Singh plays lip service to two-state solution
But NDP caucus has different plan for Middle East
The NDP’s socialist caucus is an unofficial left-wing faction within the party that seems to immature with age.
It has consistently adopted resolutions that range from the preposterous to the unworkable. Ahead of the convention that will be held in Ottawa, Feb. 16-18, it has come up with some belters.
Among other acts of political self-immolation, the socialist caucus would pull Canada out of NATO; fire NDP Foreign Affairs critic Helene Laverdiere because she attacked the “progressive government” of Venezuela; nationalize the auto industry and all the big banks; place the telecommunications industry under public ownership; raise the minimum wage to $20; and shorten the work week.
Party officials point out this is par for the course — that some resolutions make it to the floor for discussion but most don’t.
Yet there are concerns among some New Democrats that one resolution in particular may garner some sympathy from new NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh.
In the resolution, the socialist caucus calls for “solidarity with Palestine” on the basis that the two-state solution is dead and the only alternative is a one-person, one vote, democratic, secular Palestine.
The resolution calls for the NDP to actively campaign in support of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, “until it dismantles the apartheid wall, allows refugees to return home, ends its demolition of Palestinian homes and olive groves, lifts the siege of Gaza, ends its occupation of Palestinian lands and terminates its apartheid practices.”
If adopted, it would be a major policy shift for the NDP, which supports “peaceful co-existence in viable independent states with agreed upon borders.”
A group called Canadian Friends of Peace Now has circulated a news release pointing out that the “highly one-sided” resolution makes demands of Israel but none on the Palestinians.
In particular, it said the call for the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their pre-1948 homes would mean the end of the Jewish majority in Israel, in effect ending that country as the national homeland of the Jews.
“It is the antithesis of the only realistic solution to the conflict — a negotiated twostate solution,” the group said in a statement.
The importance of the NDP staying inside the international consensus on the Middle East was appreciated by former leaders Jack Layton and Tom Mulcair.
At the height of the war in Gaza in 2014, Mulcair called for a “balanced and constructive role” for Canada in building peace.
He lamented civilian deaths in Gaza but called the firing of rockets into Israel by Hamas “utterly unacceptable.”
There have been concerns in some quarters about Singh’s public utterances on Israel.
As a member of the Ontario legislature in 2016, he voted against a motion rejecting the BDS movement. He called for a free expression of dissent, while rejecting hate speech and antiSemitism.
More recently, he wrote a Twitter thread that recalled headlines from 2014 in Gaza when four Palestinian boys were killed by the Israeli military while playing on a beach.
“I belong to a community that has lived through trauma and that continues to experience political injustice….
“As leader of the NDP, I will always stand in solidarity with all people who have experienced oppression. I stand for Palestinians’ right to freely determine their political status.”
That sounds a far cry from Mulcair’s more nuanced approach. The former leader believed the conflict was far more complicated than saying one side is always right and the other side is always wrong.
Jewish groups were further discomfited when Singh went on to recall his own experience in the Middle East.
“I witnessed the technology and development in Israel. I was shocked by the contrast I saw in Palestine. I witnessed the presence of the military occupation in Hebron and the frustrating conditions created by the settlements deep in the West Bank,” he said.
That exposure should have given him a more enlightened sense of the complexity on the ground.
He is right that the Otniel settlement in Hebron’s old quarter is an impediment to peace. I remember strolling through the ghost town of Shuhada Street — formerly a bustling market and shopping district, where the only residents now are bored Israeli Defence Force conscripts and settlers who believe they are walking in Abraham’s footsteps.
But if the Israeli government is culpable, so is the United Nations for passing down refugee status from generation to generation and, most pertinently, so is the Palestinian Authority for maintaining the fiction that, once the enemy is defeated, its people will return to their homes in Israel.
Israel argues the settlement issue would be resolved in a peace deal. But there will be no deal until the Palestinian Authority accepts a Jewish state. No Israeli government is going to give up its independence and become a religious minority in an Arab state.
I asked the NDP leader’s office to provide a sense of where he might come down on the Palestinian issue at the policy convention.
It has been a thorn in the flesh for all NDP leaders but particularly for one who wants the grassroots to believe he’s supportive of Palestinian activism, without alienating the media and swing voters.
“As leader of the NDP, my position on Israel and Palestine maintains the party’s longstanding desire to see a peaceful resolution through the establishment of a twostate solution,” he said in a statement. “The NDP has and will continue to acknowledge the Holocaust and a history of violence directed at the Jewish people, the trauma of which continues to cause understandable stresses, while at the same time being staunch in our defence of Palestinian human rights, as well as international law.”
It was a classic example of third party fence-straddling. But at least it suggests an evolving maturity.
Nobody who seriously aspires to the job of prime minister should take their lead from a fringe group that holds up Nicolas Maduro’s totalitarian regime in Venezuela as a model of good governance.