Abstract
This paper contends that the Zionist policies implemented by Israel had and continue to have a grave impact not only on the Palestinians in historic Palestine alone but also follows them in the diaspora, where some Palestinians have taken refuge. This article argues that Israel’s apartheid regime, exposed by various international Human Rights Organizations, is not a recent discovery. Apartheid, the exclusion of the natives, and their racialization have accompanied the Zionist movement since its inception. Crucial questions raised in this paper include how Palestine and the Palestinians are conceived by Zionism, in and outside of Israel, and how they are perceived by the West, especially within the Canadian context. This paper pays special attention to comparing the experience of Palestinians with that of North America’s Indigenous population, specifically concerning Israel’s and Canada’s colonial policies towards the Indigenous peoples. It also discusses the impact of Israel’s policies of silencing and vilification that doggedly follow Palestinians into the diaspora: vilifications and silencing enacted by the Israel lobby through its various Zionist (Jewish) branches, whose primary role is to silence and vilify the Palestinians and curb criticism of Israel and Zionism. This policy, it is argued, is strongly supported by Canada, structurally, institutionally and through media propaganda.
Keywords
Introduction
To properly understand the Zionist settler colonial project, its racist and racializing policies and practices, a brief history of the emergence of the Zionist project and the disappearance of Palestine and the Palestinian toponomy is needed. This exercise is crucial to understanding existing attempts by the West (including Canada) to suppress any discourse on Palestine and the Palestinians. Palestinians in the West are largely treated as individuals devoid of history, national heritage, culture, identity and rights as Indigenous people. Absenting the Palestinians from their past, culture and national identity is a basis for erasing Palestine and the Palestinians as a national group.
This paper argues that the Zionist policies of racialization and vilification of the Indigenous Palestinians have and continue to have a grave impact on the Palestinians in historic Palestine. These policies also follow them in the diaspora, where some Palestinians have taken refuge as immigrants or refugees. Questions raised in this paper include: How are Palestine and the Palestinians perceived by Zionism, in and outside of Israel, and how does the West perceive them? The article pays special attention to comparing the experience of Palestinians with North America’s Indigenous population. While it argues that each settler colonial state is historically specific, the paper addresses some similar characteristics between Israel and Canada. It will be argued that Canada and Israel share some important similarities, especially regarding the state’s treatment of the Indigenous land and peoples. It is argued that the use of Apartheid policies towards the Indigenous peoples resides at the heart of the colonial endeavour of both states.
This paper also pays attention to the impact of Israel’s policies of silencing and vilification that doggedly follow Palestinians into the diaspora. Through its mainly paid or ideologically committed agents (e.g. B’nai Brith, Hillel, Simon Wiesenthal, the ADL in the United States), Israel ensures its projected image of the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’, camouflaging, at the same time, its colonial and imperialist interests and role, in the regional and internationally.
The foundations on which Israel was established in 1948 have already been established in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with the emergence of the Zionist colonial project and its strong ties with the British Empire. In the late 19th century, several British and French (Jewish) capitalists, more specifically, Baron de Rothschild, with strong ties to British imperialism, had financial dealings with the crumbling Turkish (Ottoman) Empire, resulting in transferring some tracts of Palestine land to European Jewish capitalists. At the time, land acquisitions were used to extract surplus value, that is, as a capitalist enterprise seeking Indigenous cheap labour power. Therefore, the Palestinian peasants living on the land continued to live and work on their land and were not dispossessed. This process continued until the early 20th century and the actual British control over Palestine, allowing the realization of the Zionist settler colonial project. The latter was materialized through the establishment of the two primary Zionist organizations: the JNF (Jewish National Fund) (in Hebrew Keren Kayemet), responsible for acquiring land as exclusively Jewish property, and the Histadrut (the Jewish labour and employer agency), functioning as the employer and the union of Jewish labour. Both organizations have contributed to changing the face of Palestine’s lands and its economy.
Using the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which promised to establish ‘a Jewish home in Palestine’ 1 and the British colonial control over Palestine, both the JNF and the Histadrut enforced their Jewish, exclusionary, and racialized policies of preventing Palestinians from living or working on land acquired by them. The two organizations’ clear policies of ‘Avodah Ivrit’ (Hebrew Labour) and ‘Adamah Ivrit’ (Hebrew Land) were implemented, establishing the preamble for Israel’s Apartheid state to come. From the outset, Zionism invented itself as a superior white (European Jewish) race and saw all others, especially Indigenous Palestinians, as the inferior Other (Lentin, 2018).
Racialization and Apartheid against Indigenous peoples who reside at the heart of the settler colonial state have historically been the foundation of colonial and imperial rule. Apartheid and racialization have been and continue to be central policies for Canada and Israel. Israel’s apartheid policies and practices have been documented by various International Human Rights Organizations, most recently by Amnesty International. This will be elaborated on further in the paper. 2
How Did Palestinian Lands Become Jewish Before the Creation of Israel?
Unlike the Zionist propaganda and its claim that Palestinians sold their land to the Jews and that land transfer was made ‘peacefully’, the history of land transfer in Palestine reveals a different reality. Since 1920 British control over Palestine, the government had declared itself an ardent supporter of the Zionist project in Palestine. Until the late 1940s, the British government introduced laws and regulations, para-legal and extra-legal mechanisms, causing massive poverty among the peasant population. British over-taxation and the imprisonment of many who could not pay have led to the impoverishment of massive peasants and the indebtedness of many (Abdo, 2011, 2018). Considering most peasants continued cultivating the land they inherited from their parents and grandparents, the transfer remained within the family. Most peasants lived subsistence lives outside the wealthy class and did not have the cash to pay for land registration. They stayed on their land but without land deeds. However, their inability to pay state taxes or land registration resulted in their further imprisonment and, later, the loss of their land to the state. The confiscated land was subsequently sold to the highest bidder, who, not surprisingly, were European Jewish settlers or their organizations, especially the JNF. In Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race, Patrick Wolfe (2016) provides a detailed analysis of the political and economic (capitalist) nature of the European Zionist settlers.
British colonial government in Palestine, in other words, played a vital role in transferring parts of Palestine’s land to the Zionists, who used them as their exclusive property. As a result, many Palestinian peasants who lost their lands were forced to leave their villages and became internal refugees. Still, Palestinian resistance to their massive land transfer to the Zionists and their severe impoverishment was not met with silence and submission. Quite to the contrary, Palestinians waged massive and continuous protests, demonstrations and sit-ins against the British/Zionist policies in Palestine, throughout this period. Their resistance included the well-known 3-year revolution (1936–1939) and a 6-month general strike against the British and Zionist racializing policies. Nevertheless, despite continuous Palestinian resistance, the partial transfer of Palestine land to the Zionist settler-colonial project, along with the support of the British colonial government, continued until the British left Palestine in 1947.
In 1947–1948, Heavily armed Zionist groups (gangs) who gained military experience serving in the British army, have viciously attacked Palestinians. These well-equipped and trained gangs were met with largely unarmed Palestinian civilians, with a few fighters engaged in a guerrilla war. The Zionist fierce attacks and violence included bombings of city quarters, destruction of neighbourhoods, demolition of homes, and ultimately, the elimination of over 75% of the Palestinian population through the forced expulsion of about 750,000–800,000 Palestinians, in what is known as the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe/elimination). Capturing the ‘frontiers’ meant first attacking all cities on the seashore (Haifa, Yafa, Ledd, Akka and al-Ramleh) and those bordering other Arab countries (e.g. Safad – bordering Lebanon, Asqalan/Ashkelon – bordering Egypt, and Jerusalem – bordering Jordan), getting rid of their population and settling the cities with predominantly Jewish settlers. As Wolfe (2006) reminds us, colonizing the Frontier is often the first act in the settler-colonial project.
