 Hi everyone, my name is Duncan McHugh, I am a professor at the School of Journalism here at Carleton University and welcome, welcome to this very important discussion that we're having tonight called Understanding Israel Palestine in the Shadow of War. We have two fabulous guests who are going to walk us through this terrain and teach us and share with us, but before we get started I want to turn this discussion over to Dean Brenda O'Neill, who is of course the Dean of Public Affairs here at Carleton to start off our evening. Thank you so much Duncan, I appreciate it. I want to first just say thank you to everyone who is joining us this evening, it's certain to be an interesting and an informative discussion, but I also want to say it's going to be an important one. I want to start tonight's event by providing a land acknowledgement and the purpose of land acknowledgements is really to both acknowledge but also honor the people and the treaty agreements and unceded lands of Turtle Island. So I'd like to suggest always I always say that we should do this with intention but also do it with some reflection and so I want to acknowledge that the land on which we gather to present this webinar tonight is the traditional and unceded territory of the Algonquin Nation. I don't want to take up too much time, I want us to get going, but I do very much want to set the tone for this evening's event. I know that we're all aware that the topic can be and is a very difficult one for many people for a number of reasons on both sides regardless of our beliefs and our positions but this is exactly the task that I think we face in democracies. It's figuring out how to be able to discuss topics on issues on which we take completely opposing sides and positions. We can't eliminate those differences and so I think it's imperative that we choose to discuss these issues with civility and I think universities are exactly the places for setting this kind of an example. Not only do I think it's the exact kind of place but I think this is where we must learn to set the example for having these kinds of challenging conversations, for being respectful of each other's humanity, for challenging beliefs without challenging a person. I don't think we can avoid these conversations. I think holding our tongue isn't an answer but I think we have to and must be able to have the conversations about topics particularly those that we're most passionate about while also respecting the very people that we disagree with. So I'm going to ask each and everyone joining us tonight to keep this in mind, listen with intention, think about what you're hearing, digest what you're hearing, think about that before you decide to speak, speak and question with respect, respect to everyone joining us tonight and I would say especially those that you disagree with, let us be an example. So thank you and I very much hope you enjoy tonight's webinar. Thank you so much Dino, Neil and I want to echo that those words that you shared in terms of respect. It's such an important principle of the Indigenous community that I come from, that you be conscious of the words that you're sharing with people and that words have impact. So do we have a Q&A feature here and we are welcome. Our guests are quite happy to answer your question and so please do feel free to throw any questions that you may have into the Q&A feature. I will keep my eye on that throughout the talk this evening and from time to time we'll lob questions at them. Let me introduce you to the folks that we have on the screen who are we're going to spend the next hour and 15 minutes with. Mira Sukharov is a professor of political science here at Carleton University in Ottawa. She specializes in teaching about Israel and Palestine and she's the author most recently of Borders and Belonging, a memoir. Omar Dajani is a co-director of the Global Center for Business and Development at the McGeorge School of Law which is at the University of the Pacific in Sacramento, California and he served as a legal advisor to the Palestinian negotiating team in peace talks with Israel. So two folks that have spent a lot of time thinking about our topic this evening, understanding Israel, Palestine in the shadow of war. We're going to be talking about conversations about the past, present and future of Israel and Palestine and I guess importantly for those of us here in North America, how we can talk about the challenges in the region. So, Mira and Omar welcome to this webinar. Thank you. It's been months now since October 7th and so I just want to start off and both of you are so closely tied to the region. I just want to start off by asking how you're doing. Omar, let me start with you. It's hard to fathom that it's been five months. Tomorrow will be five months since October 7th and that the carnage continues and shows no signs of abating. I was repeating this morning that over the last 24 hours another 86 people, 86 Palestinians and Gaza were killed in IDF strikes and that brings the number to well over 30,000 civilians killed during this time. That big number is hard to swallow and I think that it's hard to imagine as well when we talk about numbers of that kind very quickly they can seem abstract theoretical and I think what I'm struggling to do and it makes me feel anguished and angry and guilty that it is a struggle is to continue to think of the large number as a number comprised of the deaths of a lot of individual people. The demons tormenting me these days Duncan are guilt and anguish and anger and impotence and I think particularly from here in the United States in a context where our unfolding election year yields so few opportunities to transform policy in a place that matters as much to me as Israel Palestine does that adds another layer of challenge to all of this. I've got questions for you Omar just about how you how you deal with that guilt and that anger but let me ask the same question to Mira as well. Omar shared his thoughts on the impact on the Palestinian people obviously Mira this has had huge impacts for Jewish folks as well how are you doing? Yeah and of course I am a Canadian Jew and a professor here at Carleton and Omar is a Palestinian American and we'll talk a little bit about how that comes into play in our ongoing research partnership and friendship. For me I look both at and I know Omar does too at Israelis and Palestinians and what is the degree of suffering and trauma that that is happening across that quasi border of course this we're not talking about two separate states it's important for people to realize that Gaza is not an independent state so this isn't like a Russia and Ukraine situation except for the degree of human suffering and trauma it is. So first I'm I'm I'm also horrified by the increasing bloodshed and Israel's policy of mass starvation and I'm very conscious of also not wanting to compound the trauma of my Israeli family and friends and so I'm doing a lot of social media a lot of public talks and I'm aware that my primary audience isn't Israelis because I I'm sort of a little bit awkward I feel a little bit like it's not necessarily my place to tell them what to do except in one instance in one instance when we've seen recent polls showing the degree upwards beyond 93% I think up to 94% of Israelis Israeli Jews in this poll who support the degree of force being used in Gaza that is very alarming and so I I know that some of my family and friends there are among that tiny tiny 6% outlier and then others aren't so that's sort of the balancing act I'm trying to do right now is