Stephen Lewis was an aggressive Jewish supremacist for nearly his entire life. Yet in a sign of the Jewish exceptionalism and disregard for Palestinian rights pervading our political culture some are lauding the deceased politician as pro-Palestinian for attending a single protest.
In word and deed Stephen Lewis was anti-Palestinian for almost his entire life. From a simple online search, here are four examples spanning forty-five years:
- In 1975 as leader of the Ontario NDP Lewis demanded the federal government cancel a major UN conference scheduled for Toronto because the Palestine Liberation Organization was granted observer status at the UN the previous year and their representatives might attend. Lewis considered the PLO a “terrorist” organization. The Pierre Trudeau government was loath to cancel the Fifth United Nations Congress on the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders, which had been granted to Toronto five years earlier and had nothing to do with Palestine, but opposition in Ontario ultimately prevailed on the federal government.
- After Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon Lewis criticized the Committee of Concerned Canadian Jews for picketing the apartheid state’s consulate in Toronto.
- In the mid 1980s as Brian Mulroney’s ambassador to the UN Lewis voted against multiple resolutions upholding Palestinian rights. In 1987, for instance, Canada voted against condemning “Israel’s decision to annex Jerusalem and to declare it as its ‘capital’ as well as the measures to alter its physical character, demographic composition, institutional structure and status.”
- After Canada’s failed 2020 bid for a seat on the UN Security Council Lewis sought to protect Israel by (absurdly) denying that Canada’s extremist anti-Palestinian voting record at the UN contributed to the country’s defeat. That move prompted a letter of complaint from Canadian Friends of Sabeel co-founder Father Robert Assaly and my article “Does Stephen Lewis want Palestine to disappear?” The article also outlines how Stephen’s father, sister and wife repeatedly expressed/pursued anti-Palestinian positions.
While his son, Avi, publicly criticized Israel two decades ago and wife, Michelle Landsberg, began publicly criticizing the apartheid state five years ago, Stephen appears to have waited until twenty months into the Gaza genocide to publicly express opposition. As he prepared to officially launch his campaign to lead the NDP — aware that his family’s Jewish supremacist history was an Achilles’ heel — Avi posted a picture on May 30 of his father at a rally with a sign saying, “Stop the genocide in Gaza”.
Many have cited this post to laud Stephen Lewis on Palestine. My friend Judy Haiven wrote a “Tribute to Stephen Lewis” for the Independent Jewish Voices list, which said “he became increasingly critical of the State of Israel and its actions as several members of his family —members of IJV — spoke out against it. In the last couple of years, despite his illness, Stephen Lewis tried to attend the weekly demonstrations on Kingston Rd. in Scarborough (Toronto) against Israel’s genocide in Gaza.”
Rabble.ca’s Karl Nerenberg devoted an entire column to Lewis attending a single rally. In “Toward the end of his life Stephen Lewis demonstrated against Netanyahu’s tactics” Nerenberg effectively admits Lewis promoted apartheid but justifies the bigotry from someone who was an MPP at 26 as a reaction to the discrimination they faced. Nerenberg writes, “Stephen Lewis had encountered the ugly face of antisemitism many times over his life and was, as a result, loath to criticize anything the State of Israel did.” Amidst the Jewish supremacist state’s unrelenting horrors, it’s appalling to see a left publication so easily excuse decades of apartheid and violence promotion. (I immediately emailed Rabble’s editor asking if they’d accept a rebuttal but have yet to receive a response.)
In making this point Nerenberg quoted Avi’s May 30 post. It noted, “When he was Canada’s ambassador to the UN from 1984-88, Dad was truly shocked by the regularity of open, vitriolic antisemitism in the cocktail parties and ambassadorial receptions that surround that crucial but flawed institution. For this reason (among others) he’s always been the one in our family with the deepest atavistic fear of antisemitism. He was sympathetic to the idea of Israel as a refuge longer than the rest of us.”
Are we to believe someone who sought to shut down a 1975 UN conference because a representative of the unter menschen might attend did so because they experienced antisemitism as UN ambassador a decade later? And didn’t the ‘antisemitic’ UN grant Lewis multiple top posts (Special Advisor to the UN Secretary General on Africa, deputy director of UNICEF, United Nations Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, etc.)?
Labelling the UN, which shamefully facilitated the creation of a Jewish supremacist state, ‘antisemitic’ is a common Zionist trope. It’s long been used to besmirch the international body for its 1975 resolution labelling Zionism a form of racism and other pro-Palestinian/international law resolutions.
Years before he was Canada’s permanent representative to the international body Stephen was criticizing the international body as “antisemitic”. In a story about a 1977 speech to pro-Israel fundraiser United Jewish Appeal, which the Canadian Jewish News titled “Lewis praises [Conservative premier Bill] Davis for Stand on Israel”, Lewis denounced the UN’s “wantonly anti-social attitude to Israel” and told the pro-Israel audience that “the anti-Semitism that lurks underneath the surface is diabolical.”
Decades of bigotry shouldn’t be washed away by attending a single rally, which happened to benefit your son’s political ambitions. It’s a stunning rebuke to the victims of many horrendous Israeli crimes that ‘pro-Palestinian’ leftists would demand so little of someone who claimed to be an “internationalist”, “anti-racist” and “socialist” before forgiving and then lionizing him.
If this little will satisfy ‘the left’ on Palestine what does that portend for our confrontation with capitalism?
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