Making use of the 1917 Balfour Declaration, both the JNF and the Histadrut enforced their exclusivist, exclusionary and racializing policies of preventing Palestinians from living or working on their own land. The two organizations’ clear policies of Jewish exclusivism established the foundations of Israel’s Apartheid state to come. Zionism, from the outset, to repeat, has invented itself as a superior white (European Jewish) race and saw all others, predominantly Indigenous Palestinians, as inferior Other (Lentin, 2018).
1947–1948 Nakba: Genocide and Elimination of the Palestinians as a Nation
Before addressing the Nakba (catastrophe), or as argued elsewhere, ‘genocide’ (Abdo, 2018), which is a continuous process of Israeli/Zionist elimination and erasure of the Palestinians, a few conceptual clarifications are in place to make a clear sense of what exactly happened during the Nakba. First, it is important to differentiate between ethnicity and nation, or the ethnic and the national. The popularized notion of ‘ethnic cleansing’, coined by Ilan Pappé (2006) to describe the Israeli atrocities during the Nakba, is highly problematic. The problem lies in that Palestinians were/are not an ‘ethnicity’ and should not be referred to as such. Ethnicity denotes a specific immigrant group: you become an ethnicity, not in your homeland, but when you immigrate or become a settler in a different country/state. Palestinians, instead, are a nation. Nation refers to an Indigenous population living on their historic land and country. Palestinians, like native North Americans, are Indigenous people; they are a nation that originated in Palestine and built their culture and history there until Zionist Israel uprooted them. As an uprooted national group, Palestinians have since built themselves as a national movement seeking sovereignty and freedom. Elsewhere, I critiqued Ilan Pappé’s (2006) concept of ‘ethnic cleansing’ used to describe the Israeli process of elimination/erasure of the Palestinians (Abdo, 2018), as well as Oren Yiftachel’s (2006) concept of ‘ethnocracy’ 3 used to describe Israel’s rule over the remaining Palestinians.
Among other things, Abdo (2018) argues it is wrong to conflate ethnicity with nationalism: ethnicity, as mentioned above, belongs to immigrants/settlers, while nationalism is the character of Indigenous nationality(ies). Unlike what Israel and its supporters propagate, the Jews in Israel do not constitute a national group; they do not make a nation. Jewish settlers/immigrants are made up of different ethnicities from all over the world. You do not have one Jewish ethnicity in Israel, but diverse ethnicities originate from Europe, North Africa, the Arab world, Iran and other Asian and African countries. Being different ethnicities, certain Jews in Israel, especially non-Ashkenazi (white-European) or Mizrahi (Arab) Jews, have been racialized, oppressed and discriminated against by Israel (Abdo, 2011, 2014, 2018; Lavie, 2014; Lentin, 2018; Shohat, 2017). Mizrahi Jews, who until the early 1990s (before the mass immigration/settlement of the Russian ‘Jews’) made up over 60% of the Israeli population, were not seen by the state as proper Jews!
The 1948 Nakba did not mark the end of the elimination/erasure of the Palestinians, nor did it end Israeli settler rule and the seizure of further Indigenous Palestinian land. The elimination -forced expulsion – of about 80% of the Palestinians left massive, landed properties and homes empty. All such homes were either looted, emptied or bombed, and the land was occupied by the Zionist-cum-Israeli army/settlers. Akevot (the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Research Centre) researcher Adam Raz’s (2020) book Looting of Arab Property in the War of Independence 4 documents the atrocities and massacres conducted by the Zionist/Israeli army throughout Palestine to eliminate the Palestinians by expelling them and conquering their movable and immovable properties. Raz (2020) tells how shocked he was at the revelation of the newly released state and Army archives that spoke of the alarming level and rate of looting and vandalism. He writes that ‘Jewish civilians and military were involved in looting all kinds of equipment, including jewellery, cars, manufacturing sites . . . most of the property of over 750,000 Palestinians driven out of their homes and lands’. Looting, as some documents reveal, was allowed by the Zionist leaders. Hagar Shezaf (2019) quotes then Prime Minister of Israel David Ben Gurion in 1948: ‘It turned out that most of the Jews are thieves’. Israeli authors finally revealed and discussed what I term the Genocide of the Palestinians.
The Zionist atrocities, massacres, bombings and killings of Palestinians, including the recent discovery of Palestinian mass graves, discovered in Tantora, were part of recent revelations of the state atrocities. A brief account of such revelations of Israel’s plans, policies and actions committed during and immediately after 1948, known as Nakba, or genocide (Abdo, 2018; Wolfe, 2016), will follow. However, before going there, it is essential to acknowledge that Palestinians, ordinary people and academics have known about many of the massacres, rape and threats of rape they have undergone and have recorded many such atrocities. Still, all were denied and ridiculed by the Israeli establishment and ignored by the West. Now, with the revelation of the same through Israeli documentation and written by Israelis, it is hoped that the international community can be better informed about the nature of Israel and the colonization of Palestine and the Palestinians.
One important fact to register also from the recently revealed records is that all such information has been there but concealed/buried by the Israeli establishment. In her Burying the Nakba: How Israel Systematically Hides Evidence of 1948 Expulsion of Arabs, Hagar Shezaf (2019) writes: ‘since the 2020 Defense Ministry teams have scoured local archives and removed troves of historical documents to conceal proof of the Nakba’. ‘Hundreds of documents’, she adds, ‘have been concealed as part of a systematic effort to hide evidence of the Nakba’.
5
The aim of such secretive activities is to continue the memorycide and the deception of the Palestinians, the Israelis, and the world at large. Here is how one massacre was described: Safsaf [former Palestinian village near Safed] – 52 men were caught, tied to one another, dug a pit, and thrown in. Ten were still twitching. Women came and begged for mercy. Found bodies of 6 older men. There were 61 bodies. Three cases of rape, one east of Safed, a girl of 14, and 4 men shot and killed. From one, they cut off his fingers with a knife to take the ring.
This upper Galilee village, as the writer notes, was destroyed and replaced with a Jewish settlement taking a similar name: Moshav Safsufa!
In his Testimonies From the Censored Deir Yassin Massacre, Ofer Aderet (2017) writes, ‘They Piled Bodies and Burned Them’, adding, ‘A young fellow tied to a tree and set on fire. A woman and an older man were shot in the back. Girls lined up against a wall and shot with a submachine gun’. These are some of the testimonies from filmmaker Neta Shoshani (2017) about the massacre in Deir Yassin. 6 In this article, Aderet (2017) details the horrific massacre in Deir Yasin, a village near Jerusalem and describes the piling of dozens of women and children found in the village after it was occupied. Similar to other authors writing on the Nakba, Aderet (2017) addresses the role of the Israeli state in hiding all documentation on the various massacres conducted by Zionist gangs operating under the British, during 1947–1948 as well as the Israeli state, even after its establishment as well. 7
Other horrific stories of the Israeli/Zionist atrocities committed during the Nakba are told by Naeim Giladi (1998), an Iraqi Jew who immigrated to Israel in 1950 and worked in various government jobs, including joining the army during the 1967 war. Giladi left Israel very disillusioned at the Zionist racism against Arab Jews. In his biography, he writes about how the village of Al-Majdal/Asqalan, bordering the Gaza Strip (under Egypt at the time), was emptied of its Palestinian population and re-populated with Jewish settlers as he was responsible for gathering signatures of Palestinian residents who would ‘leave voluntarily’ to the Gaza Strip. Those who refused to leave were driven by force. 8
According to Giladi (1998), an Army officer at the time, ‘In 1948, Israeli forces emptied Arab villages and cities of their population, often by threats, sometimes by just gunning down a half-dozen unarmed Arabs as examples to the rest’. Adding, ‘To make sure the Arabs could not return to make a fresh life for themselves in these villages, the Israelis put typhus and dysentery bacteria into the water wells’. 9
The case of Akka water wells quoted by Giladi (1998) was also discussed by Salman Abu-Sitta, who confirmed the crime of polluting the waters of the Indigenous people. 10 Polluting the water (the environment) of the Indigenous peoples is a familiar phenomenon in the Canadian context. Canadian pollution of Indigenous lands is a well-known phenomenon. In addition to its eliminatory practices, the Zionists, from 1947 until the state’s early years, managed to erase about 500 villages, and on their ruins, they built new Jewish settlements.
