politics – Jewish Independent

Misappropriation of Israeli flag

According to the Associação Scholem Aleichem, in Rio de Janeiro, right-wing religious groups are misappropriating the Israeli flag in their show of support for Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. (photo from ASA)

This article is a response to the continuing misappropriation of the Israeli flag by right-wing religious groups, followers of a certain Christian belief known as “progressive dispensationalism” (no political connotation), whose adherents support Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.

Bolsonaro and his stalwarts have consistently raised the Israeli flag while promoting their reactionary views and hate-mongering. Most recently, several Israeli flags were displayed at a public rally in support of Bolsonaro and his policies regarding COVID-19, including his stance against preventive measures such as social distancing and stay-at-home orders, and the championing of hydroxychloroquine as a sufficient means of treatment and prevention.

Within any nation, there may be contention over its symbols. Two Brazilians may wield the same flag in favour of two different ideals. Such a case is restricted to members of the same country. Likewise, as the state of Israel was created to take in and represent Jews, the only non-Israelis who may claim its flag are Jews from other countries. If non-Jews raise an Israeli flag, for whatever reason, they appropriate a symbol that is not theirs. This is all the more serious in a prejudice-filled world in which various peoples have been losing the right to tell their own story.

It is only natural – indeed, healthy – that Jews, in Israel or elsewhere, should discuss the meaning of a Jewish state. Debate has always been part of our culture, and we have never felt the need to agree on everything. But the spokesperson of another people, by seizing another nation’s symbol, makes it the hostage of their own political agenda. It is one thing to raise the Soviet flag, conceived by a party as an emblem of an international revolution. It is not so much an appropriation of a national symbol as it is an endorsement of Bolshevik ideology. The Israeli flag, by contrast, was meant to rally a people in the Diaspora. Jews outside Israel may brandish it; a non-Jew would be overrunning someone else’s realm.

Throughout history, we Jews have constantly encountered non-Jews ready to ascertain if we are a religion, a race or a nation. The consequences have always been tragic. Yet, just as it is for every people to define itself, it is a Jew’s prerogative to determine the depths of his or her Jewishness and, likewise, to determine his or her relationship with Israel. Nowadays, many Christian groups believe that the Second Coming of Jesus will be ushered in by the regrouping of all Jews in the “Holy Land.” It is no gesture of goodwill toward Jews, just another of the many ways of inserting us into a foreign narrative.

Strains of thought within dispensationalism grant Israel an importance peculiar to their religious aspirations, but the country was not established for this reason. Christian dispensationalism sees history as a series of specific stages (“dispensations”) of the “administration” of the “divine plan.” In this scheme, the prevalent trend has imputed a particular role to “the ethnic nation of Israel” – “Israel,” the people chosen for Jesus’s divine revelation. Its fulfilment entails “the end of disobedience,” namely, the embracing of Jesus as our saviour. This entails a kind of eschatological glorification of the Israeli state. Let it be said that this is no favour for Jews. Indeed, were that “dispensation” to come to pass, it would be the effective end of Judaism. Not a single architect of the state of Israel could have entertained such a notion.

But that is not all. To blur the purpose of the Jewish state with the myth of “Israel’s salvation” is to cloud public opinion and impair its perception of what Israel can – and should – represent. Far more troubling, however, is that these very same groups that preach the aforementioned Christian theory and misappropriate the Israeli flag also polarize the political climate wherever they live. In Brazil, they hold considerable sway, and their conduct is extremely controversial, to say the least. The improper use of Israeli symbols links us Jews to these controversies in a wholly detrimental fashion. And regardless of the collaboration between the current Brazilian and Israeli governments – the current Brazilian government has a strong ideological identity with the Netanyahu government, and its members seek to establish profitable commercial relations with Israeli companies – flags symbolize states, not governments.

Brazilian Jews may and should oppose “bolsonarism,” but a delusion under which Bolsonaro links his policies to a universe as complex and diverse as Israel’s will always be harmful. For starters, there is a cultural element to the issue: Bolsonaro is Brazil’s representative, and a disgraceful one at that, but he does not represent Israel in any shape or form, disgracefully or otherwise. It requires immense ignorance on his part to equate the Israeli experience with his political project.

And there is another level, of a more political note. Israelis have their own problems and, regardless of the kind of society they wish to make, it would be detrimental to link it to Bolsonaro’s administration, with all the dire misfortunes the latter casts upon Brazil.

Finally, there is a matter of principle. By parading his submissiveness towards the United States, saluting its flag and playing the lackey to its president, Bolsonaro undermines the sovereignty of his country and degrades his own authority. By juxtaposing Israel’s flag with those of Brazil and the United States, he seizes someone else’s authority and, above all, affronts the sovereignty of someone else’s country. He transgresses the complexities of Israel’s society to subject it to the same submissiveness he expects for Brazil. The United States has a long history of interference in Brazilian affairs and in those of Latin America in general. This – and the specific perversity of the current U.S. president – adds further weight to Bolsonaro’s folly.

The misappropriation of the Israeli flag effectively represents a transgression of the meaning of Israel, regardless of its government, a disdain for the liberty of the Israelis, regardless of their religious tradition and ethnic identity, and a hindrance to the personal choices of Jews, regardless of our country. As Brazilians, we assert that Bolsonaro lacks standing to uphold national sovereignty. As Jews, we maintain that he lacks legitimacy to wield the Israeli flag – and that he is both fraudulent and destructive when he does.

