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Earlier this month, McGill University students voted 436 to 263 to postpone indefinitely a Students’ Society resolution condemning the “bombings” of “educational institutions in Gaza.” The initiative paralleled similar resolutions which passed at other Canadian universities, including University of Toronto and York. But a clear majority of McGill students proclaimed that they did not want their student union developing a foreign policy. As pro-Palestinian forces try importing yet another round of the Middle East conflict to campus, the McGill majority endorsed the vision of a student society devoted to students’ needs and enhancing campus society not pontificating about political conflicts far away.
True, it is the academic’s conceit to comment about everything. We enjoy passing judgment from our cushy ivory towers, inviting our students to join our know-it-all chorus. Few students need such encouragement, compelled as they are by their own youthful vanity to judge the world their elders have bequeathed them.
Student political organizations convey that spirit, legitimately. Campuses should be filled with many social, political and religious organizations, reflecting diverse attitudes, ideologies and political persuasions. I am proud of my students who campaigned for now-U.S. President Barack Obama – and my student – note the singular – who supported Senator John McCain. I love seeing young Liberals and Conservatives electioneering, and I applaud the passion of those from beyond the conventional political spectrum too.
Nevertheless, students’ partisan identities should not intrude on student union politics. The inspiration so many students drew from Obama was commendable, but it would have been appalling if a student union had circulated a motion praising Obama and condemning McCain. This breach of political etiquette would have turned the student union into partisan Democratic headquarters, making it the student disunion.
Following a similar rationale, the anti-Israel resolutions are divisive and distracting – as well as disproportionate and discriminatory. They sabotage the modern university’s commitment to diversity. All great universities today welcome students of different religions, nationalities, races and creeds. Pronouncing on such a hot button issue, implying that students share some consensus position, imposes thought control and presumptions of uniformity where none exist. This posture of unity will foster disunity, importing passionate divisions into an arena where they do not belong. Such incendiary, irrelevant resolutions distract from what should be a student society’s mission – improving students’ experiences.
Five years ago engineering and commerce students at Concordia University rebelled against their student union’s political obsessions. Students were embarrassed that, all too often, job recruiters related to Concordia as a place characterized by radical, sometimes violent, pro-Palestinian stands rather than as a center of academic excellence. The students elected new leaders committed to helping students, not developing a foreign policy.
Finally, the resolutions themselves give a slanted view of a complex conflict. They ignore the role of Hamas, a terrorist group with an anti-Semitic, genocidal charter advocating Israel’s destruction, in triggering the recent violence, cowering behind educational institutions, mosques, and hospitals, and targeting Israeli schools. Where were these concerned students when 10,000 Palestinian rockets bombarded Israel? Where were student unions when these rockets fell on Sapir College in the Negev, or on nurseries, kindergartens, elementary schools and high schools in Sderot and its environs? Where is the outrage that smuggled Grad missiles menaced Ben Gurion University, that Soroka Hospital in Beersheba, which serves Jews, Christians, Muslims, Druze, Bedouin equally, is targeted? Does anybody care that Soroka had to place sandbags on its sleep lab and evacuate its maternity ward under fire?
More profoundly, has anyone condemned Hamas for threatening chances of a two-state solution by using the Gaza disengagement to launch rockets and dig tunnels rather than building a functional civil society? The umbrage at Israel’s actions seems false and disproportionate, thus discriminatory, singling out the Jewish state for special scrutiny and particular enmity.
Campuses are fragile eco-systems, special places wherein many different people congregate to live together and learn together. Campus leaders have a special responsibility to avoid polluting the atmosphere with poisonous rhetoric, biased behavior, and irrelevant assaults on fellow students’ sensibilities. Indulging in foreign policy postures regarding explosive issues, particularly the Middle East, fails that test – raising tensions rather than alleviating them, doing nothing to solve the conflict and importing tensions from 10,000 kilometers away too close to home.
Gil Troy is Professor of History at McGill University. He is the author ofWhy I Am a Zionist: Israel, Jewish Identity and the Challenges of Today. His latest book Leading from the Center: Why Moderates Make the Best Presidents, was recently published by Basic Books.
