A group of Israeli students visited French university campuses last week. i24News
reports on their impressions:
On French campuses, the students said, prejudices abound. Thus, "Zionists" designates a people, a nationality, or simply a variant of the "fascist" slur. "Jewish," they discovered, stands for a religion, not a people; all Jews live on stolen land; all Jews are Israelis and all Israelis are Jews; all Israelis are soldiers and consequently have killed Palestinian children voluntarily. The students noted that on all the campuses they found that the language used to describe the Arab-Israeli conflict is the same -- a crude lexicon that seems to have been shaped by the media.
"At Tolbiac, a student gave me a menacing look after he spat on the leaflet I handed him," recalled Batsheva, a member of the delegation who hails from Tel Aviv. "But little by little, he realized he did not know everything." Batsheva said the initially unpleasant exchange ended with a photo session with the speaker and other students at Tolbiac who finally agreed to listen.
(...)
After seven days on French campuses, the Israeli students were left with mixed impressions. "You have to ignore anti-Semitic slurs completely," said Perle, from Jerusalem. "I was branded a Nazi four times this week, I was told to go back to the gas chambers."
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