Inspired by a 2016 incident in which Hasbara Fellowships was excluded from a campus event because of its “ties to Israel,” the advocacy group launched a legal task force to connect Canadian Jewish and pro-Israel students with some of the country’s best lawyers.
Robert Walker, the Canadian director of the organization, said the John & Rose Ziner Memorial Legal Task Force is the only group in Canada that offers free legal aid to students.
Walker explained that the idea for the task force came about after a conflict with the Student Association at Durham College and University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT) and the UOIT Faculty Association.
Last February, Hasbara Fellowships responded to an invitation by UOIT’s student association to apply for a table at a Social Justice Week event to promote the Hasbara Fellowships’ “Israel Peace Week” program.
Walker said he received a rejection email that said since the student association passed a motion endorsing the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement in January, and because Hasbara Fellowships “seems closely tied to the State of Israel… it would be against the motion to provide any type of resources to your organization.”
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In July, Hasbara Fellowships filed a complaint with the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal (OHRT) against the UOIT’s student and faculty associations for their “blatant and remorseless discrimination… targeted at Jewish and Israeli people.”
“After the story became public, lawyers reached out to us, lawyers who were pretty upset and distraught, like Brooke Goldstein from the Lawfare Project {in New York] and Nitsana Darshan-Leitner from Shurat HaDin [in Tel Aviv],” Walker said.
“The legal action we ended up pursuing, and it’s still ongoing, was a result of one of the lawyers who reached out to us.”
Hasbara Fellowships is seeking $50,000 in compensation, a mandatory review of the associations’ policies and training for all members to identify and eliminate anti-Semitism from those policies, and a written apology, among other demands.
Walker said after he was approached by a number of lawyers, it occurred to him that there was a “huge untapped potential sitting at our fingertips that could be used to the benefit of students.”
He said the task force is an ad hoc collection of lawyers, most of whom work pro bono. He said there are about 15 to 20 lawyers involved so far.
“It’s free of charge for students. They don’t incur any costs.”
Walker explained that the task force provides students with legal training, “anything from helping students leaders understand the university constitution to helping them document items on campus.”
If there is an incident that requires legal aid, such as writing a legal letter, students are encouraged to reach out to one of the task force lawyers.
“One of our students recently was targeted on a neo-Nazi website [Stormfront], and we spoke immediately to a lawyer – one of the top defamation lawyers in the country – who guided us and the student as to what their rights were,” he said.
“There was an incident last semester at a Montreal university and we needed to determine whether an anti-Israel group on campus had done something inappropriate using university property, and only a lawyer in Quebec could do a title search to determine who owned the property. These are the kinds of things lawyers can do in different parts of the country with their different expertise.”
The task force also offers an opportunity for mentorship.
“We connect students, particularly Jewish students who want to go into law and legal fields with lawyers who are successful, whether it is tax law or defamation, or business law who can connect with students. We’re not just about… defeating anti-Israel propaganda. We really want to be proactive and make the future better for Jewish students.”
For more information about the legal task force, contact Robert Walker at [email protected]