A photo Dekel Agami took Oct. 7, 2023, of Kibbutz Nir Oz in flames. (phot by Dekel Agami)
On Oct. 7, Kibbutz Magen, from which residents can see the Gazan city of Khan Yunis, was infiltrated by dozens of terrorists from Gaza. While two of the approximately 400 kibbutzniks were murdered and two seriously injured, a more horrific outcome was avoided, thanks to the heroic acts of a small squad of kibbutz civilian defenders, who held off the terrorists during a seven-hour gun battle.
A member of that response team was in Vancouver last week, sharing his story.
Kibbutz Magen is a kilometre away from Kibbutz Nir Oz, a village with a similar population, but which suffered exponentially more tragic outcomes that day – 46 Nir Oz residents were murdered and 71 taken hostage.
One reason for the less catastrophic death toll in Magen is that the terrorist infiltrators blew apart the perimeter fence a good distance from the kibbutz’s residential area. But the heroism and tireless response of Magen’s civilian emergency squad played a big role.
Dekel Agami, who grew up on the kibbutz, and his partner, Nufar Gal-Yam, who grew up in Sde Boker, the kibbutz most noted as the home of David Ben-Gurion, had moved in together on Kibbutz Magen on Oct. 4.
Since both had grown up in southern Israel, close to Gaza, the red alerts on Oct. 7 did not disturb them unduly. Around 7 a.m., Agami, an Israel Defence Forces veteran who served in the special forces, headed out with his weapon to meet other members of the security squad, a group of civilians and off-duty soldiers ranging in age from 20 to 70. He quickly realized this was not a routine day.
As he walked to meet his colleagues, Agami saw figures near the kibbutz border. The first one he encountered was wearing an Israel Defence Forces uniform – as numerous terrorists were that day – and so he did not shoot.
He came across the head of his security team, Baruch Cohen, who had been shot in the leg. As Agami was delivering first aid, an anti-tank missile hit the vehicle they were next to. Agami does not know how they survived.
In the event of an emergency, civilian and off-duty military personnel on kibbutzim are expected to manage on their own for 20 to 30 minutes until the arrival of the IDF. On Oct. 7, the dozen emergency squad members in Kibbutz Magen battled 30 to 40 terrorists on their own from 7 in the morning until 2 in the afternoon.
The terrorists breached the fence at a location relatively remote from the residential area of the kibbutz, giving the defenders a small tactical advantage. Fighting soon moved to the terrorists’ targets, the kibbutz’s homes, and, after providing first aid to Cohen, Agami fought the terrorists from one of the houses. The kibbutzniks successfully flushed the infiltrators back to the fence, where some of them fled – maybe back to Gaza, possibly off to murder easier prey.
During the fighting, Agami took a photo of nearby Nir Oz, where multiple plumes of smoke were rising in an ominous foreshadowing of their potential fate. The photo went viral in Israel.
“When I took this picture, I thought we were next,” Agami said to an audience at Temple Sholom on the evening of April 14. He and Gal-Yam also spoke at the weekly rally earlier that day, outside the Vancouver Art Gallery.
When the IDF finally made it to Kibbutz Magen, about 2 p.m., they killed the remaining terrorists. Then the larger trauma began to dawn on Agami and his fellow kibbutzniks.
Agami’s two daughters from a previous relationship were with their mother at a moshav a few kilometres away. During the battle, he didn’t worry about them – partly because, he said, he “couldn’t go there” but more because it never crossed his mind that the battle he was engaged in was part of a much larger crisis. When he finally did get in touch, he found out the three were safe.
The Magen fighters were too occupied keeping the terrorists at bay – Agami alone expended 15 magazines, about 450 bullets – to check their phones to see what was going on elsewhere. They did, though, have cellular connectivity, which was not the case in many kibbutzim. The terrorists were strategic, first targeting army bases and bringing down communications systems.
As the smoke cleared midafternoon on Oct. 7, several stunning realities came to light.
Three wounded residents – Cohen, Nadav Rot and Avi Fleisher – had been transported by the kibbutz doctor to a nearby community, from which they were helicoptered to hospital. Fleisher did not survive. Cohen would eventually have his leg amputated. No one – including those who made the journey – understand how they made it to safety. The terrorists had taken control of all the roads in the region, killing every Israeli they encountered. Even the military had not breached the area by the time the medical transport got through.
The exhausted kibbutz defenders soon discovered that what they had experienced was a comparatively small part of the worst terror attack in Israel’s history. In just a hint of the depths of preparation that went into the attacks, the fleeing terrorists left behind not only weapons, flashlights and food for an extended siege, but even supplies of blood for infusions.
Agami and Gal-Yam were brought to Vancouver by Itai Bavli, a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer in public health at the University of British Columbia. He and Dekel grew up together in Magen.
The friends estimate that 60 alumni of their regional high school died on Oct. 7. Including those killed in the subsequent war, they estimate 100 of their circle of friends are dead, including Bavli’s stepbrother, Tamir Adar, who lived in Nir Oz.
Agami downplays his heroism, but Bavli is emphatic.
“He saved my family,” Bavli said.
Gal-Yam, who is expecting a baby in July, just completed a five-month call-up as a major in the IDF. She and Agami are now in temporary accommodations on her home kibbutz of Sde Boker. Agami spent five months relocated in Eilat.
“It’s like some area after a hurricane,” Gal-Yam said of the chaos at Kibbutz Magen, which was founded in 1949 and is one of the oldest communities adjacent to the Gaza Strip.
She has since returned to her day job, but everything has changed, she said.
“It seems unimportant to do again whatever it was I was doing before Oct. 7,” she said, noting that creating a normal routine is impossible. “Nothing is normal now. I’m not normal. I’m a completely different person. We are living completely different lives than before. Nothing is the same. Nothing at all.”
The Israeli visitors demurred from making predictions about the political or military ramifications of events.
“Some people are going to have to give answers after all this will be over,” Gal-Yam said.
The length of time the hostages have been in captivity – more than six months – is something that was unimaginable on that first, terrible day, she said. “Not a person in Israel thought it would take more than six months to bring them home,” she said. “This is a reality none of us expected.”
An audience member asked how they view residents of Gaza now.
Bavli reflected on how, before Hamas took over the Gaza Strip, workers from Gaza came to their kibbutz, even staying overnight.
“People from Gaza worked on our kibbutz and were treated as family,” he said. “We wanted to have them as neighbours, to find political solutions, to find a way to live together.
“We don’t have anything against people from Gaza,” he said. “What broke our hearts was, at Kibbutz Nir Oz, the first wave [of infiltrators on Oct. 7] was Hamas, but the second wave was just people who came to steal. But they also killed people. That’s what broke our hearts, confused us.”
For the future, Bavli sees the willingness of Gazans to live in peace as key.
“Hopefully,” he said, “there are enough good people there to find a way to live together.”
Dr. Gil Murciano of Mitvim, the Israeli Institute for Regional Foreign Policies, and Uri Weltmann of Standing Together, spoke April 17 at Temple Sholom. (photo by Pat Johnson)
For months, weekly rallies across Israel after Shabbat have demanded the return of the hostages from Gaza. These rallies have often coincided with separate protests, which have been going on much longer, against the government of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu generally and its proposed judicial reforms specifically. These two streams of protesters have coalesced in recent weeks, according to an Israeli activist leader who spoke in Vancouver last week, because, he said, many Israelis are convinced that Netanyahu is not advancing freedom for the hostages, but hindering it, for his own political advantage.
Uri Weltmann, field organizer of Standing Together, made the claim April 17 during an event at Temple Sholom organized by New Israel Fund Canada.
“What happened three weeks ago is that it stopped being two different protest movements,” said Weltmann. “They are basically changing their strategy. They are calling for early elections and for [Netanyahu’s] government to be removed and replaced with a different government. [Activists are] pointing their finger at him as the obstruction, as the obstacle toward advancing to a ceasefire agreement.”
Weltmann argues that Netanyahu is concerned not only for his political survival, but for his freedom.
“For Netanyahu, the protraction of this war, the continuation of this war, is in his political interest,” said Weltmann. “He knows that a temporary ceasefire might lead to a permanent ceasefire. A permanent ceasefire would mean an end to the war. An end to this war would bring an end to this coalition government because the extremists he huddled with have already said publicly that, if they will end the war before total victory, they will topple the government.”
The end of the current government and the ousting of Netanyahu, he said, would have more than just political ramifications for the prime minister, who opinion polls suggest would be soundly routed if an election were held now.
“New elections mean him losing the majority and him losing the majority is not only Netanyahu the politician being ousted from office. It’s also Netanyahu facing corruption charges, having his trial resume, [and he] might lose his personal liberty. For him, it’s intimately linked to the continuation of the war.”
The consensus among these activists is that Netanyahu is seeking to prolong the war and the captivity of the hostages to protect his political and personal interests, said Weltmann.
“It’s an incredibly important political development within Israel that a broad movement around the families and friends of the hostages have made this link,” he said.
Weltmann’s group, Standing Together (known in Hebrew and Arabic as Omdim Beyachad-Naqif Ma’an), was founded in 2015 and is one of the on-the-ground groups New Israel Fund supports.
Among the goals of the group is to build a grassroots movement for peace and progressive politics in Israel, including in rural and peripheral areas of the country. Making such a movement successful beyond the activist hub in Tel Aviv is the only way to advance Standing Together’s goals, Weltmann said. Even a more centrist or progressive government, if elected tomorrow, would not necessarily advance meaningful steps to peace and coexistence if there is not a broad popular movement in support of such a policy shift, he said.
Without a national movement for peace, he said, a new prime minister, however well-intentioned, would not feel the pressure to abandon the status quo and take steps for a changed future.
“We must, as a strategic starting point in our process of progressive transformation of Israeli society, be present in the Negev, be present in the Galilee, be present in those parts of Israeli society that for too long have been the playing ground of the right-wing with left-wing actors completely non-present,” he said. “We must be there organizing local communities.”
Jewish citizens cannot do it by themselves, said Weltmann, and neither can Arab citizens.
“We must have Jewish-Palestinian unity and cooperation within Israel for this change to be effective,” he said. An example of this strategy was a slogan adopted by a joint Jewish-Arab slate in Haifa during the recent municipal elections. The far-right Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) party of Itamar Ben-Gvir ran slates across the country trying to solidify the party’s roots at the civic level. The joint slate in Haifa played off Otzma Yehudit’s xenophobia with the slogan “Jewish Arab Power.”
“We are at a crossroads,” said Weltmann. “Every Israeli should choose which side am I on: the side that leads to a continuation of the status quo, a continuation of the state of affairs in which the Palestinians live in the occupied territories under military rule devoid of citizenship, devoid of rights, a situation that can lead to Oct. 7 one after another unless we put an end to it, or the reality of an Israeli-Palestinian peace that will guarantee both people safety, security and an imaginable, livable future?”
