Anti-Israel bandwagon

A MOTION by the Australian National University Students’ Association (ANUSA) supporting the recent anti-Israel motion passed by the University of Melbourne Student Union (UMSU) has been condemned by Jewish students.

The ANUSA motion backed its Melbourne counterpart, issued in April, which accused Israel of “massacres, forced expulsion and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians”, labelled Zionism “a racist, colonial ideology” and supported the right of Palestinians “to engage in self-defence against their occupiers”.

In a statement, the Australasian Union of Jewish Students (AUJS) and the ANU Jewish Students (ANUJS) slammed the May 18 ANUSA motion as “antisemitic, not because they criticise Israel, but because their supporters have arrogated to themselves the right to define Judaism, Zionism and antisemitism in a way that conveniently meets their own views, over objections of Jewish students and the vast majority of Jewish people, and is contrary to the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism.

“AUJS rejects the idea that antisemitism only exists on the political right and condemns the hypocrisy of those people who have no difficulty condemning racial forms of antisemitism and Holocaust denial from neo-Nazis and other white supremacists, but seem to be emotionally and ideologically incapable of recognising more contemporary forms of antisemitism from the ‘progressive’ side of politics. This includes the rejection of Jewish peoplehood and the Jewish people’s collective right to national self-determination.”

Describing the UMSU and ANUSA resolutions as “dishonest in glossing over the failures of the Palestinian leadership”, the statement lamented the “biased discourse that we see on campus”, which ignores the successive historic opportunities for statehood that have been spurned by the Palestinian leadership.