think about how I can be a voice of moral clarity and of course many people some people listening to this would say that Sukharov is not a voice of moral clarity at all so let's unpack that and what that even means to people but trying to bring a scholarly understanding of what's happening and informed by international law and keep keep the facts straight and help people get through this time and and again I will come back to this I am very curious to know how you are straddling those two positions and the conversations that you have but but but but let's let's lay the let's lay the groundwork here for for for our audience and just you mentioned the friendship you have had an incredible friendship and productive working relationship and and I'd love to know how that started uh Mira let me ask you first um I kept and this will be good for the graduate students and junior faculty among us in the audience I kept getting book rejections I or or they would the editors would be excited about my book idea I mean I have published a bunch of books as well but at this point in 2021 I had another book idea kept getting rejected editors liked it peer reviewers were mixed and I realized it's time to bring in a Palestinian voice it's time to collaborate across the aisle so to speak and I think I'm ready at this point in my career to have my voice enriched by by a Palestinian and rather than have them be simply the object who I'm writing about really bring them in as an active voice in my collaborations and I reached out to Omar in the last during the last act of conflict between Israel Hamas it was turned out to be in a much smaller scale than it is now than what's going on now but it was equally alarm it felt alarming at the time and that was in May 2021 and I had Omar and I had been Facebook friends for some years were in common intellectual scholarly uh networks with some common friends so I had seen his post and at this point in May 2021 Omar wrote what I thought was a very both educational and moving post about how the Gaza Strip came to be and it was centered on both the historical and factual context of who lives in the Gaza Strip and what their needs and desires are and the history of the Gaza Strip but it also focused on Omar's own family story Omar's father when he was 16 was driven out of Jaffa which at the time was the most populous Palestinian city and in April 1948 over the course of two weeks the city and emptied out of almost its entire 70 000 plus Palestinian population and Omar is now the son of a refugee because of that and I was really touched by how he brought in the personal element and the scholarly legal political element and I shared it with my followers and what's very usual in my case is I get a lot of pushback from many of my followers and I just kept the conversation going and Omar and I became friends from then on. Omar what did you think when I mean you were Facebook friends but what did you think when Mira who writes about Israel reached out to you to ask to collaborate? Well so I should say at the outset that in that exchange in May of 2021 what touched me was that I had posted something that told a profoundly personal story and she had folks from her network who were raising a lot of hard questions and Mira was defending me, defending my story, defending the Palestinian narrative in ways that touched me particularly in view of the fact that we didn't really know each other and so when a few months later she reached out to me and said hey would you have an interest in maybe writing a book together even though my first vociferous reaction was no because I just finished a book project and was not keen to start a new one I was intrigued by the possibility of collaboration and I suggested at the time that we explore doing a podcast together something that I had been thinking about and that I thought might be a means of reaching a younger and broader audience and a means also of exploring the history of Israel Palestine in a way that enabled us to go back and forth between narratives and engage a range of different voices and she was intrigued and so we had a good discussion about it but I'll say a last thing on that front which was that maybe two last things if I may the first was that I realized in our early discussion that Mira was also really trying to suss me out to determine where my convictions lay to make sure that I was someone who stood for the same kinds of values that she did and whose politics weren't too compromised even with regard to Israel Palestine and and I realized that maybe subtly I did the same thing and the second thing I'd say is that we well before October 7th a good couple of years before we had occasion before we'd actually met in person to work on an article together in which we were corresponding as ourselves at an earlier point in our lives about Zionism and it was a kind of a creative nonfiction project but what we were able to do was to have a conversation on paper about a hard topic with a little bit of distance not just from the paper but also because it was our earlier innocent selves who were conversing and that enabled us to talk about some very difficult things to be kind of blunt with each other and I think that strengthened our capacity later on to have hard conversations and to get through them and you talk about the hard conversations that you would end up having as a putting together the book putting together the podcast I wonder as you started to have those conversations Omar was what surprised you you know I think that there are a few things so first of all if you look closely at our respective political commitments I think that they're difficult to distinguish from each other and what I've learned over a lot of conversation that is that we see the future of Israel Palestine in pretty similar terms we operate as I indicated earlier from a set of similar values even our views about the political parties that we think should prevail whether in in Canada or in the US or in Israel Palestine are pretty similar and so there is a lot of similarity on that front but it obscures a difference in experience that can come out in significant ways it Mira as I'm sure she'll tell us more about grew up with a deep attachment to Israel and an attachment that was rooted not only as maybe we Palestinians can sometimes imagine in a kind of indoctrination by family but instead also by deep experience by the kinds of identity issues that so many of us have a seeking of a place that could be that could feel like home a way to find mooring in a in a shaky world particularly as an adolescent and all of these many experiences produced attachments that are just really different than my own and so when we started taking trips to Israel Palestine together I realized that as we would walk down the sidewalk our emotional reactions to what we would see differed I would get angry about things things that were not obvious sources of sources of anger for example this spectacular park that is built on the waterfront in the in the city of jaffa where my family comes from I've seen that park gets me exercised because I I know that that park sits on rubble of houses like the house that my family once built and it's not that Mira is insensitive to those things but her reflex when we're in those places is to see Israel through a place of love through a place of connection and just that starting point creates occasional tensions and difficulties so I'll maybe leave it at that for now but maybe maybe Mira would like to elaborate Omar raised an important word there indoctrination and and I wonder