Esther Kuperman submitted this article, which was written by the Associação Scholem Aleichem, in Rio de Janeiro ([email protected]). ASA is a century-old institution founded in Brazil by Jews who came from Europe in search of security and survival, fleeing persecution and wars. Its main mission is the cultivation of Jewish culture, without losing sight of Brazilian cultural manifestations and the defence of human rights.

Canada fails to get seat

There is no way to determine definitively why Canada failed to secure a temporary seat on the United Nations Security Council last week.

Since the UN was created after the Second World War, Canada had generally been elected to one of the temporary seats once per decade. This ended in 2010, when Canada lost its bid, and last Wednesday’s vote represents the second decade of Canadian absence from the prestigious council.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau contended that the successful countries – Ireland and Norway – had been campaigning longer. Also significant may have been the fact that Canada’s contributions to foreign aid and UN peacekeeping efforts have declined in recent years. Not to be dismissed also is the perception of Canada as an ally of Israel.

Since 2006, under Conservative and Liberal governments, Canada has voted against or abstained from the annual litany of 16 recurring anti-Israel resolutions at the UN General Assembly. That trend was broken last winter, when Canada unexpectedly endorsed a resolution condemning Israel.

Jewish and other pro-Israel Canadians have viewed Canada’s pro-Israel UN votes since 2006 as a principled position in the face of a global dogpiling – the votes are routinely passed with numbers like 160 to six, with Israel, the United States and American-aligned South Pacific micro-nations in the minority. No other country is singled out with such multiple routine censures.

Canada’s abrupt reversal of this stand last year was seen by some as an effort to distance Canada from Israel in advance of last week’s vote, particularly among the nearly 60 Arab and Muslim countries in the General Assembly.

While Trudeau made the case that Canada’s principled voice was necessary for the world in this challenging time, Opposition voices, like Conservative (and former Liberal) MP Leona Alleslev, argued that the government had betrayed its principles and, as a result, undermined its own argument for putting a Canadian representative on the Security Council.

The point is fair. To base our country’s campaign for the seat (at least partly) on the idea that we are a principled voice on the world stage and then do a 180 puts the whole venture into a weird light. For those countries who dislike our history of pro-Israel votes, the last-minute reversal must have seemed too little too late. For those (admittedly few) who admired our chutzpah, the recent vote must have been a disappointment, if not a betrayal. It’s almost a wonder that we got as many votes as we did.

Political art of living

Avram Finkelstein will be participating in the Queer Arts Festival, which takes place July 16-26. (photo by Alina Oswald)

A lot of it feels familiar, said New York-based artist and activist Avram Finkelstein about the current situation in the United States. The same American institutions that failed during the HIV-AIDS crisis are failing to effectively deal with the pandemic. And, when he was a teenager in the 1960s, cities were also being burned in America.

“It’s sad to think that we will be having the same struggles,” he told the Jewish Independent in a phone interview last week. “But, also, as you get older, you realize that progress is not a pendulum swing from left to right, it’s actually a spiral going forward and things do move to the right and they move to the left, but [there is] incremental change. So, part of me feels like we’re seeing the dying gasp of a world that I hope we’re leaving behind, and I see a world in the future that I want to live in. So that’s kind of helping me through this.”

Finkelstein was scheduled to come to Vancouver next month to participate in the Queer Arts Festival.

A founding member of the Silence=Death and Gran Fury collectives, as well as the political group ACT UP, he is the author of After Silence: A History of AIDS Through its Images (University of California Press, 2017). His artwork is part of the permanent collections of MoMA, the Smithsonian, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, to name but a few places, and his work has been shown around the world. He was set to unveil one of his new works in Vancouver. As it is, with the restrictions required to minimize the spread of COVID-19, he will be helping open the festival remotely, as part of a panel discussion chaired by curator Jonny Sopotiuk, which will also provide viewers with a tour of the festival’s art exhibition.

“I have a large mural that was going to be in the exhibition and now it’s going to be in a virtual space,” said Finkelstein. “I’m very excited about this piece and the fact that Jonny chose it – it’s the first time I’ve shown it…. I had a commission to do a work for the Shed, which is a new art space in New York, and, while I was waiting for the weaving tests of the final pieces – it’s a very large jacquard weaving – I decided to start drawing from the same source material as the cartoon for the weaving. I hadn’t drawn since recovering from a stroke; I had a stroke about two years ago…. I then realized that my hand isn’t my own, my body is no longer my own.”

The source material, he explained, “is a portrait of a gender-non-conforming friend who later transitioned. The work was all about corporeality as an abstraction and the ways in which we’re allowed to look at certain things, and what is public and what is private about gender and sexuality. And then, all of sudden, I realized, I’m actually talking about my own body in these drawings because my own body is not my own body anymore. I realized that I had made this sharp pivot from an abstract, theoretical idea of corporeality to this kind of war or dance, or I don’t know how to describe the physical process of having to use your entire body to hold a pencil.”

Despite the health, political and other challenges Finkelstein has faced, he remains hopeful.

“We’re trained to think that, if we don’t have hope, then the only thing that’s left is despair, but the truth is, hope isn’t so much the point – it’s the horizon that hope is sitting on and, so long as you can see a horizon, I think that, to me, is the same thing,” he said.

“I’m Jewish, as you know, and I think that Jews have a very different relationship to memory and to witnessing. If your people have been chased all over the globe for centuries, you take a long view. You sleep with one eye open, but you take a long view, and I think, therein, I’m eternally hopeful.”

In an interview in 2018, Finkelstein predicted that the situation in the United States would worsen before it improved.

