Opinion – Page 88

The Chanukah lights

The nights were getting longer already, but when we changed the clocks a few weeks ago, it seemed to change very suddenly into a new season. For our cousins in

Israel, the days might be a bit brighter – a video of shirt-sleeved Tel Avivians dancing last week as an antidote to the terrorist mayhem was an inspiring and somewhat envy-inducing scene – but the spectre of violence there is real and immediate.

It was 68 years ago last Sunday that the United Nations voted for an independent Jewish state and an independent Arab state in Palestine. That was a day of jubilation, of momentous light, for Jews worldwide. Yet there is never total victory, never a moment when our enemies have permanently laid down sword, or stone or missile or knife.

In Jewish life, we light candles both to mark times of joy, as well as of grief. In Jewish rituals, the happy moments are tempered by the recollection of not-so happy moments.

At Chanukah, we light candles and curse the darkness. Hatred will not prevail. This is the message of Chanukah.

We see the darkness, but we do not succumb. We dance, as we saw in Tel Aviv. We give thanks for what we have, for the self-determination that is Israel and for the freedoms we enjoy in Canada. We rally ourselves and our neighbors to sponsor refugees and to raise funds for the Joint Distribution Committee to aid those who need it. Because we remember, or our parents do, what it is like to be refugees and to be in need. We advocate against climate change. We teach our children the values of tzedakah. We gather blankets and jackets for those in our own city who need warmth.

We will make our own light. We will celebrate not only our historical and contemporary victories, but life itself. We will love, laugh, dance, eat. L’chaim.

Proud of Canada votes

The last time there was a Liberal government in Canada, this country took a “go along to get along” approach to the annual Israel-bashing at the United Nations each autumn. Government officials offered excuses, but still our representatives at the General Assembly voted in favor of most of the one-sided attacks on the Jewish state.

Things changed when the Harper Conservatives came to office. They set Canada apart as a moral, often-isolated voice of reason in the bastion of anti-Zionists.

During the federal election this year, the Liberals promised that they would continue Canada’s support of Israel if they won the election. In their first significant test, they came through. This year’s General Assembly saw the usual raft of resolutions condemning Israel, while completely or largely ignoring the worst offenders of human rights in the world.

Proudly, Canada voted against them.

This is a very positive development, indicating that we will not slip into the ways of the past. As we had hoped, support for Israel – the only democratic regime in its region, a light to the nations in so many ways and, not insignificantly, the world’s only Jewish state – is not a partisan position, but a Canadian value.

Are food banks here to stay?

In March 2013, 833,098 persons were served by food banks in Canada. Food bank use remains high and many Canadians depend on food banks for weekly, semi-monthly or monthly grocery items in order to put food on the table. One-half of the families being served include children and close to one-half are two-parent families. More than one-third of food bank recipients are children, many of whom are school age and go to bed hungry.

In Richmond, 1,300 persons are served each week by the Richmond Food Bank. Of the 1,300 recipients, there are 524 persons who actually attend this food bank and they represent 2.4 persons per household. The majority are seniors and people with mental health issues. These groups usually visit each week. Others who use the food bank are on low incomes and use the service as needed. Users must be Richmond residents. Once residency is proven, recipients are granted food packages on an honor system. The average value of a food hamper is about $100 and the food bank tries to ensure the five basic food groups are included.

The Jewish Food Bank in Vancouver serves 350 persons, of whom 55 are children under 18 years of age, and 95 are seniors. If, as it is estimated, 16% of the Jewish community lives on or below the poverty level, it is possible that many in need are not being served or are being served by other organizations. The value of each Jewish Food Bank hamper for a single individual, for example, is $54. Larger family units receive more food. This is in addition to food vouchers supplied by Jewish Family Service Agency. Food that is made available is seen as “supplementary,” enough to fill the gap until the next pay cheque or income. Food hampers are delivered every two weeks to those unable to attend for personal pick up.

