Byline: The Editorial Board

Violence not solution

Last week, thousands were on the streets of Tehran for Al-Quds Day events, which consist of calling for the annihilation of Israel. Parallel events were held in other cities, including London, England, where Hezbollah flags flew amid posters bearing modern blood libels, and in Toronto, where a speaker called for the “eradication” of Israelis and Zionists.

Also difficult to ignore are the realities of the incendiary kites being sent over the border from Gaza affixed with flaming tails or petrol bombs. Some international observers have dismissed the incidents, contrasting the Gazans’ unsophisticated arsenal with Israel’s contingent of fighter jets and advanced weaponry. But Israeli firefighters report that 741 acres of forest and 4,500 acres of agricultural land have burned in the past two months thanks to at least 285 individual kite and helium balloon attacks. An estimated 500 kites have been intercepted before they could do damage. Experts say return of flora and fauna in affected areas will take years.

The ongoing hostilities at and near the Gaza border are the latest in the ongoing conflict that keeps the world’s attention focused on the region.

That attention turned to the world of soccer recently. A planned game between the Israeli and Argentine national teams was cancelled after pressure from the movement to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel (BDS).

On social media, the BDS movement profusely thanked the Argentine team for cancelling the match. But the president of the team acknowledged it was not political considerations, but safety concerns, that led to the cancellation. The team – and specifically its megastar Lionel Messi – received threats of violence. As well, at the team’s practice facility in Barcelona, protesters waved Argentine soccer jerseys daubed with fake blood, and it wasn’t clear whether the blood was meant to symbolize Palestinians who have died or Argentine soccer players who might have been harmed if the game had been held as planned and the threats been realized.

There has been a shift from peaceful protest – that was the phrase repeatedly invoked about the conflagrations at the Gaza border – toward overtly violent rhetoric, threats and actions by Israel’s adversaries, who are both literally and figuratively “playing with fire.”

Nonviolent pressure, which is what BDS has claimed to advocate, is a tactic that could, one never knows, lead to some peaceful resolutions. But destroying farmland, endangering children, threatening people with harm and inciting genocide will only lead to more violence.

Holocaust education needed

Common sense prevailed at a meeting of the Pittsburgh school board in the end, although two of nine board members voted against participation in a Holocaust education trip to Poland.

The educational program is funded by the nonprofit organization Classrooms Without Borders at no cost to the school district. Nevertheless, one board member insisted that Pittsburgh schools are doing enough Holocaust education and that the trip could be seen as taking sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She contended, despite the fact that the funds were granted specifically for the Holocaust education trip, that they should be reallocated to programs that focus on African-American topics, including slavery.

It’s sort of a tempest in a teapot – especially given all the other things going on in the United States and around the world right now – but it is illustrative. Pennsylvania has an excellent record on Holocaust and genocide education, especially since 2014, when the state passed a law to “strongly encourage school entities in this Commonwealth to offer instruction in the Holocaust, genocide and other human rights violations.” That’s a far more specific directive than the British Columbia curriculum requires.

A representative of the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh responded to the board member’s criticism of the Poland trip.

“The notion that a trip to Poland to enhance the quality of Holocaust education in Pittsburgh public schools somehow discriminates against the Palestinian people is incomprehensible at best,” John Sayles told the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle. “What’s more, the insinuation that in order to most effectively teach about slavery we must allocate resources away from Holocaust education, or vice versa, is disturbing, as teaching about these two very important histories are not and should never be mutually exclusive.”

Coincidentally, but not unrelated, educators in Florida made a dubious decision to provide parents with an opportunity to opt their children out of a presentation by a Holocaust survivor. Parents of students at St. James Middle School in Murrells Inlet, Fla., received a letter saying, “We understand that a firsthand account of the atrocities of the Holocaust may be sad or difficult for students to hear. Students may opt out of this assembly and complete an alternative activity. Students who opt out will watch [a] video about the Holocaust in the media centre as an alternative activity.”

The letter assumes that the survivor speaker would not present at a level appropriate to middle schoolers. Second, and more significantly, it implies that difficult aspects of history should be sugarcoated – that was the word used by the survivor.