“Which is another thing about being Jewish – you learn that there is no such thing as paranoia because it’s all real,” he said. “So, one could have seen, as plain as the nose on one’s face, where America was heading. And, in actual fact, what happened with Trump’s election was, we’ve joined the international march of global totalitarianism…. And, it’s not about to get really bad, it’s really, really bad. It’s really bad and I think that, here again, you can’t be Jewish and not think – not think your entire life, actually – in some way being prepared for, OK, what are the risks I’m willing to take if this happens? How far would I be willing to fight for other people if that happens. The shadow of Nazi Germany never escaped your consciousness.”

So how does Finkelstein conquer the fear?

“I guess I’ve replaced it with anxiety,” he said, laughing. But, he added, “I don’t know why I’m not fearful. I think that I was just raised – a day doesn’t go by that I’m not reminded of another lesson or another incident or another part of Jewish-American social history in the 20th century that my family was directly there for. I almost feel like I’m the Zelig of the left. All the stories you would tell my mother or my father, they’d be like, ‘Oh, yeah, we were there. We were there at the Robeson riots. Oh, yeah, we were there when they closed The Cradle Will Rock and everyone walked down the street’ – exactly the way it was in the last scene in Tim Robbins’ movie. When I saw it, it seemed too preposterous, I called my mother, said, ‘Could that have happened?’ And she started singing the song that Emily Watson sings in the film.

“So, I think I have such a sense of self that one could interpret it as fearlessness, but I think that it would be more accurate to say I was not given an alternative role model. I was raised to feel the suffering of others and, if other people are suffering, there’s no night’s sleep for me. So, there’s really no option – you’re either closing your eyes to something terrible or you’re doing everything you can to try and make it less terrible. And I think that that’s the Jewish condition.”

He described Jews as being like queer people. “We are everywhere,” he said. “We’re in every culture, we’re in every race, we’re in every gender, we’re in every country. We have every type of ethnic community that we surround ourselves with. An Ethiopian Jew is different from an Ashkenazi Jew, but we’re still all Jews.”

Though raised by atheists, he said, “I don’t think you’ll find anyone more Jewish than I am or than my family, but Jews are prismatic. We are many things. Consequently, I feel like I can’t speak on behalf of other Jews, I can only speak on behalf of myself.

“Likewise, I’ve always had people of colour in my family; I just always have. And, I learned very early on back in the ’60s, when the civil rights movement was fragmented between King and Stokely Carmichael and the Panthers, and everyone was choosing sides, I think that’s another example of what I’m talking about – there are many ways in which to be black. And so, I don’t feel like what I have to say about this current moment is anywhere near as important, essential, vital, critical … [as] a person of colour – what a person of colour has to say about this moment is much more important.”

image - The original Silence=Death poster has been adapted over the years by many people, including for use as a pin — The original Silence=Death poster has been adapted over the years by many people, including for use as a pin.

Finkelstein was one of the minds behind the now-iconic Silence=Death poster, which has been adapted over the years by many people. A variation of it could be seen in at least one of the recent protests. The original iteration encourages viewers to use their power and, for example, vote. In general, working towards solutions is an important part of Finkelstein’s activism.

“I think critiques are easier,” he said. “I think also we mistake public spaces, we mistake the commons, as a declarative space. I tend to think of it as an interrogative space. I think that, even in late-stage capitalism, when someone is trying to get you to put your money in a bank or go buy a soft drink, there’s something Socratic about the gesture of trying to get you to do something … you’re responding to it, you’re engaged in it, and that’s the interrogative part that I think is easy to overlook. And I think that’s where the answers are.

“I think that the way that the Silence=Death poster is structured is it’s really like a bear trap. We worked on it for nine months – the colour has certain codes and signifiers, and the triangle has another set of codes and we changed the colour of the triangle from the [concentration] camps and inverted it to obfuscate some of the questions about victimhood. And the subtext has two lines of text, one that’s declarative and one that’s interrogative, and the point size forces you into a performative interaction.”

This poster and other work with which Finkelstein has been involved include aspects that “people are very afraid to experience,” he said, “which is fallibility, mess-making and tension. And I find all of those things as generative, as kindness, support, community. They’re differently generative and … hearing so many people who are trying to figure out how to find their way in, as white people, into the conversations that are happening in America right now, is the same struggle as a young queer person trying to find their way into the AIDS crisis. I mentor a lot of young queer artists and activists and the first thing they say, their immediate impulse is, I have no right to this story, I wasn’t here, I didn’t live through it. To which my response is, immediately, you have every right to the story – it’s your story, it’s the story of the world…. Race is a white person’s problem. People of colour are paying the price for it, but the problem, the genesis of the problem, is whiteness. And we have to figure out how to talk about it…. But I think now is the time for listening.”

He said, “We have to know what our responsibilities are and this goes back to Judaism – our responsibilities as witnesses. You can’t let your discomfort change the importance of this moment or overshadow the importance of this moment.”

One of the things Finkelstein does is teach social engagement via flash collectives. “I think we’re never put into a position where people mentor our personhood,” he said. “We have people mentor us as computer programmers or healthcare providers or tax accountants or artists or writers, but … there’s something primeval which is missing in the way we’re acculturated, and the flash collective is almost shamanistic in that regard; it taps into this primal thing that is quite astonishing when you let it out.”

Understanding that he will not live forever, he said “the Silence=Death poster casts a very mighty shadow and it makes it very difficult for people to figure out how to make new work, if that’s what they think it has to be…. It became obvious to me that I could be talking about Silence=Death until the day I drop, but, one day, I am going to drop and I want other people to start making those new works and I thought this would be a way to get people to make new work.”

