Back to Part 1 / Back to Part 2
AIPAC North firms up its base
As the Canadian establishment’s support for Israeli Apartheid increased, the GPC polls conducted for and relied upon by CIJA showed that public opinion was lagging behind. The gist of their findings is expressed by a pair of Globe and Mail headlines from around the time of the Martin’s government’s pro-Israel epiphany at the UN: "Neutrality on Mideast favoured, polls find" (Jeff Sallot, November 2004); "Canadians don’t share Ottawa’s pro-Israel tilt" (Jeffrey Simpson, February 2005). Despite all UIAFC’s talk of a grand "PR offensive," despite reported CIJA meetings with newspaper editorial boards, less than half of those surveyed (42%) considered Israel to be a democratic state. Moreover, the rhetoric about "security" had not entirely eliminated adverse reactions to Israel’s open campaign of extra-judicial assassinations and collective punishment of Palestinians. GPC found that more than one third of Canadians (36%) believed that Israel was linked with terrorist organizations. The polls found that the more people knew about the conflict, the more likely they were to support the Palestinian cause.
B’nai Brith public relations in this context were a reminder of why CIJA strategists keep the organization at arm’s length. Around the time the time that these GPC polls were released, Adam Aptowitzer, Ontario chair of B’nai Brith Canada’s Institute for International Affair, went on record with the following argument: "Terror is a tool, terror is a means to an end … When Israel uses terror to … destroy a home and convince people to be terrified of what the possible consequences are, I’d say that’s acceptable use to terrify someone." He continued, in words that have been widely quoted: "the truth is that terror is an option to be used by states in order to prevent deaths of their own citizens and others. Acts that take place in Gaza and [the] West Bank, you might want to classify them as terrorists sponsored by the state. But when that is being done to prevent deaths, are we going to say that is wrong?" Support for state violence is a mainstay of Israel advocacy. But clumsy honesty reveals a lack of strategic sense, and Aptowitzer was compelled to resign. His argument and agenda continued to press forward through more subtle means.
Poetry, libraries and the anti-Israel menace
Given long-term Israel advocacy strategy and concern over popular opinion, one strategic target was the school system. Where the Israel advocacy apparatus had strong control, its pedagogical approach was already on display. This was the case at the Community Hebrew Academy of Toronto (CHAT). In the spring of 2003, CHAT students were treated to a visit by an Israeli military operative. Second-in-command of a 600-soldier battalion, "Major Alon Harel says the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) is fighting two battles," reported the Canadian Jewish News, "one against terrorism and the other against visuals that portray a Goliath army oppressing Palestinian children." One CHAT student commented that Harel "probably doesn’t like those people with the orange identity cards very much," having learned how Palestinians are identified at Israeli checkpoints. Harel insisted he did not hate Palestinians, but explained that "he’s even seen pregnant Palestinian women trying to smuggle explosives into Israel and it has become a challenge to convince soldiers to balance searches with civility at checkpoints when they know their lives are on the line." Supporters of Israeli militarism were thus cultivated at a young age. In fact, while CHAT is at least a secondary school, even much younger children at Israel advocacy events in Toronto – including many looking far ahead to puberty – are often dressed up in Israeli military paraphernalia.
But long-term support for a Canadian foreign policy pitted against Palestinian human rights cannot be generated by internal community indoctrination alone. CIJA went on the offensive. Expressions of sympathy for Palestinian suffering or resistance in the public school system were subject to attack. In November 2004, CIJA’s Canadian Jewish Congress learned that a performance at Toronto’s Earl Haig Secondary School had "ended with a poem about Palestinian oppression by Israelis." CJC officials demanded that the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) brush up its censorship apparatus. TDSB sent a memo to all of its staff warning that "sometimes trips, performances and events that have been past practice for years may be insensitive because of programming changes, etc." As the Canadian Jewish News reported, "It cited as an example the presentation at Earl Haig Secondary School by ARCfest, a group that organizes a five-day human rights arts festival, which, the board said, failed to meet the standards held by TDSB policies." The memo was to CJC’s satisfaction.
