Is it a wariness toward activism, hesitance around Palestinian solidarity, or partisan instinct that’s pushing Avi Lewis supporters to advance misleading claims? While the NDP’s position has greatly improved on the lawless genocidal apartheid state, the recent debate exposed its limitations.
According to multiple Avi supporters and opponents of my NDP leadership bid, all the candidates are similarly (or sufficiently) opposed to Canada’s complicity in genocide. In response to someone complaining that Gaza wasn’t mentioned at the recent NDP debate, the Courage Facebook page repeatedly made this claim yesterday. The Avi aligned NDP group stated, “several candidates have quite strong positions on the genocide in Gaza … What do you see as the difference between his [Engler] position and the others, substantially?”
Anyone following this leadership race knows the difference between my campaign and the others is significant. We’ve put forward – and campaigned on – a 10-point plan to end Canada’s complicity in Israeli crimes. As far as I can tell, no other candidate has taken up at least five of these demands (Heather McPherson recently echoed our call to “Prosecute Canadians who fought in Gaza under the War Crimes Act.”).
The five points are:
- Enforce Foreign Enlistment Act — Stop Canadians joining IOF
- Revoke charitable status of groups funding ethnic cleansing
- Stop promoting genocide through special envoy
- End Operation Proteus (Canadian training of PA forces)
- Abolish anti-Palestinian “terrorism list.”
The gulf between our campaign and Courage’s preferred candidate is well-illustrated by Avi Lewis’ silence last October, when the Trudeau government criminalized a grassroots anti-genocide organization in his city. He said nothing as Vancouver’s Samidoun Palestinian Prisoners Solidarity Network was placed on the terror list — an anti-Palestinian decision that also poses a serious threat to Canadians’ civil liberties. I have publicly challenged this move again and again.
Amidst a Canadian-backed campaign of mass killing in Gaza, Lewis has sought to remain ‘respectable’. In a bid to distance himself from the ‘radicals’, Lewis smeared protesters who posted signs and slogans on disgraced anti-Palestinian BC NDP minister Selina Robinson’s riding office in February 2024. He tweeted, “This is childish & gross, and has nothing to do with the many legit groups that protested Selina Robinson.” But anti-genocidal outrage expressed through chalk and placards should be promoted, not criticized. Even the police subsequently reported that everything “had been cleaned up and there was no physical damage located” at Robinson’s office.
In keeping with this cautious approach, Avi Lewis declined to sign the “Defend Sarah Jama, Stop the Attack on Gaza” public letter I helped initiate through the Canadian Foreign Policy Institute just days after the Ontario NDP expelled her. That letter was endorsed by Roger Waters, Gabor Maté, Fred Hahn, and hundreds of former MPPs, academics, artists, and activists.
Nor did Avi sign the 2018 “A call for the NDP to withdraw from the Canada-Israel Interparliamentary Group”. That public letter was endorsed by 200 well-known musicians, academics, trade unionists and NDP members, including Roger Waters, Noam Chomsky, Richard Falk, Maher Arar, Amir Khadir, Jim Manly and Linda McQuaig as well as 15 organizations.
It’s remarkable to see groups that profess solidarity with Palestinian liberation and activism insist disingenuously that every candidate holds a “strong position” on genocide. Expecting Canada to uphold its own laws and stop providing exceptional support to a state committing grave abuses, the core of our 10-point plan, should be the bare minimum.
Claiming that “all the candidates have strong positions” also wipes away the hard-won gains achieved through decades of struggle. Many organizers, in and beyond the NDP, have been smeared for confronting the left’s longstanding accommodation of apartheid.
In my 2010 Canada and Israel: Building Apartheid and many articles I’ve challenged the NDP’s anti-Palestinian history. His grandfather and father, who Avi regularly invokes, are central figures in that odious history. As recently as 2020 his father was still openly peddling anti-Palestinian positions, as I detailed in “Does Stephen Lewis want Palestine to disappear?” In one of her latter Toronto Star columns Avi’s mother Michelle Landsberg, who he also mentions regularly, wrote, “to keep their people primed for endless war, Palestinians have inculcated racist hatred of Jews and of Israel in school texts, official newspaper articles and leaders’ pronouncements, in language so hideous it would have made Goebbels grin.”
To his credit, Avi’s positions have long been far better than his parents. And it is welcome that, in the lead-up to his campaign, his parents issued public statements opposing the genocide in Gaza.
But let’s not pretend the NDP’s position on Zionism is fine. The party hosted a ninety-minute leadership debate in the middle of a genocide, and not one candidate even uttered the word “Gaza.”
To assist, donate or learn more about my bid to lead the NDP check out yvesforndpleader.ca
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