PETER MANSBRIDGE: Montreal's Concordia University is a long way from the Middle East, but the Israeli/Palestinian conflict can leap great distances, igniting emotions and exposing divisions. That reality is hard to escape at Concordia especially today. The university released a report into a violent protest last year before a planned speech by Benjamin Netanyahu, now Israel's Foreign Minister. The university admits making mistakes and promised new guidelines for political debate. Still, repairing the rift will be difficult. As Amanda Pfeffer learned, Concordia is a campus of discord.
AMANDA PFEFFER (Reporter): Montreal, September 9th, 2002, the downtown campus of Concordia University.
NOAH SARNA: People were saying there's a riot outside. People are beating up, spitting on, harassing people trying to get in.
LEITH MAROUF: We were able to make Arab and Muslim students feels that they have their dignity.
PFEFFER: Politics of the Middle East are threatening to fundamentally change one of Canada's most liberal universities.
AARON MATE: I'm thinking, man, this has really, really gotten out of hand.
PFEFFER: It's become a microcosm of some of the conflict taking place in Israel. Concordia means harmony in Latin. The university was founded when a Jesuit college in the west end of Montreal, Loyola, was joined with the controversial downtown university Sir George William in 1974. Its downtown campus always reflected the demographics of the city in which it was built. Every wave of immigration to hit Montreal have also been represented on the campus and today that influx is from the Arab world bringing Concordia's Arab student population to 5,000 out of the 26,000 students. This prayer room for male Muslim students is one of the ways in which Concordia has tried to adapt to changing cultural and religious needs of some of its students. But the demographic changes didn't affect student politics until a controversial student council was voted in two years ago. Leith Marouf was elected onto that council in the spring of 2001. It was a coalition of pro-Palestinian and left wing activists joining forces. Born in Jordan, he saw his role as fighting perceived racism against Arab and Muslim students.
MAROUF: I had to highlight the fact that my identity and my views had the right to be heard and Arab and Muslim students' identity and views had the right to be heard, whether the administration likes it, whether it's donors like it or not, and whether the board of governors likes it or not.
PFEFFER: So out of frustration, Marouf took things one step further leading him into conflict with the administration for spray painting graffiti.
MAROUF: So I did in broad daylight go to a building that was going to be demolished and wrote on it end the Israeli apartheid, free Palestine.
PFEFFER: Marouf was expelled for vandalism and spent most of the year fighting to get reinstated. He succeeded and forged alliances with others on the student executive. Aaron Mate has joined forces with Leif Marouf. He's a Jew and a Palestinian sympathizer and a member of this year's student executive. Mate says he's proud of the alliances the union has struck.
MATE: I see it as a little diverse progressive community with a lot of different groups going on doing different things. I see it as a model for other universities in that there's been a coalition of a wide variety of groups that have formed together to advance progressive issues, to raise public awareness. They've done a very good job at doing so.
PFEFFER: Some of the million dollars in dues collected by the student union paid for this calendar or agenda last year. On a page showing a board meeting being bombed by planes, it says this is not an agenda called uprising. It's an agenda for uprising. A poem reads intifada, out of your houses and into the streets, intifada, hear the calls, the cries, the voices screaming, intifida take arms for revolution. Professor Graeme Decarie has been teaching history at Concordia for almost 30 years. He was appalled by what he saw in the student agenda.
GRAEME DECARIE: The reality is, of course, there are Jews who are critical of what Israel is doing. There are a lot of Jews who are very critical, especially of Israel. It is possible to criticize these things. Having said that, you do have people on this campus in that student council and among some of the Arab groups who are anti-Israel and they are anti-Jewish. I remember reading their student handbook of a year ago and it looked like something published by the Hitler youth.
PFEFFER: Many students and staff see the student union executive as being very critical of the state of Israel by their support for the Palestinian cause. Students face a gauntlet of anti-Israel posters, at every escalator in this building and the more the pro-Palestinians push their agenda, the more the pro-Israelis fell compelled to strike back. Noah Sarna is co-president of Concordia Hillel, a group representing Jewish students. He says up until last year, he saw Hillel as more of a social and cultural group than a political one. Sarna grew up in an orthodox religious family spending his summers at a Zionist youth camp. He's tired, he says, of being on the defensive on campus.
SARNA: It feels like a punch in the face. It feels like someone who's deliberately making something that you care about into something that is the opposite of anything good.
PFEFFER: It was into this climate that the Asper Foundation decided to bring former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to speak in Montreal. The foundation is funded by Izzy Asper, owner of Canwest Global Corporation. He'd paid for Netanyahu's four city speaking tour to Canada and asked Hillel if it wanted to have the Israeli political speak at Concordia. Netanyahu has been characterized as a hard liner by his opponents. Layla specifically chose to come to Concordia to do her Ph.D. because of the pro-Palestinian activism. She's one of the students who saw Netanyahu's proposed visit as a provocation to the Arab and Muslim students on campus.
LAYLA: Netanyahu is a particularly controversial figure within the Palestinian/Israeli community. I personally think of him as a war criminal. There are many people who share that opinion. So that when Netanyahu came to visit Concordia, it was the catalyst that sparked this kind of protest.
PFEFFER: Concordia rector Frederick Lowy could not see a way to avoid the imminent confrontation.
FREDERICK LOWY: Like it or not, he was a democratically elected Prime Minister of a democratic country. Indeed he was also democratically defeated and left office. And obviously some people at some point felt that he was a legitimate states person. Indeed he was former Israeli ambassador to the United States. He had a number of postings throughout the world. For us at Concordia, to say that he's not acceptable as a speaker just because some people don't like his policies, to me, is unacceptable.
