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Written by: Daniel Xie

According to newly published surveys on October 7, 2020, conducted by EKOS Research Associates, co-sponsored by Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME), Independent Jewish Voices Canada (IJV), and the United Network for Justice and Peace in Palestine-Israel (UNJPPI), the vast majority of Canadians are opposed to efforts to conflate support for Palestinian human rights and self-determination with anti-Semitism. The findings of the survey reveal that:

An overwhelming majority (80 per cent) of Canadians believe that accusing Israel of committing human rights abuses is a legitimate form of political expression.
A large majority (76 per cent) of Canadians believe that calling for a boycott of Israel because of alleged human rights abuses is a legitimate form of political expression.
A significant majority (69 per cent) of Canadians believe that comparing Israel’s policies to South African Apartheid laws (69 per cent) to be legitimate expression.

These results also demonstrate that Canadians that are more likely to believe criticism of Israel as legitimate forms of political expression are also more likely to reject anti-Semitic statements about Jewish Canadians. To George Bartlett, chair of UNJPPI, this indicates that claims by Zionists that anti-Zionism or criticism of Israel automatically constitutes anti-Semitism is false. By contrast, Bartlett notes, those conflating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism are more prone to adapt anti-Semitic beliefs.

The result of the survey come amid the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of anti-Semitism (IHRA WDA) in Canada, adopted last year by the Canadian government, which many critics of the definition of the IHRA argue is overly vague and an attempt to suppress BDS and other forms of pro-Palestinian activism within Canadian society by conflating anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism.

According to the CJPME, these findings suggest that Canadians strongly oppose the attempts of Prime Minister Trudeau and others in demonizing and suppressing pro-Palestinian solidarity and BDS. As stated by Thomas Woodley, President of CJPME, the fact that Canadians “rightfully maintain that criticism of Israel is legitimate” is the strongest indictment of the Trudeau government’s efforts to criminalize manifestations of pro-Palestinian activism such as the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement and Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW).

The recent round of surveys are also consistent with two previous surveys conducted by CJPME, IJV and UNJPPI showing Canadian solidarity with Palestine, of which this survey is the third part of in a series of surveys gauging Canadian support for Palestinian self-determination. On Wednesday September 16, 2020, the three organizations released an survey that revealed that 84 per cent of Canadians surveyed would support a hypothetical ICC war crimes investigation into Israeli war crimes, 86 per cent of Canadians believe that Israel’s human rights violations despite being a Canadian ally, and 82 per cent of Canadians do not support the position of the Netanyahu government that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital.

Even earlier, on June 16, 2020, the details from the first part of the three-part survey on Canadian support for Palestinian solidarity revealed that 74 per cent of Canadians indicated that Canada should oppose Israel’s plans to annex the West Bank, while 54 per cent of Canadians believe that Canada should not decrease support of human rights of Palestinians with 40 per cent believing that Canada should support even greater human rights for Palestinians. The current part that has been released, along with the second survey are both consistent with the data of the first survey showing that a plurality of Canadians oppose the one-sided pro-Israel foreign policy of the Trudeau government.

The results from these three sets of survey data were further consistent with an earlier survey conducted by CJPME in 2017 that reveal Canadians as perceiving their government, along with the media, to be biased toward Israel, with 40 per cent of Canadians supporting BDS as a reasonable measure to defend Palestinian rights. The 2017 survey also revealed that most Canadians believe that criticizing Israeli government policies is not necessarily anti-Semitic, which are consistent with the later findings of the October 2020 survey revealing that Canadians believe that opposition to the policies of the Israeli government to be legitimate political expression.

Canadian government Remains out of Touch with Canadians on the Issue of Israel-Palestine

What these surveys demonstrate is that the Canadian government’s foreign policy with regards to Israel remains out of touch with the desires of Canadians to see a less one-sided foreign policy in the Middle East; especially in light of the fact that even the majority of Liberals disagree with the one-sided pro-Israel foreign policy of the Canadian government.