No matter the topic – the Holocaust, slavery, current events, writing, reading or arithmetic – effective education is delivered at an age-appropriate level. Survivor speakers understand this as well as any teacher.

The opportunity for today’s young people to hear firsthand accounts from witnesses to the Holocaust is a benefit no future generations will receive. To do anything but try to maximize the number who experience this opportunity firsthand is a tremendous loss.

This is especially true when a recent poll commissioned by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany indicates that many Americans are unaware of the most basic facts of the Holocaust. (See jewishindependent.ca/basic-facts-not-known.)

This is fraught territory and headlines can be deceiving, such as the one in Newsweek, which declared: “One-third of Americans don’t believe six million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust.” Contrary to the headline, the poll suggested not that these Americans have heard the truth and rejected it, but rather that they have not been educated enough in the topic to have the facts. The issue is not Holocaust denial, in this case, but plain ignorance.

Denial of the facts is one thing, ignorance of them is different and far less malignant. In both cases, the answer is more education, not less.

Poll exposes confusion

A poll undertaken by the Union of Jewish Students in France returned some bizarre and seemingly contradictory ideas among the French public about Zionism, Israel and Jews.

More than half of the 1,007 respondents to the poll – 53% – viewed Zionism as a Jewish conspiracy aimed at manipulating the world to benefit Jews. Likewise, half of respondents said Zionism is a racist ideology.

Thirty-eight percent said Israel’s existence “feeds antisemitism” and 26% said that boycotting Israel is justified. Asked if Israel was a “threat to regional stability,” 57% said yes. More than half – 51% – called Israel a “theocracy.”

These are disturbing findings. Some of these are not matters of opinion – Israel is not a theocracy, no matter how many French people say it is. Other responses are deeply distressing. The assertions that Israel is a threat to regional stability – rather than being seen as a stabilizing force in a region roiling with instability – or that Israel’s very existence makes people hate Jews indicate a pattern of opinion that is seriously disordered.

But here’s where it gets really weird: 46% of respondents acknowledged that Israel is a democracy and 48% see it as a “normal country like all others.” A remarkable 54% of respondents view anti-Zionism as a form of antisemitism and 59% correctly identify Zionism as a “movement of liberation and emancipation for the Jewish people.”

Together, these responses paint a picture of French confusion and contradiction – a picture that would probably be replicated to a degree in other European and North American polls, were we to undertake them. One might be tempted to critique the pollster and their methodology. After all, polling is suffering a crisis of credibility these days and this particular poll is so confounding in its contradictions that it simply can’t be right.

Or can it? Is it possible that the French (and others) are so baffled by the truths and fictions floating around that they could, as a community or as individuals, hold such cognitively dissonant ideas such as the acceptance that Zionism is a movement for the liberation and emancipation of the Jewish people and that it is a Jewish conspiracy to manipulate the world and that its fulfilment creates antisemitism? Could people believe both that Israel is a democracy and Israel is a theocracy? One could argue that different individuals responded differently to the questions, but with affirmative responses to all these questions ranging near or above majority levels, it is almost certain that some people responded affirmatively to contradictory positions.

In fact, this makes as much sense as any other explanation. The poll seems to suggest that the French (and we would extrapolate to most Western countries) hold very confused, bizarre and inconsistent views about Jews and Israel.

For all the work Zionists have done explaining ourselves for the past seven decades, we seem to have a long way to go.

A paper covers events

Last week, we published a story about a group of people gathering outside the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver to hold a Yizkor service for Palestinians who died during the March of Return actions at the Gaza-Israel border.

We are not surprised by the reaction from readers, but we are disappointed in some of it. We have been criticized for covering the event. One commenter on Facebook accused us of supporting Hamas.

We are a newspaper. The fact that a group of Jews – it doesn’t matter how many or how few – organized an event like this is newsworthy. We covered it. It is what any newspaper worth the paper it’s printed on would have done. To accuse the Independent of endorsing the event – or Hamas – because we ran a story about it demonstrates a stunning lack of understanding about the basics of journalism. When a newspaper covers a flood, it is not endorsing the river.