Mira I mean you I could sense that you were hesitant to reach out across the divide as you said when when you were looking for a partner so for you what kind of surprises did you encounter as you got to know more I think I think okay I'm going to say something kind of nuanced so I love to I'm I'm comfortable debating and I do that a lot on social media as anyone who follows me knows and you're always welcome to follow my many public posts Facebook is my favorite platform these days because I'm of the older generation and that's where we tend to hang out and but when it happens with Omar that we fall into a political debate which certainly is not outside of the remit of our intended work together nevertheless I find that I crumple so what I have come to experience is that I experience Omar as more self than other and I unlike other unlike a garden variety political rival who might exist out in my social media world or if I were at a protest and there was a counter-protester there I might relish the debate with a political rival with Omar I don't and that has been something I've had to contend with because there are times where we really our work depends on hashing some things out and I find that I'm I find that very emotionally taxing to do and that surprised me so and then and then October 7th rolls along and so so you're it's one thing to to say that that you're you don't look at each other as other but that must have Omar talked about the tensions I'm curious as to how your friendship dealt with with October 7th Mira let me start with you so at first it was relatively easy because in the early hours of October 7th the direction of violence was very clear and what Hamas did was very clear I mean they did two things they attacked soldiers in addition to that they attacked civilians and the majority of the 1200 casualties that day out of Israel were civilians and Omar and I could be united and were united instinctively that morning in condemning Hamas's attacks on civilians and the taking of hostages and what helped as well was Omar had Omar already had friends in Israel even before he met me but he hadn't spent very much time until he met me around the Gaza area and Israelis call those kibbutzim the agricultural villages near the Gaza fence they call that the Gaza envelope and we had spent a few days together there just last summer at my kibbutz family's house and Omar had been given the secure room to sleep in and I've been given a room down the hall um and my kibbutz parents that when I say kibbutz family just quick briefer uh when I was 20 and did a junior year abroad at the Hebrew University I had a family that sponsored me on a kibbutz and they sort of took me in as a second family or I they took me in as a sort of a quasi-daughter and that was common among North American Jews who were seeking a connection with the kibbutz so I have a lot of friends who still are in touch with their families from this kibbutz and the one nearby so they later moved to a kibbutz even closer to the Gaza Strip and that's where we spent a few nights in last July and so when I told them when I called Omar and I said that my kibbutz family had been holed up in their secure room hearing Hamas militants outside and narrowly being escaped narrowly escaped being taken hostage and they're traumatized right now and few hours later I had to tell Omar that now Ellie my kibbutz dad has a bullet in his hand that won't be removable because the IDF thought he and his wife Yonit were Hamas militants as they were driving out of kibbutz to shelter a few hours later Omar not only knew them had had a relationship with them but had slept in that very secure that very room that's known as the secure room that most Israelis have if they can afford one so it created a sense of united between Omar and I where we were united in being revolted by the attacks on civilians but then things got more complicated. Omar I'll turn it over to you. Sure so you know start by saying that you know even though I'd spent a lot of time inside the Gaza Strip had worked there for the UN as Mira noted I hadn't spent time in the Israeli communities that surrounded and so it it did resonate I experienced October 7th emotionally very differently as a result of having spent those days with her than I would have otherwise and indeed one person that we had breakfast with Vivian Silver was initially we thought taken hostage but it turned out was among those murdered on October 7th and so it had profound personal resonance for us on that front but within 24 hours Israel began its assault on the Gaza Strip and that assault as we all know has continued to this day and while Mira and I again were united in our disgust by the punitive quality of the IDF's actions by the scale of civilian death that the IDF's tactics its operations on the ground was resulting in differences in the way in which we saw events unfolded started to emerge and I'll give one example but I think there there are a few that we might talk about over the course of this conversation so one one example of kind of a difference that emerged was in relation to the allegations the allegations of sexual violence on October 7th as many folks will know there is there were allegations which the United Nations as well as the government of Israel and the New York Times have all said are substantiated of rapes and other horrific violence being inflicted upon women on October 7th that those things occurred was something that we had both read about but Mira who as she noted is often on Facebook and engages a lot with folks on Facebook um texted me in December noting that she had posted the New York Times piece talking about the sexual violence and and that folks including one of my family members had challenged her on it and and that what she framed as denialism on that front was really troubling to her and my reaction to what she wrote in in that text was a bit ambivalent I sent back kind of an a cringe emoji initially and it was ambivalent because whereas on the one hand I didn't doubt that there had been sexual violence I felt that the way in which it was being framed in the New York Times piece was a likely to elicit even more rage and and particularly in view of the fact that Israeli officials and Israeli soldiers were already expressing genocidal intentions framing their actions in profoundly dehumanized dehumanizing ways I was fearful about the way in which this New York Times piece which presented some first-person narratives in sensational detail the way in which that might feed the violence in that moment so I was very apprehensive about that and I also felt that as I read through the piece that it didn't feel it didn't seem as well substantiated as I expected New York Times journalism to be the accounts were derived from single-person testimony without evidence from others and I mean the the anecdotal accounts and as I as I read them I thought oh this this doesn't feel true to me and I I felt that the way in which the testimony was the reporting was laid out left too much oblique and and so so in all of this I'm kind of struggling because you know I understand how important it is to believe women when they allege sexual violence against them and I know how hard I understood how hard Miro was taking this and the ways in which denialism in particular looms large for for for Jewish people but I also felt how important it was to read critically the news reports that were coming out about what was unfolding and continuing to unfold in that moment and so all of this together produced an ambivalent reaction which I think