For the settler colonial to establish sovereignty over destroyed Indigenous villages and cities, it must change the whole toponomy/geography of the place. This helps erase it not only from the geographical map but also from the mind (memory) of its settler population and allegedly from the Indigenous people. Toponymycide, or the erasure of the geographical identity of a place, involves name-changing from original to foreign settler. 11 This, together with the process of memorycide, which intends to replace citizens’ memory of the true history with that of the new reality (Israel), 12 represent typical acts of the settler colonial state. This process is true for Israel as it is true for Canada.
In the past few years, Canadians have begun to acknowledge the original Indigenous names of the country’s territories. As I am writing from ‘Ottawa’, a Western name for what was/is originally the territories of the Anishinaabe and Algonquin nations, almost all academic institutions have finally begun to acknowledge the actual or real terms of the territories their institutions are built on. Still, this acknowledgement remains a formality and was not intended to affect a real change. In fact, no actual attempt at rectifying the situation of the Indigenous peoples has yet materialized in Canada.
To put it differently, Israeli state atrocities and violence, recently documented through the ‘discovery’ of mass Palestinian graves, through their disappearance, killings, bombings and the poisoning of the Indigenous environment is just a poignant reminder of the similar settler colonial policies enacted and are still being enacted by the Canadian state.
It is important here to recall the role of remembering and oral history of Indigenous peoples for the survival of their cultural and national identity and the maintenance and continuation of their history and geography. Rosemary Sayigh (1979) has long advocated the significant role of memory and oral history in the Palestinian struggle, especially among Palestinian refugees, as they retell their stories to their children. As argued by Harris (2017), and Abdo and Masalha (2018), storytelling and orality serve as a mode of sumoud (steadfastness) and resistance. Both memory and oral history represent two faces of the same coin: resistance. To provide a personal anecdote: I remember my mother’s tears when she first took us to Haifa (in the mid-1960s) to see her family house. She explained how she could not recognize her home, her street, or even the living quarters in Haifa, where she and her extended family had lived for generations. All such places have been renamed and altered, losing their original Palestinian character. Until she passed, my mother never forgot her city – Haifa – where she was born and lived her early life with her extended family, many members of whom were expelled to Lebanon. Israel’s policies of erasure remain at the centre of this paper.
Israel – Apartheid and Settler Colonialism Continues: 1948–1966
The fact that our visit (mother and children) to Haifa took place around 20 years after Israel colonized Palestine was not accidental. My family was among those 20% who remained on the land and became internal refugees. They/We became ‘citizens’ of Israel as second or third-class citizens. These close to 200,000 remained after the Nakba, now accounting for around 1.3 million Palestinians, were placed under military rule between 1948 and 1966. They/we were segregated from each other in three geographical areas: The Galilee (North), the Naqab’ Negev’ (South) and the Triangle (Centre). Movement restriction was imposed on these Indigenous citizens. They were denied the right to leave their village/town or move to other places without a permit from the military commander. During that time, Apartheid, segregation from each other (and the rest of their people) and segregation from the newly established ‘Jewish’ Israel were the rule. Their racialization and perception have further exacerbated the already Apartheid state under which they lived. Indigenous Palestinians have been and continue to be racialized and Othered as ‘terrorists’ or as ‘security threats’ that required constant surveillance.
In preparation for the 1967 colonial war, Israel lifted its military occupation over its Palestinian citizens, diverting its military forces to the war against Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria, in the so-called 6-day war. After the war, Israel placed an apartheid rule over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. It seizes and continues to take more Palestinian land, establish more Jewish settlements, especially in the West Bank, including Jerusalem, and implant hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers there. Such policies resulted in the demographically and geographically altered toponymy of the West Bank. Placing the 1967 territories under its control enabled the Zionist state to divide, isolate and segregate these territories: the Gaza Strip, separated/isolated from the West Bank and the latter, with the checkpoints and military surveillance, separated cities from each other and villages. Apartheid in the 1967 occupied territories has been further cemented through the Apartheid Wall.
State seizure of Palestinian lands throughout the West Bank continues. It is not the only targeted place. Israel’s expansionist colonial agenda continues to occupy, confiscate and seize lands in the Galilee. Land seized or stolen in the Galilee followed the secret Memorandum issued in April 1976 by Israel Koenig, the Northern District Commissioner of the Ministry of the Interior, for 26 years. In its overall plan to eliminate the Palestinians, this Memorandum aimed to reduce Indigenous Palestinian residents of Galilee and replace them with Jewish settlers. The revelation of the Koenig Report, as it was called, has raised the alarm among the Indigenous Palestinians resulting in the 1976 Day of the Land, expressed in mass demonstrations. In the first mass demonstration, Israel sent army and tanks to the villages, killing six young Palestinian (Arab) civilians and injuring more than 100. Since then, the Day of the Land has been annually commemorated as a national day. Israel’s settler colonial policies of expansionism have included the annexation of Jerusalem, the Syrian-occupied Golan Heights and parts of Southern Lebanon. Over the past decade, the Naqab Bedouin territories became the target of Israel’s settler colonialism; large tracts of land, including those on which the Bedouins have erected their homes, were confiscated for the purpose of expanding the Jewish settlements.
Canada and Israel’s Racialization: Natives and Beyond
Settler colonialism, in general, comes ready with its racializing/Othering policies which often extend beyond the Indigenous peoples and includes immigrants/settlers who are deemed ‘unlike us’. As seen in the enslavement of Americans of African origin, their segregation and atrocious treatment in the United States and the shabby treatment of Blacks and Asians, especially the Japanese who were interned during WWII in Canada, Israel’s settler colonial racialization is no different. Ironically, racialization, segregation, and dehumanization were enacted in the Israeli case against no other than the very Jews who ‘immigrated’ or were brought by the Zionist Agency to the country. Zionism which is a European (white) ideological movement, as explained above, saw itself as superior to all non-Jews (read, Palestinians) as well as non-European Jews (namely, Mizrahi or Arab and African Jews). For space limitations, we cannot provide a lengthy discussion of the debate whether Mizrahi (Arab) Jews ‘immigrated’ voluntarily to the country or whether they were driven by force from their Arab countries to settle in Palestine/Israel. Suffice it to mention that various authors, including Jewish and Israeli, have asserted that many Arab Jews, especially Iraqis and Yemenis, were brought into Palestine/Israel by force through the Zionist Agency. This includes authors such as Abarjel and Lavie (2006), Giladi (1998), Khazoum (2002, 2019), Lavie (2014) and Shohat (1999, 2017).
