Dear Elizabeth May

The world is watching Israel's slide into right wing radicalism. The Conservatives and the Liberals look the other way. The Green Party membership won't. Your party, Elizabeth May, passed a moderate resolution calling for a peaceful settlement of the Palestinian question and supporting the Boycott Divest and Sanction movement to help achieve it.

Just so there's no doubt about where Canada stands, and with whom, Alison at Creekside, has reproduced this General Assembly vote on the recent resolution.

Seven nations opposed it - Israel, the United States, Canada and the bought and paid for Palau, Marshall Islands, Nauru and Micronesia. Seven votes, four of them stooge ballots. Look at the other side, the 155 nations voting in support - Britain, France, Germany, Netherlands, Czech Republic, Belgium, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, Finland, Estonia, Portugal, Luxembourg and Liechtenstein, Italy and Ireland - the whole bloody European Union - plus the nations of Africa, South and Central America, and Asia Pacific.

It's an apartheid regime and the world knows it. You say you oppose BDS but offer not one damned thing that might work in its stead. Where are you going to draw your line, ethnic cleansing? There are a lot of voices in Israel brazenly calling for that now and most of them support Netanyahu.  Israel has been doing it incrementally for half a century to the point that now the West Bank looks like this. That's what dialogue has achieved. Mind you, this is a full decade out of date. There's less, much less remaining of the Palestinian homeland now.

Canada, Liz, is in a bad way. We, Israel and the U.S. stand alone against the rest of the nations that can no longer look the other way. Censuring BDS has to be denounced for what it is - one more effort to stifle dissent and that's about as undemocratic as it gets. Wait, in Canada, it gets way more undemocratic than a mere censure motion. Speaking out can cost you your job.

Wake up Liz. Netanyahu's former second in command, then defence minister, Moshe Yallon, resigned in protest saying his country had been taken over by extremists. Former Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, has warned that Netanyahu has planted the seeds of fascism. Netanyahu appointed Russian-born thug, Avigdor Lieberman, to serve as defence minister, effectively making him czar of all captive Palestinians. Here's just a glimpse at this thug:

Lieberman has called to redraw the border between Israel and the West Bank so that Israel would include large Jewish settlement blocs and the Palestinian state would include large Arab-Israeli population centers. He proposed that Israel's citizens should sign a loyalty oath or lose their right to vote.

In November 2006, Lieberman, who described Arab members of the Knesset that meet with Hamas as "terror collaborators", called for their execution: "World War II ended with theNuremberg Trials. The heads of the Nazi regime, along with their collaborators, were executed. I hope this will be the fate of the collaborators in [the Knesset]."[79]

The comment was attacked as racist by Eitan Cabel, a Labor party representative, and Ahmad Tibi, leader of the Arab party Ta'al and one-time advisor to Yasser Arafat, who demanded that "a criminal investigation be initiated against Lieberman for violating the law against incitement and racism".[79][80] Tibi strongly objected to Lieberman's ministerial appointment, describing him as "a racist and a fascist". Labour minister Ophir Pines-Paz, who resigned over Lieberman's appointment, echoed Tibi's remarks, saying that Lieberman was tainted "by racist declarations and declarations that harm the democratic character of Israel".[81]

In remarks in the Knesset in March 2008, shortly after the 6 March attack at Jerusalem's Mercaz HaRav yeshiva, Lieberman commented that "yesterday's attack can not be disconnected from the Arab MKs incitement, which we hear daily in the Knesset."[82] Directing his comments at Arab MKs whose comments Lieberman describes as anti-Israel incitement, he added that "a new administration will be established and then we will take care of you."[83]

Or you might dwell on the warning of the Deputy Chief of Staff of the Israeli Army, general Ya'ir Golan:

“If there is something that frightens me about the memories of the Holocaust, it is the knowledge of the awful processes which happened in Europe in general, and in Germany in particular, 70, 80, 90 years ago, and finding traces of them here in our midst, today, in 2016.”

General Golan knows the reality of fascism. A German Jew, his parents managed to flee Hitler's Germany in the nick of time. As a boy he saw fascism take hold and spread in his boyhood homeland.

"Things happening in Israel, especially since the last election, bear a frightening similarity to those events. True, the process is quite different. German fascism arose from the humiliation of surrender in World War I, the occupation of the Ruhr by France and Belgium from 1923-25, the terrible economic crisis of 1929, the misery of millions of unemployed. Israel is victorious in its frequent military actions, we live comfortable lives. The dangers threatening us are of a quite different nature. They stem from our victories, not from our defeats."


"The discrimination against the Palestinians in practically all spheres of life can be compared to the treatment of the Jews in the first phase of Nazi Germany. (The oppression of the Palestinians in the occupied territories resembles more the treatment of the Czechs in the “protectorate” after the Munich betrayal.)

"The rain of racist bills in the Knesset, those already adopted and those in the works, strongly resembles the laws adopted by the Reichstag in the early days of the Nazi regime."

Here's Fareed Zakaria's take on Lieberman:

As fiercely as he denounces the Palestinian militants of Hamas and Hizbullah, his No. 1 target is Israel's Arab minority, which he has called a worse threat than Hamas. He has proposed the effective expulsion of several hundred thousand Arab citizens by unilaterally redesignating some northern Israeli towns as parts of the Palestinian West Bank. Another group of several hundred thousand could expect to be stripped of citizenship for failing to meet requirements such as loyalty oaths or mandatory military service (from which Israel's Arabs are currently exempt). The New Republic's Martin Peretz, a passionate Zionist and critic of the peace movement, calls Lieberman a "neo-fascist ... a certified gangster ... the Israeli equivalent of [Austria's] Jörg Haider." No liberal democracy I know of since World War II has disenfranchised or expelled its own citizens.

As for the Boycott Divest Sanction movement that has your knickers in such a bunch, Lizzie, listen to Murray Dobbin who notes that the ghost of Stephen Harper lives on in Parliament, including now it seems, in the office of the leader of the Green Party.

That the Liberal government is so in alignment with Israel lobby groups raises a number of questions: Just who actually makes Canadian policy towards Israel? Did Trudeau think this through at all -- such as, is this in Canada's interests? But perhaps more to the point, is it even in Israel's interests? Does the Trudeau government have some brilliant ideas about how to get Israel to the bargaining table? Or does it believe the current situation doesn't need resolving? It makes me feel like Stephen Harper still rules the day on this critical foreign policy issue. Indeed the resolution smacks of Harper's declaration that criticism of Israel's government is the "new anti-Semitism."

The BDS campaign might not worry Netanyahu so much if it weren't for the fact that Israel now ranks near the bottom of pile when it comes to world opinion. A BBC poll in 2013 interviewed more than 26,000 people in 25 countries and found only 21 per cent of participants had a positive view of Israel, while 52 per cent viewed the country unfavourably. Only Iran, Pakistan and North Korea fared worse.

...If Justin Trudeau and his government believe they are doing Israel a favour by supporting the repugnant Conservative thought crime resolution, they could not be more mistaken. Every time a Western government turns a blind eye to Israeli apartheid it reinforces and extends that system by signalling to Netanyahu that he can do whatever he pleases.

As a Haaretz columnist recently wrote, BDS isn't the best weapon against Israeli right wing extremism, it's the only weapon. It's the only measure that works. So let's kill it off, eh?