• Certainly not the activists who stay in the university encampments.
• Certainly not the thousands of Canadians, of all faiths and races, who march down the streets of our major cities, week after week to protest  Israeli genocide.
• Certainly not Muslims  and Christians who may attend their mosques or churches and pray for peace.
• Certainly not people who wear keffiyehs in solidarity with Palestinians.
• Certainly not those who wear small watermelon brooches, or t-shirts that say ‘ceasefire now’.
• Certainly not the relatives who work two jobs to raise the tens of thousands of dollars needed to help their desperate Gazan family to get out of  the killing fields of Gaza.

Question: So who is violent; who is abusive?

Answer: The people in authority who try to stop the people above. 

• The employers that fire staff (at the behest of pro-Israel lobbyists B’nai Brith) because the staff applauded pro-Palestinian demonstrators, or signed petitions and open letters or used their private social media accounts to support Palestinians.
• The members of a private Facebook site Canadian Jewish Physicians decided which of 271 medical graduates would be permitted to enter various medical residency programs.  The Canadian Jewish Physicians sidelined the grads who signed petitions for Palestinian human rights. 
• The universities (Calgary, the University of Alberta, and UQAM) that summoned the police to beat up protesters and break up encampments for Palestine. 
• The NDP in Ontario for kicking  MPP Sara Jama out of the caucus for calling for a ceasefire (months before the federal NDP did) and for labelling Israel an apartheid state.   
• The Ontario legislature for deliberately silencing Jama, and the court that ruled yesterday the MPP had no right to appeal the Speaker’s decision.

40,000 Murders and Counting

How can it be that 40,000 Palestinians, mainly women, old people, children and babies – civilians all– have been killed by Israel the last seven months in Israel’s ongoing slaughter, and yet it is we who oppose Israel’s actions that are considered antisemites and terrorists.  

MP Housefather: silencer of pro-Palestinian voices

Case in point is the House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights led by Liberal MP Anthony Housefather (who is a Jew).  The Committee has allowed only Jews who are “uncomfortable” with or vehemently opposed to criticism of Israel to be witnesses.  The dozens of witnesses so far are all from the establishment Jewish community.  They include students who have cried and shaken when testifying about the antisemitism on their university campus — specifically noting the horrible existence of McGill’s encampment.  The students are liars.  Though McGill has applied twice for an injunction to dismantle the encampment citing antisemitism, no court has found a shred of evidence that Jews were pushed, hit, screamed at or forbidden from entering any buildings at McGill. Both injunctions were denied.  Not only were the students testifying about things that did not happen, I don’t believe they were never cross-examined about their statements.

As far as I can tell, no Jews or anyone else who opposes Israel’s war have been allowed to give evidence to the hearings.   Independent Jewish Voices Canada, the major national organization that represents thousands of Canadian Jews in support of Palestinians, was not allowed to send representatives to testify about “antisemitism” in Canada.  Full disclosure: I’m a member of IJV. 

We all know that Housefather was given this “plum” job of chairing the Justice Committee about antisemitism on campus  in exchange for staying in the Liberal fold.  He was apoplectic when his boss Trudeau and virtually the whole Liberal caucus (except for himself and two others) backed an NDP motion that called for the recognition of a Palestinian state and a suspension of arms trading with Israel.  The Liberals watered down the motion by calling for a two-state solution (something Israeli government totally rejects) and stopping authorisation for arms transfers to Israel. 

Pundits are saying Housefather demurred when he was invited to cross the floor to join the ranks of Poilievre’s Tories. It would have been a step too far for Housefather, who is a lifelong Liberal.  What’s more his Montreal riding, Mount Royal, is historically a Liberal stronghold – his predecessors include luminaries such as Irwin Cotler, Sheila Finestone and Pierre Elliott Trudeau. It is not a good look for Housefather to bolt to the cave of the right-wing Tories.

What of my Jewish challenger at the fitness class on Zoom?

What of my Jewish friend in the zoom fitness class? She would rather excoriate me for wearing a keffiyeh and pull a tantrum than deal with the reality of what is happening in Gaza. Account after account has said children were decapitated and bodies burned beyond recognition when Israel dropped bombs into a tent encampment for refugees in Rafah. Even The New York Times does not  believe it was accidental.  Even though  the “most moral army in the world” doesn’t make such mistakes.

