The rhetoric from the Israeli government and its supporters is becoming more alarming.
A familiar phrase, redolent of past persecution of the Jews, “blood libel,” was hurled against legitimately expressed concerns about Israel committing genocide and ethnic cleansing against Palestinians in Gaza.
The targets were British-American journalist Mehdi Hasan and Israeli columnist Gideon Levy, both speaking on behalf of critics of Israeli military actions, including international human rights experts. This happened during a raucous spring exchange at the Munk Debates in Toronto in Roy Thomson Hall where about two-thirds of the audience depressingly sided with the two pro-Israel exponents on stage, Douglas Murray and Natasha Hausdorff.
Afterward, Hasan was still recovering from the hit. He in fact wrote the book on debating and now lamented to his videocast audience that he thought that Toronto was a liberal city. Read with frustration about the verbal attack on Hasan and Levy in the pro-Israel National Post.
In the bigger picture, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) is the self-appointed guardian for all Jews in Canada. Politicians take heed when CIJA comes knocking. The lobby group is quite vocal about the horrible crimes committed by Hamas on October 7, including the taking of hostages and the rape and death inflicted on Jews specifically, but is deadly silent on the death and destruction of greater numbers in Gaza since last fall.
Papered over are serious divisions that exist on Israel’s conduct within the Canadian Jewish community, said retired University of Toronto sociologist Sheryl Nestel, PhD, in a submission on behalf of Independent Jewish Voices Canada (of which I am also a member) for a parliamentary committee in Ottawa on antisemitism, which had originally declined to permit her participation in the hearings because her perspective did not cater to those who conflate antizionism with antisemitism.
Nestel noted that in a March 2024 study, 28 per cent of Canadian Jews surveyed found that Israel ’s response to the Hamas attack was “excessive,” 54 per cent of Canadians opposed expanding Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank, and 58 per cent believed that the Canadian government should not be meeting with extremist politicians from Israel’s government.
Say that to Liberal MP Anthony Housefather, who met and had his picture taken with Simcha Rothman, the apologist for Jewish settler violence and a pro- “judicial coup” Israel government minister.
Admittedly, CIJA and other Jewish institutional leaders have managed to convince and frighten a segment of the Canadian Jewish population (with the assistance of media coverage and some domestic politicians) in the face of a growing and remarkable pro-Palestinian movement throughout the country on the streets and in the university campus. That explains the estimated appearance of thousands of Jews at a recent pro-Israel walk in Toronto.
Notwithstanding reliable reporting about an increase of antisemitism, the latest academic research demonstrates there is definitely “very little correlation between antisemitic views and animosity towards Israel among Canadians,” says Nestel in her paper.
Currently, CIJA is actively campaigning to discourage school boards from introducing policies on anti-Palestinian racism as part of their diversity portfolio. We can only assume that CIJA fears that this would legitimize the long- standing Palestinian narrative of the Nakba, the occupation and the siege of Gaza.
The far-right government in Israel and its supporters have repeatedly said that October 7 represented the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, was a clear manifestation of Palestinian antisemitism, and that accordingly the Jewish state has a right to defend itself. No doubt the indiscriminate and almost gleeful nature of the killings of civilians in their kibbutz homes and at a dance party in southern Israel bordering Gaza by Hamas on October 7 cannot be ignored and should be condemned.
What is absent from the Netanyahu government’s narrative about October 7 is any sense of the suffering of another nation, the Palestinians, over the previous century. What is present is a feeling of persecution, a congenital paranoia, inherited trauma. In his book The Hundred Years War Against Palestine (2020), Rashid Khalidi notes that this sentiment is a constant presence in the Revisionist Zionism of Likud and its predecessors, and is involved in its extreme attitudes and violent, oppressive behaviour.
This sentiment is something Palestinian activists have too often failed to reckon with when assessing Israeli reactions to actions that are labelled as terrorism. Even if some of the excesses of October 7 were motivated by antisemitism, would that justify the genocide that is now occurring?
Some particularly shrewd insights respecting the Hamas attack were offered by Rabbi Alissa Wise, a past staff leader for the U.S.-based Jewish Voice for Peace and a founder of Rabbis for Ceasefire during an interview with host Marc Lamont Hill on the UpFront television program on Al Jazeera.
Wise stated:
“I think it is a mistake to think about the Hamas attack as an antisemitic attack. I think the Hamas attack was an attack that was targeting Israelis and the Israeli state, for decades of dispossession, occupation and apartheid. And it is part of Israel’s project (to) completely conflate Zionism and Judaism. So, we are meant to understand that anything that Israel does is as the Jew in the world. Israel is not a Jew; Israel is a state, and they need to be dealt with, as any other state would, (with) the same accountability.”
Yes, the majority of the 1,200 killed on October 7th were Israeli Jews, soldiers and civilians. But there were also 71 foreign nationals who experienced the same confrontation without mercy from the Hamas led rampage They were primarily migrant workers from Thailand, Nepal, Cambodia and the Philippines. Relying on the foreign ministry of Thailand and other sources, Human Rights Watch stated in a report: “22 Thai citizens were taken hostage, 32 were killed, and 19 were injured. Furthermore, 10 Nepalese students working in agriculture were also reportedly killed, as well as four Filipino caregivers, and one Cambodian student.”
Even speaking Arabic did not save the life of paramedic, ambulance driver and Palestinian citizen of Israel Awad Darawshe, who was confronted and killed on October 7 while trying to assist the wounded, as his relative Mohammed Darawshe recounted in a piece in Haaretz.
Rabbi Wise argues that what happened on October 7 was the predictable outcome of an indefinite and punishing Israel-led siege and blockade of Gaza in which Palestinian residents since 2007 have faced the misery of daily restrictions on water, electricity, food and medical care, as well as regular aerial Israeli military bombardments wiping out families and residential structures.
An excellent overview of October 7 and how anti-settler colonial violence is to be understood if not necessarily applauded can be found in a piece in the London Review of Books by Adam Shatz, the author of The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon.
There are many historical parallels to what Hamas did on October 7. One in Canada is the Frog Lake Massacre, in which a breakaway element of the Plains Cree killed nine white men on the morning of April 2, 1885, during the Northwest Rebellion led by Metis leader Louis Riel in what is now Alberta. Hunger was a major contributor to the extreme violence against the overseer population.
Today, with the hindsight of history, we Canadians don’t generalize and say that all Metis and First Nations people, even their descendants, should be condemned for what transpired in Frog Lake and other similar attacks on white settlers in our history.
Yet, that is what we Jews in the diaspora are being asked to do–to endorse an Israeli government decision (backed by the U.S.) to undertake the collective punishment of men, women and children of Gaza and by extension the occupied West Bank. As Rabbi Wise explains, this is out of whack with Jewish values.
This article was originally published on Paul Weinberg’s website.
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