A few months later, the Israel advocacy apparatus caught wind of another scandal: an elementary school student at an Islamic school in Ottawa had written a story that featured Palestinian fighters as protagonists. This was unacceptable; in the education system as in Israel-Palestine, Israel advocates support Zionist militarism while demanding Palestinian passivity. The student in question was a Palestinian child with relatives living under Israeli military occupation with those "orange identity cards." Learning that one teacher had assisted the student with the project, and that another had marked it with positive comments, CanWest Global’s Ottawa Citizen attacked the school from its front page. The CJC demanded that the Education Ministry launch an investigation, which it promptly did. The two teachers were suspended and the school was subjected to a government probe.
To cite just one further example from the elementary school system, consider the more recent attack mounted in Ontario on the liberal children’s book Three Wishes: Palestinian and Israeli Children Speak. Author Deborah Ellis made a clear effort to construct a sense of symmetry between the Israeli and Palestinian experiences. Nonetheless, the basic relation of domination and subordination that characterizes Israeli Apartheid was not sufficiently downplayed for Israel advocates to be satisfied. B’nai Brith’s League for Human Rights demanded that "all copies of the books be pulled from school library shelves immediately, pending a full review by the board of the content and use of the book." CJC applied its own pressure, and was informed that the TDSB "was pulling the book from the Ontario Library Association‘s Silver Birch reading program and removing it from school and library shelves. Children in Grade 7 and up will still be able to borrow the book from a librarian or school office." The book was censored to a greater or lesser extent in jurisdictions throughout the province.
Since public knowledge about the Israel-Palestine conflict results in support for the Palestinians, CIJA had resolved to address the problem at its root.
Copyrighting Jewishness
CIJA coordinated similar offensives in various spheres of Canadian political life. In so doing, it could not rely solely on rhetoric about Israeli security and Palestinian terrorism. After all, Israeli violence dwarfs Palestinian violence in scope and intensity, and Aptowitzer’s justification of Israeli terror does not always fall on receptive ears. To proceed with political force, Israel advocates were intent on maintaining the guise of Jewish community representation. True, UIAFC’s own president had gone on record describing institutions like the CJC and CIC as "agents" of a corporate fundraising system. And the fact that B’nai Brith had been made to fall back on an independent fundraising base didn’t make it much different in this respect. Still, representing a nexus of corporate-U.S.-Israeli power is not nearly as prestigious as representing the accumulated history of the Jewish people. So Israel advocates continued to lay aggressive copyright claims to the latter.
The notion was bluntly expressed in a letter to the Jewish Tribune which denounced Naomi Klein’s position regarding Israel-Palestine: "Isn’t it time for the Jewish community to excommunicate her or at least have her cease to be a member of the Jewish community in good standing?" UIAFC operatives toed a similar line. On April 22 2004, for example, a Canadian Jewish News story quoted Zac Kaye, executive director of Hillel of Greater Toronto, regarding the situation at York University. "Kaye highlighted some of the stresses faced by Hillel@York. ‘Many pro-Palestinian students at York are Jewish,’ Kaye said. ‘They’re beyond the pale for us Jews and it can be quite frustrating.’" The category "us Jews" thus required not so much Jewishness as support for Israel. The confidence with which this definition has been applied is remarkable. Consider, in light of Kaye’s remarks, the fact that a news story in the very next issue of the same paper began by declaring that York University’s "Jewish students are putting up a united and organized front in promoting Israel." The story relied on quotes from Talia Klein, then director of Hillel@York.
It is worth stressing the extent to which this effort comes from quarters that are not only Zionist, but chauvinist in the most extreme sense. At York, for example, UIAFC’s involvement (through Hillel) in the student elections of 2003/2004 brought into the presidential office of York’s undergraduate student union the head of Betar Tagar’s York University chapter. (This individual had been a pro-war organizer and the host of IDF Appreciation Day, mentioned above.) The Betarim are the youth followers of Jabotinsky, the Zionist extremist who counted many open supporters of Mussolini among his followers, and whose early call for an "iron wall" between Zionist settlement and indigenous society would prove prophetic. Walter Laqeuer, a leading and quite sympathetic historian of Zionism, describes the origins of Betar as follows: "The stress on military training, leadership, discipline, and the whole ideology of ‘conquer or die’ gave it a certain similarity to the fascist youth movements of the 1920s and 1930s."[1] Talia Klein, director of Hillel@York through the height of CIJA activity on the campus, became national director of Betar Tagar in May 2006. Klein, formerly a national officer of the CJC and employee of B’nai Brith, wrote her thesis on Jabotinsky’s ideas. On the relationship between Hillel and Betar, she told the Canadian Jewish News that "We’re like two currents in a river. Sometimes we join up and sometimes we don’t. … we’re not by any means mutually exclusive."
