ours found it. On the other day, they literally crumpled it in the bushes.” SJP does not currently know who specifically took down the banner.

One group of eight students unaffiliated with any campus clubs constructed a banner opposing the argument that Israel is an apartheid state and placed it opposite the SJP banner. Two of the students involved in creating that banner, Aviv Glick ’16 and Doron Shapir ’19, told the Justice in an interview that the students who made the anti-apartheid banner come from a range of perspectives on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but all agreed that calling Israel an apartheid state is wrong factually and morally. “When I recognize that there is an enemy for peace — and that enemy can be a terrorist, and it can be a person who calls for the destruction of my country, but it also can be a person that distorts reality — I need to stand up,” Shapir said.

“We thought that a good way to stand up wouldn’t be by attacking and by showing the lies, because going and debating with these people, we don’t think that will be effective,” Glick said. “But actually showing our own truth and why we are right [would be.]”

Glick and Shapir, who are both Israeli, agreed that they hoped their banner would present a view counter to the SJP movement’s opinion and would inspire students of all views to discuss the issue, but they said that often, debates between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian students are unproductive because neither group can agree on a set of facts to begin the conversation. Regarding his decision to post the banner, Glick told the Justice, “I just said, ‘Forget the arguments, just put a statement.’ And my statement was, ‘It doesn't matter how many times you put out a lie; and how many people believe the lie, it doesn’t make it true. Come to me, talk to me, ask me, and I’ll give you my view on that.’”

SJP also posted three lists of Palestinian villages and towns that were destroyed in the Nakba, which Mika described as “the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948 and ongoing.” The lists on the side of the Usdan Student Center and Sherman Dining Hall were taken down, but the list at the bottom of the Rabb steps was not, according to Mika, who also said he did not know if they were taken down due to student opposition or another reason.

Regarding feedback that SJP received for Israel Apartheid Week, Mika said, “Obviously the pro-Israel students weren’t happy. That’s to be expected … I think there was a lot of very positive feedback; there’s a lot of people who are very supportive but are afraid to get involved because of the way that conversation goes on this campus.” He pointed to a post on the Facebook group Overheard at Brandeis, in which a student wrote about hearing other students say they were excited about Israeli Apartheid week as evidence, because the post received many likes. “Before I was a freshman, people were afraid to even have an Israeli Apartheid Week,” Mika said. “They had to call it Israeli Occupation Awareness Week. And I think that we can have an Israeli Apartheid Week now shows how much this discourse has shifted.”

Mika also said that critics alleging SJP was an anti-Semitic organization were incorrect: “SJP as an organization is very deeply not racist, and they are against all racism. … As a Jew, I think that it is important to draw distinction between the Jewish community and Israel-Palestine and the policies of the state of Israel.” He also responded to a series of posters across campus which showed successful Palestinian and Arab Israelis and told their stories with the phrase “Apartheid?” at the bottom of the poster. Mika compared the individual examples of successful Palestinians in Israeli society to pointing to individual African Americans who achieved success in America before the Civil War as evidence that racism did not exist and said that the SJP movement is concerned with the system at large.

Glick said that he did not plan to attend Israeli Apartheid Week events, explaining, “I can say the same thing about the pro-Israel events. It’s like a broken record. We know it all, we’ve seen it all. It’s not a discussion.” Shapir, however, said that he planned to attend Israeli Apartheid Week events, saying, “I believe in freedom of expression, but I also believe that we have to recognize that the words people say are going to create a sort of reality that we have to deal with … I can’t deal with a one-sided thing.”