Canada’s threats to depart from the United Nation’s World Conference Against Racism on the grounds that Israel is being unfairly singled out for punishment shows a disappointing, though not surprising, lack of vision on behalf of the Canadian government. Their premise for withdrawing has a grain of reason–the conference should be about more than the Middle East. But the simultaneous defence of Israeli actions implicit in the Canadian position is simply an extension of our unconscionable support of a homicidal and illegal policy of regional ethnic cleansing initiated in the 1940s with the founding of the state of Israel.
Before condemning such a position, consider some historical perspective.
The shame, despair, and horror that must have faced the free world in the aftermath of the Second World War is hard to fathom. The selfish and isolationist paradigms that fuelled foreign policy in the countries of Europe and North America allowed Adolf Hitler’s nightmarish visions to become a sickening reality for a period of time. The fence-sitting and games of diplomatic chess pursued by the West allowed the horrific suffering and death of millions, and the Jewish people endured a particularly stark and tragic fate as the world turned their collective back on the pleas to accept the families trying to flee the persecution they faced in a country polluted with xenophobic insanity.
It is no small irony that the attempts to rectify the collective guilt the world felt over these events would produce the horror and persecution of the Palestinians stemming from the founding of Israel in 1948. The scale of the two tragedies is in no way proportional–in one case millions of people and in the other thousands–but the spirit is sadly the same. Hundreds of Palestinian villages have been razed and families slaughtered. There were mass deportations, brutality, torture and arbitrary arrests.
These gruesome activities abated somewhat with the entrenchment of the Israeli forces in the occupied territories, but are far from extinguished. The body count rises weekly, with four to five Palestinians being killed for every Israeli death. Since the original invasion, there has been an apartheid-like system of social control on the Palestinians. They are subject to curfews and random detention, while their cities are criss-crossed with military roads and armed checkpoints established by a foreign army. They have been reduced to second-class humans who barely have an economy to provide jobs to feed and educate their children while the neighbouring Israeli state prospers. Then the Israeli government wonders why the Palestinians would riot against these circumstances, exacting draconian revenge on populations often armed with little more than stones.
This situation has drawn the ire of many of those within the Jewish community, such as world renowned linguist and intellectual Noam Chomsky, who see plainly the tragedy of the plight of the Palestinians and the hopelessness of continuing this violent police-state. To oppose such actions is to celebrate humanity and freedom. It is not, as propagandists disingenuously suggest, to be anti-Israel, or anti-semitic.
So Canada faces a United Nations membership at the WCAR that is highlighting these unjust conditions in a way that is unpalatable to powerful domestic lobbies, and Hedy Fry’s reflexive response is to equate criticism of Israeli policy with a racist attack on the Jewish people. That position is like saying that voting against Jean Chrétien makes one un-Canadian, a statement that, if true, would make most of Canada’s voters un-Canadian. For what unites many in the Jewish and non-Jewish communities is despair at the perpetuation of policies that have proven themselves to be consistently destructive and counter-productive for over 50 years. If the Israeli government of a given day chooses to continue those policies then people of conscience will continue to oppose them, an opposition that is quite distinct from opposition to the Jewish people.
Canada could choose to make that distinction, to fight the many worthy battles at this conference, including the ongoing slave-trade and racial discrimination worldwide. Instead, the government is taking great efforts to align itself with a self-interested American decision. Americans are ducking out of a conference that is threatening them with the unsavoury possibility of making financial reparations for the slave trade they infamously exploited in building the foundation of their current prosperity.
While Canada’s government is ignoring the real issues and squabbling in defence of the shameful Israeli policies, far more nations are choosing the higher road maintaining pressure on Israel and the U.S. that will ultimately be needed to undermine the Palestinian apartheid. In that sense, this conference may yet represent some of the first small steps toward a world where oppression and persecution are shamed in the international spotlight, rather than rationalized in the context of history and obscured with diplomatic sugar coating. It’s a shame it will be in spite of Canada and not because of it.
Mike Bowerman can be reached at [email protected].