He described the collectives, which teach political agency, as being “like a stew of the top 10 hits of grassroots organizing in a condensed workshop that’s tailored to the individuals in the room.”

He said, “I believe that I don’t necessarily have to change the world because I know that there could be a teenager in 2050 who sees something that someone I worked with did that made them think of something else that I never would have thought of. That is the point of the work, not the how do I fix it before I’m gone, which is the dilemma of Larry Kramer [who passed away last month]. He really thought, and I think it’s really male, but it’s very men of a certain generation also – he really thought that he could fix the AIDS crisis, and it didn’t happen.”

Unfortunately, space doesn’t allow for most of what Finkelstein shared with the Independent about Kramer, who he described as “a complicated person.”

Kramer was a rhetorician, said Finkelstein. “And I’m a propagandist. We’re both rhetoricians in a way, but what was the dividing line that made Larry incapable of understanding the work that I did?… I felt like I understood his process better than he understood mine. And I started to think, well, here’s the difference between a person who articulates their rage with words and a person who articulates their rage with every tool in the toolbox…. Not to make myself sound superior, but I realized that I think of rage as sculptural; he thought of rage as rhetorical. I think of rhetoric as sculptural, I think of it as casting a shadow and activating social spaces. And I think that he was a Jewish gay man of a different generation and a lot of his rage was tied into his personal struggles. And I did not have those. I had other personal struggles, but I did not have them.”

As part of the Queer Arts Festival, Finkelstein will lead a flash collective on the question, “What does queer public space mean in a 21st-century pandemic?” He hopes the resulting work will be shown in a public space.

For more information about the festival, visit queerartsfestival.com. The next issue of the JI will feature an interview with QAF artistic director and Jewish community member SD Holman.

Responding to COVID

Left to right: MP Joyce Murray, MLA Selina Robinson and Vancouver Councilor Sarah Kirby-Yung spoke at a June 3 webinar hosted by the Canadian Jewish Political Affairs Committee. (photos from the internet)

“Intense” was the word used by speakers from all levels of government to describe their experiences during the pandemic emergency.

In a June 3 webinar on Zoom, federal and provincial cabinet ministers and a Vancouver city councilor addressed COVID-19: What’s the New Normal? The event was hosted by the Canadian Jewish Political Affairs Committee.

Joyce Murray, member of Parliament for Vancouver-Quadra, is Canada’s minister of digital government, a role that took on sudden significance when even Parliament began operating virtually and almost all federal civil servants are being asked to work from home.

“It’s been an incredibly intense time,” she said. “I never thought I would work harder than I do as a minister in Ottawa, but I would say these last few months have been much more intense than I expected.”

A million Canadians were able to apply for the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) on the first day, which Murray said illustrates the scope and speed of the government’s electronic mobilization.

Responding to a question from an audience member, she acknowledged that there may be some inequities in the program – some people are earning more not working than a neighbour might earn on the job – but the decision was made to ramp up immediately, knowing that anomalies were likely.

The federal government has not decided when to reopen the U.S. border, Murray said. The current, extended closure ends June 21.

“Our primary focus is the safety of Canadians,” she said. “We’ll be taking the advice of public health officials and thinking about all of the different ramifications and make a decision when the time comes.”

The discussion was moderated by James Moore, a former Conservative MP, who pressed Murray on the unanticipated federal expenditures resulting from the pandemic.

“Fortunately, Canada entered this in a very strong fiscal position compared with most of its G-20 partners,” she responded. “So we were ready and able to respond and there is now approximately $150 billion in direct support to Canadians that has been put on the table. That makes it one of the most ambitious response plans in the world. But our view is that we had fiscal firepower, it was right to use it and it will help our economy emerge more quickly and more strongly when the pandemic allows us to do that safely. Our focus right now is on helping Canadians and getting that right.… We will return to a strong fiscal position when it’s time.”

Selina Robinson, British Columbia’s minister of municipal affairs and housing, noted that the provincial government stepped up with $5 billion in emergency funding.

“It would be very, very hard coming out of this if we had people who were evicted from their homes and couldn’t put food on the table,” said Robinson, who is MLA for Coquitlam-Maillardville. “I think everybody agrees that we needed to invest in people, so that they can continue to feed their families.”

Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry has warned that no pandemic in history has not had a second wave. Robinson said British Columbia and other jurisdictions are ready for that potential.

“I think we’re far better prepared for any future waves, given the experience we’ve had over the last few months,” she said.

Murray lamented the sharp rise in anti-Asian hate crimes, while Moore warned that U.S. President Donald Trump “is going to run for reelection against China, and not against Joe Biden” – he fears the repercussions for Asian communities in North America as a result.

Robinson said the Jewish community is uniquely placed to be allies to those affected by this phenomenon, as well as to racialized individuals during the parallel upheavals around race, police violence and Black Lives Matter.

“I’m really proud to be part of the Jewish community and knowing that our history as a Jewish community has historically stood up for these values, to make sure that there is space for everyone and for standing up when we see injustice,” she said. “We will continue to do that and I urge everybody who is participating to make sure that you use your voice however and wherever you can.”

Sarah Kirby-Yung, a Vancouver city councilor, also spoke from a personal perspective, noting that her immediate family is of Asian descent.

“I’m incredibly distressed when I hear from members of the Asian community, seniors and vulnerable people particularly, who are afraid to leave their home or go for groceries or are changing their pattern because of who they are,” she said.

