Boy stands by building rubble in Palestine. Photo: Grassroots International/Flickr

In June 2009, I joined a delegation of Code Pink to visit Gaza. The main purpose of our delegation was to build playgrounds for the children of Gaza after Israel’s brutal aerial, naval and ground attack named Operation Cast Lead. It was estimated that 1,400 Palestinians were killed by Israeli security forces. Schools, hospitals, universities and a major part of Gaza’s infrastructure was destroyed. The ultimate objective of our delegation was an attempt to break the siege imposed since 2007 by the Israel government on the Gaza strip — a densely populated 365 square kilometres where 1.8 million people live, many of them in precarious conditions.

Our delegation was composed of U.S. human rights activists, mostly women, and a few Canadians. We were motivated by our quest for justice and our will to see with our own eyes the conditions Palestinians were living in after the devastation caused by the military operation. Armed with patience but mostly a lot of good luck, our delegation was able to cross the Gaza border with Egypt, another country complicit in maintaining this unfair and humiliating blockade.

Since then, two other brutal military operations (Operation Pillar of Defense in 2012, Operation Protective Edge in 2014) targeted Gaza, and the humanitarian crisis has deepened. Last week, on March 31, Palestinians from Gaza gathered along Israel’s borders for a “Great March of Return” to demand that refugees obtain rights to return to their land. It is a symbolic but strong move, expected to continue until May 15, the commemoration of the Nakba, when Palestinians were expelled from their homes in 1948. Israeli soldiers responded to these demonstrations by firing live ammunition and killing 17 Palestinians and injuring more than 700 hundred people. Israel claimed that the protesters killed were either violent and part of Hamas.

Last December 2017, when Donald Trump decided to move the U.S. embassy from Tel-Aviv to Jerusalem, Canada issued a statement where it described itself as “a steadfast ally and friend of Israel and friend to the Palestinian people.”

One assumes that if a state is an “ally and friend” with another state, both offer condolences to each other in times of tragedy and share “good advice” or at least “restraint in using force” if an “ally and friend” has fired on demonstrators, killing 17 of them and injuring more than 700.

But this is only if the “ally and friend” is not named “Israel” and if the victims of the military operation are not named “Palestinians.” So Canada sheepishly didn’t say anything to its “friend and ally” and once again let down the Palestinian people.

This position — choose what you’d like to name it — of “cowardice” or “self-censorship” or “who really cares,” not only defines the action or inaction of the Canadian government in general, it also applies to individual members of Parliament, who in a democracy are supposed to enjoy freedom of opinion and some sort of immunity to speak their minds. But, once again, apparently this applies only to “some issues” and to “some countries” and not when it comes to Israel and the Palestinian people.

Last year, when a simple “harmless” motion, M-103, that led to another “harmless report” with no serious recommendations regarding Islamophobia was presented in the House of Commons to study the extent of Islamophobia in Canada, many members of Parliament were panicking, speaking out, and raising the spectre of the loss of freedom of expression and a creeping sharia invading Canadian streets. They were claiming that people should be able to criticize everyone — even Muslims and Islam. Over and over, we heard the argument that “no one is above criticism, we are a free country.” No one or maybe except when you kill 17 people and they happen to be Palestinians, then freedom of expression isn’t used — it is replaced by silence.

Even our Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland — whose spokesperson explained her silence on the U.S. moving its embassy to Jerusalem with the reason, “The minister does not make statements about world events before they happen” — didn’t say a word about the killing of 17 Palestinians by the Israeli army.

However, Minister Freeland was eloquent in speaking out about the expulsion of four Russian diplomats from Canada, because of the alleged Russian poisoning of an ex-Russian agent and his daughter in Britain. There is not an investigation into the poisonings yet, no report yet and still she was quick to take strong actions and words. But on the killing of Palestinians, despite the flagrant casualties, the pictures on social media, the dead bodies shot by the bullets, the denouncing of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, she kept silent.

In about a year, there will be a federal election. I really hope that Canadians will remember this troubling silence and think of the MPs that communities worked so hard to elect, the ones they distributed flyers for, the ones they went door to door to help elect, the ones they helped to raise funds. These hard-working communities should remember how their MPs reacted during these moments of tragedies. Did they react with silence or did they stand up for justice, even with a simple word? I am not saying that federal MPs should be elected solely on a single issue, in this regard their positions on Israel-Palestine. But rather, these positions are very eloquent. Sometimes silence is more telling than words.

Monia Mazigh was born and raised in Tunisia and immigrated to Canada in 1991. Mazigh was catapulted onto the public stage in 2002 when her husband, Maher Arar, was deported to Syria where he was tortured and held without charge for over a year. She campaigned tirelessly for his release. Mazigh holds a PhD in finance from McGill University. In 2008, she published a memoir, Hope and Despair, about her pursuit of justice, and recently, a novel about Muslim women, Mirrors and Mirages. You can follow her on Twitter @MoniaMazigh or on her blog www.moniamazigh.com

Photo: Grassroots International/Flickr

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Monia Mazigh

Monia Mazigh

Monia Mazigh was born and raised in Tunisia and immigrated to Canada in 1991. Mazigh was catapulted onto the public stage in 2002 when her husband, Maher Arar, was deported to Syria where he was tortured...