September 23, 2024

We are writing to express our deep disappointment and concern regarding the recent session hosted by University of Alberta’s Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry (FoMD) on September 9, 2024. Ostensibly organized to raise awareness about antisemitism, indeed a worthy goal, reviewing its content clearly exposes its hidden agenda of silencing and intimidating voices critical of the State of Israel by falsely smearing these voices as antisemitic.

This happens when to date, more than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli occupation in Gaza. Israel destroyed more than 80% of Gaza’s schools and 70% of universities and colleges. Israel also killed close to 500 healthcare workers, and destroyed 31 out of Gaza’s 36 hospitals. Gaza witnessed its first case of polio in 25 years due to Israel’s genocide and destruction of the healthcare system and now has the largest cohort of pediatric amputees in history.

The FoMD went forward with the session despite concerns raised about the event speakers. These concerns were serious enough to prompt speakers at a previously announced sister event on Islamophobia to cancel their talk in protest. Both sessions were advertised as tools to educate students given the ‘continued conflict in the Middle East’. Although there may be an intersection between anti-Palestinian racism (APR)  and Islamophobia, they are distinct forms of oppression. APR specifically targets Palestinians and their narratives, often denying their identity and rights in relation to historic and occupied Palestine.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) was concerned enough to order Israel to “prevent genocide”. The UN’s Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese’s report found that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating the commission of […] acts of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza has been met. On the receiving end of this genocide are the Palestinians who the FoMD clearly and intentionally chose to not include in this so called “educational” attempt. Given the recent event of anti-Palestinian racism that your office is well aware of, this is truly disturbing as it appears to constitute a trend to erase and exclude Palestinians and Palestinian voices.

In their presentation, the speakers clearly and repeatedly equated antisemitism with the criticism of Israel and Zionism, a settler-colonial political ideology that calls for an apartheid state where Israelis have more rights than others. Israel was mentioned 56 times, zionism/zionist was mentioned 17 times. The weaponization of antisemitism to silence voices is not new as outlined by this report from Independent Jewish Voices. However, FoMD chose to officially condone such silencing both by sanctioning this content while not even inviting Palestinians to speak about APR. By doing so, FoMD not only adopts the widely criticized IHRA working definition of antisemitism but also promotes an environment of intimidation and lack of safety for Palestinians and their allies.

Below are but a few of the harmful examples, with time stamps, of the propaganda and misinformation presented at the session:

• 00:57–00:58: “From the River to the Sea Palestine will be free sounds supportive and benign, but it finds its origins among terrorist groups advocating for the destruction of the State of Israel and pushing its entire populace into the sea.”
• 0:55–0:56: “That the struggle against Israel and Zionists is the struggle against the great evil in the world. By this logic, the reason that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the most important one in the world is because Israel and the Zionists are the great evil plaguing the world.”
• 00:53–00:54: “Disagreements with the decisions of the Israeli government is more and more expanding into discrimination and hate of people from Israel. We saw this with boycotts of academics from Israel or with ties to Israel.” 
• 00:52–00:53: “Being a Zionist doesn’t mean taking a perspective on the current Israeli government or its actions, nor does it mean having an opinion on the existence of a Palestinian state. The problem is that people do not respect Zionists’ own definitions of what it means to be a Zionist.”
• 00:50–00:51 “Ask yourself, am I accusing Israel using classic anti-Jewish conspiracy theories? To say ‘Israel murders Palestinian babies on purpose,’ is just to replace the word Jews with the word Israel in anti-Semitic rhetoric that has been leveled against Jews since medieval times.”
• 00:50–00:51: “One of the ways in which Antisemitism is expressed and masqueraded as okay in plain sight, is through the demonization and redefinition of Zionism that it means the person is pro settler-colonialism, that they want to displace Palestinians.”

We are very concerned that FoMD chose to further perpetuate anti-Palestinian racism in the middle of a genocide. This not only violates the university’s commitment to EDI principles of antiracism, justice, and anti-colonialism; but also follows a worrying trend of exclusion and  erasure of voices of Palestinians and their allies on campus.

We therefore urge the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Alberta to:

1. Cancel all future sessions with the three aforementioned speakers.
2. Organize an anti-Palestinian racism session to educate students and faculty members on anti-Palestinian racism and its impact on our faculty and our communities.