Trudeau has, rather than subject Canada’s foreign policy with regards to Israel and Palestine to reassessment, continued Harper’s one-sided pro-Israel foreign policy. He has wasted no time in taking the opportunity to smear anti-Zionist and pro-BDS statements with the brush of anti-Semitism at home, while continuing Canada’s economic ties with Israel abroad and using whatever leverage he has on the international stage to defend Israel from facing any international scrutiny, even going as far as to threaten to intervene to halt an ICC investigation into Israel War crimes which most Canadians believe the government shouldn’t intervene in.

The progressive leaning parties within Parliament, the NDP and the Green party, are not much better with regards to moving away from a one-sided pro-Israel foreign policy. While there have been various left-leaning and progressive MPs and MPPs in both the NDP and the Green party that have called on the Canadian government to take action against continued Israeli war crimes and settlement construction in Palestine, the establishment and the leadership within both parties have sought to stifle any criticism of Israel. The NDP’s track record under Mulcair and Singh in refusing to criticize Israel, and even outright preventing critics of Israel from running for office, have been well documented.

Within the Green party, there was some hope, particularly by those disenchanted with the NDP’s pro-Israel foreign policy, that the Greens could move away from the one-sided pro-Israeli foreign policy championed by Elizabeth May. This was due to the fact that the Green party’s membership overwhelmingly backed measures calling on their party to endorse BDS; a resolution that Elizabeth May and the establishment wing of their party had worked hard to suppress. Hopes for a Pro-Palestinian orientation within the Green party also strengthened due to the potential for change represented by the Green party leadership race that saw pro-Palestinian ecosocialist candidates such as Dimitri Lascaris and Meryam Haddad bring fourth a vision for a leftist Green party fully embracing Palestinian solidarity.

Alas, those efforts to bring forth a policy change through the leadership campaign have come to nought. Despite Lascaris’ successful run for the leadership, the position of Green party leader was ultimately won by establishment favorite Annamie Paul. This victory happened in part due to constant meddling by Elizabeth May in favor of Annamie Paul during the leadership race despite her initial pledge of neutrality, along with the Party’s efforts to suppress left candidates to ensure Paul’s coronation during the election; these efforts were exemplified by the initial efforts to bar Lascaris from running for leader, as well as the efforts of the Green party to suspend Haddad in the final days of the campaign.

Annamie Paul has demonstrated herself as the most pro-Israel out of all the candidates in the race, in the CJPME’s leadership assessment of the Green party leadership candidates’ Middle East policy, Paul received a ‘C-‘, the lowest score out of the candidates. While she has ostensibly condemned the construction of illegal settlements, she has dodged many of the questions surrounding the issue of Palestine and brought forward the idea, during the foreign policy debate, that Israel can be could be talked down or made to agree to peace terms if the right combination of diplomacy and pressure is utilized, despite the fact that every single attempt to get Israel to agree to a peaceful resolution to the conflict has provided no solution in sight to the problem of Israeli settler colonialism.

As leader, she would be extremely likely to remove any pro-Palestine foreign policy initiatives within the Green party’s platform, and start to purge the party’s left wing through the weaponization of anti-Semitism, a pattern that has previously been repeated by neo-liberals in the NDP and the British Labour Party seeking to purge their left.

What Canadian opposition to a one-sided foreign policy favouring Israel demonstrates is just how out of touch our government’s response to the problem of Israeli apartheid is.

Even as Canadians believe that anti-Semitism is not anti-Zionism, and that Israel should be held onto account for it’s crimes, the mainstream political parties, even the progressive leaning ones, have refused to reassess their foreign policy, even going as far to weaponize anti-Semitism as a weapon against legitimate criticisms of Israel.

In response, it is imperative that progressive-minded and leftist-minded Canadians within the Liberal, Green and NDP parties, as well as those whom fully operate outside electoral politics, to unite to build movements and organizations working against their respective political establishments and their unjust foreign policies in order to bring about a long overdue reassessment of not only our pro-Israel foreign policy stance, but Canada’s foreign policy as a whole.

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