Israel advocates thus sought to redefine Jewishness as support for Israel, with the organization of this support dominated by corporate power and driven by politics veering to the ultra-nationalist right.
Opposition to Israeli Apartheid was thereby smeared as anti-Semitic. As a 2003 Canadian Jewish Congress guide to campus advocacy put it (PDF p. 8), it "is in fact anti-Semitic … to deny the Jewish people its right to sovereignty in its ancestral homeland." To advocate the Palestinian right of return, then, is in fact racist. Jews, so the argument goes, cannot be subject to criteria that simply guarantee equal rights for all people wherever they live. It is instead necessary to acknowledge a mystical, overriding right to Palestinian land possessed by all Jews, as resulting from a perpetual ancestral bond; and on the flip side, to reject the residency and citizenship rights of the population indigenous to this land and evicted en masse since 1948. To criticize the system of open-air imprisonment maintained by Israel over the Gaza Strip, or to condemn Israeli plans to annex West Bank territory and wall Palestinians into enclosed ghettos (on the Gaza model), is itself to flirt with bigotry – to be guilty of "functional anti-Semitism," as the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies recently declared. What this Zionist argument lacks in logic it makes up for through the force of resources and constant repetition. In fact, the leadership of CIJA’s CJC explicitly counted among its 2005 priorities "working with partners to educate Canadians about the links between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism."[2]
But it does not end there. Having been stretched to fit the most anti-racist of Palestine solidarity activism, this elastic concept of anti-Semitism has been expanded even further. Immunity from criticism is conferred on not only an overriding "Jewish sovereignty" in Israel-Palestine, but also its reactionary allies. Hillel of Greater Toronto’s Zac Kaye implied a move in this direction by justifying the arrest of key organizers of a March 5, 2003 anti-war student strike at York University as follows: "police were needed to protect Jewish students." Kaye was referring to pro-war Hillel organizers working through the local chapter of the Canadian Alliance. The issue was put more bluntly still by Canadian Jewish News columnist Lawrence Hart. As the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq began to set in (and anti-occupation politics spread), he argued that we need to take our cue from U.S.-Israel advocates and call "attention to the forces of anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, anti-racism and pacifism as major facilitators of today’s anti-Semitism."
The betrayal of anti-racist politics is both profound and explicit.
Canada’s U.S.-Israel lobby evolves
In May 2005, the leadership of CIJA-PAC, CIJA’s main lobby apparatus, once again joined AIPAC for its annual conference in Washington, D.C.. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice were both in attendance. The conference included discussion of foreign policy on Iran as well as on Israel-Palestine. The Canadian Jewish News interviewed Mark Waldman on the assembly: "Witnessing the way American lobbyists have created a bipartisan political support for Israel and contrasting that with the Canadian situation can be ‘depressing,’ Waldman said." But efforts were underway to address this disparity. AIPAC’s conference "included a one-day event … aimed at helping Canadian and European communities develop the kind of grassroots organizational strength that AIPAC has shown over the years." That same month, Josh Cooper resigned from CIJA-PAC.
At the end of 2005, Cooper re-emerged, now at the head of a new Canadian lobby group, the Canadian Jewish Political Affairs Committee (CJPAC). Much to the bewilderment of B’nai Brith (and anyone else with their eyes open), CJPAC denied any connection with CIJA or CIJA-PAC. Meanwhile, CIJA-PAC dissolved. CJPAC differs in important ways from CIJA’s original and now-defunct lobby arm. The new lobby is not "charitable" but political, not "non-partisan" but "multi-partisan." It organizes direct financial and political involvement in all Canadian parties and the election process generally. It is worth recalling, in this light, the unprecedented cross-partisan support for Israel on display in the election of January 2006 (and since). Looking back on the election, the Canadian Jewish News reported the new lobby’s satisfaction with its work under the headline "CJPAC claims success after federal election."
