The ‘Israel Effect’ in Canada

Below is a Foreword Yves Engler wrote for Peter Eglin’s just released Analysing the Israel Effect in Canada: A Critical AutoEthnography

 

Israel is the outgrowth of a European colonial movement sponsored by the British Empire. Born in ethnic cleansing, the country oversees a long-standing illegal occupation and siege of the Gaza Strip. The oppression faced by Palestinians is glaring, but Israel also repeatedly bombs and invades its neighbours. 

Still, Canadian politicians express unmatched fidelity to a state most leading human rights groups say has long committed the crime of apartheid and the International Court of Justice suggests is now committing genocide in Gaza. Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government organized a pizza party for Canadians fighting in the Israeli military, sued to block proper labels on wines from illegal settlements and announced that should Canada win a seat on the United Nations Security Council it would act as an “asset for Israel” on the council. Trudeau describes Canada and Israel as having a “special bond”.

The exceptional relationship has an intellectual side, detailed effectively by Peter Eglin. Since crossing the country to attend Concordia University at the turn of the century I’ve repeatedly witnessed the Israel Effect. Working with the support of a leftist student union, Palestinians and Arabs activists turned the campus into North America’s leading hub of solidarity campaigning. The pushback was ferocious. In Summer 2001 the administration expelled two elected members of the student union and days after the 9/11 attacks in the US B’nai Brith organized a press conference where they asked if the student union’s feminist, anti-capitalist and pro-Palestinian handbook was “a blueprint for Osama bin Laden’s youth program in North America?” Combined with pressure from the university administration, media and right-wing students, the Israel lobby succeeded in getting the student union president and part of the executive to resign.

Despite backlash causing the partial collapse of the student union, a leftist pro-Palestinian slate that I was part of won the next election. The Israel lobby raised the pressure with media mogul Izzy Asper sponsoring a speech by Benjamin Netanyahu in what Israel lobbyists called the “viper’s nest of anti-Semitism.” When Netanyahu’s speech at Concordia was disrupted the condemnation was swift. The next day the Globe and Mail published the former Israeli Prime Minister’s full speech and when they eventually accepted an Op-Ed responding to the opprobrium leveled against protesters the headline chosen was “Day of broken glass”, which was a not too subtle reference to the Nazis’ Kristallnacht or “night of broken glass”. 

Amidst the battle with Canada’s paper of record my colleague on the student union executive, Aaron Maté, relayed his well-known father’s experience with the Globe. The Op-Ed editor was always happy to receive Gabor Maté’s commentaries except when he wrote (critically) about Israel. A decade later token leftist Globe columnist, Rick Salutin, echoed the point, telling me Israel was the principal issue his editors complained about.

Immediately after Netanyahu was disrupted by protesters the university administration restricted discussion of Palestine-Israel, granted itself the power to summarily expel students and rescinded the right to conduct student affairs in the two busiest areas of the campus. A month later I was arrested for violating the leafleting provision and subsequently expelled from the university. A month after that Concordia’s administration got a court injunction to block Members of Parliament Libby Davies and Svend Robinson from speaking on “peace in the Middle East” on campus. 

Concordia taught me a great deal about the Israel Effect. Publishing a book on the subject and working for a labour union taught me more. 

Among those I reached out to review my 2010 Canada and Israel: Building Apartheid was Montréal Gazettereporter Irwin Block. He told me he enjoyed the book and would’ve sought to review it if the title hadn’t included the word apartheid. 

When a (single) daily paper reviewed my book it prompted a counter review. In the lead-up to the London launch, University of Western Ontario professor David Heap submitted a positive review to his local paper. But two weeks later, the London Free Press published Honest Reporting Canada head Mike Fegelman’s response claiming it was “professionally unethical for Heap to not disclose his highly partisan stance on the Mideast file” when reviewing Canada and Israel.

HRC is a ‘flack’ organization that criticizes media for not towing their pro-apartheid line. They write replies, submit complaints and instigate email campaigns to media outlets when they publish something deemed objectionable. 

Two years after publishing Canada and Israel I was hired to work in the research department of the Communications Energy and Paperworkers Union (CEP). In discussing ghost writing for a union president seeking leftist commentary on various issues, Dave Coles told me in no uncertain terms he wasn’t interested in criticizing Israel. He didn’t need to say it. I was already well aware of the “Israel Effect”. Sometime later the assistant to the president, a former Communist Party leader, said he wouldn’t want to pick a fight with the Israel lobby and after the CEP and Canadian Auto Workers merged the new head of research complained about my implicitly opposing Zionism by criticizing the colonial Jewish National Fund (in an article on my own time). It was one of the reasons I was pushed out of my job at Unifor. 

Over the past dozen years of speaking to student groups about Canada’s contribution to Palestinian dispossession I can’t remember how many times Israel lobby backlash has prompted university officials to send an ‘observer’, add security or rescind a room booking. In one of those incidents some poor scribe from the Wilfred Laurier University administration spent his evening taking note of my words to Peter Eglin’s students. Eglin was one of the few academics willing to denounce Israeli apartheid and Canada’s complicity in the dispossession of Palestinians. As Analysing the Israel Effect in Canada: A Critical AutoEthnography demonstrates, he has the lumps to prove it. 

The Israel Effect is real. It’s diminished as liberal establishment groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have finally admitted Israel is committing the crime of apartheid. Even though the dominant media has all but ignored their conclusion the public understands. Thirty-eight percent of Canadians believe Israel maintains a system “similar to apartheid” and 20 percent labelled it a state that “restricted minority rights”. According to the 2023 poll of 1,100 Canadians only 11 per cent of those with an opinion consider Israel a “vibrant democracy”. 

The Israel Effect isn’t what it once was.