Weltmann spoke alongside Dr. Gil Murciano, an Iran expert and chief executive officer of the think-tank Mitvim, the Israeli Institute for Regional Foreign Policies, which one journalist has called “the diplomatic wing of the protest movement.”
Like Weltmann, Murciano longs for a “new majority” in Israel’s body politic. “A new majority that will allow us to advance toward a state where we live in peace, we live in dignity, we live in equality, without the occupation, without the injustices, throughout our society,” he said.
A fundamental shift in perspective is needed, argued Murciano.
“We used to speak about ‘wars of no choice’ in Israel,” he said. “We need to start thinking in terms of ‘peace of no choice.’”
On the one side, he said, the extreme right has a plan of annexation, with Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s minister of finance and head of the far-right National Religious Party, calling for the government to “encourage” migration from Gaza to Egypt. On the other side, he said, since Oct. 7, people on the left have been motivated to seek an alternative to the status quo.
Dr. Maayan Kreitzman, a local food systems researcher and activist who moderated the event, challenged Murciano on this point. Rather than progressive voices calling for more coexistence, she said, she has heard the opposite. People that are “quite dovish” have had second thoughts about their worldview and transformed into a more hawkish, securitized attitude, she suggested.
Murciano acknowledged that all Israelis share one overriding priority. “For Israelis, it’s pretty clear,” he said. “The first, second and third priority of Israelis right now is security.”
That is a prerequisite to any advancement, he said.
Murciano proposes something he acknowledges to be “a little bit symbolic,” an international peace conference to kick off a new process between moderate Israelis and moderate Palestinians. This could be a first step to breaking an impasse that has existed in recent years, he said.
“Some people have described the last decade as the lost decade of Israeli diplomacy,” he said, a period where “conflict management” has been the priority; effectively, a maintenance of the status quo.
“I think that’s the right description, actually. It’s a strategy of not having a strategy,” said Murciano. “Coming to terms with the fact that there is no political way out and basically every couple of years we’re going to have a bit of violence.”
This approach sees Israelis forfeiting the initiative to Hezbollah and Hamas, he said, “Basically setting yourself in a situation where you only respond to a reality that is forced upon you.”
Oct. 7, he said, destroyed this conceptual framing.
Part of any future needs to include a multilateral project to “rebuild life-sustaining systems” in Gaza, he said, not a “peace-keeping force” but a “multinational force” that will be an on-the-ground part of a larger process toward peace and coexistence.
Ben Murane, executive director of New Israel Fund Canada, spoke of the emotional impacts of recent months.
“If you’re like me, what has been excruciating the past six months has been not just holding my pain, our Jewish pain, the pain of my Israeli coworkers, my family, my friends there, the pain of the Israeli people, but also, in my heart, holding the pain of the Palestinian people too,” he said.
Since the earliest days of the current war, Murane said, there have been countless glimmers of hope in the form of cross-cultural dialogue.
“In the first few months, we were astounded to see, across Israel, dozens of gatherings, conferences, events with hundreds of Jews and Palestinians standing together holding up those now-iconic purple signs saying ‘Jews and Arabs refuse to be enemies,’ ‘Jews and Arabs stand together’ or just simply ‘B’Yachad,’ together,” said Murane. “We were astounded to see Jewish citizens of Israel respond to the needs of the Palestinian citizens of Israel, Palestinian citizens of Israel making calls to families of the hostages, joint Jewish-Arab humanitarian aid missions to the south and to the north. As the war in Gaza accelerated, those Israeli voices also said, ‘We do have choices, even now. We have lots of choices with how we execute a just war justly.’”
Any long-term solution to the decades-long conflict must bring safety and dignity to both peoples, said Murane, “and anything else, anything short of fairness to both sides, will perpetuate this for another generation.”
New Israel Fund partners with and supports, according to its website, “organizations in Israel that fight for socioeconomic equality, religious freedom, civil and human rights, shared society and anti-racism, Palestinian citizens, and democracy itself.”
The April 17 event was hosted by Temple Sholom and co-sponsored by JSpaceCanada, which calls itself the advocacy voice of Liberal Zionism, Ameinu Canada, described as the voice of labour Zionism in Canada, and Canadian Friends of Peace Now, as well as the speakers’ organizations.
Rabbi Dan Moskovitz, senior rabbi at Temple Sholom, said he had received emails expressing concerns about hosting a perceived left-wing event.
“I get the same emails when we host people to the right of centre,” he said.
One of the purposes of a synagogue, he said, is to engage with ideas that “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.
“You may find your truth by agreeing with what you here tonight,” he said. “You may find your truth by disagreeing with what you hear tonight. The important part is to engage with it.”
Vancouver activist David Berson promoted the opportunity to listen to the Israeli guests as a chance to gain a perspective apart from the most common refrain he hears on social media and WhatsApp threads.
“There’s another way you can look at what’s going on,” he told the Independent after the event. “Come out and hear a different perspective. I invited people to come tonight and listen to a different narrative.”
The 200 to 300 people at the event was about double what organizers had earlier expected, he said.
Western Canada House, a shelter for women and children escaping domestic violence, is now open in Rishon LeZion, near Tel Aviv. The project is a result of support from Jewish National Fund of Canada supporters in Vancouver and Winnipeg. (photo from JNF Pacific Region)
Western Canada House, a shelter for women and children escaping domestic violence, is now open in Rishon LeZion, near Tel Aviv. The project, a result of support from Jewish National Fund of Canada supporters in Vancouver and Winnipeg, provides a temporary home to families in crisis, as well as access to counseling services, programs for mothers to become self-supporting and assistance in finding permanent, secure housing.
The project was made possible by revenue from 2016 Negev Dinners in Vancouver and Winnipeg and was chosen by that year’s Vancouver dinner honouree, Shirley Barnett. The honouree of the Winnipeg dinner was Peter Leipsic. (An additional Vancouver connection is that Leipsic is the father of Dr. Jonathon Leipsic, who is, among many other things, a leader in the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver.)
Barnett said she was motivated to choose the project in part because it is a joint initiative with No2Violence, whose founder, Ruth Rasnic, Barnett had met previously. Rasnic, who was awarded the Israel Prize in 2009 for her life’s work, founded No2Violence in 1977, to enable women and children suffering from domestic violence to break away and start a new life – by providing them with shelter, professional help, vocational training and legal aid – as well as to raise awareness about domestic violence. The group now operates three shelters in Israel.
“When I was honoured by the JNF, they asked me what kind of a project I would like the proceeds to go to,” Barnett recalled. The agency provided a number of options and, based on her background in social work and her familiarity with Rasnic’s work, she chose this one.
“No2Violence is interesting,” Barnett said. “They are not a religious organization. There are other shelters in Israel that cater only to the Orthodox. No2Violence is nonsectarian and, in addition to that, it is open to women who are not Jewish. It is also open to women who do not have legal status in Israel, who have not been deported because their children have been born in Israel. So, their doors are open to women who have come from Sudan, women who have come from Russia, who have been trafficked into Israel by their Israeli boyfriends. That was also attractive to me.”
Rabbi David Bluman, director of youth engagement at Congregation Beth Israel, visited Western Canada House earlier this month as part of a joint mission to Israel by Beth Israel, JNF Canada and Congregation Har El.
“It’s a beautiful place,” Bluman said. “They have different areas for children to play. They have a communal kitchen where each family signs up at a different time to do the cooking for the group that’s there. It’s obvious that JNF Western Canada did a really good job, put a lot of money in to build that place. It’s beautiful.
“I don’t think anyone wants to be there, they need to be there,” said the rabbi. “JNF Canada has made it as welcoming as possible, making it so it’s like home for them while they are there.”
The shelter has capacity for 10 to 12 families, providing needed refuge in a country where, statistics indicate, as many as 70% of women and children experiencing domestic abuse cannot access alternative housing.
Michael Sachs, Pacific region executive director of JNF, visited the project last year to assess progress and is delighted that the shelter is now open and providing housing to families. There were delays in completion of the initiative, Sachs said, because of municipal bureaucracy.
Daphna Kedem speaks at one of the weekly rallies she organizes to unite the local community and express solidarity with the Israeli hostages being held by Hamas (photo by Pat Johnson)
Until recently, Daphna Kedem was a single mom with two jobs, an Israeli-Canadian who came to Vancouver in 2011. Upset by political and social developments in her homeland, she mobilized a local branch of the global activist movement UnXeptable. Then, on Oct. 7, driven by grief and an inability to sit idly, she became the face of weekly vigils for Israel’s hostages, terror victims and families.
UnXeptable is, according to its website, “a grassroots movement launched by Israeli expats in support of a democratic Israel.” The group mobilized around the world against the “judicial reforms” of the current government, which critics say would fundamentally undermine the democratic nature of the state.
The Vancouver activists were meeting weekly and, in the hours after the Oct. 7 terror attacks, it was immediately evident that there was a need for people to come together. Community organizations, she said, were waiting until the close of Shabbat to announce a community response.
“I said, no, we can’t wait,” Kedem told the Independent. “In the Jewish tradition, a war or a crisis like this is beyond Shabbat. You can actually break Shabbat if it’s very important.”
In her capacity as an individual – not on behalf of UnXeptable or any other organization – Kedem brought the community together at the Vancouver Art Gallery on Oct. 9 and has continued, with a few exceptions, at that location every Sunday since. (Conflicting events have resulted in shifting locations a few times and there were no rallies on Dec. 24 or 31.)
Kedem doesn’t recall specifically making the decision to hold a weekly event, nor would she have imagined it would go on so long.
“I don’t know how it came about but I just said, let’s do this every Sunday at 2 p.m. until all the hostages are released and, unbelievably, we are here six months after,” she said.
Kedem works for a Vancouver company specializing in products for chiropractors, massage therapists and other medical professionals, and she is also an entrepreneur who bakes pies and sells them at farmer’s markets. The weekly rallies have become effectively a third job. On top of all this, she is also deeply committed to animal rights, being a local organizer for a California-based global animal movement called Direct Action Everywhere.
Kedem laments that attendance at the rallies has dropped off – it is challenging to keep audiences engaged week after week. She notes that she hears some people in the community talking worriedly about the size of anti-Israel rallies, but then does not see those faces at her Sunday gatherings.
“For me, it should not happen because it’s like saying we are giving up on the hostages,” she said of the declining numbers. “It’s like saying this is our new normal, and it shouldn’t be this way.”
Kedem, who was born and raised in Israel, lived in London, England, in her 20s. When she decided she and her daughter, who is now a student at Western University, in Ontario, needed a change, she considered Berlin, which has a large Israeli expat community, but decided an English-speaking city would be better. Her experience of London had been one of bigoted locals with unwelcoming attitudes toward “bloody foreigners” and she is not enamoured of the political climate in the United States. Australia and New Zealand seemed too far away.
