By Dyala Hamza<\/p>\n
Whether it is your bias in favor of Israel that recently cost you your seat on the UN Security Council, it is a fact that in the space of five years you have voted \u201cno\u201d 50 times to UN resolutions in favor of Palestine. Of the 166 \u201cno\u201d votes by Canada since 2000 this represents an embarrassing average. Neither the protests of Marc-Andr\u00e9 Blanchard, No, Canada is not back, nor can it be, as long as you sacrifice the rule-of-law, in its various applications, on the altar of the United States. Canada is not, and will not be, back as long as you evade a critical examination of your authoritarian allegiance to Zionism \u2013 an allegiance that admits of no opposition from your own government. Far from the clamor of Zionist pressure groups and the blinders of Israeli propaganda, please do see and hear what otherwise looks you in the eye and bursts your eardrums.<\/p>\n Zionism in Canada is a cult: a religious one, for those who conflate Judaism and nationalism; a political one, for those who are illiberal, who well know that violent and eradicative ideologies need an array of anti-democratic laws to shield them. Consider the historical Zionism of the pioneers \u2013 Herzl\u2019s foundational Zionism; \u201ctransfer-Zionism\u201d, that imagined by the Zangwill, Syrkin, Motzkin and Aaronsohn; or Jabotinsky\u2019s revisionist Zionism. Consider, too, Netanyahu\u2019s Zionism today and some of its laws \u2013 to mention but the most recent one, the \u201cIsrael Nation-State of the Jewish People\u201d Law.<\/p>\n Zionism in Canada is a bipartisan dogma, which Conservatives and Liberals alike firmly uphold. In Canada today the rules of blasphemy apply to Zionism. Anyone who questions it or criticizes it is first publicly shamed, then quasi-criminalized. With the help of motions and resolutions, definitions, declarations, and tweets, we have built in the space of a few years, in Canada, an impressive gagging arsenal. Here are its pillars:<\/p>\n \u2013\u00a0BDS<\/strong>. Ever since you assumed power, whether in a private or official capacity, you have not ceased to condemn, vilify and slander the peaceful resistance movement, Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, launched 15 years ago by Palestinian civil society. In 2015, you meddled in McGill University\u2019s passage of a pro-BDS motion, declaring that the movement \u201chas no business being on Canadian campuses\u201d; in 2016, your party supported an anti-BDS parliamentary resolution, in the name of friendship and economic and diplomatic relations between Canada and Israel; in 2018, in apologizing for Canada\u2019s rejection of Jewish refugees during WWII, you chanted this worn-out Zionist catchphrase, associating criticism of Israeli ultraviolence with anti-Semitism; in 2019, at a town hall at Brock University, you explained that you uphold your condemnation of BDS, not for foreign policy reasons, but \u201cbecause of Canadian values\u201d: what values \u200b\u200bMr. Trudeau? The colonial ones that you share with Israel?<\/p>\n \u2013\u00a0IHRA<\/strong>. To give legal legitimacy to your witch hunt, your government announced, in June 2019, that it would formally adopt a controversial and dangerous definition of anti-Semitism, that of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, by including it in its antiracism strategy. A definition that allows \u201cfriends of Israel\u201d to achieve exactly their goal: to conflate opposition to Zionism and anti-Semitism. A definition above all which now legitimizes the physical and moral harassment practiced by the subsidiaries of Zionist violence in North America against whole sections of the population: namely, those Canadians of Palestinian descent and all those who support them.<\/p>\n \u2013\u00a0CIFTA<\/strong>. When on July 29, 2019, the Canadian federal court ruled in favor of a citizen who argued that wines produced in illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank (which Canada officially considers as such) could not be labeled and sold in Canada as \u201cproducts of \u2018Israel\u201d (Kattenburg v. Canada)\u2026 you saw fit to lodge an appeal. Driven, no doubt, by the posturing of the Center for Israel and Jewish Affairs, for whom the occupied West Bank is a region \u201ccovered\u201d by the Canada-Israel Free Trade Agreement (CIFTA)? To accept such labeling and trade is not just the normalization of the Occupation, it is the legitimizing of annexation. To agree to our trade relations with the Palestinians being channeled through Israel is to admit their economic subjugation. It is to admit, as is the case presently, that for a \u2018yes\u2019 or a \u2018no\u2019, Israel is withholding, in its own coffers, the tax and customs revenues from Palestinian exports, which Israel collects on behalf of the Palestinians.<\/p>\n \u2013\u00a0ICC<\/strong>. When in December 2019, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, said she was \u201cconvinced that there is a reasonable basis justifying the opening of an investigation\u201d into \u201cpast and present war crimes\u201d, committed in Palestine\u2026 you challenged the court\u2019s competence in hearing such a case, on the grounds that Palestine is not recognized as a state. Not only was it not for you to deliver such a legal opinion (but up to the Court itself), but it is hard to believe that you found it flattering to remind the world that it is Canada that does not recognize Palestine, unlike an overwhelming majority of UN member countries. If, as your Foreign Minister rightly pointed out last June, \u201cthe staff of the International Criminal Court should not be singled out for their work,\u201d then they should not be targeted at all, whether the war crimes under investigation are the US\u2019s in Iraq and Afghanistan or those of\u00a0 Israel against the Palestinians.<\/p>\n That energy that you deploy in support of the unsupportable, would be better channeled in supporting international law. Recently, calls for a change of course in Canadian foreign policy have become deafening. Almost as much as your silence on the annexation scheme for Palestine, fomented by Mr. Trump and Mr. Netanyahu last January. At the time, you failed to consider international sanctions against Israel, which is required by your formal adherence to the \u201ctwo-state solution\u201d, as well as by the inadmissibility of territorial acquisition by war and its illegal settlement by settlers. It is also required by the absurd impunity of that state, which violates day and night its occupied populations, evading the 4th Geneva Convention, which Canada has, however, ratified. By now, you probably feel exempted from responding to Trump\u2019s annexationist plan, since the United Arab Emirates, and now Bahrain, have just announced a normalization of their relations with Israel. But you are well aware that Netanyahu was quick to apprise us that the said annexation has only been postponed.<\/p>\n Finally, allow us to submit to you some very general recommendations that could serve as a framework for the overhaul of Canadian foreign policy:<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/paju.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/1027.jpg\")
nor the denials of Bob Rae, your successive ambassadors to the UN, have been able to diminish the echo of your campaign slogan, as reckless as it is boastful: \u201cCanada is back.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n