Mira then took as me kind of sawing off the limb that she had walked out on here she was someone who was entering into a lot of arguments with other members of her own community about events as they were unfolding in the Gaza Strip and how to read them and what she was seeing from me was in relation to this episode that I was not there supporting her and so it was one context in which our the level of trust between us personally our respective emotional reactions to what was unfolding and our fears about what might be still to come all converged to make for an argument that to be honest has continued almost to this day although I think it's just in the last few days that we've kind of found some common ground with regard to to that episode I see you nodding man yeah I mean I'm sort of nodding kind of probably unconsciously saying haven't we made up yet haven't we made up yet I thought we had but yes the debate still resurfaces and there's new takedowns from the alternative press trying to poke holes in the New York Times reporting and so I mean this was something we could talk I'm sure a lot with you about Duncan as a journalism professor in terms of what is to be viewed as correct and I tend to view legacy media as legitimate until proven otherwise and that's my instinct but again that's another question about sourcing and there have been questions raised about the Times piece but before I just wonder if I could take a step back for a second I mean you talk about shared values and the fact that you wanted to collaborate I wonder prior to October 7th when you started to go back to Israel what kind of reactions would you get from people when when you sat down together and introduced the work you were attempting to do you know for me that a lot of it so with the the the trips we've taken to Israel Palestine we've taken four together and we have a fifth planned in the coming months and the idea is to show each other people and places that are meaningful to us and we're meant to represent showing the reader how Jews and Palestinians can live together better than they're living together now but that that can't happen until there's a real authentic reckoning with the emotional experience of feeling connected to that place and so we're trying to come from a sense of mutual honoring of connection rather than what we see all too often in social media or everyday discourse where people one group is trying to delegitimize the connection of the other group to the area so it's the idea of mutual uplifting to with we have some future visions in mind of what that might look like we could get to that later but so I would take Omar and I would notice so we might meet with some friends of mine who made their life in Israel in the wave of the 1960s 1970s immigration and I would sort of be watching as Omar engaged with them what brought you and what brought you from America to Israel let's say and I'm sort of hoping that they'll make a connection and knowing that Omar is very sort of suspicious of in a sense I shouldn't speak for Omar but my sense is that Omar is a little bit suspicious what does this mean to enact American Jewish privilege and come and add to the Jewish privilege that already exists you're not you might say to the person sitting across from us you're not a holocaust survivor you weren't kicked out of a country in the Arab world you came from privilege in northern California what makes you land here so that's a question too because years ago I would have never questioned them in fact I thought I might make my life in Israel when I was in my 20s and I never thought of it in terms of adding tipping the scales of Jewish privilege I always thought that I would come and help make the country better so some of those little little moments I've noticed what kind of reactions did you get Omar I was I was struck by you staying in the safe room when when you were on the visit to to the Kibbutz and I just wonder what it's like for you as a Palestinian engaged in the work that you're doing with Miriam yeah it's complicated so it's complicated whether we're visiting Israeli Jews or we're visiting Palestinians and so yes when we were at her Kibbutz family's home it was strange to me to recognize that I was the only Palestinian around I mean there it turns out there there was there were some workers who were also who work on the Kibbutz who were close by and I hadn't been introduced to but it was recognizing that Gaza Strip was a couple of kilometers away millions of Palestinians literally right there but that I was in that space with with Mira's family having conversations where we were negotiating our way toward talking about some difficult issues grappling with for example what happened in 1948 I mean we spent one afternoon at another Kibbutz in which we were having coffee with some friends of her her families and and we had this wide-ranging conversation about 1948 and how each of them perceived it and it was in some ways really fortifying because it was striking how many different perspectives there were there was on the one hand one person who was sort of very emphatically saying we've tried to put that out of our minds we've tried to move past that there's no point in you know rehashing what happened before they should be where they are and we should be where we are and that should be the end of it kind of the opposite of the spirit of the land acknowledgement that you that that y'all gave at the beginning of this talk on the other hand there was a guy there who confessed that he had had no idea about the the nakba until in his 60s he had decided to finish college and took a course at a community college and in which he learned the history and it opened up opportunities for him or a desire in him to find out what had happened on the land where the place where he was living was and so so it was it was strange and frustrating and moving to sort of be a part of all of those conversations in that living room in that place of privilege with green lawns all around us very different from what exists on the other side of the Gaza Strip and then conversely you know we spent time with my Palestinian friends in places like Ramallah and Bethlehem and Jerusalem and and with people that we met together in Jaffa and and there was a tricky dynamic because folks in that place engage in a lot of what's the word to use kind of people are always attempting to try to read your politics from all sorts of signals that you give try to place you to situate you people come into every interaction with a lot of assumptions and it is a very deeply divided place which I guess is not a great insight but it's something that you don't realize until you go there and so you know we would be sitting at a table and I would be paying attention to the dynamics how how are my friends reacting to Mira what do they think about the way in which she's telling that story what do they think about the fact that she just put you know through a Hebrew phrase into a sentence that she was using and indeed some of my friends not having had the long conversations that we've had about what has been what should be you know would ask me questions like is is Mira Zionist what what you know what does she see as the future does she believe in Palestinians right of return all of these questions and I think knowing that that happened also would make Mira feel uncomfortable and vulnerable so it's a it's a complicated negotiation at every juncture. You're talking about these really difficult conversations one of the reasons I was so pleased that Dean Brando and Neil asked me to do