Israel’s cry for ‘saving the Jews all over the world’ is not a new colonial tactic. Voluntary and forced ‘immigration’ of Jews to Palestine/Israel has been a well-calculated plan since the beginning of the Zionist project, namely, to settle Palestine with as many Jews as possible and create a ‘Jewish state’, empty, if possible, of its Indigenous Palestinians. In the early 1920s, the Zionist Agency brought around 20,000 Yemenis to be used partly as a source of cheap labour power and partly to replace Indigenous Palestinian labour power (Kimmerling, 1983).
In Women in Israel (Abdo, 2011), the author discusses the Othering/Racialization and Orientalization of Mizrahi Jews and their oppression by the state. Mizrahi scholars, especially Arab Jewish and Israelis, almost unanimously dissociate themselves from Zionism.
In their Another Act in the Mizrahi-Palestinian Tragedy, Reuven Abarjel and Smadar Lavie (2006) write that Zionism was/is not the ideology of Arab Jews but rather a superimposed one by the Israeli state and media: Zionism was superimposed on Mizrahi communities, yet they welcomed it with open arms. Many still believe in its deceitful vision of an integrationist inter-racial utopia, even though they are systematically excluded from the centres of power due to Zionism’s intra-Jewish racism. Those few who succeeded in securing high-ranking positions in the Ashkenazi regime have long since erased their own past, as they adopted their masters’ worldview.
13
The long history of suffering by Mizrahi Jews has been discussed in detail by several authors (Abarjel and Lavie, 2006; Giladi, 1998; Khazoum, 2002, 2019; Lavie, 2014; Shohat, 1999, 2017). 14 A couple of examples of such treatment: the Abduction of Mizrahi, especially Yemeni children, and Israel’s Eugenics, which included the use of Depo Provera, will be discussed below.
Between Residential Schools and the ‘Yemeni Babies Affair’
One of the well-known strategies of the settler colonial state is expressed in the disappearance and assimilation of the Indigenous or potential Indigenous but unwanted citizens. This phenomenon is well documented within the Canadian context. For example, the MMIWG (the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls) (2019) and the TRC (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada) (2015) provide a detailed description and analysis of the mass disappearance of Indigenous women as well as the abduction of babies of Indigenous peoples in Canada. In this context, Glen Coulthard (2014) also devotes his book, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition, to the issue of assimilation and the fallacy of treaties. He demonstrates the political inefficacy of ‘reconciliation’ highly advocated by Canadian officials and academic writings, arguing the impossibility of reconciliation between the colonial and the colonized.
Within the Israeli context, the phenomenon of disappearing children is known as ‘the Yemeni Baby Affairs’. It is expressed in the abduction of babies or small children from their mothers’ arms to sell or give them for adoption. The recent discovery of hundreds of dead children in unmarked graves in Canada is a poignant reminder of such atrocities. 15 Settler colonial Israel enacted a similar process against Arab or Mizrahi Jews, targeting primarily Yemeni Jews, selling them, or giving them for adoption by Ashkenazi (European) Jews. As in the case of Canada, such acts intend to reduce the Indigenous or the unwanted ‘Other’ ethnicities or nations. Residential Schools, which began in 19th-century Canada and continued with the 60s scoop, have resulted in the disappearance of tens of thousands of Indigenous children. This act marks a critical moment in the Canadian process of eliminating and erasing the Indigenous peoples by assimilating/‘westernizing’ indigeneity and stripping the new generation of their history, language, culture and identity. A detailed account of the two phenomena of elimination/assimilation, namely, the Residential Schools and the 1960s Scoop used in Canada, is found in the recent National Inquiry into MMIWG (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls) Report (2019) and the TRC (the Truth and Reconciliation Commission) Report (2015). 16
The publication of the above-mentioned reports has led the Canadian government to recognize its colonial character as a past phenomenon and not a continuous process. Therefore, it is no surprise that very little logical explanation has been found for the thousands of disappeared women and girls.
Within the Israeli context, a similar phenomenon, known, as mentioned above, as the ‘Yemenite [sic] Baby Affairs’, occurred in the first years of the establishment of Israel and was revealed by many agonizing families who lost their loved ones in the past two decades. In another act in the Mizrahi-Palestinian Tragedy, Reuven Abarjel and Smadar Lavie (2006) write, while reasserting that Zionism is an Ashkenazi ideology which was superimposed on Mizrahi Jews, the latter embraced Zionism and adopted it as their ideology.
‘Many’, they write, ‘. . . still believe in its deceitful vision of an integrationist inter-racial utopia, even though they are systematically excluded from the centres of power due to Zionism’s intra-Jewish racism. Those few who succeeded in securing high-ranking positions in the Ashkenazi regime have long since erased their own past, as they adopted their masters’ worldview’.
They add, Rebuilding the ruptured Mizrahi families was difficult because they were denied access to the financial and cultural resources necessary to facilitate an equal participation in the Zionist patriarchy. Mizrahi men’s feminism is epitomized in their struggle to mimic handsomely crested Sabra masculinity, hoping it might provide them with equal opportunities. Even with the arrival of South Asian maids in the 1990s, Mizrahi women continue to occupy the lowest-paying scale of the Israeli job market. Having lost their production line and house cleaning jobs to Filipinas, they work as lower-level secretaries and service providers, and they constitute the majority of the unemployed.
17
In his The Jews of Iraq
18
and Ben-Gurion’s Scandals: How the Haganah and the Mossad Eliminated Jews, Naeim Giladi (1998, 2006 (1992) writes, I was disillusioned at what I found in the promised land, disillusioned at the institutionalized racism, disillusioned about what I came to learn about Zionism cruelty. The principal interest Israel had in Jews from Islamic [Arab] countries was a supply of cheap labour, especially for the farm work that was beneath the urbanized eastern European Jews. Ben-Gurion needed the ‘Oriental’ Arab Jews to farm the thousands of acres of land left by Palestinians who were driven out by Israeli forces after 1948.
19
The claim that Zionism needed Arab Jews as a source of cheap labour power and, in many cases, as slave labour, placed for months and even years in shacks, has long been established by Palestinian and Jewish-Israeli authors alike (Abdo, 2011; Giladi, 1998; Lavie, 2014; Shohat, 2017). Upon their arrival, Iraqi, Yemeni, Ethiopian and other immigrants/settlers were placed in transit camps for weeks, for months and even for years, waiting to be settled in proper homes. For the ‘white’ Zionist enterprise, these Jews were deemed uncivilized, inferior, and Other: a perception which acted as the driving force behind their vilification by the Zionist state. Hence, the abduction of babies affected many Mizrahi Jews, especially the Yemenis. 20 Abduction, disappearance and erasure of Indigenous children in Canada and Arab Jews in Israel have also been accompanied by the phenomenon of Eugenics conducted against them, as the following shows.
The Vanishing of Unwanted Children: Israel and Canada
As it became known, the Yemeni Babies Affair is no different than the Canadian experience of Residential Schools and the 60s Scoop mentioned above. The abduction of Yemeni babies and small children and selling them to Ashkenazi families sends the message that the Yemenis are not welcome in Israel and that the authorities will take care of [assimilate] the new generation.
As a European (white) settler colonial movement, Zionism, it is noted above, has placed and continues to set itself as superior overall in what has become Israel. This includes the Yemenis, many of whom were brought to Israel as a source of cheap labour power, beginning in the early 1920s and later in the 1950s.
In his Remembering the thousands of children who disappeared in the ‘Yemenite [sic]Babies Affair’, Vincent Calvetti-Wolf (2019) quotes Amram’s (an Israeli organization dedicated to documenting and raising awareness of what has come to be known as the ‘Yemeni Babies Affair’) assertion that every eighth child of a Yemeni family was abducted/disappeared. 21 If we consider the Yemeni population at the time to be just over 50,000 people, the total number of babies abducted from this community alone comes to over 62,000 children.