For seniors, this is a very troubling scenario. As of two years ago, three out of five women in Greater Vancouver over 65 lived on an income of less than $25,000 per year (as reported by United Way). Many seniors on low, fixed incomes must make major decisions each month. Once rent is paid, are there enough funds for food or do they have to choose between prescription drugs (if not covered by a drug program) and food? Will there be funds for sundries, clothing and entertainment? Will there be enough money to eat out once or twice during the month? Most of us who live in the comfort of our warm homes take this for granted. For a good description of the need for affordable housing, see David Hume’s excellent article in the Nov. 23 Province.

It is generally accepted that food banks had their origins in the early 1980s during a major recession. Hunger was affecting the lives of many Canadians who were unemployed, unable to work, under-employed or whose incomes were below a living wage. It was to be a short-lived situation until the economy improved, as it eventually did, and the need for food banks diminished. However, today, food banks are an integral part of the social fabric. There are currently about 500 food banks across Canada, a sad commentary for a rich nation. In this writer’s opinion, food banks have become secondary extensions of weakened social safety nets. In this respect, food banks may be seen as undermining the state’s obligation to respect and fulfil its requirement to ensure that none of its citizens go hungry. Food banks are driven by poverty but in no way solve the problem of poverty. If anything, the goodwill they provide allows governments to opt out of taking their leadership role in decreasing the need for food banks.

Those persons who staff and volunteer at food banks are not “do-gooders looking for recognition.” Volunteers are the backbone of most not-for-profit organizations. The volunteers that I met while observing one food bank in action were made up mostly of senior citizens who were giving back to the community, who understood the plight of those being served and who served them with respect and genuine caring. Thousands of individual donors, many anonymous, provide millions of dollars each year in support. Many corporations take great pride in supporting food banks, in kind and in cash. They often make the public aware through advertising, hoping what they do will encourage other corporations to do the same.

Food banks will be needed for some time in the future until governments at all levels – federal, provincial and municipal – develop, embrace and put in place a viable national anti-poverty program. Food banks can collectively lobby for stronger and sustainable social safety nets for those in need. In a recent publication, Dignity for All: A National Anti-Poverty Plan for Canada (2013), a number of priorities were considered: income security, housing and homelessness, health, food security, early childhood education and care, jobs and employment. If two or three of these were prioritized and put into operation, it would bring many thousands into mainstream Canada.

Much has already been studied and written about poverty and its effects on too many Canadian citizens. It is time for a concerted and coordinated plan of action. Until that happens, thank G-d for food banks.

Ken Levitt is a vice-president of the Jewish Seniors Alliance of Greater Vancouver and a former chief executive officer of Louis Brier Home and Hospital.

Co-opting history

Tonight, the Canada Palestine Association, BDS Vancouver, Canadian Boat to Gaza, Independent Jewish Voices and a few other groups will come together to address the topic Stolen Land: First Nations and Palestinians at the Frontline of Resistance. The obvious intention is to equate the history of colonial settlement in North America, Canada in particular, with the actions of Israel toward Palestinians.

The concept is flawed at its core, of course, because, as the Palestinian narrative often does, it portrays the Jews as colonial occupiers of Arab land, while denying the legitimacy of ancient and modern claims to the Jewish homeland. The logical failure here is that such a narrative recognizes the legitimacy of a 200-year-old land claim, but not a 2,000-year-old land claim, which seems like an arbitrary position.

Nevertheless, there is a larger issue here. The anti-Israel movement insists on appropriating the historical experience of other people and using it in an attempt to fortify their narrative. The most obvious example is the apartheid libel, which tries to paint Israel as the ideological descendant of South African racism. This is offensive not only to Israelis. It debases the experience of black South Africans who suffered from genuine apartheid.

Even more egregiously, the anti-Israel movement routinely uses the imagery of Nazism and the Holocaust against Israel, attempting to equate the victims of the Third Reich with its perpetrators. This deliberate rubbing of salt in Jewish historical wounds is common and, as we discussed in this space last week, the objective is clearly to inflict pain rather than to resolve grievances.

This is a deliberate strategy of the anti-Israel movement, which apparently finds its difficult to make a legitimate case of their own and, therefore, co-opts the historical experiences of others. As another example, last summer, when people in Ferguson, Mo., and elsewhere in the United States were protesting police shootings of young African-Americans, the “pro-Palestinian” movement attempted to infiltrate that movement as well, trying to portray Israeli soldiers and police in the same light as American killer cops.