this is that of course there should be there should be no better place to to have these kinds of difficult conversations than our university campuses in in in Canada and in the United States but as we've seen these these have become very contested battlegrounds in many ways I'm curious to know your thoughts you're both professors what you think about campus activism the general dynamics of the conversation around October 7th and what's happened in the past few months Mira. My comments are going to be intended more generally to campuses across North America what I say shouldn't mean to single out Carlton or be specific about Carlton I just wanted to say that and so one thing that troubles me in campus dynamics and this is something that Omar and I try very hard to overcome in our interactions with each other one thing that troubles me in campus dynamics is the mutual diminishing of each side's pain and so for example when one side tears down hostage posters that feels to me like a like what's the word when something's a movie's got too much violence uh X extraneous there's a special word for it it seems to me gratuitous it seems to me like a gratuitous act of diminishing the other side's pain similarly when the other side views in the most uncharitable terms uncharitable interpretations Palestinian slogans of freedom so that if people are chanting from the river to the sea Palestine shall be free and the other side assumes that that means genocide or ethnic cleansing of Jews rather than looking rather than being curious and reading sources and reading what Palestinians mean by it and there's a lot of literature on what it means I'm not saying that there isn't a debate to be had but the the assumption of bad faith on the other side is what troubles me a lot and so it's the brittleness of the discourse that's troubling I mean in a way it's not really on the on the other hand but I guess at the same time uh college university is the time to exercise your political muscles and and learn to use your voice and I know that um when I was 18 19 I was also learning that and I don't know if I always did it in the most perfectly effective manner so I don't want to um I don't want to sort of tar I don't want to act like the old foggy sort of saying oh kids these days and they don't know anything so I think we also have to be charitable that students are learning the way uh learning to find their way but at the same time I I do have hopes for how we can speak more effectively across these divides and if any of our audience has any questions you're welcome to share them I will keep my eye on the q&a feature at the at the bottom of the zoom there throw them in there and I will start to lob them out I've still got lots of questions so I'm not going to start sharing them yet but but but please do put enter your questions and I'll and I'll try to share them with Omar and and Mira as we go along um I asked about campuses Omar I mean I can't I the chill uh after uh after the the president of the University of Pennsylvania the Harvard president uh testified in front of congress and then we we saw the fallout of of of their attempt to to to talk about what was happening on their campuses I what are your observations about the state of of of the the the conversation or the debate uh that's that's going on in campuses in the United States so I I'd like to say three things about it um the first is that I think uh I've I've rarely seen um Palestinian um Arab and Muslim students feeling so vulnerable as they do in the current moment and I think that that is a function of a lot of different things it's a function of the fact that on many campuses students have been punished for their speech and have been censured in a range of censored and censored and censured in a range of different ways and I think that that's left a lot of students unsure where the lines are separating what is acceptable and what isn't and I think that creates vulnerability the fact that there have been students who like the three young Palestinian students who were shot in Burlington Vermont after coming from a demonstration deepens that sense of vulnerability so I think that that's a very significant piece and I I just uh got a call the other day from a student who was worried about what her legal situation was likely to be in view of things that she had said and we have been engaging with law firms lately and as as a law professor I'm very deeply aware of the fact that some law firms have revoked their offers of employment to students who had expressed solidarity with Palestinians or taken a position about what happened on October 7th so vulnerability I think is an important part of what's happening secondly I think that we do need to find ways of providing more rather than less context for the things that we do say I think there is a lot of course to be said for protests and and demonstrations play a hugely important role and in a moment like this one where avenues for challenging policy through for example primary elections are closed off by the lack of options that the political process affords you can see the need for protest but I also see how crucial it is that folks provide more context provide more explanation than a slogan typically allows and and I think too often on campuses we end up sort of speaking too briefly rather than at adequate length and that brings me to my last point which is that and maybe this is because I'm American and I'm a constitutional law professor but I whereas I I do think that we need to privilege civility I I think that we need to privilege more freedom and in terms of the discourse on campuses in a moment like this in view of the stakes I think university administrations need to ensure that students have opportunities to vent their concerns about policies that they feel are are morally bankrupt and I think there's been on many university campuses on the part of many university administrations too much restrictiveness on that front you mentioned context Omar and I wonder there's a one of our audience members Maya has a question it's been my experience in my journalism classrooms that my students are quite eager to to tackle the topic journalistically and and that's a that's great the challenge for me as a journalism journalism professor is unpacking some of the words that work their way into their their student journalistic work such as apartheid such as genocide Maya one of our audience members has a has a question about that word genocide how to do Omar and Mira feel about using the term genocide about what's happening in Gaza and I'd love to just hear your thoughts on unpacking a couple of those terms I'm not going to ask the law prof that question first because we could be here for a while so so Mira what do you think about that term genocide so the the good thing about the question a question that asks about those specific terms is that those terms unlike some other controversial terms let's say like settler cloning colonialism the terms apartheid and genocide are codified in international law so it becomes easier to say well let's look at the definitions together in fact I was at a dinner party the other night with some Israeli friends of friends and we pulled up the definition of genocide and Omar and I were discussing it just earlier today and part of the problem is that it's very very very broad because it talks about destruction of a population in whole or in part and it doesn't specify what part what percentage of the population needs to be destroyed in order to needs to be killed or murdered in order for it to classify