Controversy at the Cambridge Union is nothing new – they have long basked in it. When the South African ambassador came to speak in the 1980s, their website fondly recalls, student protestors rioted outside, bricks flying. Aside from furthering the unquestionably honourable mission of defending free debate, one might reasonably wonder what was to be gained by providing a platform to the representative of a settler-colonial state engaged in the violent enforcement of racial subjugation while cadres of the African National Congress were imprisoned and black South Africans lay dead on the streets of Soweto. Similar questions may be asked of the Union’s new annual tradition of hosting representatives of the Israeli state.

“What’s so horrifying about understanding that the entire Palestinian people is the enemy?” asked Ayelet Shaked, Israel’s current Justice Minister, in the midst of Israel’s last exercise, in the summer of 2014, in massacring Gaza’s stateless, besieged civilian population, which left over 2,000 Palestinians dead, including at least 551 children. When the new Michaelmas term came, the Israeli ambassador Daniel Taub was among the first through the door of the Union, as was the case in the previous assault in 2012. Last year, the Union took it upon themselves to ask Cambridge University Palestine Society (PalSoc) for suggestions of potential Palestinian speakers, expressing a desire to host a joint event, only to abdicate when the Israeli embassy didn’t fancy the list, instead inviting their spokesperson alone.

These events, including newly appointed ambassador Mark Regev’s appearance last week, have taken a Q&A format, with state representatives not shielded from hostile questioning. But the Palestinians, victims since 1948 of Israel’s continual colonial dispossession and routine brutalisation, have been conspicuous by their absence in the Union’s busy speaker schedules. Giving primacy to the voice of the oppressor at the expense of those without one serves merely to reproduce the drastic power imbalance that enables perpetration of war crimes with impunity and denial of the most basic Palestinian rights – among them the right to move without harassment and humiliation, equal access to water, and the right of refugees to return home. It is in this context that PalSoc continues to stand outside in solidarity – though with candles and flags rather than bricks. 

In its attempts at even-handedness, the Union underscores its miscomprehension of the realities on the ground in occupied Palestine. The idea that neutrality in the context of deliberately perpetuated, racialised injustice is an impossibility is a tiredly repeated truth in the Palestine solidarity movement, but many, apparently including those running the world’s oldest debating society, appear at best ignorant of this reality, and at worst engaged in wilful denial through pretence of impartiality. The fallacious objectivity obligation will be fulfilled, it is supposed, when the Palestinian diplomatic representative to the UK visits the chamber later this month. We should recognise, though, that as an appointee of the Palestinian Authority (PA), the unelected body to which Israel subcontracts enforcement of its occupation in roughly one third of the West Bank – an arrangement commonly characterised as neo-colonial – the representative is hardly an embodiment of Palestinian civil society.

Mark Regev’s illustrious past career as spokesperson for the Israeli Prime Minister’s office means he is, atypically for a diplomat, a well-known face. When Israel invaded Southern Lebanon in 2006, and during each of its subsequent bombardments of Gaza, he undertook a tour of British television screens, professionally packaging actions condemned by the UN and many human rights groups as war crimes and crimes against humanity as justified self-defence. Since his appointment as ambassador this spring, Regev has been been an eager presence on campuses, with publicised visits to SOAS and Oxford as well as Cambridge.

These appearances take place against the backdrop of an international crisis of legitimacy for the Israeli state. There is a deep-seated fear, as the campaign for Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) gains momentum in universities across the West, that Israel – once spun as the ‘light unto the nations’ in the dark Orient – sits on the brink of becoming the pariah state that its settler-colonial cousin South Africa was when its ambassador graced the Union some three decades ago. The reactive propaganda offensive manifests in Israel in the Ministry of Strategic Affairs – which controls a $45 million budget – and, closer to home, in another appearance for Regev in Cambridge next week, hosted by ‘StandWithUs’ and ‘Camera on Campus’, two American ‘advocacy’ groups for Israel.

In strategising to salvage Israel’s global reputation, its apologists and ostensible defenders seek to present the problem as one of Palestinian intransigence and lack of dialogue. This claim, echoed in moralising tones by Regev at the Union, is directly contradicted by all available diplomatic documentation, most recently the 2011 Palestine Papers, which demonstrate the willingness of PA negotiators to relinquish hopes of control over East Jerusalem and drop demands for a full return of refugees. In defending the vitality of Israeli democracy, Regev notably neglected to mention the over 50 laws that discriminate specifically against Palestinian citizens of Israel. Perhaps his flimsiest defence, though, was that the rate of settlement expansion had slowed – never mind that each and every settlement directly contravenes the Fourth Geneva Convention and innumerable United Nations’ resolutions.

Students will continue to stand in solidarity with Palestinians and elevate their voices against Israeli oppression, with or without the Union.