A birthday's lessons

Editorial

Sometimes on your birthday you find out who your friends are. In Vancouver, on Israel's 60th birthday, 2,600 friends gathered for a celebration at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre. Back east, Prime Minister Stephen Harper restated his respect for Israel and his unequivocal support for the struggle for peace.

On the other side, there were those who were not celebrating. Outside the Queen E., while Yom Ha'atzmaut was being celebrated, a hardy band of a half-dozen protesters held a banner declaring that this was no time to celebrate and making a grim comparison between the numbers of dead Israeli children and the numbers of dead Palestinian children. Back east, a few days earlier, the Canadian Union of Postal Workers became the first national union in North America to pass a resolution supporting boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel.

The postal union voted to support divestment, sanctions and boycotts "until Israel recognizes the right of Palestinian people to self-determination and complies with international law, including the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes as stipulated in UN resolution 194," and promised an "education campaign about the apartheid nature of the state of Israel...."

The hypocrisy in CUPW's position should not come as a surprise. While demanding that Israel recognize Palestinian self-determination - something Israel has done since 1994 at the latest and arguably since 1947 - the resolution seeks to negate Jewish self-determination by demanding the "right" of Palestinians to "return to their homes." This "right of return" would result in the elimination of the world's only Jewish-majority state. This position – adopted by a major Canadian union ostensibly concerned for human rights and social justice – is not only a cynical attempt to destroy Jewish self-determination in ways that wars and terrorism have not been able, it is also a blind refusal to learn several lessons from history.

The number of Arabs dispossessed in the 1947-'49 conflict is about commensurate with the number of Jews dispossessed from Arab lands during that period and shortly after. Why don't justice-seeking groups like CUPW advocate for these refugees and their ever-growing number of descendants?

And why, when we know the fate of Jews living in every Arab- and Muslim-majority country, would we think that an Arab- and Muslim-majority Israel (which is what would evolve, recent clarifications about the "demographic time bomb" notwithstanding) would treat Jews any differently, particularly given the contentious nature of the past decades and the diet of anti-Israel propaganda to which most of the would-be Arab Israelis have been subjected?

It is precisely this nonchalance about the fate of millions of Jews that leads to accusations of anti-Semitism against the left. It may not be driven by the kind of anti-Semitism that we are familiar with, but it leads to the same place.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, Canadian letter carriers are groaning under ever-increasing heaps of mail being piled on by a Canada Post whose object, fairly enough, is profitable business practices. Ask your letter-carrier, How has your job changed in recent years? If they've been at it for a few years, they will tell you that the expectations placed on them by the corporation have become increasingly burdensome, with commensurate health implications for workers. If this is the first time you've heard of this attack on workers, ask yourself this, Why do we hear from CUPW on issues halfway around the world, but effectively nothing on the issues that actually affect their members?

Though it may appear that the polarization between pro- and anti-Israel positions is a left-right dichotomy, it is more accurate to say it is one of right and wrong. Morally and historically, the position taken by CUPW is an abrogation of the idea that both Jews and Arab Palestinians have a legitimate claim to self-determination, and is, therefore, morally inconsistent for a labor movement that claims the mantle of social justice.

More reprehensible by far though were the signs outside the Yom Ha'atzmaut celebration, whose not-so-subtle message was that the side with the most dead children wins the PR war. This is precisely the measuring stick the Palestinian leadership and terrorists have tried to make the world accept, creating a situation where every child killed in the conflict is a feather in the cap of the "cause." By validating this approach, Canadian protesters risk complicity in the use of human shields and child combatants.

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