The event this week has a similar purpose. Not satisfied to let Canada’s First Nations people tell their stories and have their experiences validated, the “pro-Palestinian” activists want to elbow their way in and demand that Palestine get equal time (at least).

An infinitely more constructive approach can be seen in the remarkable story of a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust who traveled across Canada as part of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, sharing his story of survival and accomplishment after tragedy. (See the story “Survivors helps others.”)

There are ways to positively advance First Nations experiences, the Palestinian experience and the Jewish experience in order to create a more understanding and tolerant world. The organizers of this week’s event – and the anti-Israel movement more broadly – do not seem interested in that sort of progress, in that sort of world.

We stand …. together

There has been an outpouring of grief and solidarity since the terror attacks in Paris a week ago. At some point, though, people began to ask why there was not a parallel response to the terror attack the previous day in Beirut, or the sadly frequent but remarkably similar incidents in various flashpoints in Asia and Africa recently. And what about the ongoing knifings and vehicular attacks against Israelis? Are some victims more important than others? Are some acts of violence more justifiable?

For comfortable people in Western societies, the Paris attacks remind us that violence can come to where we live – even though we don’t live in a place normally associated with such mass killings. Yet losing a loved one is no less painful because you live in a war zone. We should not allow ourselves to become numb to murder simply because of where the victims live, the color of their skin, their religion or nationality.

But current events have become far more fraught because of the perpetrators in Paris. Early reports suggest at least one of the murderers entered Europe amid the throngs of legitimate refugees streaming in recently. This will have damning consequences for the millions of persons displaced by war in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere in the region.

And the violence has reverberated to Canada. A mosque in Peterborough, Ont., was set ablaze, almost certainly an act motivated by a disordered response to events in Paris.

We should stand with victims of violence everywhere, whether in Peterborough, Paris, Lebanon or Jerusalem.

Limits to free speech

Last week, a Quesnel man was found guilty of criminal hate speech for anti-Jewish postings to his website.

Arthur Topham’s RadicalPress website is packed with the kind of “commentary” you have to read to disbelieve. Many of us imagine we know the sorts of slanders being purveyed in the dusty corners of the internet. You can’t imagine.

In addition to his own material, Topham has made it his side-business to repatriate from the crevices of discarded ideas and republish some of history’s forgotten anti-Jewish hate literature.

Topham was found guilty by a jury under Section 319 (2) of the Criminal Code, which pertains to “Every one who, by communicating statements, other than in private conversation, wilfully promotes hatred against any identifiable group.…” He will be sentenced next year.

The law does not go so far as to demand proof of incitement to injure or kill. Yet, among other gems, Topham’s postings call for “the extermination of Israel and all Jews.” In his defence, Topham’s lawyer insisted his client does not actually hate individual Jews. Indeed, he told court, Topham’s wife is Jewish.

Canada’s hate laws are controversial. Where to draw the line between fair comment in a free society and that which is to be criminalized is a very difficult balance. Generally, it is best to confront hateful ideas in the marketplace of ideas and to give them enough air that we can know they exist, and not drive them underground where they can corrode into even worse words and deeds.

This case was addressed under criminal law and not by the quasi-judicial human right apparatus, which is a far more dubious medium. Limitations on free expression should be limited to the most extreme and egregious offences. Indeed, this is the first criminal conviction for hate speech in British Columbia since 2006, so it is a rebuke that is reserved for the most heinous offences.

A democratic society expresses its values in its laws. Incidents like this, which meet the standard of intolerable expressions of hate, are a message from and to our society about what is fair comment and what is not.

On the whole, however, we prefer that our society express its commitment to equal treatment and cross-cultural respect in the context of our civil discourse – in our education system, in the free exploration of contentious issues, in the vocal condemnation by the many of any egregious offences by the hateful few. And that is what we do. In the most extreme instances, our society has agreed to a legal proscription.

Topham’s case will send a message, although it is already being rejected by his advocates as the demolition of free speech in Canada and as the manifestation of Jewish power.

As a society, we should accept the court’s verdict, but also rededicate ourselves to the promotion of intercultural respect. Comments under the story in the local Quesnel newspaper, almost unanimously of the “Jews control the world” variety, suggest we still have a long way to go.