“I had friends that were moving to Vancouver and I said, OK, I can get a tourist visa for a year and, if things don’t work out, we can always have an experience of a year in Canada,” she said. “That’s how it started.”
Bringing the community together on behalf of Israeli hostages, victims of terror and their families takes effort and volunteers, Kedem said, but it is also a vital source of empowerment and comfort for her and all who attend.
“It’s necessary that we unite in common as a community,” she said. “It is for the solidarity with the hostages but the other thing is just being together, the community in Vancouver. People need to feel a part of something and, for the past six months, it has been created. People find a safe space and a safe space can grow with more people coming out.”
Kedem has a lot on her plate. Rather than adding to her stress, though, the weekly rallies are a comfort. She said, “It’s helping me because I have to do something.”
Ilan Pilo, left, and Rafi Yablonsky of the Canadian Shaare Zedek Hospital Foundation. (photo from CSZHF)
In Jerusalem, Yad Vashem stands as the foremost memorial centre to the Holocaust, dedicated to the millions of Jews murdered during the Shoah. Across the street, as if in defiant answer to the past, is one of the world’s busiest maternity centres, where 22,000 newborns meet the world every year, strengthening the future of the Jewish people.
The maternity section is just one of Shaare Zedek Medical Centre’s many specialized departments, advancing health not only at the start of life but all through the lifespan of patients. Shaare Zedek is home to an emergency preparedness and disaster response centre. It offers a one-stop multidisciplinary and comprehensive diagnostic breast health centre. There are departments focusing on heart health, medical genetics, digestive diseases, oncology and an array of other specializations – more than 30 in-patient and 70 out-patient departments in all. The hospital sees a million patients annually and has 1,000 beds. Located in the centre of west Jerusalem, it is, among so much else, a teaching and research facility.
Western Canadians will likely be hearing more about this particular facility as the Canadian Shaare Zedek Hospital Foundation has just opened its first office in this part of the country. But, while the organization may be a newcomer as a physical presence in Vancouver’s Jewish community, it will be a familiar face sharing the Shaare Zedek story.
Ilan Pilo, who served as shaliach (emissary) and regional executive director of Jewish National Fund of Canada from 2013 to 2021, has returned from Israel as the Western Canada executive director for the Canadian Shaare Zedek Hospital Foundation.
“I was thrilled and honoured to be offered the opportunity to be the first to launch the Western office in Canada,” Pilo said.
During his time back in Israel, Pilo served as principal of a postsecondary trades and skills school and, most recently, ran the campaign for Yariv Fisher, who won an upset victory to become mayor of Herzliya, north of Tel Aviv. Municipal elections across Israel were delayed twice due to the war and, almost immediately after seeing his candidate elected, Pilo jumped on a plane and headed for Canada, spending 10 days in Toronto orienting to his new role before landing in Vancouver in March.
The hospital is 120 years old and was founded to ensure medical adherence to halachah (Jewish law), providing appropriate care for Orthodox Jews in the pre-state era. While it still provides everything religious Jews need, including minyanim, it is also, Pilo said, a “safe zone” for all people, regardless of ethnicity, nationality or religion.
“When you look at the population in Jerusalem, you see that there are one million people – 300,000 of them are ultra-Orthodox, 400,000 are Arabs and the rest are, let’s say, secular Jews,” Pilo said. “It’s the most interesting and complex mix of people.”
That diversity is reflected not only in the patients but in the doctors and staff, Pilo said.
Right now, the hospital’s specialists in trauma are dealing with soldiers and civilians injured in the war. Since Oct. 7, Shaare Zedek has treated 300 wounded civilians and more than 700 Israel Defence Forces soldiers. In addition, hospitals in the north and the south of Israel have transferred 60 of their neonatal intensive care unit patients out of conflict regions to Shaare Zedek, where the NICU is housed in completely sheltered areas.
Rafi Yablonsky, national executive director of the Canadian Shaare Zedek Hospital Foundation, said he and the foundation’s board decided to expand operations across Western Canada because of the region’s philanthropic and Zionistic reputation.
“We hope that more Canadians learn about the transformative and world-leading work of Shaare Zedek Medical Centre in Jerusalem,” he said. “Our goal is to grow our donor base and volunteer base with business and philanthropic leaders out West.”
This is not the first time Pilo and Yablonsky have worked together.
“Ilan and I were colleagues when we worked at JNF Canada together,” he said. “I witnessed firsthand how Ilan is highly skilled as a world-class fundraiser, also motivating groups of volunteers to do their part in our community.
“Shaare Zedek is a public hospital that is privately funded,” said Yablonsky, “and it receives very limited support from the Israeli government to upgrade equipment and technology, develop groundbreaking international research and ensure state-of-the-art medical training is available to staff. As such, the hospital relies heavily on the generosity of donors around the world to supplement $30 million needed annually.”
Benny Stanislawski is communications director for Congressman Ritchie Torres. (photo from Benny Stanislawski)
While many of the young, progressive Democratic lawmakers in Washington, DC, form a cadre of anti-Israel voices on Capitol Hill, Ritchie Torres, a congressman from the Bronx, in New York City, has been a frequent and welcome voice for Israel since being elected in 2020 – and even more so in recent months, as Israel has been heavily criticized on the international stage.
The 36-year-old, gay, Afro-Latino politician – who was the youngest elected official in the city when he became a New York city councilor at age 25 – has been in the news frequently supporting Israel’s right to defend itself.
Torres’ pro-Israel positions stem from a visit to that country early in his city council career, when he was taken there by the Jewish Community Relations Council. While Torres is known to Jewish voters as a tireless ally, to hometown voters, he is an energetic young pol with a dramatic backstory. Raised in public housing in the Bronx – his mother still lives in the same place – he dropped out of New York University during a struggle with depression, during which he considered suicide, a crisis he has spoken about openly. He is a strong voice for the working poor and Americans experiencing mental health challenges. It is his unapologetic support for Israel, though, that has Jewish and Israel-allied people sharing memes of the young congressman’s quotes and clips of his videos.
And the congressional staff member who manages Torres’ media schedule has a Vancouver connection.
Benny Stanislawski, a 26-year-old who already has a litany of behind-the-scenes political successes under his belt, is the congressman’s communications director. Stanislawski graduated from the University of British Columbia with a bachelor’s in political science and a minor in Jewish studies, in 2021. While at UBC, he was president of the Jewish fraternity, Alpha Epsilon Pi, and a familiar face around the campus Hillel House.
A dual Canadian-American citizen, Stanislawski grew up in Chevy Chase, Md, a suburb of Washington. His father is from Montreal and Stanislawski wanted to live in Canada for a time.
After graduating from high school, he spent a gap year in Israel with Habonim Dror, the labour Zionist youth movement at whose Camp Moshava, in Maryland, he had spent 10 years as a camper and counselor. After returning from Israel, he was off to study at UBC and take advantage of his Canadian citizenship and the beauty of Vancouver’s natural surroundings.
After graduation, which followed a pandemic-enforced period of remote learning, he took a job at the Jewish Democratic Council of America (JDCA), which defines itself as “the voice of Jewish Democrats and socially progressive, pro-Israel values.”
At the same time, he completed a master’s of professional studies in legislative affairs at George Washington University.
After two-and-a-half years with the JDCA, he moved to a Senate primary campaign in his home state and, when that candidate dropped out of the race, he joined the Torres congressional office.
Amid all this, Stanislawski traveled to organize on the ground for some of the most watched political campaigns in the country, including nail-biters in the 2022 Arizona midterm elections and the Georgia runoff for Senator Raphael Warnock.
Less than six months into his role in Torres’ office, Stanislawski is expansive in his admiration for his employer.
“In my short few months working for him so far, he’s been extremely kind and gracious and a very, very great boss to have,” said Stanislawski. “He says what he believes at a time when things are perilous for the world and for our community. I appreciate his advocacy.”
Shai DeLuca and Alexandra Smith flew in Sunday from Toronto to address Vancouver’s weekly vigil for Israeli hostages on the six-month anniversary of the atrocities committed on Oct. 7. (photo by Pat Johnson)
Unity, defiance and determination were the overriding messages at the community rally Sunday, April 7, marking six months since the atrocities of Oct. 7.
“Our hearts are heavy with the weight of loss and sorrow,” said Michael Sachs, regional director of the Jewish National Fund of Canada. As Israelis were called up for service at the start of that war, another battle began in the diaspora, he said.
“Jews worldwide were drafted for a different, yet related, war,” said Sachs. “In the wake of Oct. 7, we witnessed a disturbing and radical rise in antisemitism and Jew-hatred right here in Canada.”
Canada today does not resemble the Canada of Oct. 6, he said, as anti-Jewish ideas and actions have “emerged from the alley and are now openly displayed on our streets and threatening the very fabric of our society.
“We should always draw strength from the resilience and courage of the survivors,” Sachs said. The souls of those murdered that day, he said, live on “in our commitment to build a world with compassion, justice, that will triumph over the cruelty and ignorance that we are seeing.
“The brave soldiers, of all faiths, who have made the ultimate sacrifice in defence of Israel – we mourn you and we will never forget you,” said Sachs.
The Jewish response to evil is goodness, he said.
“In the face of their darkness, let us shine our light on them by rejecting forces of division, and continue to embrace the power of the unity of our community and our amazing allies,” he said. “Let us stand together, hand in hand, to be the hope and strength to the families of those held hostage. Let us show the world that our Zionism – not the Zionism that they have created – our Zionism, our love of Israel, is stronger than any hate they can throw at us.”
Aron Csaplaros, BC regional manager of B’nai Brith Canada, recalled his own family’s history.
“For hundreds of years, we have overcome expulsions, pogroms, massacres,” he said. “During the Holocaust, my grandmother spent months hidden in a dark basement, constantly hearing the footsteps of Nazi officers walking above her head, knowing that she could be found and murdered at any minute. But she, like Jews have done throughout our history, survived. She is here today standing in the crowd and we, the Jewish people, are still here, stronger and more united in our resolve than ever.”
He reiterated the demand of the weekly events, that the hostages be released, and added that Hamas should accept its defeat and unconditionally surrender to facilitate a new era of peace between the Palestinian and Israeli people.
“We will never stop fighting those who wish to destroy us,” Csaplaros said. “And we will not stop fighting to defend our indigenous homeland, the land of Israel.”
Until the hostages are released, he said, “We will not stop rallying. We will not stop marching. We will not stop advocating and we will not stop calling on our elected leaders in government to act until every single one of our brothers and sisters held hostage is safely returned.”