Vincent Calvetti-Wolf provides poignant quotes from Yemeni family members who lost their babies. In one testimony, we read, They tried to kidnap my uncle right after he was born. The nurse came in to tell my grandmother that her baby didn’t survive. My grandfather, who had the ability to be very scary when he wanted to, was not convinced. He went over to her and yelled: ‘Where is my son?!’ and was both mad and loud enough to make the Ashkenazi nurse return his son. (Testimony of Roy Grufi)
In another testimony, we read, My sister Rachel was three months old. She had a fever, so my mother took her from Nahariya to Rambam Hospital in Haifa. We lived in a shack in the transit camp, and my parents didn’t speak any Hebrew. There was transportation only once a day. My mother went to visit her after a week and found her healthy. She wanted to take her home but was told to return in two weeks. A week later, she received a letter saying the baby had died. She asked to see a body, but there was nobody. Eighteen years later, an army draft notice arrived. (Testimony of Herzel Doniari)
22
In her Whitewashing Narratives: Israeli Media and the Framing of Kidnapped Yemenite [sic] Babies Affair, Shoshana Madmoni-Gerber (2021) writes, [A] typical scenario among all cases was as follows: a baby was taken to the hospital despite parental assertions that the child was healthy. The baby was then taken to one of several institutions around the country, such as WIZO, an international women’s organization with centres in Safed, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv. The parents were told that their baby had died.
23
It is important to note here the important role played by the WIZO (the Women’s International Zionist Organization – based in Israel and the United States) in selling these babies. The involvement of WIZO in selling babies to North American Jewish families was widely quoted in most reports published in this case.
Madmoni-Gerber (2021) disrupts the official Israeli discourse, which for many years denied the Yemeni Babies affair and enforced a total silence on it, saying, In some cases, a child who was said to have died was later returned to their family when a parent made enough of a disruption. In other cases, parents were told their child had died and been buried by hospital staff, with families never shown a burial spot or death certificate. And in others, nurses have testified that they thought they were ‘doing the family a favour’ by finding another, more well-off family to adopt their child. As a result, many families of missing children have accused establishment-linked hospitals and clinics of systematically kidnapping their children and giving them to Ashkenazi families in Israel, Europe, and the United States.
Madmoni-Gerber (2021) exposes the Eurocentric, Orientalist ideology and, may I add, Racial policies of the Zionist state and its media who dismissed the families as misled by superstition or urban legend. Quite often, she adds, a family’s background as Mizrahi Jews – those Jewish communities with ancestral roots in the Arab and Muslim world, widely acknowledged to have faced structural racism at the hands of a largely European, Ashkenazi establishment during the first decades of the state of Israel – was referenced to discredit these testimonies.
24
As the author notes, the whitewashing of the disappearance of Yemeni children and babies and their dismissal by the Israeli government and media placed a lid on the topic. In 2016, then Prime Minister Netanyahu, ‘in response to growing pressure’, ordered the Israeli State Archives to declassify 210,000 files from government enquiries into the disappearances – ‘records that were originally scheduled to be ‘declassified only after 2071’.
In most of the cases, when the families enquired and insisted on finding evidence of the death of their children, there was nobody, and there was no grave. But years later, the child’s military conscription order would arrive at their doorstep. 25
The emphasis made above on the phenomenon of missing and disappearing Yemeni children in Israel is crucial for the comparison it makes with the Canadian Residential schools, the 1960s scoop and the missing and murdered Indigenous women.
While the Canadian and Israeli cases are historically specific, the similarities between the two cannot be overlooked. In both cases, babies and children were snatched by force from their parents; the latter never knew where their children were, and all appeals by the parents to keep the babies/children at home were rebuffed. While the elimination of the Indigenous in the Canadian case was expected, considering the actual contradictions between settler colonialism and the Indigenous peoples, Israel’s treatment of the Yemeni Jews exposed its lies and fabrication about its claim as the protector of the Jews in the world. Zionist Israel wanted to be ‘Jewish’, but of a specific kind: Ashkenazi or White European! Another phenomenon is worth discussing in this context, namely Eugenics within Israel.
Eugenics, Israeli Style
The Invention of Zionism/Israel as a superior race, rendering all others inferior, made it possible for the state to use all means to control its Indigenous and Other Jewish undesired population, regardless of how unethical, immoral and inhuman an act is, such as the use of Eugenics against some of its population. Eugenics as a colonial method is used as a means of control and to redesign the future generations as desired by the state: with white and European characteristics.
In Israel’s very own history of Eugenics, Jonathan Cooke (2014) tells the story of Jewish Eugenicist Chaim Shiba, who decided to treat ringworm, a benign childhood disease that affects the scalp, with chemicals. ‘Shiba’, Cooke (2014) writes, ‘went to the US, collected old military X-ray equipment and zapped tens of thousands of these children’s heads with potentially lethal doses of radiation’. Palestinian children were also included in this process. ‘The survivors tell of their horrifying experiences during and after the treatment, and of the brothers and sisters they lost at a young age”. 26
The role of Haim Shiba in the Israeli style of Eugenics was elaborated in greater detail in Ronit Lentin’s Traces of Racial Exception: Racializing Israeli Settler Colonialism. Lentin (2018) exposes Israel’s eliminatory and genocidal policies towards Palestinian Arab and Arab Jewish settlers/immigrants. Basing her information on a documentary released by the Israeli NGO Tikkun Olam (world fixing), Lentin (2018: 78–79) elaborates on the ‘medical’ case, which resulted in the elimination (killing) of tens of thousands of Arab (Palestinian) and Arab Jewish immigrants/settlers. The documentary Ringworm Scandal: When Israeli Doctors Killed Tens of Thousands of Arab Children (2014) details the tail of such killings, with the primary responsibility being that of Professor Chaim Sheba, a senior Israeli doctor. He experimented on Palestinian and Arab Jewish immigrant children. As mentioned above, Tikun Olam also exposed the Knesset enquiry, which reveals that Yemeni babies were murdered during medical experiments, abducted from parents, and exploited in paid National Institutes of Health Experiments (Silverstein, 2017). 27 Lentin (2018) expresses deep regret and shame as she discusses the work of Haim Shiba, who was also a close family member.
Still, the list of abhorrent practices intending to eliminate, erase, vilify and suppress Israel’s Indigenous Palestinians and non-Ashkenazi, mainly Arab (Mizrahi) Jews, does not end with babies’ abduction and using chemicals to treat ringworm. It extended to the use of Depo Provera. The latter, used as a deterrent for reproduction, was heavily used against Arab Jews, especially the Ethiopians. Ethiopian Jews, who make up less than 2% of the total population, make up 57% of Depo Provera users in Israel (Cooke, 2010). 28 The use of Depo Provera among First Nations in Canada and other Indigenous communities in settler colonial states in Australia and New Zeeland has been well documented. Depo Provera scholars agree it has been, and in various colonized communities, remains the primary mechanism used by the state (and the medical profession) to curb reproduction among the natives. In her ‘Depo-Provera and the Regulation of Women’s Reproduction’, Jeannie Morgan (2005) provides a detailed analysis of the wide use of this mechanism in Canada.