Vancouver’s budget has taken a swift kick during the pandemic, but Kirby-Yung rejected the rumour that the city is approaching bankruptcy.

“We are looking at about a $150 to $200 million projected revenue gap for Vancouver through the end of 2020,” she said. “Vancouver is not going bankrupt. We are in reasonable shape, but it doesn’t mean that we don’t have to be very thoughtful about our spending in our decisions.”

Politics in the pandemic

Clockwise from the top left are Amanda Blitz, Kathleen Monk, Amanda Alvaro and Chad Rogers.

Political pundits Amanda Alvaro, Chad Rogers and Kathleen Monk recently participated in an hour-long panel discussion on politics during COVID-19, examining how Canada’s leaders have fared since the start of the pandemic, what still needs to happen and how the coronavirus will shape the nation’s politics in the future. Hosted by the Canadian Jewish Political Affairs Committee (CJPAC), the May 14 webinar was emceed by its general counsel and director of communications, former news anchor Amanda Blitz.

The CBC Power & Politics regulars began, not with partisan jabs, but with kind words for the other sides of the political aisle. Alvaro, who frequently champions Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Liberals, paid a compliment to Premier Doug Ford of Ontario. “He’s really been able to connect well with Canadians. He’s delivered the news in a way people want to hear,” she acknowledged.

Rogers, a Conservative stalwart, praised Minister of Small Business Mary Ng as a person “who has done the hard work with a tremendous amount of humility and ability.”

And NDP proponent Monk lauded the work of the nation’s public servants, whose “yeoman’s efforts” have brought Canadians home from abroad and supplied them with stimulus cheques in a timely fashion.

Nonetheless, it took only a few seconds for Andrew Scheer’s name to appear on Alvaro’s list of those who have not performed well during the crisis. Rogers sprang to the Conservative leader’s defence, countering that it is exceedingly difficult for anyone on the right to watch a government spend as much as the Liberals currently are. “We’ve already allocated more money than we did in World War Two. For a Conservative, this is the worst horror movie ever written,” he asserted. “We are going to have things in this crisis that are going to be horrible missteps.”

Monk, meanwhile, criticized Quebec’s response to the pandemic but commended British Columbia’s. “It is amazing how good public policy can save lives. Never has it been more evident that we are a country of different governments, different territories,” she said.

Nobody on the panel could dispute the economic toll of the pandemic, including double-digit unemployment. Monk shone light on how women have been disproportionately affected, dubbing it a “she-cession,” as a higher ratio of women work in sectors brought down by COVID-19.

Both Alvaro and Rogers gave kudos to the federal government for providing emergency assistance to individuals quickly. However, Rogers claimed the Liberals were using “COVID-19 as a cover to put their boot heel to the throat of the oil and gas industry in Alberta. There is an extreme environmental agenda trying to pivot the Canadian economy into something it isn’t,” he said.

Of course, China was discussed.

“Despite the erosion of China’s image recently, we can’t avoid China,” Alvaro said. “There are many reasons why China can’t be written off, but many reasons why China is making it very difficult for countries to have a positive relationship with them.”

“The Chinese government is a totalitarian cult of death,” Rogers declared. “They could have aided the world by getting a week or a month ahead of the [COVID-19] curve. We should be very mindful every time we speak with them.”

“China has not done itself any favours with their management of the post-crisis phase,” Monk added.

In the midst of the pandemic, the Conservative party leadership race is taking place. All of the panelists steered clear of the Derek Sloan method of populism – which questioned the patriotism of Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief public health officer – and saw it more as a contest between Erin O’Toole and Peter MacKay.

All also agreed that it is remarkably challenging to campaign without being able to press the flesh and make stump speeches. However, Alvaro said, while people are at home, politicians do have a captive audience if they “can tap into the digital space that is less time-consuming than going door to door.”

On the topic of leadership, Rogers predicted that Trudeau will, as the crisis subsides, give consideration to his future as leader and ultimately decide it will be time to step down before the next federal election.

“It will give him an honourable exit, after establishing himself as essentially a wartime leader and not having to face a caucus that has lost faith in him,” Rogers said.

As the discussion wrapped up, Monk postulated that a potentially positive outcome from the crisis would be an increase in trade closer to home, i.e., within North America.

Alvaro said there will be many questions to follow: “Much of this will obviously be judged on how the recovery comes about, and how we fix the things we have fundamentally ignored, like long-term-care facilities.”

Rogers appealed to all in attendance to make a charitable donation, as nonprofits have been struggling for funds during the pandemic; a request that was backed by all the panelists.

For more information about CJPAC, visit cjpac.ca.

Sam Margolis has written for the Globe and Mail, the National Post, UPI and MSNBC.

Favourable position

British Columbians, like others in much of the world, are stepping gingerly into what may be a post-pandemic period – or an “inter-pandemic” phase, if the predicted second wave bears out. Our daily briefings from Dr. Bonnie Henry, the provincial health officer, and Health Minister Adrian Dix are cautiously optimistic, tempered with the reality that some people, given an inch, will take a mile. Confusion around, or contempt for, changing social distancing guidelines has meant numerous instances of inappropriate gatherings.

All in all, though, British Columbians have so far experienced among the lowest proportions of COVID-related illnesses and deaths than almost any jurisdiction in the developed world. Each death is a tragedy, yet we should be grateful for those who have recovered and the fact that so many of us have remained healthy so far. Thanks should go to all those who have helped others make it through, including first responders, healthcare professionals and also those irreplaceable workers we used to take for granted: retail and service employees and others who have allowed most of us to live through this with comparatively minimal disruptions.