Shai DeLuca, an interior designer who lives in Toronto and Israel, is a familiar face to audiences of Toronto’s CityTV and Global television. During the Hamas war in 2014, he pivoted to being a voice for Israel and has led battles against anti-Zionist campaigns in Toronto. He said he was nonchalant when he awoke to alerts on Oct. 7. But, as he and his husband took refuge in a shelter, he realized this was not routine.
“I have lived through enough attacks, hundreds upon hundreds of Hamas rocket attacks throughout my life, to know that this felt different,” said DeLuca.
Soon, Israeli phones were lighting up with push notifications, videos and images showing murder, rape and other atrocities.
“It was from numbers we did not recognize,” he said. “Only later did we find out that these were targeted push notifications from Hamas.”
Last week, DeLuca was back in Israel and visited the site of the Nova music festival, where hundreds were murdered. The site is about 15 minutes from his family home.
He spoke with Rotem, a young woman who had been a vocal advocate for reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians. She had spent 30 hours in a safe room with her children before the terrorists gave up and sought out easier prey.
That day, Rotem told DeLuca, was “the day that I realized they really don’t care who we are.”
“A Jew is a Jew,” she told him. “They want us all dead.”
Many of Israel’s most avid peace activists lived on the kibbutzim that were attacked.
“The belief that one day we would have peace with our neighbours wasn’t something she could foresee anymore and that was heartbreaking to see,” said DeLuca. “She had strived to work toward a better tomorrow for all and was met with the worst massacre of the Jewish people since the Holocaust, on her community specifically…. A community that employed Gaza workers and worked daily to build bridges. That bridge no longer exists, she said, they torched it.”
Now, in the diaspora, Jews are faced with what DeLuca equates to the antisemitic marches of the 1930s and ’40s.
“We have never been able to depend on others,” he said. “Our history has proven that.… The difference today, unlike times past, is that we have our home to go to. While the hate marches we seerepeatedly across cities and across countries call to deny the existence of the only indigenous home the Jewish people have ever known, they continue to prove why its existence is so very important.”
Alexandra Smith, director of End Jew Hatred Canada, came with DeLuca from Toronto on a delayed flight, arriving just in time for the event.
“Today, we are called upon not only to demand the immediate and unconditional release of those unjustly held, but to reaffirm our commitment to each other as members of a shared community, a shared nation, a shared destiny and, indeed, a shared humanity,” said Smith.
“Starting on Oct. 8, for many in the Jewish community, the open, brazen, unashamed Jew-hatred exhibited on college campuses and on our streets came as a terrible shock and a deep sense of betrayal,” she said. “But, for those of us who have been working in this space for a length of time, it came as no surprise. Antisemitism has always been there, only hidden under wraps. It took a war in the Middle East for it to rear its ugly head. It’s not an exaggeration to call this a profound crisis. In moments of crisis, however, the strength of a community is seen not only in its leaders but in the spirit of its people. Unity is our beacon of hope. Shoulder to shoulder, regardless of backgrounds, beliefs and life experiences, we embody the resilience that has helped communities throughout history overcome adversity.”
Rabbi Andrew Rosenblatt of Congregation Schara Tzedeck chanted El Moleh Rachamim, invoking the name of Elad Katzir, a hostage whose body was recovered by Israeli soldiers the day before the rally. Rabbi Susie Tendler of Beth Tikvah in Richmond said the prayer for the hostages.
For 20 years, on the afternoon of Yom Kippur, Prof. Chris Friedrichs delivered a lecture to the congregants of Temple Sholom on the subject of the Holocaust. It started in 2004, when Rabbi Philip Bregman, now rabbi emeritus of the shul, asked Friedrichs to speak on the most solemn day in the liturgical calendar. The rabbiasked him to reprise the lecture the following year, and it became an annual event.
After the 2014 passing of Friedrichs’ wife, Dr. Rhoda Lange Friedrichs, like her husband an historian, Rabbi Dan Moskovitz announced that the presentation would be known as the Rhoda Friedrichs Memorial Lecture.
Friedrichs, now professor emeritus of history at the University of British Columbia, decided to end the tradition after 20 years and his friend and UBC colleague, Prof. Richard Menkis, suggested the idea of compiling the lectures in a book.
The volume, Reflections on the Shoah: Yom Kippur Sermons Given at Temple Sholom 2004-2023 is a small but irreplaceable volume offering deep and original insights on the lessons of history from a leading thinker on these subjects.
In these lectures, Friedrichs does not dwell on the facts of history so much as draw broader insights into their meaning. In 2005, he reflected on the term “martyrs,” which is often used in reference to the victims of the Nazis.
“A martyr is someone who has accepted death rather than renounce his or her Jewish faith,” he said. Yet, he noted, among the six million were many, like the Jewish-born Catholic nun Edith Stein, who were not killed because they refused to renounce their faith. Indeed, he said, renunciation would not bring redemption. It was Jewish “racial” identity, not adherence to Jewish ideas, that drove the Nazis’ murderous objectives.
In an historic sense, though, Friedrichs argues, Jews were murdered in the Holocaust because generations of ancestors had refused, against all pressures, to abandon their identities. “And, therefore, it is in fact right to honour those who died as martyrs,” he said.
In 2007, Friedrichs struggled with theologians’ explorations of the meaning of the Shoah, as though some divine purpose could be discerned from it.
“The Shoah was an entirely human event,” he said. “But that hardly removes the question: where was God while it took place? Why did God allow it to happen?”
God gave humans free will, he concluded, but this does not answer the unknowable question.
“In a world we cannot begin to understand, we can still hope for mercy, and we can pray for strength,” he said.
In a brief postscript to this lecture, Friedrichs writes that the daughter of a friend, having heard the sermon, asked her father “Where was God?” In response, the father said, “Where was man?”
In 2012, Friedrichs spoke of the first Holocaust memorial ever created, in May 1943, in the Majdanek death camp, where a group of prisoners persuaded the SS administrator that the camp could be made more beautiful if they could erect a pillar topped by a statue of three eagles about to take flight. The commandant never knew that under the base of the pillar the inmates had buried a container of ashes of the victims taken from the crematorium.
In 2013, Friedrichs addresses the problem with the very word Holocaust, which means a burnt sacrifice.
“What a meaningless term!” Friedrichs declared. “Six million Jews were sacrificed? Sacrificed to what God? Sacrificed to what end?”
In 2020, when his lecture was recorded and shared virtually because of the pandemic, Friedrichs spoke of the sanctity of life.
The next year, after unmarked graves were discovered adjacent to a former residential school in Kamloops, he spoke of the “humanitarian obligation to go beyond just our circle of Jewish concerns.” He drew parallels between the MS St. Louis, the ship of Jewish refugees turned away from ports of refuge, including Canada’s, and the Afghans clambering through the Kabul airport, struggling to escape the country before the takeover of the Taliban.
In 2022, he invoked a very different piece of history. In high school, his most memorable teacher was Anne Schwerner. When the news came, in the summer of 1964, that three civil rights workers had been murdered by white supremacists in Mississippi, one of them Michael Schwerner, Friedrichs realized this was his favourite teacher’s son. He reflected on the lessons of obligation to universal freedom and rights embodied in Jewish tradition.
In his last lecture in the series, Friedrichs spoke of how, when he speaks to audiences of high school students, as he frequently does, he makes the lessons relevant to young, multicultural Canadians.
“I tell the students that it is normal to dislike somebody because that person, as an individual, is bad or unkind or unpleasant,” he said. “But to dislike or hate somebody not because of their own characteristics but because they happen to belong to a group, to hate them just because they are Chinese or Filipino or South Asian or Black or members of any other group, is to take the first step on a path that has led and could lead again to things like the Holocaust.”
In most of his lectures, Friedrichs describes predations that are difficult to read and must have been more difficult to hear on a Yom Kippur afternoon, in a room that includes survivors of precisely such atrocities. This, though, is one of the invaluable aspects of Friedrichs’ approach. Whatever reservations might exist in this time of safe spaces and trigger warnings, one can hardly make the case that it is too burdensome to listen to a few examples of the barbarism for the sake of education, memorialization and understanding, when there are people in our community, including in the congregation Friedrichs was addressing, who experienced the cruelties themselves.
Anyone who heard these lectures when they were delivered, or has heard any of Friedrichs’ many presentations elsewhere, can hardly help but hear his deep voice and commanding delivery while reading his words. Those who haven’t had the privilege of hearing him speak are fortunate to have these lectures compiled in this new book.
Alex Greenberg’s family experience drove his work for the Dallas Holocaust Museum. (photo from Alex Greenberg)
It was a winding road for Alex Greenberg to become head of animation at a leading creative technology firm in Vancouver.
Born in Moldova, Greenberg and his family made aliyah in 1990, when he was 11 years old. After a “pretty regular childhood” in Israel, high school graduation, military service and a bit of travel around the world, Greenberg settled down to study animation.
“Unfortunately, two months into school, the director of the school took the money and split,” he said. “My luck. All the money was gone, the money I got from my [military] service.”
He started looking for schools in Canada and the United States where he could continue his studies. He discovered the Art Institute of Vancouver and moved here, by himself, in 2003.
Fast-forward … Greenberg is immersed in immersive technology. As head of animation for ngx Interactive, he has his finger in many projects – including one that shares the testimonies of Holocaust survivors and which, of everything he has worked on, is closest to his heart.
Founded more than two decades ago in Vancouver, ngx’s 80 or so employees, according to the company’s website, help clients “reimagine what’s possible in physical and digital spaces.”
“We work with four main sectors,” said Greenberg.
The museum sector is a big one. The company took part in a major re-envisioning of the National Portrait Gallery in London, UK. It reopened last year featuring 41 multimedia exhibits, including an artificial intelligence-powered portrait experience, an animated projection wall featuring some of the gallery’s most stunning portraits, interactive touch screens, and documentary films produced by ngx.
The medical sector is another area and, if you have ever taken your kids or grandkids to BC Children’s Hospital, you may have seen the interactive aquarium ngx developed for the emergency room so that young patients and their families have something to take their minds off the stressful reasons for their visit.
A third area is themed attractions, which have engaged audiences in such diverse spaces as Vancouver’s Science World, SeaWorld Abu Dhabi, Jurassic World in Beijing and the Canada Pavilion at Expo 2020 in Dubai.
Their corporate and institutional work, another core area for ngx, includes an interpretive exhibition in the pharmaceutical sciences building at the University of British Columbia, where visitors explore the world of health, and a project for Roche Canada, in the Toronto area, where the global pharmaceutical company has an interactive space for employees to engage with the Roche brand story.
Other projects help visitors explore cultural institutions like the Citadel Heritage Centre in Halifax, Indigenous cultural storytelling at Wanuskewin Heritage Park in Saskatoon, and interpretive exhibits about nature at Wind Cave National Park in South Dakota.
