No Country For Anyone

Especially Canada:

Since Canada’s ostensible support for the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism has become a farce, Prime Minister Mark Carney should be honest with Canadians and formally withdraw Canada’s endorsement of the document.

He can do it when he recognizes the State of Palestine at the 80th Session of the United Nations General Assembly next month, so that it will be clear to Canada’s 400,000 Jews where his government actually stands on the issue of protecting them from unprecedented hate and antisemitic violence.

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When Prime Minister Mark Carney announced in July that Canada would recognize a Palestinian state, he reversed almost eight decades of Canadian policy regarding Israel and its Arab protagonists. That reversal was ill-formed, badly timed and bound to give comfort to Israel’s enemies and strengthen the extreme right-wing nationalists in the current Israeli government.

Canada’s involvement with the birth of the modern State of Israel began in 1947, the year the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) — an 11-member body tasked with exploring the Palestine question and charged to make recommendations to the General Assembly on the future of the area — was formed.

One member of the committee was Justice Ivan Rand of the Supreme Court of Canada. After extensive travels, interviews and hearings, UNSCOP — with Rand in the majority — decided to divide the area into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. The General Assembly agreed.

The Jews accepted the recommendation and the Arabs did not. On May 15, 1948, the Jewish community in Palestine declared the independence of the State of Israel. This was followed by the invasion of a half dozen Arab states, including Egypt, Jordan and Syria. Israel won the war.

Canada recognized the new state in 1949, largely because Rand had supported the partition and also because Canada — like most European countries, the United States and the Soviet Union — recognized that the Jews had already established workable political, economic and social institutions there, while the “West Bank,” as we now call it, had been seized by Jordan and the Gaza Strip by Egypt.

Canada’s longtime policy was that any solution to the ongoing conflict had to be created by the parties themselves. In other words, Israelis and Arabs would have to come to a solution — one should not be imposed on them. That remained Canada’s official policy until last month. ...

All through those tumultuous years, Canada stuck by its idea that Arabs (including Palestinians, of course) and Israelis should decide the terms of the end of their protracted war. It stuck by the idea that no peace imposed from the outside would ever stay in place. And that simple idea was killed by Carney when he announced that Canada would recognize a Palestinian state.

Canada is hardly a major player in the Middle East anymore. But it’s ludicrous that Canada would try to punish Israel for its campaign in Gaza by recognizing a Palestinian state that has no defined borders, an effectively non-functioning and certainly non-democratic government that’s paid bonus money to the families of terrorists who died attacking Israel. Indeed, Canadians should ask themselves: what is this action supposed to accomplish?

 

Votes in Toronto.