From: [email protected]
Canada & Israel's Occupation
By Yves Engler
Znet: January 14, 2009
The Canadian Left has taken a major step forward in opposition to Zionism.
On Saturday Montreal held probably the largest pro-Palestinian demonstration
in Canadian history. Despite some ridiculous media reports, I estimate that
there were between 12,000 and 17,000 (possibly as many as 25,000) people
marching through the streets of downtown. "Jews, Christians, Muslims,
anglos, francos, grandmothers and children walked together yesterday in the
bitter cold to call for an immediate ceasefire in [Gaza]," noted the
Montreal
Gazette. The march was endorsed and organized by all three major Quebec
unions and most of the province's social groups.
On Thursday 20 people blockaded Israel's consulate in Montreal, a day after
a group of Jewish women occupied the Israeli consulate in Toronto. Two weeks
ago Sid Ryan, the head of 200,000-member Canadian Union of Public
Employees-Ontario, courageously denounced Israel's "genocide" in the Gaza
strip and this weekend influential Canadian author Naomi Klein published an
article supporting the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against
Israel called for by Palestinian social movements. In the face of media
hostility, CUPE-Ontario, The Canadian Union of Postal Workers, the teachers
Federation in Qu?c and the 40,000 members of Qu?c student Association ASSE
have all supported the international boycott campaign against Israeli
apartheid.
Canadian opposition to Israeli policy is important in light of this
country's long history of private and public support for Zionism. Before
there was a Jewish Zionist movement, in the 1880s, Canada's preeminent
Christian Zionist, Henry Wentworth Monk, supported efforts to colonize
Palestine on behalf of European Jews and called for the British Empire to
establish a "Dominion of Israel", similar to the Dominion of Canada. Six
decades later, Ottawa played a decisive role in the UN's 1948 partition
plan, which gave the new Jewish state the majority of Palestine despite the
Jewish population owning only 5.8% of the land and representing less than a
third of the population. Four decades on, a survey of UN members ranked
Canada second only to the U.S. in perceived support for Israel and by fall
2008, Harper's Conservatives were publicly proclaiming that Canada was the
most pro-Israel country in the world.
One might assume that the Canadian Left has long opposed Israel's
Jewish/White supremacy, its role in advancing US geopolitical interests in
the Middle East or its status as the final frontier of European settler
colonialism. Unfortunately this has not been the case. Recent opposition to
Israeli policy by the Canadian Left is particularly important because it's a
reversal of the Left's historic support for Zionism. While it might seem
like ancient history to unions that recently passed motions to boycott
Israel, in September 1977 the Canadian Labour Congress passed a resolution
demanding Ottawa enact anti-boycott legislation against Arab countries that
were boycotting companies doing business with Israel to pressure that
country to return land captured in the 1967 war.
In 1975, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution (72 votes to 35 with 32
abstentions) calling Zionism a form of racism. In response, CLC President
Joe Morris, stated, "By this act, it can justifiably be argued the UN has
'legitimized' anti-Semitism and pogroms against Jews. Canadian labor will
fight all moves to implement such a resolution and will exercise its
influence to prevent further extensions of the resolution." The same year,
the CLC vigorously opposed the admission of the Palestinian Liberation
Organization (PLO) to the International Labor Organisation and in 1985 CLC
president Dennis McDermott denounced a Canadian Senate report that rebuked
Israel's 1982 invasion/occupation of Lebanon and provided mild support for
the PLO. McDermott, who refered to himself as a "Catholic Zionist," said the
Senate report, which stopped short of calling the PLO the legitimate voice
of Palestinians, was an ''exercise in bad judgment and, even worse, bad
taste.'' (A portrait of McDermott hangs in a library named after him at the
trade school of the Histadrut union in Israel.)
Most astoundingly, in 1956, the CLC called on the Canadian government to
"lend its sympathetic support to Israel's request for defensive armaments in
order that Israel may match in quality if not in quantity, the constant flow
of Soviet Block armaments into the Arab countries." The resolution was
passed just before Israel invaded Egypt alongside former colonial powers
France and Britain. What is especially disturbing about this resolution is
that Canada had been selling Israel weapons for a number of years and was
under (private) pressure from Washington to send Israel advanced fighter
jets.