Greenberg’s specific role in ngx projects is lighting and look development.
“When you are working on a project, there’s a certain style to it, lighting, a certain mood, something that will convey the story,” he said. “We don’t just create these experiences to make them look cool. There’s a lot of thought that is being put behind them, thinking about the colours and thinking about the movement and [in the case of the BC Children’s Hospital virtual aquarium] how kids are going to interact with it to help them relax.”
In his seven years with the company, one project stands out among the rest for Greenberg.
Visitors to the Dallas Holocaust Museum, in Texas, enter a room that transforms into a home in eastern Europe at the start of the Holocaust. Survivors share their testimonies as the home becomes no longer a refuge but a backdrop for the projection of scenes of atrocities. Then the screen rises and a holographic version of a survivor engages with the audience.
Hundreds of hours of interviews with survivors using 360-degree cameras allow for the realistic perspective of meeting these individuals in person. The project, called Dimensions in Testimony and developed in partnership with Steven Spielberg’s USC Shoah Foundation, introduces school groups and other museum visitors to a different survivor and their experiences each week of the year.
“This was one of the most impactful projects that I ever worked on,” Greenberg said. “You feel like you’re sitting in their living room. As you hear the story, the room begins to change. Lights going off, you hear marching of the boots outside, the rooms become slowly, almost unnoticeably dilapidated, just to show that the people were driven out of their homes and these homes are left with nothing but memories and a few photographs.
“After that introduction, the screen goes up and there’s a hologram production of that survivor. That’s the technology that the USC [Shoah] Foundation has developed. You can ask a question – for example, ‘What was your favourite sport when you were little?’ – and that would trigger a story where the survivor will be talking about where he used to play soccer with his friends when they were little.”
The project was close to home for Greenberg, whose grandfather lost his entire family in the Shoah.
“There was a big part of me in that experience,” said Greenberg. “I can tell and I can educate other people, people that are coming to this museum and people around the world that still don’t know what the Holocaust is, don’t know what a genocide is. It’s almost like I was telling my story.”
Selina Robinson, centre, with then BC premier John Horgan and Kate Ryan-Lloyd, clerk of the Legislative Assembly, at Robinson’s swearing-in ceremony in 2017. (photo from Selina Robinson)
Selina Robinson says she was fired from the British Columbia cabinet. Premier David Eby says she quit.
This is merely the tip of an iceberg in the conflicting stories that have roiled BC politics since Robinson’s cabinet career ended in February – and which burst into an even bigger storm when she left the New Democratic Party caucus March 6 with an incendiary letter to caucus colleagues.
Whether Robinson jumped or was pushed, Jewish community leaders and opposition politicians are denouncing what they say is a double standard, with multiple people – including the premier – getting second chances for remarks that were at least as impolitic as Robinson’s.
In a wide-ranging interview with the Independent, Robinson maintains the premier prevented her from doing precisely the work he called on her to do – another point that Eby contradicts. He thought her acts of contrition were proceeding just fine and suggests he was blindsided by her resignation from caucus.
Perhaps the prickliest aspects of the entire controversy are the motivations of the individuals involved. Robinson, opposition officials and many in the Jewish community see antisemitism at play. Government officials – including the cabinet minister Robinson says the premier “trotted out as the new Jew” – say that the evidence doesn’t amount to racial bias.
The bones of the story are familiar by now – but Robinson shared with the Independent personal reflections and sharp critiques of former colleagues, including Eby, fellow New Democrats who she accuses of profound insensitivity in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attacks, a death threat that is now in the hands of international policing authorities, and how everything might have been different if John Horgan were still premier.
Poor choice of words
The drama began with words Robinson spoke in a Jan. 30 webinar organized by B’nai Brith Canada featuring Jewish elected officials from across Canada – or, at least, that is how most media coverage frames the controversy. Robinson said she has had a target on her back since much earlier, as a Jewish woman with emotional, spiritual and familial connections to Israel. That targeting came from within her own party, she claims, and she went into some depth about her fights with fellow New Democrats in recent months and years over the issue.
During the January webinar, Robinson said that the area designated for a Jewish state under the 1947 United Nations Partition Resolution was “a crappy piece of land with nothing on it.”
She immediately clarified in the webinar that there were people living there and she was referring to the arability of the land and the limited economic development in the region. But the genie was out of the bottle. Robinson told the Independent that what happened in the succeeding weeks – and continues roiling – is not so much a result of what she said, but of who she is.
Marvin Rotrand, the outgoing national director of B’nai Brith’s League for Human Rights, was host of the now-notorious webinar. In a statement afterward, he said that a small part of Robinson’s speech was distorted and taken out of context, leading to a campaign against her by groups and individuals “too well known for their hate of Israel.”
Within days, thousands had signed a petition calling for Robinson’s firing. Leaders of more than a dozen mosques and Islamic associations sent a letter to Eby warning that NDP representatives would not be welcome in their sacred spaces as long as Robinson remained in cabinet. Days later, her constituency office was vandalized – including with the words “Zionism is Nazism” – and she received a death threat that international police organizations deem credible.
While pressure was building, Robinson and Eby both appeared to be feeling their way through uncharted territory. Robinson apologized – twice. She also offered to take anti-Islamophobia training.
“My words were inappropriate, wrong, and I now understand how they have contributed to Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism,” she said.
Parallels Robinson drew between Indigenous peoples in British Columbia and Jewish indigeneity in Israel also brought condemnations, and she specifically apologized for those remarks.
“The experiences of First Nations people are not mine to manipulate,” she said. “That was wrong and I am deeply sorry.”
“Her comments increase divisions in our province,” Eby told media. “They increase the feelings of alienation of groups of people, especially people of Palestinian descent and people who are concerned about the death and the destruction in Palestine that is happening right now.
“She has apologized unequivocally, as she should. And she’s got some more work to do,” Eby said. Robinson, the premier told media, was in the process of reaching out to community leaders to repair the damage her remarks caused.
What happened in those hours sowed the seeds for further conflict within the party, including, Robinson now says, the premier’s refusal to allow her to do what she could do – and wanted to do – torepair the damage she caused.
Was she wrong?
Some commentators have defended Robinson, saying that pre-state Israel was indeed a crappy piece of land in terms of arability. Robinson reflected on what she said and the reaction to it.
“I said things that I did not intend to hurt anybody,” she said. “I did not intend to make Arab, Muslim or Palestinian people feel like they are ‘less than.’ I understand that just the way I described Israel made them feel like they were poor land stewards, that they somehow were to blame for the conditions.”
Nevertheless, she said, she did not invent a narrative that Mandatory Palestine was a poor piece of land, she said.
“Other people have characterized [pre-state] Israel in that way,” she said. “I didn’t create that narrative. I was repeating a narrative that others had stated, from Mark Twain to land economists.”
For the purposes of historical accuracy, she said, she blames the Ottomans, whose empire had controlled the land for 400 years, for a lack of economic vibrancy in the region. That long-ago history, though, does not mean her words did not affect contemporary audiences, she acknowledged.
“Those words impacted them,” she said of people who expressed disappointment and other emotions at her remarks.
Criticism she rejects, though, are assertions that she espoused hate.
“I didn’t espouse hate,” she said, slowly, quietly and firmly. “I said words that hurt people. There was no hate in those words.”
These nuances, for what they may be worth, made no difference when it came to Robinson’s continuation as a cabinet minister.
Jumped or pushed?
“The depth of the work that Minister Robinson needs to do, in order to address the harms that she’s caused, is significant,” the premier told media Feb. 5. “[S]he screwed up, she made a really significant error and so we need to address the harm that was caused by that.”
At a news conference, Eby said a “joint decision” was made that Robinson would leave cabinet.
While she agreed to that wording, Robinson told the Independent, that is not a correct assessment of what happened.
“I didn’t think that I needed to leave cabinet,” she said. “That was not my choice. The premier was insistent that I had to.”
Robinson says Eby seized on something she said during discussions around her future.
“I said, ‘If you are asking me to step down from cabinet, if that’s what you want, I will,’” Robinson recalled. “It’s not what I want. And he said, ‘I can’t see a path forward for you in cabinet.’ So I said, ‘So you’re asking me to resign.’”
Robinson said she insisted the announcement from the premier’s office say that the premier asked her to resign.
“And they said, no, you offered your resignation,” Robinson continued. “And I said … the most you’ll get from me is that it was a joint decision and that’s what the press release [said], a ‘joint decision.’ But … let’s be really clear, as I said in my letter [resigning from caucus], I was told that there was no path back.”
Eby denies this.
“I did not remove her,” the premier told the Independent. “I can certainly believe that she didn’t want to do that, but I did accept her resignation.”
Leaving caucus
Robinson’s successive apologies and commitment to undergo anti-Islamophobia training didn’t save her cabinet job. But, she said, she was committed to making amends.
“The concept of teshuvah [repentance], for us as Jews, I take it seriously,” Robinson said, “It’s not enough to say you’re sorry, what are the deeds that go with it?”
Robinson came up with an idea she terms “The Project.”
In the aftermath of her firing, followed by the vandalizing of her constituency office and a death threat, Robinson and her family took off for a week in Mexico to recuperate.
“I called the premier from Mexico and said I have an idea, what do you think?” she recalled. “It was around outreach, working with the [Jewish and Muslim] communities, bringing them together … what did he think?
“And he said that’s a really interesting idea, let’s think about it,” Robinson said.
When she returned from Mexico, she talked to the premier’s chief of staff, Matt Smith. She fleshed the idea out some more, proposing that she and perhaps someone from the civil service – a Jewish person and a Muslim person – “would work with these communities and try to find ways to do dialogue and engagement and break bread and do the things that bring about peace and what could that look like,” said Robinson. She discussed the concept with Deborah Lyons, Canada’s special envoy on Holocaust remembrance and combating antisemitism, who was supportive and offered to do anything she could to support the effort, Robinson said.
After contemplating the idea, Smith came back with his decision: “Too political,” Smith said, according to Robinson.
The premier told the Independent that the idea that a civil servant would work on the project with an elected official is what was “too political.”
Robinson doesn’t believe that. “It was more, we’d prefer to be silent on the whole thing,” she said.
Silence, she contends, is a root of the entire problem – not just with her firing but around the government’s approach to antisemitism. The premier and the government, she contends, are more concerned with success in this fall’s election than with doing the right thing.
“We are in election mode,” she said. “And, frankly, we’ve been in election mode since [Eby] became the premier [in November 2022]. I get it. I’m a politician. I understand the gig, I know how these things work.
“However,” she said, “we are also government. We are a party trying to get reelected and we are government, and you have to be able to do both at the same time. It’s hard. I’m not saying it’s easy. But you can’t give up the governing part and just do campaign mode. You campaign and you govern simultaneously and I think what’s happened is they stopped governing. A government says, we have a problem, what are we going to put in place to help this community that is being terrorized? And it’s controversial, because there are others who think it’s appropriate to terrorize this community. I think what governments are supposed to do is bring people together. Right now, the actions are ripping people apart.”
