By Judy Haiven
In 1887 the Victoria School of Art and Design in Halifax was the first art school established in the British Empire. Today it is known as the Nova Scotia School of Art and Design (NSCAD) and it’s doubtless the first art school to ban a two-day weekend teach-in which features academics speaking about what’s going on in Palestine.
For weeks NSCAD students and their student union, SUNSCAD, have been planning an information and action two-day event in support of Palestinian rights. The Al Zeitoun Weekend is named after the Al Zeitoun tent encampment at Dalhousie University which stood in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza from May to August 2024. The Al Zeitoun encampment joined more than a dozen other encampments at universities across Canada that opposed Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Tenters and supporters demanded their institution divest from investments and programs that support Israel, and called for a ceasefire.
SUNSCAD had been assured they could use the auditorium at NSCAD; suddenly in the last 24 hours that permission was pulled because of “safety” concerns.
Wait a minute – how unsafe are Jews (I presume they are the people who feel unsafe among critics of Israel) on campus during a two-day workshop on Gaza?
NSCAD tries to silence a Jewish prof who criticizes Israel
How unsafe is it to have speakers including Dr El Jones, former Halifax Poet Laureate, author, activist and professor at Mount Saint Vincent University to speak on student organizing? Or, ironically, Dr Larry Haiven, a Jew, a founding member of Independent Jewish Voices Canada and a professor emeritus from Saint Mary’s University who will speak on “The Suppression of Free Speech on Palestine”?
NSCAD is trying to silence these two academics as well as Dr Ajay Parasram from Dalhousie University who will speak on “Decolonization in Palestine and Canada” and Dr Jon Langdon from St Francis Xavier University who will speak on “Learning in Struggle” and the potential of movements learning from each other.
You need to know that NSCAD has fewer than 1,000 students spread over studio space in several buildings in downtown and at the port in Halifax. My guess is that two to five percent of the student body is Jewish and/or pro-Israel. I doubt if any of them complained about the weekend.
Clearly the real concerns come from NSCAD’s administrators and board. They have all but admitted they don’t want the Al Zeitoun Weekend because they are worried that the weekend will spark an occupation of the art school. The organizers have vigorously assured NSCAD that they have no intent of occupying the buildings. So, this fear is an excuse – an excuse to curtail and silence criticism of Israel.
Whatever happened to free speech?
Well, as I’ve published in several other accounts of the clampdown on free speech against Israel, for the “Official” Jews plus the politically and economically powerful – those in authority and those who unquestioningly support Israel – there is no free speech when it comes to criticism of Israel’s genocide against Palestinians.
Suddenly, no institution will allow it. We saw the court injunctions (sought and decreed) to dismantle the encampments at the University of Toronto, McGill University and University of Waterloo. We saw the violent police take-downs of encampments at the University of Calgary, University of Alberta and other tent-ins across the country. As Osgoode Hall (York University) law professor Bruce Ryder warned, the universities have “engaged in kind of a mass violation of protesters’ constitutional rights.” Now it’s NSCAD’s turn to shut the door on civil liberties.
Two shocking events in one week
The last week of October, two shocking events drew my attention.
Mondoweiss reported and verified that Israel is using facial recognition technology to compile a data bank so the IDF (Israeli Defence Forces) can more easily attack civilians, destroy what’s left of their homes and identify Palestinians for arrest, forced displacement and even field execution. As Amnesty noted in a May 2023 report, “In the old city of Hebron in the southern West Bank, Israeli surveillance cameras use a facial recognition system called Red Wolf on Palestinians who pass through checkpoints in the city. ‘Their face is scanned, without their knowledge or consent, and compared with biometric entries in databases which exclusively contain information about Palestinians.’”
Frankly, this makes it easier to target and kill innocent Palestinians whom Israel believes are part of Hamas or are “human animals.” But everyone in Gaza, according to right-wing and even centrist Israeli politicians, “is Hamas.” According to Dr James Zogby, president of the Arab-American Institute, “To go from this [falsehood] to justifying killing innocent Palestinian civilians because ‘all Palestinians are Hamas’ and therefore responsible for their actions is both racist and unsupported by facts.”
Handbook was supposed to combat antisemitism; instead, it itself antisemitic
The other event was the Canadian government’s release of the Canadian Handbook on the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism.
The handbook, mandated by Prime Minister Trudeau three years ago, was researched and published by Deborah Lyons, Canada’s Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism. While the handbook is supposed to be used to combat antisemitism, in itself it is antisemitic according to a media release by three Jewish groups – Independent Jewish Voices Canada, the United Jewish People’s Order (UJPO) and the Jewish Faculty Network. Notably, the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Working Definition) conflates criticism of Israel with racism against Jews as a whole.
As the media release by three prominent Jewish organizations points out, the “IHRA makes it impossible to fight real antisemitism while also engaging in truthful political speech about Israel’s policies. We call for the government to immediately retract the handbook, and for all Canadians to refuse its implementation as it is unfit for addressing antisemitism and poses major risks for advocates of Palestinian human rights.
“In this way, the pro-Israel handbook promotes the anti-Palestinian racist idea that virtually all Palestinians and their supporters are inherently antisemitic if they accurately describe Israel’s ongoing crimes and oppose the ideology of Zionism.”
The media statement goes further,
“In our current moment, the IHRA definition will be used to stifle necessary discourse and contribute to the anti-Palestinian racism that allows the international community to tolerate genocide. The adoption of this handbook poses grave risks to all Canadians who advocate for international human rights.”
This is precisely what is happening at NSCAD. Lack of free expression and the stifling of discourse, which are the hallmarks of the pro-Israel lobby in this country. Their perspective is that genocide is not happening in Gaza – where more than 43,000 Palestinians have died, 10,000 have been buried alive under rubble created by Israel’s relentless bombings, 3,000 children have become amputees or double amputees, and millions are homeless.
But what is most important to universities nationwide, and now NSCAD, is to pretend that Israel is not committing genocide. The fiction that it is the Palestinians who are the terrorists, not Israel, is no longer “cutting it.”
Judy Haiven is a Halifax member of Independent Jewish Voices Canada. She can be reached at jhaiven <at> gmail.com
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