In a time when thinking with the blood is the expected norm, and everyone seems obliged to preface his view with the words “Speaking as a – “ plus some non-intellectual classification, there is a bankable advantage to having a surname like mine: it allows me to look completely unimpressed when I hear demands that a people should be shielded from the consequence of electing paranoid homicidal lunatics, in love with war and martyrdom and thirsting for a fatherland free-of-jews.

Actually, that’s slightly unfair – to my own sacred soil.  Following years of totalitarian control of the nation and the dumping of raw sewage into its intellectual water-supply, Hitler and his cronies still needed the night and fog of war and a complex rigmarole of trains and camps located in conquered Poland to carry out genocide.  There is zero evidence of any such restraint in the Palestinian territories.  The parallel here is with machete-season Rwanda, which required no such apparatus as men simply went out and hacked their neighbors to bits.

The forgoing is a small taste of why I find my hackles rising at the term “Israeli Apartheid”. For the record, while there is a lot of propaganda and flummery out there, I am fully aware there are crimes and abuses committed by Israel. There is a lot of propaganda and false information out there – for example The Guardian’s disgraceful indulgence of Helen Thomas – but there are some sources that have no motive for fakery that I can draw on. But it is absolutely idle to act as though this has nothing to do with the fact that Israel is surrounded by people who hate Jews with an intensity that is close to madness and on the far side at that. One doesn’t have to travel far to get evidence of this. The way that this stuff metastasizes was brilliantly exposed in the Dispatches program Undercover Mosque; more recently the indefatigable Jeremy Paxman cornered a representative of the King Fahd academy about the textbooks they use with their students (example exercise: “Mention some of the reprehensible aspects of the Jews”).

Yet it is common to act as those this fact was either negligible or nonexistent.  Take the so-called ‘Apartheid Wall’ that separates the West Bank from Israel proper.  The reason that the wall is there is that it has starkly reduced the number of suicide-murders and other outrages on the people of Israel.  Similarly, the number of casualties amongst the Palestinians would be somewhat reduced if groups like HAMAS and Hezbollah did not have the habit of placing their rocket launchers amidst schools and hospitals.  The reason they do this, incidentally, is because they know they can reliably attract condemnation of Israel, a fact on which those who have nothing nice to say about the Jewish state might care to reflect on.

Which brings me to the other thing that annoys me about this malignant Canadian export (where “Israeli Apartheid week” originates). This is the vicious libel it visits on those who faced the real Apartheid state and managed not to become depraved by it. Can anyone imagine Nelson Mandela or anyone else in the ANC leadership a) ordering his followers to conduct atrocities against schoolchildren and random civilians, b) preaching the glory of martyrdom in holy war, c) admiring an ally of Adolf Hitler, d) throwing his political rivals off a tall building, e) criminalizing homosexuality, or f) praising the foregoing?  Can one imagine even Jacob Zuma being so sexually neurotic as to forbid women from smoking hookahs?  All of which have been done by either Fatah or HAMAS and some by both.

It has also not escaped my attention that those of my fellow students who are demanding boycott and censure of Israel are completely silent when, say, the Syrian regime guns down over a hundred protestors, or when Egypt builds a wall between itself and Gaza and polices it rather more ruthlessly than the Israelis do. I can think of several explanations for this, none of them flattering.

Any sort of moral seriousness about this issue must include some definition of the kind of Palestinian state one wishes to see. I would be one hundred percent in support of a movement for a rights-respecting, secular and democratic Palestinian state.  What is on offer, however – well, I shall relate the conclusion of a conversation I had with a comrade from the subcontinent. “You think that an end could be had if we only give the violent Islamic sectarians their own state to run on their own way? How’s that working out for India?”

The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of Varsity.