PFEFFER: By the time Benjamin Netanyahu left Montreal's Ritz-Carleton Hotel for the short ride to Concordia University, a clash was imminent.
MAROUF: Concordia was in a situation where if they refused, they have a history of a outspoken pro-Palestinian campus student body, but if they refused, they would say that they are biased. And if they don't refuse, they know that there will be a reaction from the students.
PFEFFER: All sides prepared for the worst. The aims were clear, use the opportunity to create mayhem and stop Netanyahu from speaking.
MAROUF: We were able to mobilize the students. All entrances were blockaded to the building. We made sure that there was a breach of security by having those demonstrators inside the Hall building. We made sure that the message is that this is our space and this war criminal is not welcome in our space.
PFEFFER: Protestors occupied the escalators. They chanted slogans and refused to move.
LAYLA: Seemed to me a provocative measure purposefully designed to elicit a response which he got.
PFEFFER: Students pounded on the window as they saw the demonstrators take over the space. With riot police at the ready, violence seemed inevitable. One of the first arrested was Aaron Mate. After that things went from bad to worse. Some say it was the frustration at Mate's arrest that led to the resulting mayhem and Concordia's newfound reputation as a Gaza "U". As Layla fled the escalator, the police attempted to restore order. Now there would be no way of ever going back. In the aftermath, everyone began examining what had gone wrong and who to blame.
SARNA: I understand the right of people and the political position of people to oppose him, to protest his speaking and I understand that one of the things, and I understand criticism about him, and lots of them I found it very legitimate. Not enough to riot but legitimate position. If you don't want to listen to him, then stand outside and say you don't like him. That's fine.
PFEFFER: The measures used to restore order were almost as controversial as the demonstration. In an attempt to put the genie back in the bottle, the administration and the university's board of governors imposed a moratorium prohibiting public discussions of the Middle East. The administration dubbed it a cooling off period.
LOWY: The Hall building has been a seething caldron until the calming, the cooling off period. Okay. Now when people criticize what we did, I give them the right to criticize but frequently they're criticizing from a position of ignorance. And look, one has to do what one feels is right.
PFEFFER: After two months it was expected the moratorium had put things back on an even keel. But everyone was in for a surprise. With the moratorium lifted, the Jewish student group Hillel went on the offensive with posters like these at its information table. Concordia student union used its powers to freeze funding for the group on the grounds that it was exhibiting racist material.
DECARIE: What happens in a fight is that the two people fighting each other come to resemble each other. When you have a war and one side does atrocities and the other side does them back, it's hard to tell after a little while who the villain is. And if this thing allows, if they allow this thing to go on too far, Hillel is going to become very much in its thinking like the Palestinians are and then we're going to be in real trouble. That's why this thing has to be stopped soon.
PFEFFER: With their funding frozen, organizers of Hillel asked for a show of support for the Hanukah celebrations. Being Concordia that meant riot police and political controversy. With the potential for political debate, Leif Marouf and some of the supporters decided to crash the party once again upping the ante. There to support Marouf, Aaron Mate. People like Noah Sarna say they have a problem with Mate's support of the Palestinian cause, both as a fellow Jew and is one of the elected representatives on student council.
SARNA: It's not just treating equally the students that they represent, it's, there's been a community that's been put at a disadvantage whose rights have been attacked and it feels uncomfortable. Forget about being a Jew, but as a representative do something. But all the more so as a Jew, do something and they haven't done that.
PFEFFER: For Aaron Mate, this is a question of human rights and for him, that's a universal right.
MATE: Whenever I can thing back to what I'm doing and why I'm doing it, which is standing up for elementary values of human rights, you know, I don't have any qualms about what I'm doing.
PFEFFER: Aaron Mate is facing criminal charges and possibly expulsion from Concordia as the university cracks down on 12 students being responsible for all of this. Hearings to determine penalties for the 12 accused start on January 20th when the first six will be judged by a committee of their peers.
MATE: It's not worth anything to compromise their beliefs and what they believe in especially something as strong as opposing someone like Netanyahu and something as important as asserting the rights of people, you know, especially Palestinian who are assert themselves. So I don't mind, you know, if I'm going to be expelled for that, I really hope I'm not. I don't mind going out like that.
PFEFFER: Hillel's executive meanwhile decided to take a stand against the student union for cutting their funding. They chose the last meeting held before the Christmas break to make a point. Naomi Sarna, Noah's sister spoke on their behalf.
NAOMI SARNA: I urge everyone in this room, everyone with any sense of democratic values and fundamental rights to walk out with me. You don't need to stand for this. Personally I will not.
(APPLAUSE)
PFEFFER: Sarna says his group a year ago was only political has been forced to become more militant.
SARNA: They should not be using our money, money of Concordian under-grad students to fund their private views and to express them consistently on a persistent ideological line on our campus. That money that we use to pay them, that we use to fund the student union should not go to politics no matter what the view.
PFEFFER: The students are back from their holidays and sure to get back into the news. Hillel has invited another Israeli speaker to campus. This time it's Deputy Prime Minister Natan Sharansky. As the minister responsible for housing and construction, his role includes the building of Jewish settlements in Gaza in the west bank. In the pro-Palestinian will most likely want to voice their objections to his presence. For The National, I'm Amanda Pfeffer in Montreal.