as genocide but the key point with the genocide charge is it rests on intent and so when I look at the South what South Africa brought to the ICJ to the international court of justice by way of bringing charges against Israel remember one country can bring charges against another country if they're both members of the ICJ and that's what happened there and when they brought the charge of genocide against Israel their testimony had to establish intent and I think they did a reasonable case of doing that a reasonable job of doing that now we'll rest with the judges but what I do know is what I do feel confident in saying is that there have been genocidal statements by Israeli elected officials and that's coupled with two other things Israel's policy of mass starvation and Israel advocates will say no Israel is not intending to starve the population instead Hamas is diverting it but I don't think there's sufficient grounds to believe that Hamas is diverting food aid in any significant way and secondly we know that Israel in employed deployed a full siege right on October 7th and 8th of the Gaza Strip and so by then by the time that it it it softened the siege and started letting aid trucks in the amount coming in every day is not enough it's a fraction of what is necessary to sustain the Palestinian population and there's other things going on as well that we can get into so I think that it is reasonable to call it genocide I think it's not certain whether it's genocide and so I think in that way I would say I agree with people who use it and people who don't use it if that's a enough of a fence sitting answer what I don't agree with is people who feel that not using it is absolutely wrong or people who feel that using the term is absolutely wrong. One of the challenge of using it in the context of a journalistic piece is that of course there is a very technical definition which requires a fair amount of explanation and you will only have so many words in a in a news piece or a radio piece. Omar how do you respond when when when the term genocide comes up? I think that there's you know Miranisle trade places she offered kind of the legal framework and I think the legal framework is important but I think that when people are used alongside these days to describe what's happening in Gaza what they're also trying to do is to speak in a shorthand about the carnage that is unfolding and so I think what people are saying so this is a different question than whether a journalism student should use it in an article or how a journalism student should use it in an article but when people say you've got these manifold expressions of genocidal intent from senior government officials and from soldiers on the ground and from on TikTok and Reels regular Israelis and you combine that with the kinds of practices that Mira just pointed to and the scale of death which is unprecedented in the 21st century and really seen in recent years. Genocide is a term seems to fit now of course legally we'll have to get to in 10 but do I blame people for raising it no and do I think that there is a plausible case that that's exactly what's happening absolutely. Yeah Mira raised another term and I'm Anishinaabe and amongst my circle the conversation often that comes up is the term that Mira raised settler colonialism and I wonder again if I'll start with you Omar how do you navigate the use of that term in this debate. So I think that with regard to settler colonialism you have one has to sort of think about in whose based on whose experience that term is being considered right and so in terms of how Palestinians have experienced Zionism and the creation of Israel it's hard to think of a frame that is better than settler colonialism because the Palestinian experience has been one of a population facing from the 1890s forward a colonial enterprise European Jews settling in their land settling with a view towards establishing separate institutions moving toward the creation of a state that disenfranchised the local population and in a range through a range of different policies that are very reminiscent of what we see in North America reminiscent of what we see in Australia and in French Algeria we see disenfranchisement, dispossession and and the denial of self-determination. So from the Palestinian perspective it makes perfect sense when we look at the conflict the situation is with Palestine more broadly though when you back away and think about it from the perspective of Jewish experience I think the lens changes and so if you're thinking about it in terms of the experience of Jews in the early 20th century seeking a place of sanctuary unlike other colonial enterprises being folks who didn't always have a place to return to and in addition feeling a sense of connection to place then some of the other frames as a national conflict as a struggle over individual rights and a struggle for Jewish self-determination also come into play and so I think it's an appropriate label but I think it is not the only label that is appropriately used in this context. If I could ask and I'm just sharing another question from one of our audience members, Mira, related to this discussion about settler colonialism Dominique Marshall asks do you find the vocabulary in terms of the difficult discussions over truth and reconciliation here in Canada helpful for your own thinking and for some promise that Canadians who don't know the Middle East might understand what is happening in the Middle East better? For those who are trying to understand what's going on there who may not have had the opportunity to go to Israel-Palestine is that that lens of settler colonialism and the truth and reconciliation that were project that were embarked on here in Canada is that a helpful frame of reference? I think it can be very helpful now it's two sides of a sharp sword here. I once used it in an article when at back when I had a regular column in the national Canadian Jewish paper which no longer exists in the same form I brought up the parallels between the Israel-Palestine and experience and indigenous settler relations in Canada and I thought that that would calm my audience who find my criticisms of Israel overbaked I thought it would calm them because I would be saying well I'm not asking Israel to do anything different than I'm asking my own country to do vis-a-vis the indigenous population but it backfired and people got very very threatened by it and that became the end of my column but and I think also is because the word occupation appeared in the headline and that hadn't happened before and people got very threatened about the word occupation or we're not even debating that anymore so I think the key thing is this when we talk about settler colonialism in Israel we are talking more like Canada the US New Zealand Australia than we are about Algeria so a decolonized Israel won't and shouldn't imply pushing Jews out of Israel that would be ethnic cleansing and so for instance in Montreal I'm not I don't want to say which university it was because I don't want to get it wrong but an instructor at one of the universities in the city of Montreal apparently what I recall yelled at a student a Jewish student saying go back to where you came from that is very threatening offensive anti-Semitic etc etc etc so no one is calling for Jews to leave or if they are that is not what Omar and I advocate at all the idea of the settler colonial idea is to look at the structures of power that keep one ethnic group elevated at the expense of another ethnic group and that can come in terms