Article by Veronica Glab and Gabe Stein
On Thursday, March 3rd, members of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and BU Students for Israel (BUSI) gathered at Marsh Plaza in dual protests. SJP students came together to protest what SJP calls Israel’s apartheid wall against Palestinians in the West Bank. BUSI supporters rallied to support Israel and educate students on what they see as Israel’s attempts to foster peace among the two groups. The protests came in between “Israel Peace Week,” which was organized on campus by BUSI and took place from Feb. 22-26, and “Israel Apartheid Week,” which took place last week at BU.
Israel Peace Week is an initiative that aims to “spread awareness about Israel and her pursuit of peace.” Throughout last week, BUSI promoted Israel’s attempts at a peaceful resolution to the conflict, which they claim have been ignored by anti-Israel groups. In an attempt to counter the BUSI-lead initiative and as a part of BU’s version of the global Israel Apartheid Week, SJP countered this week with an “Israel Apartheid” table they setup in the George Sherman Union, which they used to draw a comparison to South African racial apartheid in the 1960s and 70s.
Yesterday, both groups met in front of Marsh plaza. How the two protests evolved and came to a head is fairly convoluted. According to an email exchange that was leaked to the Quad and other BU media organizations by SJP and subsequently posted to the organization’s website, BUSI heard a rumor that SJP was planning to build a wall last week, and asked them to refrain from doing so, citing the “sensationalizing” effects of the wall. Instead, BUSI suggested that both groups come together in a rally to discuss the issue. In response, SJP said that it had not been planning to build a wall, but decided to do so after receiving the email and learning that BUSI members had allegedly complained about SJP’s rumored wall-building plan to BU’s Student Activities Office.
On March 1 and 2, a small gathering of SJP students built an “Israel Apartheid Wall” in front of Marsh Plaza that garnered an article in the Daily Free Press and Huffington Post, but relatively few participants. That same day, messages were posted on the BU Israel Peace Week Facebook page that encouraged its members to show up at the plaza on March 3 to support Israel.
The resulting dual rally saw hundreds of protestors show up in support of both groups. Apartheid Wall participants took turns holding the styrofoam panels, waving banners, and handing out informational flyers. Meanwhile, the Students for Israel handed out miniature Israeli flags on the Plaza. Their own banners promoted Israel’s peace-making efforts and asked that SJP stop “bringing extremism to Boston University.”
At the “Palestine on the Precipice” conference in the Photonics Building that followed SJP’s protest, Junior Jarib Rahman re-told the story of how SJP’s GSU demonstrations evolved into the Marsh Plaza protests.
“We received an email from Students for Israel, who requested us to not build a wall–which we never planned to do,” Rahman said. “After we received this email, we decided to actually build this wall.”
Speaking to the Tufts Daily, BUSI member Jack Goldberg confirmed that BUSI had reached out to SJP.
“We’ve asked [SJP] to sit down and talk, and they’ve rejected our offer, BUSI member Jack Goldberg said. “Whenever they’re ready to sit down, we are too.”
For more coverage of the protests, see the Quad’s photo gallery.
Reporting on this has been horrible. Apartheid wall “in the Gaza Strip”? It’s in the West Bank, not Gaza, and from speaking to SJP members I’m pretty sure they know that.
You also left out the part about exactly why SJP does not want to sit at a table and “talk it out”. Campus pro-Israel groups are trying to use dialog to shut down discourse about oppression. The fact that one campus group would actually go forth and tell another campus group to stop building a mock wall shows how little this “BUSI” group supports dialog. BUSI, and pro-Israel groups in general, only want dialog when it’s what they want to hear. When it’s a piece of art that makes a statement about Israel’s wall in the West Bank then suddenly it’s “sensationalizing,” etc. They don’t want to sit and talk it out, they want to sit and tell pro-Palestinian activists how to voice their own opinions.
Please change “Israel’s apartheid wall against the Palestinians in the Gaza strip” to “Israel’s apartheid wall against the Palestinians in the West Bank”. This is quite important as some people from BUSI came to tell us that the wall was there to protect against rocket attacks from Hamas in Gaza. The wall is in the West Bank, where Hamas has no presence.
Thanks for the correction note. Fixed.
Also, Israel Apartheid Week was last week.
And the Wall was first built March 1
Thanks, both are fixed.
Benjamin’s comments are only partly correct. The security fence was not to protect against rockets from Hamas in Gaza, but rather to protect against suicide bombers getting into Israel from the West Bank and blowing themselves up, killing lots of innocent civilians. The value of the fence in saving lives is evident from the data: In 2002, the year before construction started, 457 Israelis were murdered; in 2009, 8 Israelis were killed. This fence (not a wall in most places) was never intended to be “against the Palestinians,” but rather to save Israeli lives and the lives of Palestinian children whom cowards decided to brainwash into blowing themselves up.