While Depo Provera was also used for Indigenous Palestinian women’s bodies, its prevalence among Ethiopians was widespread. Ethiopian Jews in Israel faced tremendous difficulties, constantly under pressure to prove their Jewishness and be accepted as Jews. Until this day, Ethiopians are forbidden to donate blood, which is seen by Israel’s medical establishment as ‘tainted’. The scandal around Knesset member Pnina Tamano-Shata, of Ethiopian background, who wanted to donate blood, was told that ‘set criteria disqualified her because she emigrated to Israel from Ethiopia’ has resulted in nationwide demonstrations against Israel’s racism afflicting this community (Lewis, 2013). 29
Eugenics by the Zionist state include poisoning waters in some Arab/Palestinian towns during the Nakba and immediately after the expulsion of Indigenous Palestinians. The case of Akka (Acre) is an example of an attempt to prevent the Palestinians from returning to their homes and living there. Here is what Giladi (1998) writes on dropping chemicals on drinking water in Arab cities: In 1948 Jewish forces would empty Arab villages of their population, often by threats, sometimes by just gunning down a half-dozen unarmed Arabs as examples to the rest. To make sure the Arabs couldn’t return to make a fresh life for themselves in these villages, the Israelis put typhus and dysentery bacteria into the water wells.
30
The tale of using poison (tetanus or diphtheria) in wells in Arab cities vacated from their Indigenous inhabitants is meant to ensure they cannot go back to their homes and live there, which has been further corroborated by Palestinian historian Salman Abu-Sitta. 31 Abu-Sitta (2007) used the minutes of an emergency conference held at the Lebanese Red Cross Hospital in Acre on 6 May to deal with the typhoid epidemic. 32
Whether it is the poisoning of Indigenous waters, abducting racialized babies and children, using Depo Provera to curb reproduction among the undesired, such as Indigenous peoples and racialized others, or employing tactics intended at physical elimination, erasure and assimilation of Indigenous peoples, settler colonialism in general, and in Israel and Canada, more specifically enact similar policies and practices with the aim to erase, assimilate, control, subjugate and oppress its non-European Other.
Scholarship on how Israel was built on the blood and bones of the Palestinians, especially by Palestinian scholars, abound. Yet, it is the Zionist and Israeli voices that are largely heard in the West and not the Palestinians. Nonetheless, it is important to acknowledge that Jewish, including Israeli, voices are not unanimous on the colonial policies and practices of the state of Israel. Many Israeli-Jewish scholars have documented the Zionist and Israeli atrocities and characterized Israel as colonial and some as eliminatory and genocidal (Giladi, 1998; Lentin, 2018; Pappé, 2006; Shohat, 2017; Yiftachel, 2006).
While the above comparisons between Israel and Canada regarding their genocidal policies towards the Indigenous peoples of the land and their racialization and vilification of the undesired ‘citizens’ are not comprehensive, the above comparisons are sufficient for this paper. Genocide resides at the centre of settler colonial state and is not something of the past. The Settler Colonial States try hard to cover up or silence their genocide. Still, true history always comes to the fore, if not at the same time by the victims themselves, it emerges and re-emerges with the new generations. This is true for the United States, Canada and Israel, among other countries (Churchill, 2004; Coulthard, 2014; Smith, 2015). Despite both states’ attempts at dismissing their violent history and viciousness towards the Other (the natives) as something of the past, the fact remains that genocide, like settler colonialism, is a process and never an event. Both Palestinians and Indigenous peoples in Canada continue to remember, document, archive and preserve the memories of their offspring and other family members. In other words, settler colonialism in its true reality of displacing and replacing, uprooting and re-rooting, and destroying and rebuilding constitute a continuing process. Over time, what changes is not the aims of settler colonialism but how such policies are differently enacted by different colonial states, despite decades of obfuscating, fabricating and silencing such histories. Interviews conducted by the MMIWG and the TRC, along with a large body of Palestinian oral history and narrations, speak to those atrocities; memorialization here is used as a means for their anti-colonial resistance.
Silencing Criticism of Zionism and Israel
Part of the settler colonial states’ policies is to bury their atrocities and genocidal act, to use various techniques of silencing, covering up and concealing their past and, to an extent, their presence. The Canadian state, through the education system, for example, has managed, for about a century, to obfuscate Indigenous history by removing its atrocious policies and practices from the history books and denying Canadian generations their right to know their history. Similarly, Israel has and continues to control Palestinian citizen’s curriculum from exhibiting any reference to do with their Palestinian identity: it bans the Palestinian flag, excludes Palestinian literature from the curriculum and nowhere in Israel’s ‘Arab’ or Palestinian school curriculum can one see any reference to their national origin, nationality, identity or culture. All these are what Israel has tried and continues to try and destroy.
In the past two to three decades, many international voices and organizations investigating the policies of the Zionist state, especially in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, but also among Palestinian citizens of Israel, and diaspora refugees, have asserted the Apartheid nature and character of the Israeli state. Yet, all authors of such reports have been condemned, ridiculed and silenced by Israel with the support of the United States.
B’Tselem (2021) (the Israeli Information Human Centre for Human Rights the Occupied Territories) report in 2021 concluded, ‘A regime of Jewish Supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea . . . is Apartheid’. But this is not the first or only admission of Israel’s Apartheid. For example, a News Release (Human Rights Watch, 2021) concluded that ‘Abusive Israeli Policies Constitute Crimes of Apartheid, Persecution’. 33 The list of International Human Rights organizations’ reports, including Human Rights Watch and recently the damning Amnesty International Report (2022), entitled, ‘Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians: a cruel system of domination and a crime against humanity’ 34 is indicative of the long-standing international human rights stand on Israel’s policies.
Along with these reports, one must mention the individual human rights experts’ reports on Israeli Apartheid and crimes against humanity. But first, let’s remember the 1975 UNGA (UN General Assembly) overwhelming support for resolution (#3379), determining that ‘Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination’. This resolution remained in effect for 16 years, until 16 December 1991, when it was retracted after pressure from the United States and Israel. Still, revoking this resolution did not change the facts on the grounds in terms of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, nor did it silence objective academics and other UN officials from reaching the same conclusion when investigating Israel’s wars, especially against the Gaza Strip.
In 2009, UNHRC (UN Human Rights Council) (2009), investigating war crimes committed by Israel in Gaza – The Richard Goldstone Report – found that Israel committed ‘war crimes and possible crimes against humanity’. 35 It is worth noting that Richard Goldstone, a Jewish Judge who served on the supreme court of South Africa, identified himself as Zionist to remove any intimation of antisemitism. Still, his truthfulness did not help. His report was rejected by both the United States and Israel, and he was forced to retract his report. Judge Goldstone changed the tone of his report, only to the dismay of the other members of the investigatory U N committee. A similar fate afflicted international legal scholar Richard Falk, who served as a UN Special Rapporteur to investigate the Human Rights conditions in the Occupied Territories. When concluding the investigation, Falk (United Nations Human Rights Council, 2014) reported that Israel has ‘violated Palestinian human rights and likely committed crimes against humanity’. Here again, both Israel and the United States rejected Falk’s report, and Israel banned him from entering Israel. The current UN special rapporteur on human rights in the territories occupied since 1967, Michael Lynk, didn’t have any better luck. On 9 July 2021, he submitted his report, which examined ‘whether the Israeli settlements were in violation of the absolute prohibition against ‘settler implantation’ in the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court’. He concluded that the Israeli settlements did amount to a war crime. 36 Like his predecessors, Lynk was denied entry to Israel as well.
Finally, the experience of Rima Khalaf, Secretary-General of ESCWA (the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia), is important to note here. On 15 March 2017, ESCWA, with Khalaf as the major investigator, published their report, affirming that Israel is ‘guilty of policies and practices that constitute the crime of apartheid’, a ‘crime against humanity under customary international law and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court’.
