http://www.thestar.com/opinion/article/780297–cohn-apartheid-week-a-semantic-sideshow

I don’t usually agree with the Bloc Québécois, but miracles do happen – especially over the holy land. To my surprise, the separatists have neatly summed up everything that’s wrong with the way Canadians on both sides of the Middle East divide lapse into name-calling.

Late last week, Bloc MP Claude DeBellefeuille sought unanimous consent in the House of Commons for a motion declaring, “That this House denounce the use of the word apartheid to describe the Israeli policy on Palestinians and the word anti-Semitic to describe any criticism against Israel.”

Elegantly put. How to explain this common sense motion?

The BQ has clearly learned, over all these years of domestic jousting, how to disagree with English Canadians without being disagreeable. That’s a lesson worth learning for Israeli Apartheid Week – and the countervailing claims of anti-Semitism that clutter the calendar every March.

But it remains unheeded. The Bloc’s motion didn’t garner the unanimous consent required to pass.

The Ontario Legislature is no less conflicted: About 30 MPPs in the chamber unanimously backed a motion condemning the use of apartheid, but provincial NDP Leader Andrea Horwath (who skipped the vote) pointedly wrote a letter reproaching fellow New Democrats, such as MPP Cheri DiNovo, for backing the resolution.

And so Israeli Apartheid Week – a slogan wrapped in a sideshow over semantics – is destined to continue, even doubling in duration (this year’s “week” lasted from March 1-14).

But in a month when Israel’s right-wing government has – like the Palestinians in the past – not missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity, we may have spent more time splitting hairs over the definition of apartheid than the substance of peacemaking.

No surprise there. But what’s truly unexpected is the apoplexy from Israeli Apartheid Week supporters whenever someone criticizes their terminology, and their outrage that lawmakers would dare to denounce them with merely symbolic resolutions.

It’s not as if these backbenchers could deploy the RCMP or OPP to shut them down. Campus facilities are still being made available, year after year, with no jackboots in sight to padlock the doors and drag people away.

And I’m genuinely puzzled as to why they are so wounded about being called anti-Semitic. What goes around comes around.

A “hostile environment” doesn’t equal anti-Semitism in my book. But if you bait anybody, they’ll bait you back until the word games abate.

So let’s reframe this debate: The real issue with Israeli Apartheid Week is not so much that it’s argumentative or provocative or intellectually dishonest. What makes it so contentious is that it is, transparently, a branding exercise.

It used to be called propaganda, but that is so 1940s.

Israeli Apartheid Week is actually a double-barrelled branding exercise: It allows Israel’s critics to brand themselves as the good guys out to fight the bad guys; and it brands Israel – demonizes it – as a racist regime equivalent to the old South Africa, one of the greatest moral stains of our time.

At root, the campus meetings are not about consciousness-raising (or dare I say it, conflict-resolution). They are about reframing Israel as a racist regime.

But why get bogged down on the semantics of apartheid – an Afrikaans word conjured up decades ago to describe segregation and systematic discrimination in Southern Africa – if what we’re talking about is racism and discrimination in the present-day Middle East?

Why not, for example, call it Israeli Racism Week? Ah, that would be too close to that discredited slogan, “Zionism is racism,” which is so 1970s – and has long since been repudiated by the United Nations. It’s too tired, too tainted, too toxic.

Apartheid has richer marketing possibilities. It’s a bolder brand. No matter that Israel isn’t South Africa, it allows university students to feel like they didn’t miss out on the great moral cause of our time – apartheid – while their elders get to relive the good old days of fighting the bad old ways.

Besides, it has more zing than Israeli Intransigence Week, or Palestine Occupation Week.

Anti-apartheid week isn’t about to disappear, whether or not parliamentarians pass non-binding resolutions. It’s fringe for the moment, but you never know when it will go viral – especially if the current Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu blunders ahead with indefensible policies on East Jerusalem and the West Bank.