In our Jewish community, so many individuals and institutions have done so much, from delivering challah to providing emergency financial and other supports for those affected by the economic impacts of the pandemic.

Canadians, in general, seem to be making it through this time as well as can be expected. Polls indicate that Canadians are overwhelmingly supportive of the actions our governments have taken during the coronavirus pandemic. How the federal and provincial governments manage the continuing economic repercussions and the potential resurgence of infections in coming months will determine long-term consequences both for us and for their popularity.

In signs that things are returning to something akin to pre-pandemic normal, Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s once-and-still-prime minister, is complaining about a “left-wing coup” and asserting that “the entire right” is on trial. In fact, it is not an entire wing of the Israeli political spectrum that is on trial, but Netanyahu himself, for bribery, breach of trust and fraud. He is accused of exchanging favours to friends and allies in return for hundreds of thousands of dollars in trinkets like cigars and champagne, and favourable coverage in media. Whatever strategy his team has for inside the courtroom, his PR strategy is pure deflection: blame the media, the court system, political opponents. He’s fighting two trials: the one in the justice system and the one in the court of public opinion. Netanyahu has managed to save his political hide thus far, through three successive elections and a year of coalition-building and horse trading. Predicting what might happen next is a popular but fruitless pastime.

More signs that things are not so different came from U.S. President Donald Trump on the weekend. As the death toll in the United States approached 100,000, Trump took time off from golfing to deliver Twitter rants, including retweets calling Hillary Clinton a “skank” and smearing other female Democrats for their appearance. Trump also insinuated that MSNBC TV host Joe Scarborough is a murderer.

Sitting (mostly) comfortably in our homes watching such things from afar, it’s no wonder Canadians are feeling good about the way our various governments – federal and provincial, of all political stripes – are behaving these days.

On brink of radical change

Prof. Shlomo Hasson was slated to bring a pessimistic forecast for the Middle East’s future to a Vancouver lecture March 31, but his visit was canceled due to the coronavirus crisis. (photo from CFHU Vancouver)

The Middle East is in a time of historical change and geopolitical shifts. The outcome is unknown and, for Israel, there may be good and bad consequences.

This is a core message from Prof. Shlomo Hasson, a professor at the department of geography, School of Public Policy, and Leon Safdie Chair at the Institute of Urban and Regional Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Hasson was to speak in Vancouver March 31 at an event organized by the Vancouver chapter of Canadian Friends of the Hebrew University, but the lecture was canceled due to the coronavirus crisis. The Independent spoke with him by telephone about what he intended to discuss.

“We are in the midst of turmoil in the Middle East because we have this havoc with Iran and the intensifying tension between the United States and Iran,” he said. “We have the ongoing conflict within the Middle East, especially in Syria, the war now between Turkey and Syria. We have the recent events in Libya, we have a worsening situation in Yemen. I’m not optimistic about the Middle East and, when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian case … the peace talks were stalled for a long time and now it seems that [U.S. President Donald] Trump’s initiative, in a way, helps to revive the issue but did it in such an awkward way that I’m not optimistic at all about the consequences of this initiative.”

The warming of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, as well as with some Gulf states, is cause for limited hope, he said.

“This is indeed a good reason to celebrate because there has been a change, even a significant change, between the Gulf states and even Saudi Arabia, and Israel because [they] are facing the same adversary, which is Iran,” Hasson said. “Israel supports Saudi Arabia because it supports them in containing Iran. In that sense, I think there is something to celebrate but this is very modest, because … the public in Saudi Arabia, for example, does not support Israel. It’s sort of an alliance between the rulers of the countries, but the public is not there yet.”

An additional crisis is climate change, which is hitting the region especially hard and will continue to do so, although this also presents opportunities for Israel to build bridges.

“We face the problem of water scarcity and droughts and flooding,” Hasson said. “I think that, especially in this crisis, Israel can help a lot because we have the technology, we’ve mastered the know-how and we can help the Middle East and Africa, while coping with this issue.”

Speaking before the most recent Israeli elections, Hasson predicted that, regardless of the outcome, they wouldn’t play a significant role in the bigger Middle East picture.

“Israel is not the central actor here,” he said. The central actors are Saudi Arabia and Iran, with China, Russia and the United States intervening from outside.

“Israel is in a position of reacting to these global, regional and intra-state developments,” he said. Even if Blue and White had won, said Hasson, it is still a right-wing party and the Israeli populace is developing a rightward consensus. “I don’t think that these elections are going to present a significant change in Israel’s political behaviour.”

He compares this moment in Middle East history to the pivotal epochs of the past.

“About 100 years ago, we still had the Ottoman Empire and, after that, we had the colonial regimes, the Sykes-Picot regimes, and then we have the nation-state regimes. The Middle East is at the brink of a change, a radical change, and nobody knows for sure what’s going to happen to the Middle East,” said Hasson. “But, in a way, it’s going to affect everything, it’s going to affect the global structure, it’s going to affect the relationships between the United States, China and Russia.”

Among Canada’s best books

In the play Birds of a Kind by Wajdi Mouawad, the character of Eitan, injured in a terrorist attack in Jerusalem, lies in a coma. As his estranged parents and his grandmother hope for his recovery, they bitterly dig ever deeper into their familial dysfunction. At one point, the doctor tells them about Eitan, “What matters is the voices of those dear to him. His parents, his friends.”