The report provides a detailed analysis of Israeli legislation, policies and practices, highlighting how Israel ‘operates an apartheid regime’, including ‘demographic engineering’. This report was unprecedented in that it included all Palestinians: citizens, the occupied territories of 1967, residents of Jerusalem, and Palestinian refugees in exile.
Yet, again, like the pressure placed on other UN research and investigations critical of Israeli atrocities against Palestinians, tremendous pressure both by Israel and the United States was put on Guterres, the UN Chief, forcing him to withdraw the report. In a news conference held on March 17, Rima Khalaf, Secretary-General and Executive Secretary of ESCWA, resigned from her position. In her resignation letter sent to UN Chief, she said, ‘the pressures and threats faced by Guterres are no secret, adding, I do not submit to such pressures, and I believe in the high morals of the United Nations’. 37
Despite all attempts at silencing critical research and findings by international experts investigating Israel’s flagrant disregard for international laws, Israel continues to be investigated for Apartheid policies and practices and for its crimes against humanity. Within the academy, world-renowned Genocide scholars like Patrick Wolfe (2006), Damien Short (2016), Lorenzo Veracini (2017), John Docker (2008) and Haifa Rashed et al. (2014), to mention just a few, have all defined Israel as a settler colonial genocide perpetrator.
Neither US imperialism, arrogance, Israel’s colonial racialization, nor their disregard for international law can hide the truth forever. In addition to the unrelenting Palestinian struggle for freedom and sovereignty, continuous Palestinian resistance and the comprehensive support and solidarity they received worldwide will no doubt avail the voice of truth and justice. The ICC (International Criminal Court) approval of the prosecutor’s request to open legal proceedings against Israel on suspicion of committing war crimes in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip might be seen by some as a step in the right direction. However, it is doubtful the organization will proceed and criminalize Israel, 38 and if it does, it will most probably be blocked by the United States and Israel, neither of whom are members of the Organization. One needs to remember Israel’s historical contempt for all international laws critical of its policies, including all UN organizations. It has often charged UN organizations and investigators with being anti-Semitic. The ICC, incidentally, has been notorious for its focus on formerly colonized nations in Africa (as well as some eastern European) enemies of US imperialism. Many have warned supporters of Palestine solidarity not to herald the ICC’s possible hearing of Israeli war crimes, as the likelihood is that Palestinian ‘war crimes’ will likely face greater scrutiny (Engler, 2020). 39
It is no secret that many critics of Israel are Jewish themselves, and some have even served in the Israeli army. A most recent revelation in this regard came from former PM’s Son and former member of the Israeli Shin Bet, Yaakov Sharett, who states, ‘Israel Was Born in Sin. I’m Collaborating with a Criminal Country’, urging Jews to leave Israel (Aderet, 2021). Sharett, in fact, is one of many Israeli/Jewish scholars, including UN experts, who are highly critical of the Zionist state. In other words, the excuse/threat of antisemitism levied against Palestinian and other critics of Israel is simply untenable. For many Jewish and other scholars alike, the Zionist attempt at equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism has been unequivocally rejected. Still, this did not quiet Israel or the Zionist lobby. Quite to the contrary, for the last two decades or so, Israel has revamped its Zionist campaign in defence of its international image and against any criticism of the state or Zionism.
Silencing Criticism of Zionism and/or the State: Canada and the ‘Palestine Exception’
Despite tremendous pressure by the United States on the UN, which includes the threat to withdraw funds, and the wide United States, Israeli and Canadian disregard of reports and findings by experts critical of Israel’s policies, the Israeli state has yet to convince the international community of its ‘innocence’ or self-claimed victimhood by the Palestinian ‘threat’. If anything, Zionism/Israel still finds itself in a peculiarly feeble position. The alarming growth of resistance to Israel’s Apartheid and vilification of the Palestinians keeps Israel in constant need to defend its image in the world: An image that has been tarnished, partly because of what the world knows and sees coming from Israel, especially with the emergence of social media, and because of the wide popular success of the Palestinian struggle and their supporters around, especially in their campaign of the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) campaign worldwide.
In response to Palestinian successes, Israel has launched a complex and heavily funded campaign of ‘hasbara’ (Hebrew, for explaining/justifying Israel’s actions) throughout the West, including Canada, to repair the damage. Various Zionist organizations were/are launched to monitor government policies, the media and most importantly, the academy. Within the Canadian context, not much work was/is needed to convince the government of the Zionist claims, especially after Canada’s publicly declared its support of Israel and its condemnation of the BDS. This position has come by no other than Prime Minister Trudeau personally (The Jerusalem Post, 2019).
Officially, Canada presents itself as a democracy, pro-human rights and against their violation everywhere, regardless of the continued shabby treatment of its Indigenous peoples and other racialized minorities. Still, this policy seems to be true largely for countries of White Western contexts, but not for Muslims, Arabs or Palestinians. Canadian and Western racism and racialization are no more apparent than in their current policies towards Ukraine, hailed as a victim of Russian ‘invasion’, while the Zionist settler-colonial and apartheid violence against the Palestinians, for the last century, have been totally ignored.
The Canadian media does not fare better in this regard. It is ironic that in the past decade or so, especially after the election of the Liberal government – not that the Conservative government fared better! – the Canadian media seems to be taking a policy of silence and silencing towards the Palestinians and their sufferings and ordeal, pretending they do not exist. In an interview with graphic journalist and war correspondent Joe Sacco, discussing the latter’s new book on the Dene history 2020), CBC Current guest anchor, Duncan McCue, referred to the state of ‘Palestine’ in his line of questioning to Mr. Sacco. The following day Duncan McCue, himself a native, was forced to apologize publicly for using the term Palestine. 40
After weeks of back and forth between PCAAN (Palestinian Canadian Artists and Academics Network) and the CBC board of directors, (PCAAN) was told that ‘Palestine Does not Exist’. Examples of excluding the Palestinian narrative from Canadian media abound: While pro-Israel commentators and analysts are often in the media, you hardly hear the voice or narratives of Palestinians. In her ‘CBC’s Palestine Exception’, Rahaf Farawi provides a solid analysis of CBC’s position on the question of Palestine and the Palestinians. Through extensive interviews with CBC reporters, programme producers and others, including Palestinian professors and their experiences with the CBC, Rahaf raises major concerns about the lack of transparency, bias towards Israel and against the Palestinians, and fear of Zionist backlash when pitching about the region, especially in discussing Palestine/Israel (Farawi, 2022).
Within the Western academy, silencing Palestine and the Palestinians becomes quite complex. Examples of silencing Professors and sacking others from their academic jobs for critiquing Israel and Zionism abound, and there is no space for accounting for them here. 41 Still, the following two short examples illustrate this point. The behaviour of the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) through its mistreatment of supporters of Palestinian rights, on one hand, and its allowing of the pro-Israel lobby groups, CIJA (Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs), to shape the curriculum is one such case in point (CJPME (Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East), 2021). On the other hand, the same (CIJA) has been putting tremendous pressure on the Toronto District Board of Education to enforce the policy of IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance), and silence students, faculty and administrative staff from being critical of Israel. CIJA incidentally has also been involved in the case of Azarova, as discussed below. As of June 2022, the TDSB paid lip service to the demands of the students by appointing an anti-Palestinian racism consultant to provide a teach-in to the Board, only to surprise these members by adopting the IHRA uncritically.