At least one critic suggested our approach should have been to publish a raving tirade against those saying Kaddish. Our approach, generally, is to report events in an unbiased fashion and leave the raving tirades to others.

Just one question, really, for those who didn’t like the inclusion of that story in last week’s issue: Would you rather not know what’s happening in your community?

Human life v. politics

A dozen or so people gathered outside the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver Monday in a makeshift Yizkor service to commemorate the deaths of Palestinians killed by the Israel Defence Forces in recent weeks. (Click here for story.)

Each one of the people killed was, indeed, a full human being, with a full life, as Rabbi David Mivasair said of the Palestinian dead. And the loss of life is tragic. That is not something we will debate.

However, reports indicate that, of the 60 Gazans killed on May 14, for example, 53 were claimed as members by Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Given the IDF’s strategy of deterrence, which includes graduated steps from warning shots, to shooting to injure and, as a last resort, shooting to kill, it is likely that those who died were among the most aggressive and dangerous among the protesters, some of whom were armed with pistols, firebombs and other weapons.

While there were peaceful protesters among the thousands who marched on the Israeli border, depictions of the rally as a primarily peaceful protest are wrong. In some interpretations, unarmed protesters were there merely as human shields for the violent participants, whose aim, in the words of a Hamas leader, was to infiltrate Israel and tear the hearts out of the Jews. Hamas social media channels presented maps to guide people from the border to adjacent Israeli towns, encouraging those who might break through the frontier to head for civilian locations and presumably fulfil the orders of Hamas.

The deliberate strategy of the Gazan leaders, it seems, is to sacrifice their own people’s lives for their PR value. Col. Richard Kemp, a British military official who has become a vocal defender of IDF strategies, said of Hamas: “This is the first government in history that has deliberately sought to compel its enemy to kill its own people.”

In a Daily Telegraph article re-printed in the National Post, he went on to state that, had the thousands of protesters breached the border and headed for those Israeli towns, the bloodshed would have been exponentially worse.

There is no question that the entire situation is a tragedy. And there is blame to go around. The narrative purveyed outside the JCC Monday and in much of the media commentary – that the Israeli military wantonly kills human beings – is as unfair and inhumane an assessment as the alternative extreme, which finds satisfaction in the loss of life.

As for Monday’s gathering, the combination of a Jewish religious ritual with a political agenda that arguably makes common cause with those seeking the destruction of the Jewish state is a dubious choice, but this is a free country and Judaism is a big tent.

To be clear, the people of Gaza are suffering, due in part to the Israeli blockade, in part due to the repressive kleptocracy of Hamas and in part to their own self-defeating actions, like burning down the main border entry point for supplies.

Palestinians receive more humanitarian aid per capita than any other people in the world. Where much of that money ends up, sadly, is in the mansions of Hamas and Fatah leaders and in pensions and rewards to terrorists and their families. This fact, of course, does not bring the dead back to life.

Palestinians, Jews and everyone who cares about human life are struggling with recent events. Each of us is confronting the multiple dimensions of the violence, which seems to be a repetition of seven decades (or more) of recurrent conflict. Respect for human life – on all sides – should be what we seek. Tallying up the dead like they are goals in a sports match does not demonstrate respect. Indeed, it may be precisely what Hamas wants us to do and, as such, may encourage them to put at risk even more Palestinian lives.

An apology is the start

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has said that he will make an apology in the House of Commons for the government of Canada’s 1939 decision to turn away the refugee ship MS St. Louis. The ship, carrying 907 German Jews, was denied entry at most North American and Caribbean ports before returning to Europe. Around half of the passengers were then accepted by the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, France and Belgium. About 500 were returned to Germany, where 254 were murdered by the Nazis.