According to Seraj Assi at Common Dreams, 

“Media reports show that Israel blitzed the tent camp with seven massive U.S. bombs, weighing 2,000 pounds each. According to eyewitnesses, the intensive bombing, which targeted Rafah’s Tal al-Sultan area, was a deliberate attack on Palestinian refugees sheltering in tents. The bombarded refugee tents, marked as Block 2371, had been designated by Israel as a “safe area” for civilians.”

Forty-five people murdered in their tents (really under plastic sheeting that served as tents) in what Israel had deemed a “safe” location.  More than 200 were seriously injured.  There are only 8 beds in Rafah’s only hospital. That day, an Israeli drone struck the hospital’s entrance, killing two staff.  There are two field hospitals in Rafah, but there is no fuel for ambulances to drive the injured to them for care. 

Just yesterday, 16 more Palestinians were deliberately killed by an Israeli missile strike.  Days ago, Netanyahu and the Israeli government said they wouldn’t stop bombing and targeting civilians, despite the ICC’s condemnation. 

What the International Criminal Court (ICJ), and the International Criminal Court (ICC) say makes no difference to the leaders, and to much of the Israeli public.

And it makes little difference to the mainstream Jewish community in Canada. 

The most Reactionary Jewish communities outside of Israel

In the 1980s, I used to know Dr Israel Shahak who was the  founder (and probably one of a handful of members) of the Israeli League for Human and Civil rights.  PaleShahak was a Jew, a professor of chemistry at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University.  Among other issues, he called for Palestinian students to have equal rights with Jewish Israeli students.  As a preteen, he and his mother barely survived  Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in World War II. After the war, they emigrated to Israel.  We invited Dr Shahak to Toronto to speak about Palestinian human rights  back in 1980.  He and I corresponded for years, then I met him on my first trip to Israel and the West Bank in 1988.   Shahak told me that out of all the Jews in the diaspora, the most reactionary Jews lived in Mexico and in Canada.  

“The most reactionary Jews lived in Mexico and in Canada.”

Dr Israel Shahak

Why, I asked? He suggested it was partly attributable to their small numbers compared to the general population, and in Canada, more than half of the country’s Jews had arrived after World War III.  That meant they tended to be conservative by nature, fearful and insular.  

Since the 1970s, the Jewish population in Canada includes Russian Jews – especially those who first lived in Israel and hated it, so moved to Canada.  Canadian Jews also include Jews who came from South Africa notably in the 1980s – these were privileged Jews for the most part who left SA because it wasn’t safe for them; they feared a bloodbath, in the years before the release of Nelson Mandela.  Overall, they did not come here because they were activists against Apartheid—they came as professionals to live a good life far from the troubles.  As I recall from the time I lived in Edmonton in the 80s, some South African emigrés lived in houses with swimming pools.

There is also the large problem of Hebrew Day schools in Toronto and a few other major cities in Canada.  As Yves Engler has written in his blog here, and Jonathan Garfinkel has written in his excellent 2008 book Ambivalence: Crossing the Israel/Palestine Divide, these schools uphold the idea that Jews are beleaguered, that Jews need special protection, that non-Jews – especially Palestinians are “out to get us”, that Zionism is Judaism.  Nearly 30% of Jewish children in Toronto and 55% in Montreal now attend Hebrew Day schools instead of public schools.  The tuition costs about $23,000 per student per year.  Today, according to University of Toronto sociologist Robert Brym, more than 40% of Canadian Jews have attended a Hebrew Day school. 

These children grew into  the young adults who testified at the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights  hearings.  The Hebrew Day schools are for the elites –for those who don’t want their children to mix with non-Jews.  The schools  are exclusive and teach children to fear and hate Palestinians, as if they were the Nazis of today.  Nothing could be further from the truth. 

Featured painting at the top: “Did you know in 1967 raising a flag in Gaza and the West Bank was a crime?” asks artist Beesan Arafat. Hence the move toward posting a watermelon slice as it has the three colours of Palestine. Here it is on a Hebron plate. For more of Beesan Arafat’s work, look here. Below are my coffee cups from Hebron in the West Bank that I bought when I was there about a decade ago.