The recent University of Toronto Scandal regarding hiring scholar Valentina Azarova is another case in point. After being hired by the Faculty of Law and following the intervention of one taxation lawyer whose family was a donor to the school, the offer was rescinded (CJPME, 2021). This act enraged members of the hiring committee and many other Canadian faculty, including CAUT (Canadian Association of University Teachers). The latter took an unprecedented act and boycotted U of T. Feeling the pressure of the boycott and the support Azarova received from academics worldwide, the U of T changed its decision and reoffered Azarova the job (CJPME, 2021). It is understandable that the scholar, whose self-respect and the incident harmed dignity, declined the position. To the role of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, it is essential to add the strong role of the IJV (Independent Jewish Voices – Canada) and JVP (the US branch of Jewish Voice for Peace). Anti-Zionist Jewish organizations have long been in support of the Palestinian people.
One of the tools used by the Zionist organizations in silencing criticism of Zionism or Israel is the IHRA and the new definition of antisemitism it provides (Wise, 2021). In this reinvented definition, anti-Zionism and the critique of Israel are considered anti-Semitic. In other words, the re-definition of antisemitism, which equates anti-Zionism with antisemitism, became a tool for silencing and stifling any critique of Israel. Recently, Israel itself used the IHRA to put pressure on social media, especially Facebook, to adopt the IHRA definition, asking the media giant to police members who criticize Israel or Zionism (Wise, 2021).
Opposition to the IHRA definition has become increasingly widespread and globally acknowledged. Kenneth Stern, who has drafted the definition of antisemitism in IHRA, writes that ‘The working definition of antisemitism was never intended to silence speech, but that’s what Trump’s executive order accomplished’. He continues, ‘Right-wing Jews are weaponizing it [the definition]’ (Stern, 2019).
Recently, Al-Jazeera investigative report reached the same conclusion about the misleading purpose of the IHRA re-definition. According to Al-Jazeera, ‘An international organization behind a controversial definition of antisemitism has misled the public about that definition’ (Kleinfeld, 2021). Al-Jazeera’s investigation was partially based on a report by Jamie Stern Weiner (Oxford University), whose report is entitled, ‘The Politics of A Definition: How the IHRA Working Definition of Anti-Semitism Is being Misrepresentative’. 42 It is utterly reprehensible that after such revelations, Zionists and other Western officials continue to ignore the reality and, instead, fabricate lies and falsifications. In addition, tens of thousands of academics worldwide have denounced the IHRA definition and cautioned against the impact it could have on academic freedoms. Here, in Canada, over 400 academics have signed an open letter denouncing the IHRA definition.
It is essential to note that while Zionism, like racism, Apartheid and other forms of racialization, must be condemned, antisemitism, like all forms of racialization, must not be tolerated. Antisemitism is a form of racism and bigotry against the Jews and has no place among progressive, anti-racist and anti-imperialists.
Canada and Israel: Concluding Remarks
The affinity between the two settler colonial regimes, expressed through the almost blind support to Israel, historically and to date, especially in security and military aid, along with total disregard for Israel’s Apartheid and human rights violations of the Palestinians, must be viewed in the context of the states’ settler colonial and imperialist interests. Both Israel and Canada are part of the US imperial hemisphere. It is no surprise that John Docker, a genocide expert, observes that both states/countries are ‘complicit in Genocide’. Docker states, ‘In a just world, Israel would be prosecuted under Article 2 of the 1948 UN Genocide Convention’, and Canada will be prosecuted under Article 3 for ‘Complicity in Genocide’ (Docker in Wolfe, 2016). Genocide, in other words, whether referred to as ‘Nakba’, ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ or Genocide within the Palestinian context, are characteristic of the settler colonial states. Genocide is historically specific and can take different forms in geographical and historical contexts.
Still, this article also showed that collaboration at the official level has also been countered by another popular form of support expressed in the increased support and solidarity by Canadian unions, academics, artists and the public at large with the Palestinian struggle for freedom and sovereignty.
The discussion of how Israel’s policies of genocide, elimination, erasure and vilification of the Palestinians have gone beyond their geographical boundaries into their diasporic spaces, especially in Europe and North America, was also demonstrated in this paper. In ‘Beyond collective violence: capturing context and complexity in Palestinian diasporic resistance’, Harris (2017) discusses the various methods of silencing and vilification enacted by the British state against the Palestinians. Similar tactics used in Canada in reinforcing the IHRA, silencing academics, and activists critical of Israel are shown by Harris as also characteristic of the ex-British Empire.
The ‘Palestine Exception’ phenomenon as it came to be known, including in Canada, represents the accumulation of racialized policies against the Palestinians and the continued attempts – albeit sometimes ineffective – at silencing them. Still, the unyielding Palestinian efforts and their supporters in the struggle for sovereignty and independence have been and continue to stand against all such attempts. Moreover, more Palestinian resistance and solidarity seem to emerge in a world experiencing expanding political consciousness and awareness as well as the development of social media. Resistance to colonialism, which is not confounding to the Palestinians, includes Indigenous peoples, African Americans and nations under colonialism that have and continue to resist and build solidarity with the oppressed against colonial and imperial powers.
The Zionist processes of elimination and erasure of the Palestinians, especially during their Nakba, together with their continued vilification and racialization (i.e. inventing the Palestinians as an inferior race to the European whites), have largely contributed to their silencing and racialization by the colonial West. The almost total dependency, at least politically, of Canada (and Europe) on US imperialism further contributes to making Israel the ally while perceiving Palestinians as an inferior race, a threat and an enemy to the West. Hence, the former’s ‘exception’. Perceiving the Palestinians as a ‘race’, as Wolfe (2016) and Lentin (2018), among others, argue, allows for their erasure or elimination. As discussed in this paper, the result is the silencing and invisibility of the Palestinians and the vanishing of Palestine.
The fear of the colonial state often emerges from inside the state, especially from its colonized and, in the Canadian and Israeli contexts, from the Indigenous populations. Both Israel and Canada recognize the viciousness and atrocities they have been inflicting on the land’s Indigenous population, in the form of destroying their environment, stealing their land, and assimilation processes, which in both cases resulted in the death and disappearance of many. This shared history and its realization destroy the state’s fabrication and mythologizing of its ‘benevolence’, of its projected image as ‘democracy’ or ‘concerned with human rights’! This is revealed through the memory and realization of the colonized, expressed in various forms of resistance and can threaten the ‘stability’ of the settler colonial state and consequently its very existence. Realizing this, especially in the case of newly invented Israel, the state creates pre-emptive techniques of silencing all forms of resistance or potential resistance. Therefore, it is no surprise that the Palestinian movement towards national liberation in North America, especially, but not solely, through its BDS campaign, has galvanized a wide range of solidarity and support from the colonized, including the Indigenous peoples. Thus, the suppression of the Palestinian resistance movement, their voice and activities become a priority for the Canadian colonial state.
Finally, this paper contended that the Canadian adoption of the IHRA re-interpretation of antisemitism in various official capacities (through certain universities, schools, municipalities and so on) and, most recently, through the Toronto District Board of Education presents an advanced technique to suppress Palestinian voices, silence their freedom of expression and further racialize them in Canada. But even this technique or mechanism has little chance of surviving. The voices of resistance, including Jewish voices (throughout the West, including North America), which have adamantly rejected the premise of the IHRA, are also being heard loud. These voices have and continue to refuse and struggle against conflating the critique of Israel and racial Zionism with antisemitism. Zionism and Apartheid Israel are sources of racism and racialization, whereas antisemitism is a form of racism and hatred against Jews, and, as such, it must be rejected. Moreover, the Palestinian struggle, the struggle of the Indigenous peoples and other colonized peoples, is of anti-colonial, anti-imperialist nature and character. And because of this, the resistance comes from the imperial centre.
