This year, as Jewish Canadians celebrate the holiday of Passover, conversations about Israel/Palestine will be difficult to avoid. As Jews, we are calling on our families, friends, and communities to embrace uncomfortable conversations and find unity in Passover’s call for collective liberation.
When we tell the story of Passover from the Book of Exodus — about the liberation of the ancient Israelites from slavery in Egypt — we are telling a universal story about the fight for human dignity and freedom from oppression. The story recounts how God forced Pharaoh to let our people go by inflicting 10 terrible plagues — with help from Moses, an Israelite who was raised as a prince of Egypt — before parting the Red Sea, and then our ancestors wandered the desert in search of a promised land.
Yet, too often the Passover story gets construed narrowly as a sort of starting gun in a (European) Jewish history involving centuries of persecution culminating in the Nazi-perpetrated Holocaust.
For many Jews, the creation of the State of Israel in the 1940s served as the other bookend to our story: our freedom, even for Jews outside Israel, would now be guaranteed by a nation state.
But just as the commonly told story of Canada’s founding omits the sins of settler-colonialism, Israel’s story ignores the injustice at the heart of its creation. It glosses over the existence of a Palestinian population, and somehow blames them for becoming refugees (and “miraculously” creating Israel’s Jewish demographic majority).
For many decades, Palestinians struggled to have their side of the story heard — the story of the Nakba. It was not until the late 1980s that Israeli scholarship started to catch up. Accessing newly released government records, Israel’s “New Historians” demonstrated that the state’s military forces ethnically cleansed hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their land. And make no mistake: the ethnic cleansing has been ongoing.
Yet, many people still don’t acknowledge the deep injustice at the root of decades of conflict and our ethical duty to support the righting of this wrong.
Instead, there are endless distractions, like accusations that the recurring protests across Canada are “antisemitic hate-fests”. Anything to avoid asking why so many Canadians — especially young people, many Jews included — stand in solidarity with Palestinians.
The strategy is to deflect from Israel’s assault on Gaza that has killed over 30,000 people following Hamas’ horrific attack on October 7; deflect from Israel’s blockade and perennial bombing of Gaza; and deflect from what human rights organizations, including the Israeli organization B’Tselem, have determined is an “apartheid regime”.
The Passover story, like many Jewish teachings, illustrates how we must all identify with peoples seeking liberation and act in solidarity with them.
First, the identities of oppressor and oppressed are not static. Even if antisemitism is once again on the rise, it does not justify Israel’s violence against Palestinians. As the Passover story is written from the perspective of the disempowered, we must centre the Palestinian call for liberation, just as we must challenge all colonial narratives.
Second, just as the Israelites escaped from Egypt, we must champion the rights of all refugees — not only Jewish refugees from Europe and the Middle East, but also Palestinian refugees whose right of return is enshrined in international law.
Finally, we must face head-on what it will take to end — once and for all — an occupation that has birthed plagues of unending violence. There can be no military solution: we must start with an immediate ceasefire and the hostages’ return. And any long-term political solution must be founded in equality, justice, and a thriving shared future for all Palestinians and Israelis living between the river and the sea.
Until then, we’re all just wandering in the desert.
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