Sonia Larbi-Aissa

Overview

Sonia Larbi Aissa has spread hatred of Israel and voted [00:07:22] for a Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) resolution at McGill University (McGill) in 2015.

As of September 2023, Larbi Aissa’s LinkedIn profile said she had been working as a Pupil Barrister at 33 Bedford Row, since October 2022.

As of the same date, Larbi Aissa’s LinkedIn said she attended BPP University, where she received a Master of Laws (LLM) degree in 2020. She also graduated from SOAS University of London (SOAS) with a bachelor’s degree in Law in 2019 and from McGill with a bachelor’s degree in economics and international development in 2017. McGill is located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

Larbi Aissa’s LinkedIn said she was a Culture Editor at the McGill Daily student newspaper from September 2015 to January 2016.

As of September 2023, Larbi Aissa’s LinkedIn said she was located in London, England, United Kingdom.

Hatred of Israel and Supporting BDS

On September 8, 2015, Larbi Aissa wrote an article in the McGill Daily titled: “Birthright: Ten days in apartheid Israel - A half-Arab, half-Jewish perspective.”

Birthright Israel is a heritage trip to Israel for Jewish young adults from across the world.

In her article, Larbi Aissa recounted her experience on Birthright going to Yad Vashem, the main Holocaust memorial and museum in Israel. She wrote: “The tour lingered on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and we learned about the civilian insurrection that the Jewish community organized against the Nazis. The irony was staggering in light of the way ‘civilian insurrections’ occurring daily in occupied Palestine were framed as ‘aggression and terrorism against the state of Israel’ throughout the trip.”


In Larbi Aissa’s article, she wrote that the Birthright programming “assumes that the State of Israel is a legitimate nation that ‘deserves’ the land it’s on.” She also claimed that the “Israeli state has hijacked a rhetoric of Jewish oppression in order to perpetuate the very crimes it claims to guard against.” 

Larbi Aissa also alleged in the article that “the lived experience of the average Palestinian seemed scarily similar to my understanding of the lived experience of a South African of colour during Apartheid. The colonized minorities of Israel living within its borders are treated as second-class citizens and forced to endure humiliation after humiliation as Zionist settlers weave narrative after narrative justifying their presence.”

On September 16, 2015, Larbi Aissa was interviewed about her Birthright trip on a radio show in Montreal called “Under The Olive Tree.” 

During the interview, Larbi Aissa claimed [00:08:51]: “I really was not prepared for the amount of racism the average Israeli had for just non-Israelis. It doesn’t matter what religion or anything they were. They just, like, ‘other’ them so hard...” 

During the same interview, Larbi Aissa said [00:07:22] she voted in favor of a 2015 BDS resolution at McGill. 

The resolution was reportedly forwarded by the campus group Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR), an alternative name for Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). 

BDS

The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement was founded by Omar Barghouti in 2005 to challenge “international support for Israeli apartheid and settler-colonialism.” BDS is an allegedly “Palestinian-led movement,” although leading BDS activists have admitted [00:01:01] this is not true. 

One of the demands of BDS includes [point 3] what is generally known as the “right of return,” a demand discredited as a way to eliminate Israel. Barghouti said the “right of return” is a means to “end Israel’s existence as a Jewish state.”  

Barghouti has said that BDS “aims to turn Israel into a pariah state, as South Africa once was.”

In his activism, Barghouti has also said [00:05:55] regarding Israel: “Definitely, most definitely, we oppose a Jewish state in any part of Palestine. No…rational Palestinian, not a sellout Palestinian, will ever accept a Jewish state in Palestine.”

The movement has been linked to numerous terrorist organizations and received a public endorsement from Hamas in 2017.

BDS initiatives include calling on institutions and individuals to divest from Israeli-affiliated companies, promoting academic and cultural boycotts of Israel, and organizing anti-Israel rallies, protests and campaigns.

The movement’s most notable achievement has been the infiltration of university campuses through lobbying for “BDS resolutions.” In these cases, student governments and student groups, backed by their own anti-Israel members and affiliates, have proposed resolutions on some form of boycott of, or divestment from, Israel and Israeli-affiliated entities.

Boycott resolutions, although non-binding, have been passed by student governments on numerous North American campuses.

BDS activity is often aggressive and disruptive. It has been noted that universities that pass BDS resolutions see a marked increase in anti-Semitic incidents on campus. On one campus, when the student government debated a BDS resolution, reports emerged of violent threats against those opposing it.