Apologizing for the past has become common in Canada. Trudeau himself has apologized for Canada’s refusal in 1914 to allow the docking of the Komagata Maru, a ship carrying 376 migrants, mostly Sikh; apologized to gays and lesbians who were discriminated against by government in the past; exonerated six Tsilhqot’in chiefs who were hanged in 1864; and apologized to survivors of the Indian residential school system in Newfoundland and Labrador. The latter apology was necessary because this particular group was excluded from the 2008 residential schools apology made by Stephen Harper, when he was prime minister, because the schools there were not operated by the government of Canada. Harper also apologized, in 2006, for a head tax that penalized Chinese immigrants. Brian Mulroney, when he was prime minister, apologized, in 1988, for the internment of Japanese Canadians.

Such apologies are deeply important to the victimized communities, as evidenced by comments from Jewish community organizations last week.

“Canada is extraordinary not only because we strive to uphold the highest ideals,” said Shimon Koffler Fogel, chief executive officer of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, in a statement, “but also because we have the courage to address moments in our history when we failed to do so.… A formal apology will be a powerful statement to Holocaust survivors and their families, including St. Louis passengers who live in Canada today.”

Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre president Avi Benlolo said, “While an apology can never change the past, it can awaken the national conscience to ensure such grave mistakes are never repeated in the future.”

On the other hand, critics come from two sides: one arguing that we cannot change the past by apologizing in the present; the other contending that apologies are mere words.

The government’s recognition of past injustices is important, however. While political motivations are probably a factor in any government decision, this should not detract from the positive impacts an apology has on affected communities.

That said, if the objective is, as the prime minister and others have stated, to learn from the past and create a more just present and future, apologies should be accompanied by other undertakings, such as ongoing education, including curricula that teachers could download to contextualize issues, monuments at relevant locations marking the incidents (some of which already exist), a commitment to further commemoration or a host of other initiatives created in conjunction with affected communities.

Apologies, in other words, should not be the end of a conversation, but the start of a process.

Blaming the victims

In a speech to the governing body of the Palestine Liberation Organization last week, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas rambled off a host of textbook antisemitic myths. He reiterated the refrain that Jews have no historical connection to the land of Israel, unearthed a legendary trope about Ashkenazi Jews actually being descended from Khazars and accused European Zionists of collaborating with the Nazis.

Abbas went on to say that the tragedies of Jewish history were not a result of antisemitism, but of Jews’ own behaviours. “The Jewish question that was widespread throughout Europe was not against their religion,” he said, “but against their social function, which relates to usury and banking and such.”

One of the things Abbas has in common with other elected leaders is the willingness to try to get away with something and then to apologize when called out. Though his wasn’t much of an apology: “If people were offended by my statement … especially people of the Jewish faith, I apologize to them.”

The speech gave Israeli and other commentators the opportunity to once again insist that the Palestinian leader is no partner for peace, something that is no more or less true today than it was last month. Abbas has been saying things like this most of his adult life. His doctoral dissertation, which was later published as a book, quibbled over the number of Jewish victims of the Shoah and advanced the perverse conspiracy theory he returned to last week: that Zionists were Nazi collaborators for whom six million (or, on Abbas’s abacus, fewer) Jewish lives were a small price to pay for advancing the Zionist cause.

Inherent to most antisemitic suppositions is the defence that Jewish particularities, habits, traditions, identities – in other words, whatever stereotypes the purveyor is advancing – are the legitimate causes of Jewish woes. In Abbas’s telling, all European Jews were usurers and bankers. (Consider the corollary: That, if true, being bankers and usurers would seemingly justify genocide.)

It is appalling that a man who is accepted as a legitimate figure on the international stage can claim, with minimal consequence, that Jews brought the Holocaust upon themselves. So, the most salient point from this terrible incident may be what it says about his audience.

Consider this in the context of the widespread global interpretation of the Arab-Israeli conflict. One can disagree with the policies or approaches of an Israeli government or any number of historical and contemporary developments. But, by no fair reading of history can the full blame for 70 years of conflict be laid at the feet of Israelis. Yet, at almost every point in history – when a pizzeria blows up in Tel Aviv or Jews are stabbed walking down the street in Jerusalem or when Hamas sends thousands to the Israeli border and floats firebombs that set the Israeli landscape aflame – there will be a sizable number of people who will conclude that Jews brought it on themselves.