Remain open to discussion

As hot as things have become in Israel and the West Bank over the last many weeks with escalating violence, here in North America a chill is palpable. It comes in the form of silencing within and across communities – in private homes, on university campuses and in community institutions. It’s coming from both sides: those who call themselves “pro-Palestinian” and those who call themselves “pro-Israel.” While the Palestinian solidarity side uses boycott and silencing, the Jewish community has its own internal conversation watchdogs.

Recently, a speaker at the University of Minnesota was shouted down, his talk delayed by 30 minutes. The invited scholar was Moshe Halbertal, a philosopher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a professor of law at New York University. It was a scholarly talk: the Dewey Lecture in the Philosophy of Law, sponsored by the university’s law school. Halbertal is also a noted military ethicist who helped draft a code of ethics for the Israel Defence Forces. The Minnesota Anti-War Committee took credit for the stunt; Students for Justice in Palestine endorsed it.

If you’re concerned by the extent to which civilians have born the brunt of violence and destruction in the Israeli-Palestinian context, Habertal is someone you’d want to speak with, especially in an academic context, where the point is the free exchange of ideas. But it’s hard to pose tough questions if you’re trying to silence the person.

This blocking of Halbertal’s speech is a trend that gets its fire from the academic and cultural boycott of Israel organized by the BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) movement, along with the more general push against what many Palestine solidarity activists call “normalization,” meaning ordinary engagement with Jews and Israelis and their ideas. Activists argue that the target is institutions, not individuals. But the effects on individuals and open speech, as they were at the University of Minnesota, are clear.

Continuing in this vein, producers of Dégradé, a film about Gaza told from the perspective of clients at a hair salon, pulled it from the Other Israel Film Festival sponsored by the JCC Manhattan because it’s a “Jewish” festival. While it seems that the producers’ decision was their own, it suggests a dangerous precedent: fortifying the silos between acceptable audiences and unacceptable ones in the world of art, ideas and culture.

Meanwhile, while the Jewish community doesn’t talk in terms of boycott and anti-normalization, it has its own troubling rules of engagement.

There are the narrow speaker guidelines for those with whom campus Jewish groups allow their members to publicly engage in dialogue. The guidelines for Hillel International, the world’s largest Jewish student organization, exclude anyone who “delegitimize[s], demonize[s] or appl[ies] a double standard to Israel, or supports the boycott, divestment and sanction movement.” While it’s natural that Israel supporters would bristle at those things, the rules effectively preclude Hillel students from inviting for debate and dialogue any Palestinian solidarity activists, almost all of whom, unfortunately, have jumped on the BDS bandwagon.

When my seven-year-long columnist post was cut from my local Jewish community paper last summer, I was told that it was to “make room for new voices.” Since then, it’s become clear that the publisher wanted only one angle on Israel. The columnist who focuses almost exclusively on the failings of Israel’s adversaries remained in place, while my replacement is steering clear of Israel altogether.

And then there are the corners of quiet shunning. I recently organized a Jewish community youth project involving rotating hosts. One of the participants pulled out, citing the fact that her husband “didn’t want me in his home.” He was appalled by my last Globe and Mail piece. When it comes to “support for Israel,” they said, “there is only one side.”

But some – young Jews in particular – are pushing back against this narrowing of discourse. First there was Open Hillel, a grassroots organization devoted to opposing the speaker guidelines mentioned above. (Disclosure: I am on the group’s academic advisory council.) And now there’s the Jewish People’s Assembly, which has launched in Washington. The group is demanding that Jewish federations – the main funding body of local Jewish communities – “not condition support for Jewish institutions and organizations on these institutions’ adherence to red lines around Israel.”

One might fantasize about casting all the silencers into a room where they can sit in silence with each other to their heart’s content. Meanwhile, the rest of us can continue to try to talk, to write and to publicly grapple with the dilemmas of the day, trying to search for bits of common ground wherever they might be.

Mira Sucharov is an associate professor of political science at Carleton University. She blogs at Haaretz and the Jewish Daily Forward. A version of this article was originally published by the Globe and Mail.