The fact that the premier’s office would not allow her to engage her colleagues in a broader discussion about both antisemitism and Islamophobia led her to believe there was nothing she could do that would satisfy the government.
“I committed to a number of deeds and have acted on them and that still wasn’t good enough,” she said.
While the government seemed unsatisfied with her efforts, many Muslim people have been more forgiving, she said. Many have expressed forgiveness for her words and accepted her apologies – she has accepted Iftar invitations and extended seder invitations to Muslim friends and acquaintances, she said.
“There are Arab and Muslim leaders that I have had wonderful conversations with, heartfelt conversations,” she said. “I could hear the agony in their voice and they could hear the agony in mine.”
That kind of amity, though, was not something she found among her NDP colleagues. On March 6, her 60th birthday, Robinson released a statement resigning from the NDP caucus.
Harsh words for Heyman
The day after Robinson’s resignation, the premier’s office organized a news conference at the Legislature. George Heyman, BC minister of environment and climate change strategy, told the media that he took exception to the assertion that Robinson’s resignation represented “our government [having] lost the only Jewish voice in our caucus or cabinet.”
“They should know,” said Heyman, “that I’m also Jewish. I grew up as a Jew.”
His experience in the NDP, Heyman said, does not comport with Robinson’s perceptions.
“My experience is that our caucus and our cabinet are deeply committed to fighting antisemitism, to opposing hatred and I have found them to be personally supportive of me on an ongoing basis,” he said.
“He was trotted out as the new Jew, which was a shonda [shame], as they say, on so many different levels,” claims Robinson. “I believe George was put up to it. I know how things work. They didn’t want me to be the only Jewish voice.
“But George doesn’t identify as a Jew,” she said. “He’s told that to so many people. He’s not connected to the community.”
Robinson thinks Heyman allowed himself to be used.
“You thought it was OK? So, the premier asks you, you could have said I’m not going to do that.”
Heyman takes exception to Robinson’s comments about his identity and especially about the idea that he was put up to anything.
“People who know me know that I don’t do things that I don’t want to do,” he told the Independent. Heyman said he was moved to address the issue as soon as he heard opposition MLAs claim the government had lost its only Jewish voice.
On the larger issue of his identity, Heyman said it is up to individuals to self-define.
“I think it’s actually my and every Jew’s right and responsibility to determine in what ways they identify and connect with their own heritage, which is not the same as practising a particular religion,” he said. “My position as a child of Holocaust refugees and as a grandchild of Holocaust victims is, I think, fairly well known. I certainly haven’t hidden it. I may not be a member of the Jewish community in the same way that Selina is. I am not a practising Jew, but to say that I don’t identify as a Jew I think is simply inaccurate.”
Is it antisemitism?
Robinson said media have tended to misrepresent her comments about antisemitism in the NDP. She did not say the party was rife with antisemites. Her letter of resignation from caucus included several incidents – and most of these were matters of record. She herself has experienced antisemitism directly only from two colleagues, she said.
Immediately after the Oct. 7 terror attacks, Robinson said, she sent a message to her colleagues noting that the Jewish community in British Columbia was experiencing trauma as a result of what was happening, including the murder of a young Vancouver man, Ben Mizrachi, and expressions of solidarity and condolences were in order.
Days later, she said, two of her colleagues – Aman Singh, MLA for Richmond-Queensborough and parliamentary secretary for the environment, and Katrina Chen, MLA for Burnaby-Lougheed – responded to her message by stating that the government should express solidarity with Palestinians.
“Three days after, maybe four days after the massacre, [they] felt that it was appropriate to put out a statement about how Palestinians were treated,” Robinson said. “Ben Mizrachi hadn’t been buried yet. The [Israeli military] hadn’t responded.”
Robinson was outraged.
“This isn’t about that,” she said of responding to expressions of Jewish suffering with demands for solidarity with Palestinians. “Could you not take a moment – a moment – to reflect on how horrible it is that a terrorist group came in and slaughtered 1,200 people? Just acknowledge it. Just acknowledge that that was wrong and we need to fight against terrorism.”
Robinson does not understand how people cannot see antisemitism in the erasure of Jewish suffering.
“Jewish suffering is discounted,” she said. “It’s [perceived as] not real, it’s fake. It has no value and diminishes another group of people who are suffering.
“This isn’t a competition of who is suffering more,” Robinson said.
She called the premier immediately upon seeing the messages from Singh and Chen.
“I said, I can’t deal with this. I can’t deal with those two. I just can’t,” she said. “And he said, let me deal with it. I was grateful. It felt like he had my back.”
Robinson never heard from Chen, whose social media feed frequently shares Palestinian memes and messages. On the day Robinson released her resignation letter this month, Chen tweeted: “Not wanting to see more kids and people die in Gaza is not antisemitism.”
An hour after she took it up with the premier, Robinson said, she heard from Singh.
Neither Singh nor Chen responded to the Independent’s request for comment or clarification on Robinson’s version of events. However, the Independent has seen the text Robinson referenced and, in it, Singh called the Oct. 7 attacks “absolutely horrific” and said Hamas “should be brought down.” He also expressed empathy with Robinson and her family in Israel.
“I wanted us as a caucus just to recognize the pain in Gaza as well,” he wrote, adding that he was not calling on the government to make a statement in that regard, “[b]ut internally I felt that needed to be said.”
Additionally, the original email Singh sent was on Oct. 12 and, therefore, after the beginning of Israel’s military actions, not before, as Robinson had claimed.
While Chen and Singh did not comment to the Independent, Heyman defended them, also noting that the emails Robinson cited were “private communications within caucus.”
“It was disturbing to me that her interpretation of actions of a number of my colleagues were that they were antisemitic,” Heyman said. “These are colleagues I respect. I’ve had many conversations with them and I know how deeply committed they are to fighting antisemitism and to fighting all forms of hatred.”
Robinson, in any event, did not consider Singh’s text an apology and did not respond. Nor has she spoken to Singh since.
“If he had come up to me and said, ‘Selina, you never acknowledged my apology, can we talk about it?’ I would have,” she said. “But I really felt like he did not get it.”
Not getting it is, Robinson thinks, the problem. It is not that her colleagues are overt Jew-haters, but that they do not know what antisemitism looks like and refuse to take the time to find out.
“What I tell them is you don’t know enough about antisemitism in its newest form,” she said. “I think for them it’s name-calling, swastikas – I think that for them is really clear. The new form of antisemitism that we are seeing … [includes] the delegitimization of Israel, [the idea] that Jews are responsible for Israel’s political decisions or military decisions, Israel as colonizer, Jews as white people, therefore, the oppressor – I don’t think they have a frame for how to make sense of that.”
Criticism of Israel is not antisemitic, she said. Denying Israel’s right to exist, which is the position of many of the people who wanted her out of office, is.
“What you’re saying is Jews shouldn’t have a homeland, that their history of continually being pushed out of those lands over time, over millennia, you want that to continue,” she said. “If you don’t recognize the legitimacy of Israel as a nation-state, then that contributes to Jew-hatred.”
Taking the North American settler-colonialism model and applying that lens to Israel and Palestine is simply wrong, she said.
“It is inaccurate, it is a false narrative, it is patently not true. And, as a result, they are engaging in antisemitism,” said Robinson, whose own comparison of North American indigeneity to the Middle Eastern model drew condemnation. “I don’t think that they want to be antisemitic but they are, because they don’t understand and they’re not taking the time to learn how that history is different from this history here in North America. I think that’s where those folks are going wrong. What’s the solution? Education. Learn the history. And you’re not going to get it from TikTok and you not going to get it from Twitter, so you need to do some – I’ll use the premier’s words – you need to do some deep learning.”
When it comes to her former colleagues, Robinson believes their culpability comes from a combination of fear of failure and refusal to learn.
“They don’t recognize this form of antisemitism and so they are silent because they’re afraid of saying the wrong thing one way or the other,” she said. “But their silence is deafening and no one is saying, I want to learn more about this.”
Though that’s not quite accurate. One colleague, after she left cabinet, and another after she left caucus, reached out to Robinson and said they have been looking to learn more about antisemitism.
One asked her why they, as elected officials, are not trained in this.
“Well, you’d better ask the premier,” she responded.
Battling Zionists
In her letter of resignation from caucus, Robinson mentioned several colleagues by name, among them Mable Elmore, MLA for Vancouver-Kensington. Elmore’s example is one that has come up repeatedly among Robinson’s defenders in recent weeks as an example of someone who has gotten away with comments that are arguably worse than anything Robinson expressed.
In November, Mable Elmore rose in the house to make a routine statement. Instead, Robinson said, she went off script and delivered a two-minute talk about people dying in Gaza.
“But she never made reference to the massacre on Oct. 7,” Robinson said. “She never tied this as a response to terrorism.”
Elmore is parliamentary secretary responsible for antiracism initiatives under the attorney general.
Leaders in the Jewish community, Robinson said, have long been wary of Elmore. At the start of her political career, Elmore got in hot water for voicing a conspiracy about “vocal Zionists” in her workplace that she and other union activists had to “battle.”
“They were always anxious about Mable, given her history,” said Robinson of leaders in the mainstream Jewish community. “When she was made parliamentary secretary for antiracism, [Jewish communal leaders] expressed concerns to me but they said … we believe people can change [and] learn, and so they went along with it.
“Then, when Mable did her two-minute statement in November that sort of disconnected what’s happening in Gaza right now from the attack on Oct. 7 and left out a big chunk of the story, [Jewish community leaders] were outraged,” said Robinson. “They were absolutely outraged. I went to the premier’s office with my own outrage and then, of course, communicated the community’s outrage.”
Jewish leaders, according to Robinson, were asking for Elmore to be taken off the antiracism file completely. Instead, she said, the premier left Elmore in charge of antiracism initiatives but removed her responsibility for liaising with the Jewish community on issues involving racism. Dealing with the Jews on antisemitism and broader antiracism approaches would be handed over to Attorney General Niki Sharma.
“This is where the story gets really interesting,” Robinson said. Eight weeks after the premier removed antisemitism and liaising with Jews from the government’s point person on antiracism and handed those responsibilities over to the more senior attorney general, Robinson reached out to Sharma after the Vancouver Police Department released a report that anti-Jewish hate crimes in the city had spiked 62% in 2023.
“It’s been eight weeks now since [Sharma] has been responsible for the file. The Jewish community is reeling, numbers are through the roof,” said Robinson, who said she asked Sharma what the government was doing. “She had done nothing from November on. She hadn’t met with the [Jewish] community. She had no plan.”