of policies discriminatory policies it can come as it often does in the West Bank in terms of land expropriation expansion of settlements in the West Bank and it can come from Israel's lack of or Israel's having barred since 1948 Palestinians returning so that's also what makes it different from Canada US New Zealand Australia as we're talking about a refugee situation that refugees have not been allowed to return into Israel so there are some differences but again I value what Omar says and that it isn't the full story because the full story also involves a sense of competing nationalism that involves Jews taking themselves seriously joining the world stage as a nation like all others who tried to get a state and succeeded and it doesn't take into account even competing notions of indigeneity so in a typical settler colonial lens there's one indigenous group even though it is comprised of multiple nations in Canada, Métis, First Nations and Inuit in Israel there's the Palestinians who have a very solid claim to indigeneity but I think Jews have another claim to indigeneity as well so I don't tend to use the word indigenous in the context of Israel Palestine because it tends to operate as a trump card and I have a different vision about how justice can be had for all. We get into the discussion about the evolution of the term indigenous again just as complicated as talking about the legal definition of genocide. You've spoken a couple of times about the importance of you having shared values. And I want to just explore that a little bit more. You've both worked on a project called Land for All and the idea behind the project is that a two-state solution is workable as that there should be one homeland as a path for peace. And I wonder as we watch what the I mean Israel has experienced the greatest loss of civilian life on one day in its entire history and then on the other hand just a staggering upsetting number of deaths civilian deaths in Palestine going on right now. I wonder there's a question from Andreas Saral. I'll start with this with Omar. How do you see Palestinian politics evolving from this conflict? So there's so much potentially to say on that front. I think that the first thing I'd like to say is that how the international community operates in this moment will play a role in determining what Palestinian politics looks like going forward. In order to understand where it's headed it's important to sort of look a little bit backwards. The Palestinian national movement has been fragmented over the last number of years and that fragmentation is a result not only of the fact that the West Bank and Gaza Strip have been ruled respectively by two different factions Fetech and Hamas but also because as a result of an array of policies that Israel has intentionally pursued Palestinian political life has been fragmented in a range of other ways and so the ability of the Palestinian authority to exercise control over areas of the West Bank has been very substantially circumscribed so that the president exercises control over less than 20% and even that is subject to Israeli incursions and the sense that the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank has failed over the course of the last 20 years to provide for to achieve Palestinian freedom to create a space within which Palestinians can move freely can build their institutions has very profoundly undermined the legitimacy of the leadership and so as we think about going forward we've got to think about what steps we can take to facilitate the rebuilding of the Palestinian national movement to reconnect the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to enable the Palestine liberation organization which at a certain juncture was a crucial provided umbrella under which many different Palestinian factions would operate and a space for dialogue and decision making about what the future of Palestinians should be we need to similarly create space for the PLO to redevelop including a space for the Islamist movements including Hamas and Islamic Jihad within that structure so that they don't turn out to be spoilers that down the line prevent the realization of ideas like a land for all and so I think to the extent that the international community says to Palestinians like all other people it's your right to choose your leaders it's your right to have a space within which you are able to hold elections move freely live as citizens of your country if we facilitate all of that I think that the Palestinian national movement stands a real chance of resurrection what I'm afraid of is that the international community seems to be doing too little and and obviously not not very punctually and could prove the kinds of policies that are being pursued right now further create further fragmentation and deepen the attractiveness increase the attractiveness of extremist ideologies social media is never a good gauge of opinion there's an awful lot of barking that goes on but Mira if I could ask you the same question I mean you talked about having difficult debates with your family members and and certainly your your Facebook circle of Jewish Canadian and I'm sure Israeli Jewish friends as well when you advocate for a two-state solution I have seen you know the the accusation that that that is considered to be anti-Semitic what I mean how how difficult is it for you to have those conversations within the Jewish community that you that you represent yes it can be very difficult because I looking at who which group has the lion's share of the power and by the way I know in journalism school we all use the term lion's share incorrectly so like all the power but really the vast majority of the power between Israel and the Palestinians is the state of Israel backed by the US and so I in my public discussions I aim to do two things one is to um acknowledge the humanity of everybody and I will often talk about in articles that I've written in the walrus and elsewhere since October 7th talking about friends and family in Israel by name and talking about what they went through at the same time I talk about the vast disparity of power between Israel and the Palestinians and there is one group that can make change much more effectively than the other given that Israel has a state and the Palestinians don't and so people in often in my community tend to think that I'm putting all the quote-unquote blame on Israel and so this is gets to be very difficult in terms of that we're not always talking about blame but we're talking about what needs to happen in order to change the status quo and also I should just add that it's not a conventional two-state solution that I support and Omar is co-chair of the board of a land for all a movement known as a land for all two states one homeland and I'm on the American support groups during committee to support the efforts of a land for all which is a joint Israeli and Palestinian group and it's a modified two-state solution it it isn't is able to overcome two of the biggest stumbling blocks that the two-state solution the conventional version had founded on and that was Palestinian refugee return and the fate of the Israeli settlements in the West Bank so under this plan a land for all Israeli settlers could stay they would become residents of a state of Palestine and they would still vote for the Israeli parliament the Knesset and West Jerusalem Palestinian refugees could return to their cities and towns in Israel that in what is now become Israel they would be residents of the state of Israel and they would vote for Palestinian