It’s not every day you can have lunch with a retired Supreme Court Justice. But yesterday, if you were kicking around Halifax with $250 burning a hole in your pocket – you could. 

The Honourable Rosalie Silberman Abella, Justice of Canada’s Supreme Court from 2004-2021 was speaking at a fundraising lunch for the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21.  

Last time Justice Abella spoke here, about a dozen years ago, I went to hear her.  Correction: I went to ask her, a prominent liberal-minded Canadian Jew, to support Palestine.  At the time, Israel had “mowed the grass” in Gaza for more than a decade.  Mowing the grass means launching a war or illegal military action against Palestinians in the West Bank and/or Gaza – every couple of years to keep people in a state of terror, to kill members of their families, to arrest them and to drive them out of their homes.  For example in 2014, during Operation Protective Edge, Israel killed more than 2100 Palestinians in Gaza (including children), and injured more than 10,000. Gazans endured a brutal 51-day siege by Israel’s IDF.    

But remember: my reason for going was to ask her to speak up against Israel’s illegal occupation and brutality against Palestinians.   

This is how it went down years ago…

After her speech, she and I were alone in the hall. I walked up to her smiling, and presented my business card. I said I had admired her work in labour law, especially her plan for employment equity which lay the ground for the federal Employment Equity Act.  She was happy, and glad to get the praise.  Then I said,

“You know, people like you and me have to stand up against injustice committed by Israel—because if we as Jews don’t stand up, we can’t expect anyone else will.  We have to speak against the Occupation.” 

Her face clouded over; sharply and clearly she stated, “I will never do that.” 

I said, “Surely if you are in favour of human rights, you have to see what Israel is doing is wrong.” 

She turned her back on me and muttered “I don’t agree and I will never say those things.”  Then she dashed for the front doors.  (From my newsletter, exactly two years ago)  

So what happened in yesterday’s speech?  Well, Justice Abella likely touched on her “joyful Canadian journey” to Canada in 1950, as a four-year-old with her family through Pier 21.  They had been living in a Displaced Persons camp in Stuttgart, Germany.   Her  immediate family somehow managed to survive Poland during WWII.  She likes to talk about the positive spirit in Canada around immigration and point out that she, a one-time child refugee, became a judge on Canada’s top court.  

A dozen years ago in Halifax, she spoke of all the trouble spots in the world, the Congo, Somalia, Rwanda, China, the Russian orbit of countries, Latin America and explained the lack of democracy and wars had caused huge suffering and the abrogation of human rights on a grand scale.  She must have named 15 countries, but never once mentioned Palestine.  

It was a huge dereliction, a glaring omission.  It was not much of a leap to understand that she believed human rights for Palestinian was an issue to be avoided, and that Israel’s illegal and brutal military occupation spanning nearly 60 years did not exist – for her. 

Clearly from her brief exchange with me, hers was a deliberate oversight. 

How do you get biometric data in Gaza?

Today, Canada is playing a shell game with Gazans’ lives.  Our government claims it has admitted 860 Gazan refugees in the last two plus years.  That number pales in comparison to the 300,000 Ukrainians who have come here through the government’s Canada-Ukraine Authorization for Emergency Travel (CUAET) program.  The Ukrainians came under federally-funded settlement services that provided some financial support and temporary accommodation. Though the government claims there are visas available to more than 5,000 people from Gaza, most have gone begging. That is unsurprising because–

a) there is no way for Palestinians to leave Gaza—all borders are closed to them. 

b) Gazans cannot get their papers, birth and marriage certificates, or any proof of their refugee status due to Israel’s abject destruction of Gaza’s homes, schools, hospitals and workplaces. 

c) Canada’s demand that those coming to here have biometric information, such as iris scans and fingerprints on record.  Clearly there are no such facilities to process this info in a destroyed Gaza.  

d) the cost of flying a Palestinian family to Canada is prohibitive.  

The Little Engine that Could…

But when the Ukrainians who wanted to come here, there was the Ukraine2Canada Travel Fund, set up by the federal government in concert with a number of Canadian NGOs (non-governmental organizations).  Canadians and businesses were allowed to donate travel points or cash to fund free flights to Canada for Ukrainian families.

In short, Palestinians from Gaza who are suffering a genocide cannot easily seek refuge here. 

My guess is that in her speech on Wednesday, Justice Abella did not mention Gaza or the genocide. 

I imagine Justice Abella’s talk was all sweetness and light at the banquet hall in Pier 21. If someone wants to come to Canada and can’t, her advice would be “keep on trying” –the takeaway from the children’s tale “The Little Engine that Could…”

After all, Gazans are not the only ones turned away or ignored by Canadian authorities.  Over the next two years, our government is cutting the number of refugees entering Canada by nearly one-quarter—from 38,000 to 29,000. Our government is also reducing the number of international students by 45%.  

Abella sets an example

Justice Abella is not alone in refusing to name the genocide in Gaza — as a human rights violation.  As I’ve pointed out here, here and here the silencing and censure or prohibition on public discussion about the Gaza genocide is very real, and very much taken as a threat to the pro-Israel lobby, the Zionists.  

The problem is that Abella sets an example.  If Abella can’t or won’t “get into” Israel’s genocide in Gaza or simply denies it – who at the top of the legal establishment will raise it? In a 2024 op-ed in The Globe and Mail, she wrote that Israel was the victim in its war on Gaza,

“Hamas’s explicit and unapologetic goal is to eliminate Jews. The elimination of Jews is genocide. … It is a legal absurdity to suggest that a country that is defending itself from genocide is thereby guilty of genocide.” Justice Rosalie Abella, in The Globe and Mail, 9 January, 2024

What’s the point in Canada talking about human rights, and a “rights-based order” if few to none in our legal world will countenance the truth.  Their refusal to criticize Israel adds more bricks to the wall of silence created by many in the professions, by those at the top of the media empires, and high-up administrators at universities. They deny the genocide and criminalize support for Palestinians.   

Cartoon at the top by Ben Jennings/TheGuardian, (date 25.07.2025)