Anti-Palestinian Canadian policy trends have continued to deepen since. A dramatic indication of this was provided by the new Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, which, soon after its election, beat even the Bush administration to the draw in sanctioning and cutting diplomatic ties with the Palestinian Authority (PA) in punishment for the resounding electoral victory of Hamas. The severity of this measure can only be understood against the backdrop of Israel’s effective sabotage of the independent economic base of Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza. This sabotage, accomplished through restrictive military orders, border closures and the like, forced broad sectors of Palestinian society into economic reliance on the PA. The decision to suffocate PA finances in punishment for the institution’s shift away from Western-backed Palestinian leadership threatens humanitarian disaster for a people among whom chronic malnutrition was already dangerously widespread. Dov Weissglas, advisor to the Israeli Prime Minister, generated some hearty official chuckles with his joke about the situation: "It’s like an appointment with a dietician. The Palestinians will get a lot thinner, but won’t die."
To justify Canadian participation in the effort, Harper has drawn from Israel advocacy rhetoric in crude (and clumsy) ways. In May 2006, for example, the Prime Minister gave a speech at an event sponsored by the Asper Foundation, B’nai Brith, CIJA, the CJC and the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies. He explained that Canadian suffocation of the PA was necessary, as was diplomatic maneuvering against Iran. Iran and the PA pose the same threat to Jews that was once posed by the Nazis, he declared, and we most join the U.S. and Israel in fighting them as such.
Harper’s zealotry is on even more dramatic display around Afghanistan, and his stance on Israel-Palestine cannot be attributed to domestic Israel advocacy alone. While Paul Martin’s Liberals were eager to show loyalty to the U.S., the Harper government has taken this to new levels. Moreover, ideology must play a part in determining the stance. Theodor Herzl’s vision of a proud Western outpost fighting off the barbarian, terrorist hordes of the Third World resonates with the Harper brand of Canadian nationalism. As leader of the Canadian Alliance, Harper had years ago embraced Israel as "part of our western democratic family" and called for "a stronger sense of Canada as a member of an alliance, a member of a family of western democratic nations." Note that much of Harper’s base is heir to a form of Canadian nationalism that once solidly excluded Jews from its ranks. The Conservative party’s former foreign affairs critic, Stockwell Day, is himself the son of a leading politician with Social Credit, the main electoral vehicle for mid-20th century anti-Semitism in Western Canada. The hangover of Social Credit anti-Semitism is apparent in the evangelical Christian support base around Day, which would see Jews congregate in Palestine only to be wiped out with the Second Coming of the Messiah. But for now – with Palestinians as clearly excluded from Harper’s happy western family as those subversive foreigners from Eastern Europe once were – Israel remains an ally.
In any case, Harper is hardly immune to domestic corporate pressure, and the base for Israel advocacy in Canada’s economic establishment is undeniably solid. Consider a recent National Post report on the Words and Deeds conference co-hosted by CIJA and Toronto’s UJA Federation in early 2006. "Packed to the gills with Canada’s banking elite and philanthropists," the conference earned the Post reporter’s praise as "the business event of the winter season."[3] One of the conference’s anchormen was Gerry Schwartz, co-founder of CanWest Global, a fact which may have encouraged the Post reporter’s praise. Nonetheless, the event did showcase an impressive foundation of corporate support. It was held partly in honour of Gord Nixon, president and CEO of Royal Bank Financial Group. Nixon addressed the assembled tycoons with confidence and pride: "CEOs are placed in a privileged position when it comes to raising money, promoting institutions and social causes and even influencing thinking on civic issues." It is not difficult to determine where this privileged corporate Canadian influence weighs in on the country’s Israel-Palestine policies.
Politically and institutionally, AIPAC North has firmed up its base.
The anti-apartheid challenge persists
But while Nixon may be right about the power of his class, the costs of letting it dominate Canadian political affairs are prohibitively high – and not just on Israel-Palestine. It is indeed interesting that just one month after finance minister James Flaherty took the spirit of Common Sense Revolution into federal government, eliminating the capital gains tax on "charitable" gifts made in the form of shares, a CIJA tycoon donated a near-record sum of $50 million to Toronto’s UJA Federation. Policies of economic suffocation at home and abroad reflect a linked agenda. As recognition of this spreads, the challenge to Canadian support for Israeli Apartheid continues to pick up momentum.
