EXCERPT from the Preface:
Canada and Israel were cut from the same cloth: settler colonies that dispossessed and killed natives to steal their lands. While there were stark differences— in the size of the colonies, their geopolitics, their historical period, and in the degree of ruthlessness exercised by the mother country and its settlers— they both are offspring of British imperialism.
Canada and Israel have many historical similarities, and Jews have come to Canada in the hundreds of thousands and prospered. The Canadian government under Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper (2006-2016) reached a level of worship of things Israeli and Jewish unprecedented in Israel’s short history, officially referring to itself as “Israel’s best friend”. More than any country except the US and Palau, Canada supports Israeli violations of international law at the UN. Canadian Jews support the obliteration of Palestinian villages famously in Canada Park, a (surprisingly) Israeli national park stretching over 700 acres, extending into the West Bank, and with donations amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars to the ‘charity,’ the Jewish National Fund. Harper’s swan song was the creation (and funding while in office) of a bird sanctuary in Israel, which the Israelis were thoughtful enough to call the Stephen Harper Bird Sanctuary.
In The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After, Edward Said worried that there is “the strong possibility that Palestinians will be Red Indianized forever, that Israel’s Jews cannot tolerate our present status either as angry religious terrorists or as compliant Red Indians.
As a weak postmodern nation (i.e., with no independent foreign policy), famous as a peace-keeper, Canada offered a perfect foil as Israel carried out some of its worst atrocities in Gaza. While the shameful Harper period seems to be at an end, the inhuman siege of Gaza continues, and Canada applauds, as if it were virtually an outpost of Israel. At the same time, Canada has become a haven for disaffected Israelis, looking for a more promising land than Eretz Israel. So this work is a case study in the way Zionism, Jews and Israel impinge on an otherwise law-abiding nation. It is also a study in contrasting relations with colonial natives.
The problem that a state of Israel might create was foreseen from the start, and addressed publicly by statesmen after WWII, when the form in which a homeland/ refuge for Jews was being debated. In Canada, only the United Church spoke out to protest the creation of a Jewish state. Prime Minister Mackenzie King was as usual a fence-sitter, glad to be freed of too many Jewish refugees. But he was shocked by the brutality of the ‘war of liberation’ of the Jews in 1948, and put off official recognition of the new state. As a seasoned politician with no particular interest in Jewish affairs, he saw trouble coming. When he retired, however, his heirs turned out to be enthusiastic Zionists. There was no public Jewish Canadian voice that was opposed to Israel, outside of the Communist Party, which was barely legal at that point, without much influence, and crippled by Cold War hysteria. The writing was on the wall.
In the US, Einstein represented the most famous Jewish voice rejecting a racially based state, but he and a few others who spoke out were drowned in the euphoria of the novel idea embraced by the more than 2 million American Jews, who were already an important factor in American life. No strong voice was willing to articulate and work to prevent the obvious: a racial state means a racist state, which was the cause of WWII, launched by the ‘Aryan’ racial state, Germany. To found a Jewish state on the same principle was surely a recipe for disaster. In the dozens of books written about Canada and Israel—virtually all by Zionists, whether Jewish or Gentile—this issue is never addressed.
‘The Zionists won.’ There has been no public debate about the legitimacy of Israel as a racially-based state, despite the fact that international law rejects this. That is why it is so important for the Zionists to force Palestinians to recognize not just the state of Israel (which they did at Oslo in 1993), but Israel as a Jewish state. It seems that in this instance, only the Arabs understand international law.
The history of Jews in Canada, and Canada in Israel, is fascinating in itself. We in Canada watch with horror the daily news, as if it were the war in Vietnam continuing, as Israel ruthlessly persecutes a people who have no effective means of self-defense. It is instructive to watch a speeded up version of what our forefathers did to Canadian natives over the past 4 centuries, though Israel has no time or interest in the niceties of British-style colonialism, so we get the uncensored, much more brutal version.
Endnotes
1 See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_Park 2 “Canadian legend Chapter IV: Goodbye Canada, Hello Harperland”, ericwalberg. com, January 1, 2016. 3 Edward Said, The End of the Peace Process, 50. 4 Gaza War (2008–09), also known as Operation Cast Lead, 2012 conflict, also known as Operation Pillar of Defense, 2014 Israel–Gaza conflict, also known as Operation Protective Edge. 5 The Land of Israel is the traditional Jewish name for an area of indefinite geographical extension in the Southern Levant, appropriately, as Israel’s ‘borders’ keep expanding. In the words of Humpty Dumpty, “a word means precisely what I intend it to mean.” Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass (1871).
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