"I feel like I am in exile in my own city and my own community," says Sharryn Aiken the morning after a conference she helped organize and for which she was vilified by her Jewish community.

A Torontonian, she teaches law at Queen's University in Kingston. It took her and three academics at Osgoode Hall Law School 18 months to mount the three-day event, Israel/Palestine: Mapping Models of Statehood and Paths to Peace.

It was to explore, among other things, the notion of one state in which Jews and Arabs would live as equal citizens, sans their religious identities. The idea, not new, is anathema to those who see it as spelling the end of Israel as a Jewish state.

That it was to be debated at York University made it worse, given the history of toxic relations between pro- and anti-Israeli groups on the campus, especially during the annual Israel Apartheid Week.

Charges were hurled that the conference would be anti-Semitic.

The Stephen Harper government ordered the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SHHRC) to rethink its modest $19,750 federal subsidy.

Pressure was put on York University to pull the plug. But it refused.

SHHRC stood by its decision.

About 200 people from Canada, the U.S., Israel and Europe came. A quarter were Jewish. The dialogue was civil, Aiken reported from the meeting, which was closed to the media.

She said that many delegates, "first and foremost, the Israelis," were outraged at the attempts to ban the meeting. Among them: Meron Benvenisti, deputy mayor of Jerusalem under Teddy Kollek (1971-78), now a columnist for Haaretz, the liberal Israeli paper.

He opposes the one-state solution. He also opposes the notion of not talking about it. Of the Canadian critics of the conference, he told me: "If they want to be more patriotic than me, I have no use for them ... I am not going to take any lessons about Israel from people living here ... It's hypocritical of them to use my national flag to stop dialogue."





FROM THE START, Aiken and her co-organizers – Bruce Ryder and Susan Drummond, professors at Osgoode, and Mazen Masri, a PhD candidate at the school – knew that they might draw criticism.

So they set up a high-powered advisory panel of 11, four of them Israelis. Besides Benvenisti, there were professors from Hebrew and Haifa universities.

"I am not naive," she said. "To allay anxieties, I did an outreach and met various Jewish groups" – to no avail.

The Jewish Defense League was "very much opposed, from the get-go," as expected. Others objected as well: the Canadian Council for Israel and Jewish Advocacy, Hasbara, B'nai Brith, United Jewish Appeal Federation of Greater Toronto, etc.

The simmering controversy burst into the open when Science Minister Gary Goodyear asked SSHRC to revisit its promised grant.

The Canadian Association of University Teachers, representing 65,000 academics, was appalled. The unprecedented political interference is "not something we have seen in this country since the McCarthy period," in the 1950s.

At York, president Mamdouh Shoukri issued a statement May 21 affirming academic freedom. He also noted that the university opposes an academic boycott of Israel as "antithetical to the very purpose of a university."

On June 5, Marshall Cohen, chair of the board of governors, and Paul Cantor, chair-designate, joined him in another statement:

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"These issues are discussed on a daily basis in all parts of the world, especially in the Middle East, including Israel. There is no reason why they should not be discussed at a university in Canada."

The York senate asserted the right of "universities to organize and host academic conferences free from government intervention."

Meanwhile, Aiken was battling B'nai Brith. It had said one of the speakers was a Holocaust denier, attributing a statement to him he never made. "We had to get a lawyer to have that defamatory statement withdrawn," and have B'nai Brith apologize on its website.





OVERALL, Aiken is left with "a deep sadness. I received a lot of hate mail. The extent of the vilification has been very painful ...

"I am not a self-hating Jew ... I am not anti-Zionist. I care about a continued safe place for Jews in Israel."

She understands "the dynamics of diaspora," where the more distant people are from a homeland or a spiritual homeland, the more orthodox they tend to be.

"What is specific to the Jewish diaspora is that Israel has been instrumentalized by mainstream Jewish organizations as the primary marker of Jewish identity. Any criticism of Israel is perceived and interpreted as anti-Semitic."

Thus, "critical dialogue becomes deeply threatening ... What is routinely discussed in Israel becomes a problem in Toronto.

"That's terribly wrong. In the long run, it will be counterproductive. Thoughtful Jews would be put off, especially the young."





Haroon Siddiqui is the Star's editorial page editor emeritus. His column appears Thursday and Sunday.

hsiddiq@thestar.ca