His father responds, “His friends are in Berlin.” His mother, “Or New York.” His grandmother, “But his fiancée is here.” (The Palestinian fiancée that his parents cannot fathom and regarding whom they are nasty, based on a mix of racism, fear, guilt, concern over their own identity, secrets they have kept and more.) The doctor tells the trio, “The stronger the emotional attachment, the quicker the brain responds. We reconstruct ourselves through affection.” Godspeed to Eitan, then.

Birds of a Kind is a fascinating, if somewhat predictable, story and Mouawad’s exposition of complex and hyper-relevant topics, such as group identity versus individual choice, is nuanced and poetic; he uses language beautifully. It is no wonder that Montreal-based translator Linda Gaboriau earned the play its 2019 Governor General’s Literary Award for translation (from French to English).

Also faring well in last year’s awards was Calgary writer Naomi K. Lewis, whose Tiny Lights for Travellers was a finalist in the non-fiction category of the prize, which is funded and administered by the Canada Council for the Arts.

Lewis is extremely candid and self-critical in this travel memoir. Readers learn about her family, her struggle with developmental topographical disorientation (which means she can’t envision a map in her head and, therefore, often gets lost), the complicated messages about Judaism she received growing up, her insecurities about being Jewish (including a botched nose job when she was a teen) and her failed marriage, among other things. We follow her on her literal and metaphorical journeys to self-discovery, -understanding and -acceptance, as her personal story is interwoven with her retracing of the route her grandfather took in 1942 to escape from Nazi-occupied Netherlands to southern France, from where he then traveled through Spain and Portugal to get to London, England.

While Tiny Lights for Travellers includes excerpts from Lewis’s grandfather’s journal of his escape, it is mostly about Lewis and her exploration of identity, family history and the Holocaust. As Lewis notes well into her book, “the journal seemed a tease, so withholding, the anomalous 30-page confession of someone who otherwise lived inside his own experience with no desire to make himself known to anyone.”

Lewis may have set out with a goal of learning more about her grandfather, of connecting to her past, “trying to find what made me,” but there are not clear links from the past to the present. The journey is revealing in the end, just not about her grandfather or exactly how she came to be who she now is, but rather in coming to terms with who that person is.

Writing for Israel at UN

Aviva Klompas recently published the book Speaking for Israel: A Speechwriter Battles Anti-Israel Opinions at the United Nations. (photo from Aviva Klompas)

Aviva Klompas came close to writing a declaration of war. In early 2013, after an Israeli post was fired upon by Syria – one of a number of attacks – Klompas was tasked with penning a condemnation that would be submitted to the United Nations.

Still relatively new as director of speechwriting for Israel’s Permanent Mission to the UN in New York City, she recalled the criticism she received: “Be more direct. Be more assertive about things,” she was told. “I thought to myself, ‘channel outrage.’ I tried to do so. I wrote this very stern letter, and I took it to the ambassador to review.”

Klompas, who spoke with the Independent recently, said she then learned the art of diplomacy, and how words might set off an international firestorm.

“To be clear,” Ambassador Ron Prosor, then Israel’s permanent representative to the UN, told her, “you don’t have any authority to declare war.” And it was off to a rewrite.

Thankfully, there weren’t any other close calls, but there are many other fascinating stories – many of which Klompas has brought to light in Speaking for Israel: A Speechwriter Battles Anti-Israel Opinions at the United Nations (Skyhorse, 2019). The book is a candid examination of how the Israeli delegation – and Israel as a whole – is perceived and treated in the international body.

During Klompas’s time at the UN, several major events occurred, including but not limited to the Iran deal, countless anti-Israel resolutions, Palestinians’ bid to join the International Criminal Court, the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers, and 50 days of war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. She wrote the book, she said, to show the tireless work of those who advocate for the Jewish state and who rarely get their due.

“It always feels like it is an uphill battle by the nature of the bias at the UN,” she said. “There are people who show up every single day and never say, ‘Why are we doing this? We should leave the UN.’ I’ve never had a single colleague make that suggestion. They came to work and did the job. I think, it’s a little bit my story, but it’s really our story.”

Klompas was director of speechwriting from 2013 to 2015.

“It’s very few people that make the headlines – the ambassador, maybe the deputy ambassador, maybe the foreign minister – but what about everyone else that is doing it day in and day out?” she asked.

About her work, the Toronto native said it advanced Israel’s policies and informed public opinion. Being successful at it, she said, required overcoming some challenges. For one, there was a culture clash.

“Certainly, Israelis are much more direct in their feedback, which is for better or for worse. At first, it is startling, but then you get to understand that it’s not personal,” she said.

Learning how to write in someone else’s voice was difficult, too. Prosor has “a very distinct style,” she said, describing him as “extremely articulate, funny, charming and intelligent. To be able to write for somebody like that takes time.”

In addition, Prosor took a different approach to diplomacy, when “so many speeches can be dry and not entirely lively,” said Klompas. “He’d be all too happy to break out into song in the middle of a speech, whether it be a song about African nations, which got him a standing ovation from some of the African nations in the General Assembly, [or] he would sing John Lennon’s ‘Imagine.’ In a speech about women, he sang Aretha Franklin’s ‘Respect.’”

Klompas gave him the nickname “the Singing Diplomat.”

“Ambassador Prosor felt it was very important to be heard and, to be heard, you have to be different,” she explained. “He knew he had to capture attention to get people to listen.”

In the beginning, she would have to write up to 20 drafts of a speech before she got a sense of the ambassador’s voice and style. Sometimes, there wasn’t much time to tweak.

