Prime Minister Justin Trudeau insists that Canada favors a two-state solution and opposes Israeli settlements. He has restored funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency that helps Palestinian refugees, which the Stephen Harper government had cut. But he condemns the boycott and divestment policy that calls for economic pressure on Israel to push it to accept a just settlement.
In Trudeau’s 13 months in office, Canada has voted against 16 motions critical of Israel in the General Assembly - the only major country, alongside the US, to do so.
Security Council Resolution 2334, on which the US abstained to Israel’s dismay, calls the Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian lands a violation of international law. It urges member states, upon whom the resolution is binding, to “distinguish, in their relevant dealings, between the territory of the State of Israel and the territories occupied since 1967.”
Canadian trade and immigration policies make no such distinction.
The UN resolution has upset Canadian Jews who blindly support Israel’s violation of the human rights of Palestinians but has elated those who favor a just settlement.
Journalist Robert Sibley moaned in the Ottawa Citizen that President Barack Obama “capped his legacy of failure by setting up the diplomatic lynching of the singular liberal democracy in the Middle East.”
Sibley asserted that the settlemnts are on lands granted to the Jews by the League of Nations and by the United Nations, that the Arabs attacked Israel in 1948 and that it was only in 1967 that Israel retook “the land intended for a Jewish state.”
He continued: The Arabs have rejected peace deals and refuse to accept Israel’s existence “and therein lies the seeds for war.”
Diana Ralph, chair of Independent Jewish Voices in Ottawa, wrote to the Citizen that Sibley’s article “is full of distorted history, outright lies and bigotry.”
She said: “World opinion overwhelmingly opposes Israel’s illegal occupation of lands it conquered in 1967. Resolution 2334 echoes many earlier rulings by the UN General Assembly, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the International Court of Justice and even the UN Security Council. In choosing to abstain, Obama chose not to continue condoning this injustice. This too is not new. In 1979, the US also abstained on a similar Security Council resolution.”
She declared: “Sibley’s claim that Arab countries attacked Israel distorts reality. In December 1947, Jewish paramilitary troops (precursors of the Israeli Defense Forces) launched a planned ethnic cleansing attack on Palestinian villages, massacring or driving out 85 percent of the residents, before any Arabs came to their defense in 1948.
“Palestinians have not refused to recognize the state of Israel. The PLO repeatedly recognized the state of Israel within the 1949 armistice lines, giving up political claim to half the territory the UN appropriated to them in 1947. Israeli scholars Zalam Amit and Daphna Levitt demonstrate that it is Israel that has repeatedly rejected legitimate peace overtures by Palestinians, Saudis, and others… Although Israel did remove its illegal settlements in Gaza in 2005, it has kept the people of Gaza under brutal military occupation by land, sea, and air, in what is recognized as the world’s largest outdoor prison.”
The Citizen did not print her letter, or others setting the record straight. But the Toronto Globe and Mail printed an article by Paul Heinbecker, a former Canadian ambassador to the UN, that stated that the UN resolution condemning Israeli settlements “reflects what the world thinks.”
Heinbecker emphasized that “esolution 2334 reflects evolving UN resolutions on the Israel/Palestine issue including:
• General Assembly Resolution 181 which partitioned Palestine and led to the proclamation of Israel;
• Resolution 194 which resolved that peace-minded refugees of the 1948 war should be permitted to return to their homes; and
• Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 that emphasized the ‘inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war.’”
The language of the most recent Security Council resolution is unequivocal. Israel’s settlements in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, constitute “a flagrant violation of international law,” and are “a major obstacle to the achievement of the two-state solution and a just, lasting and comprehensive peace.”
“Resolution 2334 reflects what the world thinks. If this resolution of the 15-member UN Security Council were put to a vote in the 193-member General Assembly, the outcome would scarcely be different.”
Mira Sucharov, who teaches at Carleton University and writes for the Canadian Jewish News, wrote in part: “neither is ‘Israel proper,’ that is, Israel within its pre-1967 borders, perfectly democratic, in a liberal sense. Even after Palestinian citizens were freed from the Israeli military regime that governed them (and only them) until 1966, there remain many structural inequalities between Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel…
“But when my students, looking to the occupation specifically, ask me this semester whether Israel is a democracy or whether it is a different kind of regime, I will turn the question back to them: can a country whose military occupation is dragging on endlessly claim the mantle of democracy?”
Mohammed Azhar Ali Khan is a retired Canadian journalist, civil servant and refugee judge.