A recent indication of this vitality was provided by the Ontario wing of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), the country’s largest union of public sector workers. On May 27 2006, CUPE Ontario’s annual convention passed a resolution declaring support for the struggle against Israeli Apartheid in clear and strategic terms. In identifying the Israeli system as apartheid, CUPE Ontario highlighted the mainstay of this system, namely, the continued denial of full residency and citizenship rights to Palestinians displaced from their homeland since 1948. It also singled out for criticism a pillar of Canadian support for this system, the Canada-Israel Free Trade Agreement. CUPE’s Resolution 50 went on to commit the union to joining in the revival of the spirit and strategy which drove the movement against South African apartheid, based on a call for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel until apartheid is dismantled.
Willie Madisha, president of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, sent the union a message of solidarity via CUPE Ontario president Sid Ryan: "As someone who lived in apartheid South Africa and has visited Palestine I say with confidence that Israel is an apartheid state," Madisha agreed. Outlining some of Israel’s more egregious abuses against Palestinians, he continued: "When the governments of the world turn a blind eye to these injustices; when they are seduced by apartheid Israel’s justification of brutality through the pretext of ‘security’; when they silence criticism of state terror through the canard of ‘anti-Semitism’ – then it is time for the global workers movement to stand firm against hypocrisy and double standards."
The call for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel having been widely endorsed in a July 2005 Palestinian national declaration, the Palestinian workers’ movement united in sending CUPE messages of wholehearted support. These were endorsed by the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions as well as a wide range of sectoral unions. Support (of varying degrees) came from a further range of labour and community organizations, from the Nigeria Labour Congress to the Steelworkers Toronto Area Council, from the Canadian Arab Federation and Canadian Islamic Congress to the dissident Alliance of Concerned Jewish Canadians. Certain voices in the Canadian mainstream echoed this chorus, notable among them Linda McQuiag, and a dissident Israeli message of support garnered a long list of signatories, including academics like Tanya Reinhart and activists like Jeff Halper. Select messages of support are available online at the website of the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid.
The reaction from Canada’s Israel advocates was predictable and knee-jerk. B’nai Brith circulated a lengthy condemnation of CUPE Ontario and its position, while CanWest Global widely printed the online address for the denunciation through its National Post. The Post, as indeed the full range of CanWest publications, directly joined the anti-CUPE campaign, running a series of fevered attacks on CUPE Ontario and the union’s president, Sid Ryan (this included an article written by Israel’s ambassador to Canada). The National Post commentary editor himself weighed in under the headline "CUPE’s bigoted agenda," going into conniptions over the threat that returning Palestinian refugees would pose to Israel’s prized Jewish demographic majority, and writing longingly of the day when the Canadian government will "finally bust the nation’s pampered unions." The CJC likewise complained that Resolution 50 "reads like a piece of propaganda."
The Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies positioned themselves at the front and centre of the anti-CUPE campaign. Bear in mind that this organization had previously joined forces with Betar Tagar to oppose the "Israeli Apartheid Week" that is spreading across Canadian campuses, and that its president and chairman is none other than CIJA/CanWest co-founder Gerry Schwartz. The Canadian Friends of Simon Wiesenthal had already attacked the campaign against Israel’s "Apartheid Wall" for its "functional anti-Semitism," and predictably set their sights on Resolution 50. The spirit of pan-imperial ("anti-terrorist") solidarity framed the institution’s public relations. This avowedly "anti-racist" association declared that to support CUPE Ontario’s position "is to turn a blind eye to the very same concerns and fate that Canadians are combating in Afghanistan and here at home." Chief of Defence Staff Rick Hillier has, after all, pledged Canadian support for attacks on the "detestable murderers and scumbags" of Afghanistan, so why fret over the treatment of their Palestinian counterparts?
At the same time, the Israel advocacy apparatus kicked into gear at the grassroots level. For the likes of UIAFC, unionist legitimacy is hard to come by, but an attempt was made. The effort to put a working class hat on Israel advocacy produced amusing spectacles, as when Carolyn Roberts, president of CUPE Local 2137, drew upon the fine tradition of labor struggle in a National Post op-ed that blasted Sid Ryan as a "rabble-rouser." Unfortunately, the quest for corporate respectability on the part of certain labor leaders came through for the opponents of Resolution 50. Canadian Auto Workers president Buzz Hargrove, for example – with memories of the Stronach Castle (if not Schwartz’s Fortress Onex) batting around in his head – dealt a further blow to his own credibility by writing an article for the Toronto Star which expressed "disappointment" in CUPE Ontario, while praising the steps towards "peace and resolution of the conflict" taken by such "brave leaders" as Mahmoud Abbas and Ariel Sharon.