“It’s pretty stressful,” she said. “You can get a phone call any time of day or night, weekend, and be told the Security Council is convening a special session, come down to the office, we have to get writing. You could have a couple of days’ notice or a couple of hours’ notice. And emergency sessions tend to get a lot of publicity.”

Klompas, who is now associate vice-president of Israel and global Jewish citizenship at Combined Jewish Philanthropies in Boston, said there were poignant takeaways from her job as a speechwriter.

“You can’t be easily deterred by situations that seem unfair or unreasonable. You need a courage of conviction to deflect the constant attacks and brush aside the fact that systems and processes aren’t as simple as one might hope,” she said. “I’d say that my experience gave me a greater sense of what happens behind the scenes in international diplomacy, and the ways in which Israel is working to find equality in the family of nations.”

Dave Gordon is a Toronto-based freelance writer whose work has appeared in more than 100 publications around the world.

We’re all in this together

Does it seem like people are behaving more kindly this week? Maybe it’s the sunshine. But maybe it’s the realization, amid all the alarming news and concerns over the spread of coronavirus, that we are all, truly, in this together.

We live in particular times that may be defined – especially as exemplified by some political leaders and their followers – as uncharitable, xenophobic, chauvinistic, mean-spirited and self-interested. These attitudes have been demonstrated, among other ways, in the attitudes of many people toward migrants from other places. These ideas trickle down to the way we treat one another – in traffic, in online interactions, in schools and workplaces, in voting – behaving in ways that take into consideration only (or mostly) our own well-being at the expense of the well-being of others. There are magnificent exceptions, of course, everyday acts of kindness and gestures of humanity great and small. But our age, it can probably be agreed, includes a lot of pettiness, intolerance and plain old snark.

Our parents or grandparents understood the meaning and necessity of sacrifice for the greater good. The communal effort during the Second World War, on the home front and among those serving, was a generationally defining undertaking. While wars, sadly, have continued, in our corner of the world, the burden has fallen on an increasingly smaller number of people – those families with members in the service. But, for at least a generation of North Americans, we have not been called upon for an unavoidable collective sacrifice for the greater good. Again, this is not to say that many people are not sacrificing for the greater good – individuals are devoting themselves to causes greater than themselves, including climate change, but they are doing so by choice. They may be driven by desperation, fear, environmental justice or other motivations, certainly, but, ultimately, it is voluntary.

Then along comes a virus with apparently incalculable potential to cause illness and death and we realize that we are not so separate after all. While they have resisted on issues like climate change, governments worldwide have stepped up (some of them more slowly and irresponsibly than others) and taken seriously the science that predicts grave consequences if we do not take urgent actions now. And individuals, in the first days of what will be an unprecedented period of unknown duration, appear surprisingly amenable to following government-issued restrictions on behaviour for the hope of long-term health, not only for themselves but for those who are more vulnerable due to age or underlying health conditions.

There is nothing good about a global pandemic. But good things happen when people act in unity to advance collective well-being. Individuals and groups have responded with astonishing immediacy when called upon to act. Places of public meeting, including restaurants and cafés, have faced the painful but unavoidable truth that they have to temporarily change their service model. This will have untold economic and social impacts as staff are displaced, with concentric circles as these workers lose purchasing power and these realities ripple through the economy, already suffering multiple unknowns and slowdowns.

In our community, synagogues and communal organizations have adopted stringent and unprecedented measures, many canceling live services and opting for alternative venues like online learning.

We witness the immediacy of these factors’ economic ripples. As our community cancels public events, advertisements are understandably pulled from our newspaper. As a result, we have made the choice to cancel an additional issue next month, and not publish for two weeks, April 10 and 17, rather than the scheduled one-week hiatus. We will have a healthy Passover issue on April 3 and we urge you to support our work and celebrate the holiday by considering advertising or inserting a greeting message in that issue or in the ones resuming April 24 and after.

In the meantime, as we come together to confront this very serious challenge, we are reminded, as Temple Sholom’s Rabbi Dan Moskovitz writes in this week’s issue writes in this week’s issue, we do not do so as Canadians or Chinese or Italians or Israelis. We are people living in different places who face the same pathogens and the same reality.

In Jewish tradition, the value of pikuach nefesh, of saving a life, overrides almost every other consideration. Among other things, this suggests that we should view our current situation through a slightly altered lens. While all of us should be doing everything we are advised to avoid getting the virus, we should be doing so not only, perhaps not primarily, for our own health, but in order to prevent us transmitting it to another person. For many of us who are younger or do not have underlying health concerns, COVID-19 could be a very unpleasant inconvenience. For others we know and love, it could be far more serious.

The top advice we have received is to wash hands with soap frequently and thoroughly, and also to stay home to avoid physical contact as much as possible. Some people are suggesting we treat these days like Shabbat. Spend time with family. Read books. Take a walk. Engage in passive activities. Turn off electronics for a time to avoid the noise of the world which, at this time, is particularly loud.

And be kind to one another. If you know of a senior or other person whose health could be endangered by going out, do their shopping. See what else they might need. Call your family and friends. Set up a virtual dinner party or a play date for your kids. Since you’re not spending money on restaurants and theatre, consider donating to charity and arts organizations.

This is all good advice. But we suspect, given some unscientific observations of kindness and communal care in the last few days, that most of us already know what to do.

For more information and latest updates from Canada’s public health authorities: canada.ca/en/public-health/services/diseases/coronavirus-disease-covid-19.html.