Spreading pain, not peace

A member of Israel’s Knesset spoke at a Kristallnacht commemoration event this week and equated Israel’s actions to the events of Nov. 9-10, 1938.

Hanin Zoabi, an Arab-Israeli member of the Knesset, spoke at a Kristallnacht “memorial” in Amsterdam that was organized by a group known for its antipathy to Israel and its sympathies for Hamas. It appears the event was not meant to sincerely mark the solemn anniversary but rather, as is so often a tactic among the most extreme anti-Israel hate groups, to rub salt in the wounds of Jewish history.

“Kristallnacht didn’t suddenly fall from the sky, come out of nowhere,” Zoabi said Sunday. “It was the result of a development over time. We can see a similar development happening in Israel over the last several years.”

She acknowledged that, during Kristallnacht, thousands of businesses and hundreds of synagogues were attacked and destroyed.

“Perhaps the majority of Germans did not approve, but they kept quiet,” she said. “When in Israel two churches and tens of mosques are burned; and hundreds of Israeli supporters of Beitar shout ‘death to the Arabs’ after each soccer match; when a family is burned to death; when a 15-year-old boy is burned to death, the majority keeps quiet, although they are perhaps shocked.”

Of course, Zoabi is wrong. When these tragic and despicable incidents have happened, they have been condemned from the highest offices, by the most respected voices and across the political spectrum of Israeli society. When the far more frequent incitements to kill Jews occur, and when terrorists stab or drive over Israelis, these acts are lauded by Palestinian political and religious leaders and are cause for celebration among Palestinian civilians. That’s a big difference.

Zoabi is a member of the Arab Israeli party Balad, which calls for a binational state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean – in other words, the effective end of the world’s only Jewish-majority nation. She is an elected official in the parliament of a country she does not believe should exist. Fine. That’s a fact of democracy. We have such a phenomenon in our own federal parliament.

Zoabi is not only a citizen of a democratic state, but one who was democratically elected by other citizens to represent them in the Knesset, which, in itself, goes some distance in undermining her hyperbolic claims.

Zoabi, because she is a citizen of a free country, has the right to say what she wants, short of the sort of incitement banned by law in every democratic society. (Although she has crossed that line, with minimal repercussions, in calls for “popular resistance” and justifying the kidnapping of three Israeli teens last year who were later found murdered.)

How ironic that a person in her position could invoke such vicious, ahistorical imagery and do it at a time and place that should call for the barest sense of human compassion and decency – and get away with it. Because, despite a few outraged comments from politicians and media, she will get away with it. There will be no legal or parliamentary repercussions for her words. She is a free person – one of the freest and most powerful Arab individuals in the Middle East, when you come down to it. Were her political agenda to be realized and the land in which she lives to come under the governance of Hamas or Fatah or any other political entity currently on the scene or even on the horizon, and she were to use her words to attack her country in this manner, the outcome would almost certainly be far more grievous for her.

Beyond this individual case, though, this kind of language is a treasured tactic of the anti-Israel movement. Clearly it is a strategy of the Amsterdam group that invited her to speak and we have seen it even on campuses and at rallies here in Vancouver: anything that can be done to cause pain to Jewish people is not only acceptable, it is a legitimate tactic.

Whether it is literally a knife in the neck of a Jew in Jerusalem or the inhuman exploitation of Jewish history against the Jewish people themselves in Amsterdam or the exploitation of Holocaust imagery and language against the state of Israel at rallies worldwide, including here in Vancouver, there is a streak in the anti-Israel movement that is more concerned with inflicting pain than finding solutions.

Kohelet and Kristallnacht

“Vanity of vanities. All is vanity.” The day of remembrance for Kristallnacht was this week. Looking at what’s happening in Israel and globally, I’m reminded of the Preacher. By the Preacher, I mean Kohelet, traditionally thought to be King Solomon, whose writings in the Tanakh are known in English as Ecclesiastes. The first line, in Hebrew, reads: “Havel havalim. Hakol Havel.”

