Canadians know Palestinians deserve justice
Last Wednesday, the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) published a report by two academic experts (Richard Falk, professor of international law at Princeton University, and Virginia Tilley, professor of political science at Southern Illinois University) concluding, “Israel is guilty of policies and practices that constitute the crime of apartheid as legally defined in instruments of international law.”
Discriminatory land policies; exclusionary citizenship laws; torture and extrajudicial killings; prolonged occupation, appropriation and cantonization of Palestinian territories; application of military law to Palestinian populations; and repression of Palestinian dissent — all are elements of an “institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over (another),” according to the report.
The idea that Israel is, or is rapidly becoming, an apartheid state is not new; this reality has been acknowledged by American and Israeli political leaders alike.
In 2010, for example, former prime minister of Israel Ehud Barak warned: “As long as in this territory west of the Jordan River there is only one political entity called Israel, it is going to be either non-Jewish or non-democratic. If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state.”
Reaction to the ESCWA report has been explosive.
U.S. ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley smeared the report as “anti-Israel propaganda” and the Trump administration pressured the UN secretary-general to request its withdrawal.
The executive secretary of ESCWA resigned shortly afterward and the report was removed from the commission’s website.
How perverse: analysis of Israel’s violence against Palestinians is treated as more reprehensible than the violence itself. (From Amnesty International’s 2016-2017 report on Israel and Palestine: “Israeli forces unlawfully killed Palestinian civilians, including children, in both Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories . . . Torture and other ill-treatment of detainees remained rife and was committed with impunity . . . The authorities continued to promote illegal settlements in the West Bank, including by attempting to retroactively ‘legalize’ settlements built on private Palestinian land.”)
The diagnosis is demonized, while the underlying sickness continues to worsen.
The same obfuscating dynamic prevails in the Canadian government’s approach to the conflict. Following its election, the Liberal Party announced its intention to serve as an “honest broker” in the Middle East.
But the promise of honesty is undermined by the persistence of extreme partiality.
At the UN, Canada continues to cast its votes with the tiny camp of states that unswervingly opposes all resolutions supporting Palestinians’ rights.
Under the Trudeau government, Canada has rejected resolutions affirming Palestinians’ right to self-determination, urging Israel to join the nuclear nonproliferation treaty and encouraging peaceful settlement of the conflict in accordance with international law: all consonant with Canada’s own official foreign-policy goal of a “comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East, including the creation of a Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security with Israel.”
This imbalance was augured by the Trudeau Liberals’ reaction to Operation Protective Edge in 2014, Israel’s 51-day military offensive in Gaza that killed at least1,462 Palestinian civilians, including 495 children.
Trudeau’s statement as Liberal Party leader at the time proclaimed that “Israel has the right to defend itself and its people. Hamas is a terrorist organization and must cease its rocket attacks immediately.”
What a stark contrast to the emphatic castigation of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign, which was the subject of a dedicated Parliamentary motion last February to “condemn any and all attempts by Canadian organizations, groups or individuals to promote the BDS movement, both here at home and abroad.”
The gross disproportion in responses should be obvious even to those who do not support BDS: Palestinian non-violent activism receives greater denunciation than Israel’s violent militarism.
But this deep disparity does not reflect Canadian popular opinion.
A recent survey conducted by EKOS found that 55 per cent of Canadians oppose the parliamentary motion condemning BDS, that 78 per cent consider the call for boycotting Israel to be “reasonable” and that 66 per cent think sanctions are a reasonable means for ensuring Israel’s respect for international law. (And indeed, Canada already imposes sanctions on 21 countries, two-thirds of which are in the Middle East and Africa.)
Canadians know that Palestinians deserve justice — even if those elected to represent us continue to deny it.
Under the Trudeau government, Canada has rejected resolutions affirming Palestinians’ right to self-determination