How Canada props up Israeli state violence ⋆ The Breach

Emma Paling, senior editor:

I think a question that a lot of people have is: what’s the bigger picture in terms of Canada’s relationship to Israel in the past years leading up to this? How has Canada been propping up the Israeli government?

Martin Lukacs, managing editor:

Every now and then the Canadian government issues some bland statement of concern about what Israel is doing, but it backs Israeli state aggression fully in line with the United States.

So, Trudeau will rhetorically oppose the illegal settlements that have encroached on Palestinian land, but doesn’t actually take any action to deter Israel from continuing to expand them. They call for peace and security, but then they continue with the policies that make that impossible.

Let me name a few.

The Trudeau government has permitted the export of some $20 million annually of military equipment. There’s explosives, military aircraft equipment. It’s expanded the Canada-Israel Free Trade Agreement, which gives products made in the illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank preferential access to the Canadian market.

They’ve legally intervened to stop the accurate labeling of Israeli wines imported from those illegal settlements. They have advocated against the International Criminal Court investigating past Israeli war crimes in Gaza. They voted against countless UN resolutions that are upholding Palestinian rights, I think at the latest count, something like 60, while the Liberals have been in power.

It has participated in training and providing military personnel to the force that helps the Palestinian Authority—that’s the government in the West Bank—police its own people. Israel, for many years, has basically outsourced the occupation to the Palestinian Authority and Canada’s complicit in that.

In 2018, Chrystia Freeland—when she was foreign affairs minister announced while Canada was trying to win a seat at the UN Security Council—said quite explicitly that Canada would aim to be an “asset for Israel” on the council.

I think they have shown that they’ve been doing that the last few years. In many ways, there’s very, very little space between them and what Stephen Harper was doing when it came to Israel. It’s been a continuous bipartisan support for Israeli colonization and daily violence against the Palestinians. And I think any Canadians that hope for justice and peace in the Middle East have a responsibility to push the Canadian government’s position to change.

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