Dartmouth Student Writes on Anti-Israeli Groups

In yesterday’s Opinion column of The Dartmouth, Paul Lazarow ’13 wrote an intelligent, logical defense of Israel from collegiate groups aimed at portraying Israel as an “apartheid regime.” Lazarow specifically points to Students for Justice in Palestine, an organization which began at the perpetual protest that is UC-Berkeley and has an organization here at Dartmouth. His column comes days after the Florida Atlantic Univerisity’s Students for Justice in Palestine put eviction notices on two-hundred-plus Jewish student’s doors.

As anything that has come out of that exceptionally liberal campus, the activist group aims to bring attention to a problem without any solution, reasonable or not. The organization looks “to amplify those voices working against injustice” in the “apartheid regime that has consolidated itself in the West Bank, Gaza, Jerusalem, and 1967 Israel.” 

Lazarow points to the Israeli government that has equal voting rights for all, active Arab memebers of the Israeli government, and the Israeli constitution that states, “[Israel] will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants … It will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants,” all of which point to Israel as an active democracy.

Lazarow calls for the separation of the Dartmouth connection to SJP, saying, “No Dartmouth student group should tread in the spheres of hate and discrimination…Freedom of speech is a right worth protecting. But is a group like SJP really illustrative of the very values of tolerance and respect that a school like Dartmouth holds dear?”

–George Mendoza