Nonetheless, despite Israel advocates’ best efforts, CUPE Ontario has held the line. The opportunity to build upon this success remains extremely promising.
The Palestine solidarity movement has much work to do. The Canadian policy package of support for Israel against the Palestinians – represented by partisan diplomacy as well as by agreements like CIFTA, the CIIRDF and the Ontario-Israel Memorandum of Understanding – is formidable. And CIJA, as Gord Nixon pointed out, can take comfort in enduring support from the Canadian establishment and its allies. But Canadian public opinion remains very mixed, and pressure for universities, pension plans and other institutions to adopt anti-apartheid policies can have an important impact. Government opposition to Palestinian rights, for its part, may be extensive, but is by the same token over-extended to the point of vulnerability.
Challenges to this vulnerability will not go away. Those working to bring Canada’s Israel-Palestine policy into line with popular opinion, let alone with demands for real justice, are not about to abandon their efforts. It is unfortunate that these efforts will be smeared and opposed by mainstream Canadian Jewish organizations. But it has become inevitable. The necessary course of action is simply to expose, confront and undermine those responsible for the smears, while escalating the challenge to their agenda.
The Need for a Public Confrontation
Samuel Huntington, a Harvard professor and loyal theorist of U.S. power, once provided a bit of advice that UIAFC and CIJA appear to appreciate: "The architects of power in the United States must create a force that can be felt but not seen. Power remains strong when it remains in the dark; exposed to the sunlight it begins to evaporate."[4] In avoiding sustained public attention and scrutiny, Canada’s Israel advocacy apparatus has indeed retained its strategic advantage. Its base of resources cannot be challenged in the immediate future; its limited public profile, on the other hand, can.
This is not a matter of confronting an ethnic lobby. The racist imagination has long conjured up images of Jews subverting governments or controlling them, spreading communism or hijacking banking systems, and on down the list. Such hallucinations must be exposed and rejected in the clearest terms possible. Anti-Semitic diatribes about the mythical social power of Jews form part of a terrible tradition of delusion and bigotry, and should be denounced as such.
But people of conscience cannot allow opposition to anti-Semitism to be reduced to a self-defense tactic for the Israel advocacy agenda. In downplaying the actual influence of their lobby while hiding behind disengenous rhetoric about "Jewish interests," Israel advocates find themselves buttressing anti-Semitic myths, not weakening them. By masking corporate and colonial structures under the guise of mainstream Jewish organization, the Israel advocacy apparatus obscures the fact that far from representing the Jewish community, it represents a limited (if powerful) political hierarchy. Denying the activities or influence of the associated organizations does not discredit anti-Jewish racism so much as it legitimizes it. Internationalist politics, grounded in principled and unwavering anti-racist and class analysis, remain the best defense against genuine anti-Semitism. It is, in any event, exceedingly difficult to take the Friends of Schwartz and Wiesenthal seriously as they try to lay claim to the history of Jewish ghetto suffering, all the while cheering for the open-air imprisonment of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
The challenge to these maneuvers, and to the Canadian policy regime they are designed to defend, is not going to come from within this country’s economic or political establishment. It is not going to come from UIAFC’s "agents," and it will be crudely smeared by the likes of B’nai Brith. Nonetheless, many outside of these circles will persist in building this challenge, and all people of conscience in this country have a stake in seeing it strengthened.
Dan can be contacted at [email protected].
For more information on Palestine solidarity in Canada, see the websites of Al-Awda: The Palestine Right of Return Group, the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid and EndIsraeliApartheid.net.
Back to Part 1 / Back to Part 2
References:
[1] Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism (Schocken Books, 1976): p. 360.
[2] This tactic has been in international use for some time. See Norman Finkelstein, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History (University of California Press, 2005).
[3] Amoryn Engel, "Business event of winter season," National Post/Financial Post, April 15, 2006 (FW4).
[4] Samuel Huntington, American Politics (Harvard University Press, 1981), as quoted in Noam Chomsky, "Domestic Constituencies," Z Magazine, May 1998.
ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers.
Donate