Unions are not the only part of the Left that staunchly supported Israel. In
1975, Tommy Douglas, the head of the CCF (precursor to the NDP) and 'father
of Medicare', told the Histadrut, "The main enmity against Israel is that
she has been an affront to those nations who do not treat their people and
their workers as well as Israel has treated hers." This speech was made
eight years into Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and a
quarter century after 800,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed during
the 1948 war. Staunch Zionist Irving Abella explained in the late 1970s
that, "Historically, the New Democratic Party (NDP) has been the most
supportive of the Israeli cause, largely because of its close relationship
to Israel's labour party, and to the Histadrut, the Israel trade union
movement."
The Left is still not unanimous in its antagonism towards Israeli policy in
Palestine, its domestic racism or its belligerence in the region (over the
years Israel has bombed Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Tunisia,
Iraq and is now threatening to bomb Iran). Some unions continue to buy
Israel Bonds while NDP MPs still take tours of the region organized by
pro-Israel groups. In a particularly distasteful episode last year, the NDP
opposed and then supported the Harper government when Canada was the first
country to withdraw from the second UN Conference on Racism ("Durban II"),
much to the delight of the Israeli government, which was the second country
to pull out (criticism of Zionism at Durban I was deemed "anti-semitic").
Despite some setbacks it is clear that the Canadian left is slowly catching
up to the rest of the world in seeing the fundamental injustice of Zionism.
Palestinian activists, alongside non-Arab activists, have worked tirelessly
to make opposition to Zionism a central part of the left's political
culture. This explains why there were 18 actions across the country on
Saturday, many of them with as many as 1000 people, even in smaller cities
like Hamilton and Edmonton.
Yves Engler is the author of the soon to be published Canada on the World
Stage: A Force for Good or Bad Actor? and other books.
From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives
http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/commentaries/3743
Comment on this commentary:
http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/commentaries/3743#AddComment
***
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1054282.html
My hero of the Gaza war
By Gideon Levy
Haaretz: 11/01/2009
My war hero likes to eat at Acre's famed Uri Burri restaurant. He
thinks it's the best fish restaurant in the world, and told me as much
yesterday from the porch of the central Gaza City office building from
which he has broadcast every day for the past two weeks, noon and
night, almost without rest.
My war hero is Ayman Mohyeldin, the young correspondent for Al Jazeera
English and the only foreign correspondent broadcasting during these
awful days in a Gaza Strip closed off to the media. Al Jazeera English
is not what you might think. It offers balanced, professional
reporting from correspondents both in Sderot and Gaza. And Mohyeldin
is the cherry on top of this journalistic cream. I wouldn't have
needed him or his broadcasts if not for the Israeli stations' blackout
of the fighting. Since discovering this wunderkind from America (his
mother is from the West Bank city of Tul Karm and his father from
Egypt), I have stopped frantically changing TV stations.
Whoever recoils from the grotesque coverage by Channel 2's Roni Daniel
is invited to tune in to this wise and considered broadcaster. Whoever
recoils from our heroic tales, bias, whitewashed words, Rorschach
images of bombing, IDF Spokesman-distributed photographs,
propagandists' excuses, self-satisfied generals and half-truths is
invited to tune in. Whoever wants to know what is really happening,
not only of a postponed wedding in Sderot and a cat forgotten in
Ashkelon. Watching is sometimes hard, bloodcurdlingly hard, but
reality is no less hard right now.
I have followed him throughout the war. Sporting a helmet and
protective vest, and sometimes a Lacoste jacket, he stands on the
roof, broadcasting in the most restrained tones, never getting excited
or using flowery adjectives to describe what we're inflicting on Gaza,
even when planes fly over him and bomb a house in the distance.
Sometimes he crouches during a blast, his eyes perpetually glazed from
fatigue, his face sometimes betraying helplessness.
At age 29, he has already seen one war, in Iraq, but he says this war
is more intense. He is frustrated that his broadcasts are carried
virtually everywhere in the world except the United States, his own
country, the place he thinks it is most important that these images
from Gaza be seen.
"At the end of the day, if there is one country that can have
influence, it's the United States. It's frustrating to know you're not
reaching the viewers you would like to," he told me this week from the
roof. On Friday he finally came down, for safety's sake, after the
Israel Defense Forces bombed a neighboring media center.
Is he afraid? "I'd be lying if I said I don't feel fear, but my
obligation is greater than the fear," he says.
Nor does he have a single bad word to say about Israel. He says he
would gladly return to visit - after all, he's got friends here. We
even set a dinner date at his favorite restaurant, for 6 P.M. after
the war.
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