Students protest former Israeli navy officer
Image: Dr Yoaz Hendel. Image: KAZ
By Tang Li
A group of students from the Sydney University Muslim Students’ Association (SUMSA) organised an impromptu protest against a former Israeli Navy Officer at the University of Sydney last Thursday.
The Australasian Union of Jewish Students (AUJS) hosted a talk by Dr Yoaz Hendel, head of the Institute for Zionist Strategies and former adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Dr Hendel was a Navy Seal during the 2008 – 09 war on Gaza that left approximately 1,400 Palestinians dead.
Students were angered by this decision and and resolved to protest the speaker event.
“The protest was the manifestation of weeks of tension between the hard-right propagandists in AUJS and the pro-Palestinian community at the University,” said Fahad Ali, President of Students for Justice in Palestine.
“The event was exemplary of AUJS’s contempt for decency and dialogue. We knew that the event would always be a forum for hardline right-wing Zionists, so attempting to engage in discussion was never one of our aims,” he said.
The President of the Sydney University Islamic Society said that despite AUJS entertaining a “war criminal” on campus, the protest was entirely peaceful.
“We simply explained the facts of the recent war and left as a group,” he said.
AUJS was barred from putting up campaign posters which compared the massacre of civilians in Gaza to the petty rivalry between Universities in Australia.
President of the Sydney University Socialist Alternative club, Omar Hassan, argued that AUJS should not be hosting soldiers who “literally have blood on their hands”.
“Encouragingly, there were very few people attending the forum who were not part of the protest, so it seems that students at Sydney University are not interested in listening to Zionist propaganda,” he said.
However, Dr Hendel and AUJS condemned the actions by the protestors for disrupting an event organised to simply inform its members.
“The people who sit here and shout are not liberals. They think they are helping human rights but they are not,” Dr Hendel said after the protestors left.
“Tonight’s antics show once again that these people are more concerned with being disruptive and detrimental to the public dialogue than reaching peaceful solutions,” said Matthew Lesh, AUJS Political Affairs Director.