Everything is havel, which, better than vanity, is translated “vaporous, breathlike, fleeting.” Everything is vapor. Like Abel, whose Hebrew name is Havel, and whose life was like vapor, blown apart by Cain. Like what we thought we had gained in Israel, once upon a time: a state of our own that had mostly won the world’s respect and affirmation through blood, sweat and tears. A refuge. We thought we had pushed back the red sea of ancient, irrational hatred. The world had, to an amazing degree, recognized our right to a homeland in our homeland. The horrors of the Holocaust were understood and widely contemplated.

Yet, in the past months, much of what has happened has the character of a bad dream. The New York Times writes that the Temple Mount may not have been where the Jewish Temple was after all (later retracted under pressure). The United Nations declares ancient Jewish holy sites to be under the rightful control of a future Palestinian state, even as Palestinian Arab terrorists torch Jewish holy sites. In Europe, organizers of a Kristallnacht commemoration declare their plans to turn it into a commemoration of the Palestinian suffering for which Israel bears responsibility.

And the stabbings. The Palestinian leadership put the word out that Jews planned to change the “status quo” on the Temple Mount, where Al-Aqsa Mosque also stands. Currently, only Muslims have free access to the site, with everyone else having very limited or no access to this sacred space, revered by Jews especially but also Christians and Baha’is. “Changing the status quo,” according to Palestinian fears, would entail increasing access for non-Muslims (at least) or tearing down al-Aqsa and replacing it with a synagogue (at most). Israel has no intention of either: not of expanding access (although surely that would be a step forward for human rights and decency were that to happen) and certainly not of razing Islam’s third holiest site. Yet the claim enflames the Palestinian street, as it did at the start of the 2000 Intifada. Mothers begin celebrating the deaths of their children who died to “defend Al-Aqsa,” even giving out candy on TV. A Palestinian Arab mother names her newborn baby “Knife of Jerusalem” after the attacks. Mahmoud Abbas, who Western media falsely portray as a moderate, calls for the shedding of Jewish blood and declares that the “filthy feet” of Jews will not besmirch Al-Aqsa.

Mainstream Israel wants to negotiate an independent state for Palestinian Arabs yet a majority of Palestinian Arabs believes Israel wants to take their land and evict them. Tellingly, this is in fact what the Palestinian Arab leadership wants – to take back all Israeli land and eliminate Israeli Jews, as the Hamas charter and popular Palestinian songs, media and school textbooks demonstrate. In a classic psychological move, the Palestinian Arab imagination projects onto Israel its own desires: what is within is used to interpret what is without. This narrative has spread beyond the borders of Israel and the disputed territories to capture the imaginations of people all around the world. So, our refuge has begun to feel, increasingly, like a new ghetto, where we can be once again easily separated out and demonized.

Havel havalim. Hakol havel.

After experiencing years of checkpoints, poverty, “collateral damage,” the Gaza wars and more, it is certainly understandable that Palestinian Arabs feel sorrow and rage. It is even understandable that they hate the Israeli government. But to blame Israel and all Jews for their suffering, and not the racist, Israel-negating, violence-inciting, kleptocratic Palestinian leadership?

Israeli self-defence is viewed as aggression; the most enlightened state in the Middle East is slandered as an “apartheid state”; Zionism is viewed as racism by people whose denial of Zionism is in fact rooted in racism. Havel havalim.

Where do we look for something solid to hang on to? The opinions of the world, the justice of its courts and institutions, are failing us. And we ourselves are not immune to being blown apart by this hurricane wind on the inside and losing anything worth fighting for. In Israel, Jewish mobs have formed to attack “enemies” internal and external. Hatred and anger against the Palestinian Arabs grows. We are in danger of forgetting their humanity and their pain. We are in danger of losing our ability to think rationally, to think long term. We cannot and will not find security in the courts of the world. We must make our own reality, one that reflects what we know to be true. And we must hold to that reality with strength and with love. That is what we are already doing in our best moments:

A Jewish restaurant gives a 50% discount to Jews and Arabs who eat together.
There are peace rallies in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
Israelis find a variety of ways to laugh through what is happening and share them online.
Doctors in Israeli hospitals treat Palestinian terrorists alongside their victims.