Whatever else his speech may have accomplished, and despite his apology, Abbas has succeeded in bolstering the stereotype that cunning Jews will sacrifice whatever is necessary to reach their devious aims, and that any horrors that befall them are their own fault. That suits the contemporary popular narrative neatly.

Place blame where due

For weeks since March, each Friday, thousands of Gazans have rallied at the border with Israel, leading to violent confrontations with the Israeli military. The objective is to build up to an incursion of such proportion that Israel’s military is unable to prevent an invasion into Israeli territory. The stated goal of the so-called March of Return is to catalyze the movement toward a “right of return,” which would have the not coincidental consequence of demographically threatening the Jewish nature of Israel.

Of course, even tens of thousands of Palestinians trying to breech the border will not result in this goal. Instead, there is an unstated goal: Hamas seeks to turn global opinion (further) against Israel. Shamefully, it seems that a few dozen Palestinian lives is a small price to pay, in Hamas’s worldview, for the PR benefits they deliver. As the New York Times reported Sunday, at least some of the protesters believe that they have nothing to lose. “It doesn’t matter to me if they shoot me or not,” said a 22-year-old protester interviewed by the paper. “Death or life – it’s the same thing.” That attitude will suit Hamas just fine.

To overseas audiences, march proponents depict it as an unarmed, peaceful, civilian-led mass action – and a peaceful protest is something we could accept, if not agree with. However, evidence shows that it is stage-managed by Hamas and anything but peaceful. Flying swastika-festooned kites with petrol bombs are sent over the border, massive tire fires are set to obscure the view of Israeli soldiers and tug-of-war lines are formed to pull down the border barrier, while crowds simultaneously hurl projectiles. At this past weekend’s action, there were reports of a few protesters armed with pistols.

Writing in the Times two days earlier, Fadi Abu Shammalah, executive director of the General Union of Cultural Centres in Gaza and a documentary film producer, insisted that he loves life, but that he is prepared to risk it to give his children a future with dignity.

A more effective means to ensure that Palestinian children live a life of dignity would be for Shammalah and others like him to write opinion pieces in the New York Times and to agitate elsewhere for the Hamas leadership to abandon both violence and their refusal to live in coexistence with the Jewish state. These are the two prerequisites to Palestinian self-determination. But such actions could well get Shammalah and others killed faster than marching against the border with Israel.

A sovereign country has the fundamental right to protect its borders from invasion. Ideally, this could be achieved without the use of live ammunition, and should minimize casualties as much as possible. Killing unarmed protesters is not acceptable.

Exclusively blaming Israel, however, is unjust. But this is more than misplaced blame: it has the precise consequence of rewarding Hamas’s strategy of sacrificing its own citizens. The more world media and activists condemn Israel and reward Hamas, the more Palestinians will be pushed toward the border. In such a scenario, the blame lies not solely with Israel or even with Hamas. The blame must be shared by these overseas enablers who, by rewarding Hamas, truly deserve part of the responsibility for the deaths and injuries.

Cynicism and realism

Last week, thousands of Germans of all faiths and identities participated in a “kippa march,” standing in solidarity with German Jews who feel endangered in the current political climate. In 2017, there were 1,468 reported antisemitic attacks in Germany, most perpetrated by members of the far-right.

The gesture is lovely. However we cannot help wondering if the whole “Je suis Charlie,” “We are all Muslims” or the “Ich bin Eine Jude” movements that pop up as gestures of solidarity are not at least slightly misplaced.

We will leave it to others to speak for their communities. But we would note that there may be a degree of comfort among some people in Europe and North America to criticize Jews. Since Christianity is descended from Judaism, it seems that there is felt more freedom to criticize Jewish behaviours, including the policies of the Jewish state. After all, the thinking might go, we are all part of the same family; it’s practically constructive self-criticism. Yet this ignores millennia of significantly divergent experiences and theology.

While the idea that donning a kippa will help keep Jewish neighbours in Germany safe, recent European history should give us reason to worry that today’s gesture of solidarity could be repurposed as a cover for criticism tomorrow on the pleasant idea that Ich bin Eine Jude.

This is a cynical response to a kind gesture, we realize. But sometimes cynicism and realism are not unrelated.