Cambridge’s Israel Apartheid Week (IAW), an awareness campaign launched on Monday by the Cambridge University Palestine Society, has reignited the ongoing student debate about the Israel-Palestine issue.

Yacoub Kureh, a post-graduate student at Emmanuel and one of the organisers of IAW, said that he hoped that the campaign would educate students about “decades of institutionalised racism, occupation, discrimination, ethnic cleansing [and] diaspora,” and about “the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions [BDS] campaign and other nonviolent grassroots movements that aim to dismantle this policy of injustice.”

However, Eylon Aslan-Levy, an MPhil student at Girton and blogger for the Times of Israel, has blasted the campaign. “IAW is a nasty smear campaign designed to demonise the Jewish state. It seeks to use an emotive label to obliterate all nuances and deliberately distort the facts,” he said.

In response to Aslan-Levy’s criticisms, Kureh said: “It’s in fact ironic to hear Aslan-Levy accuse IAW of using emotive labels. When he says ‘demonise the Jewish state’ what he really wants you to hear is ‘demonise the Jewish.’ We are not trying to obliterate nuance nor distort facts – Israel’s policies are apartheid, by definition.”

Joel Fenster, a third-year student at Selwyn who campaigns for a two-state solution in the Israel-Palestine region, expressed concerns that IAW is not “in the spirit of constructive dialogue” and said that the use of the word apartheid “does not reflect the complexity of the situation and is misleading”.

“Sadly, IAW is focused on pushing a one-sided narrative, which makes it harder for those of us working on creating real dialogue.”

However, Paul Rubenstein, a fourth-year computational biology student at Emmanuel, has defended IAW. “There [has been] no hint of anti-semitism, nor [a] dismissal of the concerns of Israelis living in the region today,” he said of one of the week’s events.

He argues that rather than attacking Israel, IAW is “a call to end policies and practices that have made lives miserable for decades.”

The IAW talks and exhibitions aim to “raise awareness of Israel as an apartheid state.” Events included a screening of the 2012 documentary Roadmap to Apartheid and a panel discussion entitled: “Separate But Not Equal: Palestinian Refugees’ Right of Return”.

The status of the Israel-Palestine debate in Cambridge was highlighted last year when Professor Stephen Hawking withdrew from Israel’s Presidential Conference at the request of pro-Palestinian activists, in a move that was interpreted as support for BDS.

Respect MP George Galloway last year notoriously walked out on a debate at the Oxford Union after learning that his opponent, Aslan-Levy, then an undergraduate, was an Israeli citizen. “I don’t recognise Israel and I don’t debate with Israelis,” said Galloway.

Cambridge Univeristy Jewish Society does not take a political stance on the issue. “The Society provides social, cultural and educational events for Jewish and non-Jewish students alike and is proud to welcome all students no matter what their religious or political beliefs may be,” said President Hilary Davidson.

IAW was established in Toronto in 2005 and has evolved into an annual series of lectures and rallies in 55 countries. Its mission statement says: “IAW has played an important role in raising awareness and disseminating information about Zionism, the Palestinian liberation struggle and its similarities with the indigenous sovereignty struggle in North America and the South African anti-apartheid movement.”