We know that Israelis want peace, and that Jewish values in no way mandate injustice or aggression towards Palestinians or anyone else. We must make our own peace and our own future, through clinging to our own highest values like a rudder in the storm. And, as we find a way to a just divorce with the Palestinian Arabs, as Amos Oz so rightly said we need to do, both for their sake and for our own, we must at no time forget the humanity of each Palestinian Arab. We must not demonize them, must not forget that every Palestinian Arab is made in the image of God. Our own spiritual tradition, the beating heart of our highest values, mandates that we do not return hatred for hatred. At no time may we forget to fear the loss of our own humanity under the impact of their knife blades and bombs and stones. That is the way to commemorate Kristallnacht.

Matthew Gindin is a writer, lecturer and holistic therapist. As well as teaching holistic medicine, Gindin regularly lectures on topics in Jewish and world spirituality, and has a particular passion for making ancient wisdom traditions relevant in the modern world. His work has been featured on Elephant Journal, the Zen Site and Wisdom Pills, and he blogs at Talis in Wonderland (mgindin.wordpress.com) and Voices (hashkata.com).

Tone is important

Once we’ve watched the videos of our new prime minister Bhangra dancing, scrolled through the rehashed pics of him shirtless at the weigh-in for his boxing bout against Senator Patrick Brazeau and perused the swooning of global commentators, we may turn our attention to Justin Trudeau’s policies in his first days as our leader-designate.

One of his first acts was to inform U.S. President Barack Obama by telephone that Canada would withdraw from combat missions against ISIS. This was a central part of Trudeau’s election platform and Canadians voted for him strongly, so this move was consistent with what he said he would do.

Canada’s role in the fight has not been insignificant, though we are by no means the foremost military in this battle. In the past year, six Canadian CF-18 jets have been involved in more than 180 airstrikes against ISIS targets. Trudeau promises this will end. He says, though, that Canada will remain a part of the 65-country coalition by increasing humanitarian aid and continuing to train Iraqi security forces.

On other matters of foreign affairs, Trudeau says that his government will restore diplomatic relations with Iran. We do not know yet whether the multipartite agreement intended to prevent Iran from constructing nuclear weapons will meet this objective. It will be years before we can conclusively answer this. But we wrote in this space when the Conservative government cut diplomatic ties with the Islamic Republic – long before negotiations over the nuclear program even began – that it was wrong to do so.

If you want to make peace, you don’t talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies. These were the wise words of Moshe Dayan. More to the point, from a practical standpoint, diplomatic relations will improve the situation for Canadians of Iranian descent and those with families there, who were probably punished more than the government in Tehran by the diplomatic break.

Continuing on foreign affairs, circling from ISIS to Iran and around to Israel – Trudeau spoke by phone to Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu four days after the election.

The specifics of the conversation are private, but Israel’s ambassador to Canada, Rafael Barak, said he is optimistic Canada’s friendship with Israel will be unchanged.

“Mr. Trudeau has been very consistent from the very beginning of his campaign, in expressing his support for Israel,” Barak told Canadian Press. “I’m sure maybe the style will change. But I don’t feel there will be a change on the substance. I’m really reassured.”

A Trudeau spokesperson said “there would be a shift in tone, but Canada would continue to be a friend of Israel’s.”

We will watch closely, of course, to see what “a shift in tone” looks like. As we noted in this space two weeks ago, the Liberal party ran an ad in the last days of the election campaign in Canadian Jewish News promising, “On Oct. 19, our government will change. What won’t change is Canada’s support for Israel.”

That is an unequivocal statement and it probably reassured a great many voters who believed a change of government was desirable but a change in approach toward Israel was not.

The importance of a potential “shift in tone” is that, frankly, tone is just about all we have to offer. The impact we had under the Conservatives – for better or for worse, depending on one’s politics – was based almost exclusively on our words.

Proud as we may be of our significant sacrifices and achievements during the First and Second World Wars, which we will mark next week on Remembrance Day, and significant as our contribution has been in Afghanistan, Canada’s impact on the global stage today is mostly one of principled voice. We are not a major military power. We have economic power, but less than our major trading allies. Agree or disagree with the content, former prime minister Stephen Harper showed that a Canadian voice – even a lonely one in the wilderness, as it often was when he defended Israel – can have powerful resonance.

Tone matters a lot.