Sharma promised to get Robinson a brief on how her department and the government intended to address the increase in hate-motivated crimes against Jewish individuals and institutions. Robinson never received it.
Disputed events
In the hours after Robinson released her letter to caucus, Premier David Eby addressed the controversy repeatedly with media.
“I wish she had brought her concerns to me directly so we could have worked through them together,” he said at one point. Later, he said, “She didn’t feel safe with me to bring forward her concerns and she felt she had to resign. So, I’ll examine that.”
Eby’s comments infuriate Robinson. “When the premier says that I never came to him – this is the part that really makes me crazy – I did,” she told the Independent. “I was even coming with solutions.”
Those solutions did not seem to move the dial in terms of any redemption Robinson might have expected for what she sees as good-faith efforts to make amends and her proposals to help address antisemitism and Islamophobia in government.
Target on her back
Robinson felt she had a target on her back – and not only since the “crappy piece of land” incident.
“There were targets even during convention,” she said. Before the BC NDP convention last November, Robinson warned the premier’s office that several delegates and groups were going to bring forward emergency resolutions about the war in Gaza.
“I kept saying, we are a subnational government, we don’t do international relations,” Robinson said. “I don’t even know why we would entertain international commentary.”
Convention organizers apparently felt there was a need to allow some delegates to blow off steam. Robinson said she and others then strove to create a relatively balanced resolution, “and that work happened behind the scenes.”
“But there were people calling for my head back then, back in November,” she said.
In her capacity as minister responsible for BC postsecondary institutions, Robinson gained the wrath in February of the Federation of Post-Secondary Educators of BC and the Canadian Association of University Teachers, who called on Eby to oust Robinson. The latter group accused Robinson of undermining “the democratic principles of freedom of expression, academic freedom, and a college and university system free of direct manipulation by the provincial government” because Robinson had retweeted a call for Langara College to fire Dr. Natalie Knight, an
English instructor who referred to the mass murders of Oct. 7 as “amazing” and “brilliant.”
As a result of Robinson’s vocal and visible presence on these issues, she said, there were people “paying very close attention to what I said, how I said it, when I said it. So, I was a target – I still am a target, I think.”
Warning signs?
While Robinson has felt a target on her back, including from some in her own party, there is a larger trend that has nothing directly to do with her, arguably going back to 1967 or before, when the Canadian left’s approach to Israel and Palestine began transitioning from a largely pro-Zionist position. With a few notable exceptions, NDP elected officials and rank-and-file members for several decades now have aligned more with the Palestinian cause than the Israeli one. While criticism of Israel may or may not be fair, depending on context, some people, including some longtime party members, have written the party off as poisoned by antisemitism.
Bernie Simpson is one of only a handful of Jewish British Columbians ever elected to the provincial Legislature. He was the New Democratic MLA for Vancouver-Fraserview from 1991 to 1996, but his roots in the party go back decades earlier. He was mentored by Dave Barrett, the first and still only Jewish premier of the province, and Simpson was at the upper echelons of the NDP from the 1960s.
Throughout that time, he told the Independent, he struggled against far-left “ideologues.” He eventually left the party about 25 years ago, in large part because of the prominence of anti-Israel voices like Svend Robinson and Libby Davies.
“I always felt, in the years that I was involved with the NDP, that there was underlying antisemitism,” he said. “I didn’t realize the extent of antisemitism in the NDP until Selina brought it to the world’s attention, and good for her.”
Simpson believes Eby is beholden to certain segments of his caucus.
“He has to appease the left-wing ideologues or else he’d have a revolt and probably they could undermine his leadership,” Simpson said. “They are quite capable of doing that, the left wing.”
“Can a party be antisemitic?” Robinson asked. “Well, people make up a party. So, it depends who is there.”
In 2021, she called on the resolutions committee of the federal NDP convention to get some perspective on foreign affairs.
“When they had their convention, they had the top 25 resolutions [and] 16 of them [or] 15 of them, were anti-Israel,” she said. “Really, people? Do you not care what’s happening in Chad, or the Congo, or to the Uyghurs? What is your obsession? I reached out to them and I called the people in charge of the resolutions committee and the response was, and I quote, ‘It has been ever thus.’ I was stunned.
“Can you not reflect on your obsession and where that’s coming from?” she asked. “I get it if you have one or two [resolutions about Israel]. I don’t like Israeli government decisions, what they’re doing. For sure, challenge this [Israeli] government in terms of the decisions that they are making. You only have so much time to debate your resolutions, but you want to spend three days debating Israel? Then you’re not a party I can take seriously to represent us as Canadians. Not on China, not on Iran, not on these really big, despotic nations. Nope. It’s just the Jews.”
Under the late Jack Layton, who was leader of the federal NDP from 2003 to 2011, Robinson said, things were not as bad as they are now.
“I blame Jagmeet Singh,” she said of the federal NDP leader. “I hold him completely responsible for the rhetoric and the outrageousness that we are seeing. He’s party leader. This is on him…. His attacks on me because I described Israel pre-1948 [Israel] as a crappy piece of land and his vociferousness towards me was vile.”
Singh had called Robinson’s comments “not only factually wrong, but offensive and irresponsible” and that “elected leaders must be voices for peace and justice.” The federal NDP leader said he had conveyed his “serious concerns” to Eby.
Singh’s office did not respond to the Independent’s request for comment.
Decision to retire
When Robinson left cabinet, she let it be known that she had earlier decided not to seek reelection in this fall’s provincial election.
She had planned to announce her retirement on March 6, her 60th birthday. After three terms as an MLA, following two terms on Coquitlam city council, Robinson thought it was time to leave public life after 16 years. In December, she shared the news with the premier.
There were lots of reasons to wind up her elected service, she said. Her (adult) kids are talking about having kids and she wants to be a hands-on bubbe. Her father turns 84 this year and she wants to spend more time with him, and with her husband’s parents, who are of a similar age. Her husband, Dan, wants to travel.
The premier, Robinson said, was kind when she shared her decision with him late last year.
“He was surprised I wasn’t running again,” she said. “He thought I’ve been a very competent minister. He had lots of nice things to say about me.”
But there was something else.
“I said, caucus hasn’t felt the same since Oct. 7,” she told Eby who, she said, opted not to ask her about that. “It just hung. He didn’t ask. He didn’t say, tell me more about that or what do you mean – he knew what I was referring to, of course – but he didn’t push, he didn’t pursue. It saddened me a little bit because I would have hoped he would have been at least a little bit interested to understand what that was about.”
Still, she acknowledges, the purpose of the call was to share her retirement decision and the conversation soon turned to logistics – when she would tell the party brass, whether she had groomed a successor, when to go public.
March 6 did involve a major announcement, of course, but it wasn’t about the decision that she wouldn’t run in the next election. Instead, she released an open letter to colleagues, telling them why she would no longer be sitting as part of the New Democratic caucus.
Death threat and vandalism
The hate Robinson experienced after her webinar comments went viral was extreme. At her offices, voicemail reached capacity. Staff were days behind keeping up with the bombardment of email.
It was a Saturday when an email came in threatening to shoot Robinson in the head, but staff didn’t discover it until four days later. They knew the procedure, having dealt with a similar incident a year earlier – a threat against Robinson not because she is a Jew but because she is a woman. Staff found the death threat email the same day they had arrived at the Coquitlam office to find it vandalized and festooned with hate messaging.
“The police have found the perpetrator,” Robinson said. The email came from the United States, so US Homeland Security and the FBI are involved. “It’s legitimate and it’s credible. It helps that it’s someone at a distance but it’s also in a place where guns are easily accessible, so it’s a bit of both.”
Robinson’s husband now keeps a baseball bat next to the bed.
Kindness amid chaos
To look at social media posts targeting Robinson is to dive down a rabbit hole of varying degrees of outrage and a great deal of hatred. In the real world, she said, she has experienced an outpouring of compassion.
An acquaintance sent her a bouquet of blue and white roses – Israel’s colours. Robinson was walking in the park with earphones in and a passerby made the heart sign. Heaps of cards, letters and emails have poured in. People have sent art, including a rendering of a woman reaching for the sky, which is displayed prominently in her office.
“I want to weep, actually, because it feels validating,” she said.
But that outpouring of support from the public is not mirrored in the reaction of her former cabinet and caucus colleagues, she said.
While Robinson’s experiences among the NDP officials with whom she spent more than a decade is a testament of profound loneliness, that is not entirely the case, she said. Some people have been dependable and supportive. She can count them, she said, on one hand. And she won’t mention them by name for fear of throwing them to the wolves.
“I’m not going to single them out, only because I’m worried about their backlash,” she said. “I want to protect them for being there for me.”
What ifs …
When she left cabinet, Robinson cleared out her personal possessions from her ministerial office. The day the Independent visited her, she had just been going through those boxes.
“I came across a card from John Horgan, when he stepped down,” she said, referring to the former BC premier, who retired in 2022, and was replaced by Eby. The card, she said, “just talked about how much he values my input and that I brought all of me to cabinet.
“He trusted my judgment vis-à-vis the Jewish community,” Robinson said. “He really wanted to understand that he was doing right by the Jewish community, so he would regularly check in with me about what did I think. I would say, ‘You were a mensch.’ He really took to that word, ‘Was I a mensch?’ ‘You were a mensch.’”
Might things have played out differently if Horgan had been in the top job when all this blew up? Robinson believes so.
“I think he might have heard my concerns differently earlier on,” Robinson said. “If I would have told him that, since Oct. 7, caucus hasn’t felt the same, he would want to know why. What’s changed? What’s it like for you? And that may have had a different outcome.”
When the webinar comment grew into a crisis, Robinson suspects the former premier might have responded differently than the current one did.
“I think he would have stood by me. I think he would have weathered the storm,” she said.
Second chances?
One of the things that Robinson’s defenders, including Jewish community leaders, have pointed out is that everyone seems to get second chances but the Jew. The offences outlined in Robinson’s letter of resignation, as well as documented incidents like Elmore’s multiple transgressions, suggest a willingness to forgive, if not forget.
When Robinson was hauled on the carpet for her comments and thrown out of cabinet within days, the official voices of the mainstream Jewish community noted that, mere days earlier, the Jewish community had been asked – and agreed – to overlook an egregious misstatement on the part of the premier himself.
On International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Jan. 27, the premier’s social media feed noted the occasion and declared: “We stand with the Muslim community throughout Canada on this sorrowful day of remembrance.”
The message was soon taken down and an apology posted.
“Do you know who managed that debacle for the premier’s office?” Robinson asked. “Me.”
Robinson was not the only one to catch the grievous error, of course. BC United, the official opposition party, screen-captured the post before it was deleted. Robinson, meanwhile, was on to her leader’s office to get to the bottom of it.
