The Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights Club has existed on campus for seven years, and although the club has been less active in the past, the team is hoping to change that now. “We’re trying to get things going this year,” says Zeina, one of the club’s executives.
“Social justice is something that is very important in my life,” says Zeina. “And especially the Palestinian issue, the cause. It’s something that I’ve seen people just completely stay away from, just ignore it, or call it complicated and never try to deal with it. And I think it’s very important to actually face the facts and actually look at what’s happening and catalyze discussion and activism on campus. Also I think it’s very important to make Palestinian students feel comfortable and feel that their identities and the struggles they’ve faced are recognized by UBC.”
“I also think it’s important to recognize intersections between struggles faced by Palestinians and struggles faced by other groups,” adds Siobhan, the club treasurer. “People kind of put it in it’s own thing; they isolate it from other social issues. But Israel is a colonial state so you can draw comparisons between what happened -what is still happening- in Canada to indigenous people, and then what is happening to Palestinians now.”
SPHRC is hoping to do a BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) campaign at UBC. “The aim of it is to put international pressure on Israel to recognize Palestinian human rights and that’s what we’re hoping for our AMS government to do. We’re proposing a nonviolent campaugn out of resistance to the AMS to accept the resolution that condemns illegal Israeli occupaton of Palestinian land and discrimination against Palestinians in Israel.”
“It’s an apartheid, ultimately,” says Zeina of the current situation in Israel. “There’s two different systems of law that are applied to people, depending on their ethnicity. There’s more than, I believe, fifty laws against Palestinians within the state of Israel. “The biggest one is the roads. There are Jews-only roads and there’s other roads for people from other ethnicities, other backgrounds.”
“There’s three main things that BDS asks for,” explains Zeina. “The ending of the illegal Israeli occupation of Arab land, the right of return for all Palestinian refugees in the diaspora -I think there’s about seven million refugees now that are not able to return to their homes due to the occupation, and equal rights for non-Jewish citizens in Israel. Those are the three main things in line with international law that BDS calls for.”
“It’s also an awareness raising campaign,” says Siobhan. “People often ask us what specifically it is we’re boycotting and what specific holdings the AMS has in Israeli companies, and we have talked to the AMS about this and we’ve asked them if they have holdings, and they basically said they don’t know.”
“But regardless, if we as a student body say this is something that we care about then we put pressure on UBC, because there’s no way for us to know what UBC has holdings in. But it’s also just symbolic, so it’s powerful in that way.” “This is your campus and people should be interested in what’s going on with different issues.”
SPHRC states in their club objectives that they aim “to underline that the struggle of the Palestinian people is not a struggle against the Jewish people, but rather a struggle against the colonialist and imperialist policies of the Israeli government and the ideology upon which the state was formed.” HCUBC asked the executives about the argument that BDS campaigns and opposition to Israel are anti-Semitic. “I think a lot of people characterize any criticism toward Israel as anti-Semitic when it’s clearly not because we’re just fighting for the human rights of people, of indigenous people,” says Zeina.
“Anti-Semitism obviously still exists and it’s important to recognize that,” says Siobhan. “If we see that anybody that comes to join our club whose support for Palestine comes from any place of anti-Semitism, we completely shut that down,” Zeina explains, “And we explain how we are completely against any form of discrimination against any people. We’re not anti-Semitic, we’re just fighting for the human rights of people.”
“Just equality and justice, that’s all we’re asking for.”