It didn’t start on 7 October
It didn’t begin on 7 Oct 2023. You have to start with 1948.
Yet almost everyone in the western media – and in Canada — claims it began that very day.
Every news article, media interview, commentary on Israel’s war on Gaza starts with stating 1200 Jews were killed by Hamas who broke through to the Israel side of the border with Gaza. Hamas took more than two hundred hostages. Many paragraphs down we find out about Israel’s payback – the murders of 42,000 Palestinians– overwhelmingly civilians — over just 12 months.
But as leading Israeli journalist Gideon Levy notes we can’t start with 7 Oct.
“You have to start with 1948. Gaza is the biggest center of Palestinian refugees from ’48, who have lived in the most miserable conditions ever since then in refugee camps. And then came 2006, when Israel made Gaza the biggest cage in the world, the biggest open prison in the world, by withdrawing from Gaza. Gaza has been under siege for the last 18 years. This is the context. It’s the most abnormal reality. You can’t imagine. It’s 2.3 million people just closed in a cage. And you wonder what will come out of this experiment in human beings, and you got it on the seventh of October.”
Today is all about Israeli deaths and Jewish sensibilities. How do Canadian Jews feel about their losses. We’ll hear that question posed by reporters all day long today – Jews feel badly. Rather than looking at what’s happening in Gaza, or the West Bank or Lebanon, many Canadian Jews focus on claims of antisemitism here at home which justifies the Canadian Jews and their pro-Israel supporters silencing critics of Israel, firing pro-Palestinian employees, kicking pro-Palestinian students out of university, and denigrating anyone who protests or sets up a university encampment against Israel’s crimes.
Of course some Canadian Jews have had relatives killed, or abducted by Hamas. Others realise how unsafe it is to live in Israel, an aggressive, apartheid state in which the Ashkenazi Jews are on the top of the heap and everyone else is slotted in far below. First come the Jews of non-Ashkenazi background. Then there are the 20% of Israel’s population who are Palestinian who face serious discrimination in terms of where they live, jobs, careers and educations. Below them are the Palestinians in the occupied territories, in Gaza where Israel has killed 42,000 Palestinians in the service of ridding the region of Hamas. And in the West Bank where Israel has killed more than 700 Palestinians—more than half children — is not governed by Hamas.
Yet most Canadian journalists and their toady employers don’t want us to hear about the despair of Jews across Canada who hold Israel in contempt– responsible for a year of massacres of Palestinians, the total and utter destruction of the people, their culture, their education, their hospitals, homes and their lives. Many Jews in Canada are furious and put distance between themselves and Israel, and some even condemn Israel.
How are Jews the victims?
How can it be that Israel killed Palestinians – the vast majority women, children and the elderly – yet insists Israel and the Jews are victims?
We know that Israel killed and starved Palestinians to death in the last 364 days, left thousands to die under the rubble of the homes and towns Israel bombed, and left more than 17,000 children without parents or homes. How can it be that the Israeli army snipers in the last year picked off and killed tens of thousands of unarmed Palestinians—unless you consider stones that kids throw at soldiers to be weapons. How can the vast majority of Israel’s Jews in cities and towns a mere 70 km from Gaza, don’t want to know or care about their country committing genocide, as Israeli Jewish journalist Gideon Levy notes
“Israelis live in denial and are brainwashed. Most Israelis have never met a Palestinian, never talked to a Palestinian, except maybe in good times when it was the street cleaner or the worker who would build their home. But they have never sat and met a real Palestinian equal to them. Most of the Israelis have never been to the occupied territories. They live under this belief that all of the Palestinians are terrorists and are Hamas.”
Do Canadian Jews need protection?
Today, is the first anniversary of the war that has killed more people than any other war this century. Today is the day that the pro-Israel Jewish community gets to brand itself victims, and revel in their saying that today marks a year since the worst genocide against the Jews since World War II.
There will be interviews with relatives of the Israelis who were kidnapped a year ago. There will be discussions about maintaining security for the Jews of Canada, protecting synagogues and community centres—even streets from enemies.
And who are the enemies exactly?
Critics of Israel? Today, I noticed that Shimon Fogel, CEO of CIJA (the Centre for Israel Jewish Affairs) grudgingly told a reporter “there is absolutely room for reasonable criticism of the war and solidarity with the Palestinian people.” Except there is not such an open, giving, space. We see hundreds of people in Canada, from medical doctor Yipeng Ge to Birju Dattani have faced firing, discipline at work, and suspension.
But today, the critics of Israel – those who support Palestinians’ rights and freedoms, those who call on Israel for a ceasefire, a release of hostages, an end to genocide – will have to take a back seat to the pro-Israel lobby.
Image at the top:
A protester plays a drum during a demonstration in support of Palestinians in Gaza, one day ahead of the anniversary of Hamas’ 7 October attack on Israel, in Berlin, Germany, 6 October. (credit: REUTERS/Christian Mang)
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Judy Haiven is a writer and activist living in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Formerly, she was a professor in the Management Department of the Sobey School of Business at Saint Mary’s University and is a specialist in Industrial Relations. Judy Haiven is a founder of Equity Watch, a human rights organization dedicated to fighting bullying and discrimination in the workplace.
Contact: jhaiven [at] gmail.com
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