“I spoke to folks in the premier’s office,” she said. “I learned who made the error. I was assured it was an error.”
An apology is not enough, she told them. “You need to explain how this could happen.”
The explanation was that two days after International Holocaust Remembrance Day was the anniversary of the 2017 Quebec City mosque attack during which six people were killed and 19 were injured. A lower-level social media staffer had apparently mixed up the messages for the two separate days.
Until the clarification, some people wondered if the post was a deliberate act of baiting the Jewish community on one of the most solemn days of the year. Robinson is confident it was simple human error.
“I have to believe that, otherwise I’m way too cynical about the world,” she said. “I have to take people at their word … and that’s what I guess is heartbreaking for me, that people couldn’t take me at my word. They chose to think the worst of me, after all this time.”
Political fallout
Robinson’s departure – and the broader issues of antisemitism she raises – absorbed the Legislature and the press gallery for days.
Kevin Falcon, leader of the BC United official opposition (formerly known as the BC Liberals), has repeatedly called for an independent investigation into what he calls “the antisemitism that is rife not just within the government but within their own cabinet, caucus and party.”
Speaking with the Independent, Falcon raised what he and so many others have called a “double standard” in the treatment of Robinson, while there are members of the NDP who have not apologized for intemperate remarks and yet have suffered no consequences.
“I can’t help but note the worst that Selina could be criticized for is using perhaps a poor choice of words,” said Falcon. “But she did the honourable thing and fully withdrew the comments, apologized for the comments and, even after saying that she would go through anti-Islamophobia training, whatever that is, [it] still wasn’t enough for the premier to [not] drop her out of cabinet, which is in stark contrast to how they’ve dealt with other people within their own government who have made terrible statements in the past.”
Recent concerns about racism against Indigenous people in the healthcare system, Falcon said, resulted in quick action.
“They couldn’t move fast enough then to appoint an independent investigation into the allegations of racism in the healthcare system,” he said. “But, when it comes to investigating antisemitism within their own government, caucus, cabinet and party, well, nothing to see here. They just continue to delay.”
Another double standard, Falcon said, is the different reactions to claims of antisemitism versus other forms of racism.
“They’re always out there professing to be so concerned about racism, except when it comes to racism against the Jewish community,” he said. “The double standard is certainly so glaringly obvious. That’s the part that feels so remarkably different. That’s the part that none of us can just get over. It’s amazing to me that they say all the right things about [being] so concerned about this, we have thinking to do, we need to create safe spaces and this word salad of woke-isms that they can spew out very easily, but fail to address the two fundamental issues that concern us on this – the double standard as a result of Selina being fired out of cabinet and people who have said far worse antisemitic statements or tropes [but who] continue to serve, some of whom have never apologized.”
Falcon said that critics of Israel, like those who targeted Robinson, are missing crucial moral principles.
“In war, tragically, there are always innocent lives lost,” he said. “It is an unavoidable aspect of war. That breaks my heart when I see innocent people dying on both sides.
“We have to understand some important principles,” he continued. “One is that Israel has a right to exist and Israel has a right to defend itself.”
Politics, legendarily, makes strange bedfellows. Robinson seems to have few reliable friends among her former colleagues, but Falcon said her new seatmates are literally and figuratively on her side – she is now on the opposition side of the House, awash with BC United, Conservative and Green MLAs.
“She’s got a lot of supporters on the opposition bench,” Falcon said.
John Rustad, leader of the BC Conservative party, a long-moribund party that is showing surprising strength in opinion polls, said his heart goes out to Robinson.
“That Selina was brave enough to share that I think speaks volumes to what is going on within the caucus and within the [New Democratic] party,” Rustad told the Independent. “David Eby has known about this for months and he’s refused to take action. I think the province is not interested in having a premier that won’t stand up and defend British Columbians and Canadians.”
The Conservative leader echoes Robinson’s allegations that the premier is more concerned with politics than fighting antisemitism.
“I don’t think they are looking to doing what’s right,” he said, suggesting that electoral calculations based on the disparity of sizes of the Jewish and Muslim populations are driving their decisions. But, Rustad warns, this approach could blow up in their faces.
“I think, quite frankly, they are miscalculating where people in this province are because I think people are not interested in antisemitism, they’re not interested in hate, they want a government that’s going to stand up for everybody in this province,” he said.
The letter from Islamic leaders warning that New Democrats would be unwelcome in Muslim sacred spaces that came shortly before Robinson’s firing was concerning, Rustad said.
“When I saw it, the first thing that came to mind was government bowing to threats,” he said.
“It takes courage to do what Selina did, it takes courage for a government to stand up for what’s right and that’s where David Eby has failed,” said Rustad. “I was, I guess, a little shocked to see how quickly David Eby backed down and bowed to that pressure that was put out there. It was disappointing from my perspective because government sometimes has to do things that some people may be upset with because it’s the right thing to do.”
BC Green Party leader Sonia Furstenau called the Oct. 7 attacks “a devastating and terrible event,” and said that elected officials in this province have a responsibility to address the local repercussions of overseas developments.
“We really have to focus on the people of BC and that we are taking seriously the reality of antisemitism,” she said. The rise in hate crimes, which began most notably during the COVID pandemic, was addressed in a report from the Human Rights Commissioner in 2022. Furstenau believes the commissioner should consider actions to confront the growing prevalence of antisemitism now.
“It may be that the next steps could be for the Human Rights Commissioner to take on a project to help us recognize, address and reduce antisemitism in BC,” she said. “I think, given the very complicated nature of the war between Israel and Hamas, that we could be looking for the Human Rights Commissioner to look at antisemitism and Islamophobia and, really, how do we come out of this as a place that’s less divided and has less hatred?”
Responding to Robinson’s expressions about antisemitism in government, Furstenau said the former minister needs to be taken at her word.
“Selina is the expert on what Selina has experienced and we have to respect that,” said Furstenau. “When somebody indicates that they have experienced racism or discrimination, it’s not our place to question that.”
“I’m fine”
Robinson’s emotional health has been a concern for friends and supporters. Few people can imagine the impact of being at the centre of a public maelstrom like the one Robinson is enduring.
Amid all this, there have been physical health realities.
In 2006, Robinson was diagnosed with a rare form of intestinal cancer. She beat it. Then, in February 2023 – “February’s been a bad month for me the last few years,” she said – Robinson shared the news that routine screening indicated that cancer had returned.
After treatment, she got the good news eight months later that the tumour they had found in February was gone.
“I’m fine,” she said. “I’m on the chemotherapy that I’ve been on for years. I will be on this medication for the rest of my life.”
The treatment is not without side-effects.
“It makes me a bit more tired than most other people, although my husband says that might not be a bad thing in terms of people keeping up,” she said. “I get muscle cramps. They are inconveniences rather than serious implications. I really am fine.”
The joyful news that the cancer was gone came on Oct. 5.
“Lots of happy tears around that,” she said. Two days later, news from Israel turned those happy tears to something very different.
Points of pride
Although she didn’t share the news with the public until the controversy arose, Robinson was already planning for a life post-politics. She will not be the NDP candidate for Coquitlam-Maillardville in the election scheduled for Oct. 19. Every indication is that she would have been reelected easily. When she first ran provincially, in 2013, it appeared on election night that she had lost. When the final votes were counted in the days after, she squeaked in by 41 votes. Her next two elections were not at all close. In 2017, more than half the voters in the riding chose her and, in 2020, she nabbed just a hair under 60% of the vote.
During her first term, Robinson was an opposition MLA. When John Horgan formed government (under an agreement with the BC Greens), he appointed Robinson minister of municipal affairs and housing. This was a daunting role in one of the most expensive places to live in the world.
Several things really stand out for her from that time.
The BC government, under Horgan, with Robinson in the housing portfolio, was and remains the only provincial government to fund housing on Indigenous reserves.
“It’s a federal responsibility, but this is ridiculous,” she said. “They are British Columbians and they need housing.”
Another achievement she cites is that, when she became minister, she undertook to meet with officials from every municipality in the province – close to 200 local governments – and she said she still runs into current or former mayors and councilors who credit her for engaging with them.
After the election in 2020, Robinson was promoted to finance minister. Achievements from that gig? Robinson throws her arms in the air without hesitation: “The biggest surplus in the history of our province.”
Her control over the province’s wallet came in the midst of the COVID pandemic, with all that entailed. In addition to sound bottom lines, she said the government brought down “good budgets that delivered for people and that made a difference.”
When Eby replaced Horgan as leader and premier, Robinson was shifted to the ministry of postsecondary education and future skills.
In this role, she takes pride in removing the age limit for former youth in care to access postsecondary education. Those who age out of the foster system had been able to obtain tuition funding and additional supports – but only until age 26.
“If you’re a former youth in care, it takes a longer time to figure out how to adult,” said Robinson. Now, these young people (even if they are no longer so young) can access educational funding and cost of living supports to reach their academic or vocational goals.
It was also in her responsibility for postsecondary education that Robinson found herself on the frontlines of campus turmoil, with anti-Israel protests by students and pro-terrorism comments by some BC academics. She convened a meeting of the heads of all BC’s colleges and universities and laid out expectations for civil, peaceful dialogue on campus.
Voting advice?
The firestorm over Robinson’s comments, charges of antisemitism in the government and public service, complaints that the premier is not taking matters seriously enough and the related controversies come only months before British Columbians go to the polls. These crises are not coincidental to the proximity of the election, Robinson contends, but are a direct effect. The government is doing what they think is politically helpful, rather than what is right, she said.
So, where does that leave Jewish and sympathetic voters who would have cast a vote for Eby’s party in October but now feel adrift, wondering if the NDP represents their interests?
“I feel very adrift as well,” she said. “I think everyone has to make up their own mind. There is no perfect party. If you’re going to bring about change, then you need to use your voice to bring about change. That’s what this is all about.”
She puts the onus on members of her own (former) party.
“If people are silent, if New Democrats are silent on this, then you are complicit,” she said. “If you think this is wrong, if you think the direction the party is taking vis-à-vis Jews [is wrong], then you need to say something. You need to take action on it. That means challenge what’s become the status quo.”
Future plans
“Boredom terrifies me,” Robinson said.
Though boredom might seem a welcome respite from some of the emotions she has endured in recent weeks, Robinson insists she is not done contributing to the community. She just doesn’t know yet in what capacity.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she said. “I’ll find something to do.”
“I’m learning to knit,” she said. She’s got local food maven Susan Mendelson’s classic cookbook Mama Never Cooked Like This and she’s thinking of pulling a Julie & Julia by trying every recipe in the book and posting them to social media.
Robinson has traveled across much of Western Europe but not Spain and she is reading about that country and its history.
She has promised her husband she will not make any long-term commitments before January.
Until the writ drops for the next election, she remains MLA for Coquitlam-Maillardville.