A fair amount of controversy was in the air last week as the director general of Peace Now, Yariv Oppenheimer, addressed a crowd at the Hillel House in Montreal.
Oppenheimer, who was joined for the Montreal session with Waleed Ziad, a political analyst and former Yale University activist, is currently on a national tour of Canada sponsored by Hillel and National Jewish Campus Life. Speaking on how to become active on campus and in cities, Oppenheimer generally avoided the political issues his organization supports, although he did use his organization as the foundation for his examples.
“We are not making a lot of effort to try to convince people who think the total opposite [Of what we do],” said Oppenheimer. “We are looking at the public that we focus on, the people who think like Peace Now, but those who aren’t doing anything about it…our goal in Peace Now is not to convince people to become Left Wing, but our goal is to take people that think like Peace Now and mobilize them into action.”
Ziad, who was at the session to speak about his experiences at Yale University offered various techniques on how to improve relationships between Jews and Muslims on campus. For Ziad, it was the events of September 11th, 2001 that proved to be the turning point in relations between the two groups. “It suddenly dawned on many students, like shock therapy, that our communities are essentially not very different,” said Ziad, asserting “The key to reverting this trend [of anger and hostility] is fostering cultural, economic and even religious ties wrapping it up with really effective marketing.”
This working relationship eventually translated into the creation of a group called Jews and Muslims, whose goal was “To create a space where Muslims and Jews can come every week to build a lasting relationship, with the hope that one day they could tackle relevant problems.” Although now a graduate, Ziad said that J.A.M. continues to grow on campuses throughout the United States, and that students are invited to receive training on how to successfully grow their chapter of J.A.M. much like the original in New Haven.
The question and answer session sparked one heated argument when Oppenheimer said Israel should begin peace talks with Syria, but was mostly calm.
Despite the efforts made by Oppenheimer to leave politics out of the session, some attendees still questioned why Peace Now was given a forum to speak by NJCL and Hillel Montreal. The President of NJCL, Richard Diamond, explained that all views should be heard. “NJCL supports speakers who are on all stages of the spectrum. Our students reflect views from all over the spectrum,” he said, adding that “Having a stance which includes the Palestinian point of view is not necessarily anti-Israeli…Peace Now is not anti-Israel.”
Sam Langleben, a McGill Hillel representative, agreed with Diamond, and said that Hillel has to offer events from both the right and left wing. “We do run events that affiliate themselves with the Jewish Right Wing, with the Zionist Right Wing,” he said, adding “This was to breakaway from that, to reach out to a side of the community that we don’t always do, we thought it would be a great idea to try an event such as this one.”
Student Dafna Wisbaum said she did not agree with Oppenheimer’s views and parts of his speech, but understood why Hillel felt that it was important to have him speak. “I didn’t agree with what he was saying about peace with Syria or returning the Golan Heights…[Also] he made it sound like Peace Now was a very manipulative organization, trying to attract members,” said Dafna Wisbaum, a McGill student, noting “however, I still think it was good [For Hillel] to have him speak, so people can at least hear what he had to say.”