national elections in East Jerusalem or Ramallah or wherever the Palestinian capital ends up being and Palestinian citizens of Israel would remain as citizens of Israel they would not be denationalized they would not be forced to give up their rights. Thank you for clarifying that and and and we've got about five minutes left so I so I just want to I want to share and and we've got some some of our audience members are wondering if there will be a video for this yes we will be we're recording this right now and and we'll send post the video on our Carleton websites and and send it out to people that that are interested in hearing more about the conversation. Historian Ival Noah Harari was on cbc radio yesterday and and he had an an interesting comment to make about the Al-Haram Al-Sharif or or the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and he said we are he was using it as a as the power of story and and and how very much what is happening in in his argument was that there are two powerful stories that are that are being doing battle. He said essentially what is happening is people are fighting over a rock and and and if you think about all of this bloodshed that's happening over a rock then then it doesn't make a lot of sense if it's a sacred rock then it becomes a different story and you can see why people are fighting over it. I wondered as I heard that I wondered if what either one of you would think about that. I think the role of religion is important but I don't think it should be overstated and so I think that there are impediments to Palestinians and Israelis enjoying especially Palestinians given the power disparity that I mentioned earlier. There are impediments to Palestinians and Israelis but especially Palestinians enjoying a life of freedom and dignity and safety that are separate and transcend religion. So for example Palestinians in the West Bank are subject to IDF shooting them. There are hundreds of Palestinians who have died in the West Bank from IDF open fire just since October 7th and settler violence for which the IDF enables or returns a blind eye. There is lack of freedom of movement within the West Bank for Palestinians because of the Israeli web of occupation and checkpoints which serve to protect the settlements and separate the settlements from Palestinian communities. There is refugee millions five million refugees at least who are not have never been allowed to return and none of that and there are laws in Israel that discriminate against Palestinian citizens of Israel. And there's been a blockade on the Gaza Strip since 2007 and of course now the genocidal type war. So none of that has anything to do with rocks in any sacred sense. They have to do with real areas of territory that people need to physically exist because we are physical beings that need space that some degree of space anyway. So I think I would and I think it can be a little bit romantic or exciting for a scientist and historian like Harari to kind of have it all focused on rocks and it makes it sound like the groups are just irrational. But I think there are some very very legitimate claims that are embedded within international law and international ethics and just basic sense of decency of what people need to live fulfilling and safe lives. You hear the terms intractable. You hear the terms complex over and over again when it comes to this debate. I wonder if we could wrap up our evening this way on a little bit of hope. You know when I look at the historical examples of atrocities that happened in Rwanda, the long running conflict in Ireland, West and East Germany, South Africa, those of all conflicts which also had difficult and complex histories were also described as being intractable and complex, I wonder for both of you what gives you hope? I mean this has been a terrible five months and it doesn't look like things are getting better. Are we going to see a continuation of this and yet another generation of conflict or will peacemakers emerge? Omar let me start with you. So it's hard to be hopeful in a moment like this but I think one has to both cling to hope and find ways of channeling it in constructive directions. We've been talking a little bit today about a land for all, the movement that both Mira and I are involved with and as Mira mentioned I'm one of the members of the joint board and this is a board that's comprised of an equal number of Palestinians from all across Israel-Palestine and of Israeli Jews and the board met for the first time on October 10th, three days obviously after October 7th. One could expect that in a moment like that a meeting between Palestinians and Israelis would be filled with recriminations but instead it was filled with sympathy and solidarity and the sense that there was more crucial and urgent work to do than ever and I think the reason why the atmosphere was different at that meeting than in many other contexts in which Israelis and Palestinians have encountered each other since October 7th and for that matter beforehand was because we had agreed to a political vision that was responsive to the needs and aspirations of both peoples. It wasn't a compromise vision that like the Oslo version of the two-state solution involved each people giving up things that were fundamental to it instead it took seriously our the fact that both of us are attached to all the length and breadth of Israel-Palestine and also that issues like refugees and their right of return can't just be wished away and so it gave me hope to see that when you engage the issues on the table seriously that people of good faith can find a way together to move forward and that and that feels hopeful even if not necessarily a basis for optimism at this moment. Last word to you Mira. I founded a little group on Facebook a couple of years ago and it was for Jews who felt connected to Israel but also wanted to engage in full throated Palestine solidarity and since October 7th the numbers have doubled of this group it's right now just on Facebook but one day I hope it will exist out in the world so we went from 500 to nearly a thousand and it's called Drachim which is the name of my favorite Israeli rock album from the 70s so it's really I mean it's I think we're all living a delicate balancing act in some ways of maintaining our connect trying to maintain our personal and communal relationships while speaking hard truths at times. I want to thank you both for for sharing your thoughts this evening it's we talk about hope it's inspiring the the the collaboration and the friendship that you that you have had and and continue to have and and also your your willingness and determination to keep keep on sharing the lessons of that so so thank you both Omar and Mira for for spending the evening with us and and and I know there's so many of in our audience who who have been enjoying this conversation thank you to everyone who who who took time out of your out of your busy evenings to to join us on this Carlton Zoom and and thank you to the the Faculty of Public Affairs at Carlton for for hosting the evening it is incredibly important we we we we we pay lip service to dialogue with this with this topic it can be very difficult but it's so important that we have these conversations and and I want to thank everyone who joined us this evening Miigwech and again we'll be sharing the the video when in a couple of days once it's all been processed and and and please do feel free to share it with your friends and family so that they can continue on the conversation thanks so much for joining us thank you thank you