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May 8, 2009

Pursuing peace and justice

Irwin Cotler helps Beth Hamidrash mark 40th year.
CYNTHIA RAMSAY

It would have been hard to leave Beth Hamidrash's 40th anniversary dinner without feeling proud to be Canadian.

There was the celebration of the synagogue itself. There was the keynote address by the Hon. Irwin Cotler. There were regular updates on the Vancouver Canucks hockey game and there was the hot-off-the-press announcement that the anti-Israel motion put forward at the Mountain Equipment Co-op annual general meeting that night was defeated.

Despite the other events taking place April 30, more than 200 people came out to the Schara Tzedeck Synagogue for the dinner, which raised funds for and honored the only Sephardi centre west of Toronto. Emceed by Tsur Somerville, the evening featured several speakers.

"This year, we are celebrating 40 years of existence," said Beth Hamidrash Rabbi Ilan Acoca. "Forty years ago, the Sephardic minyan started; they started with the High Holidays.

"It was 40 years that the Jews were in the desert," he continued. "They toiled, they worked hard, they were challenged. It was not easy, but finally they got to their goal ... the Jewish land, the Holy Land. Our congregation toiled, worked hard, was challenged. We came out of our building for a couple of years, we went back to our building, a beautiful building, and ... being here tonight, standing proud and saying we are a beautiful, vibrant, amazing congregation.... And it's not just a synagogue, it's more than that. It's a place where people gather together for classes, for prayers, [it's] for all ages."

Beth Hamidrash president Brian Libin was representative of the synagogue's diverse membership, which includes people from many different origins: "I'm not Sephardic by heritage," he said. "I came to Beth Hamidrash about 18 years ago. I fell in love with Beth Hamidrash."

And event co-ordinator Yoram Kastiel set the stage for Cotler's speech. "I want to thank Canada," said Kastiel. "I'll tell you why. In the Bible, it says 38 times you should love the immigrant.... It says you should love the immigrant, the widow and the orphan, but first, we should love the immigrant, because this is the weakest part of the chain of society, because no one really cares about the immigrant.... So I want to thank Canada for being such a great place for immigrants." He continued, "I can pray loud, without fear. I can walk with my rabbi in the street with my yarmulke on my head and no problem. I'm happy about this and I'm very grateful. That's what I wanted to say."

Liberal members of Parliament Ujjal Dosanjh (Vancouver South) and Joyce Murray (Vancouver Quadra) were also in attendance and Dosanjh introduced Cotler, who he called, "the conscience of the Parliament of Canada and perhaps Canada."

Cotler downplayed the compliments, thanked his colleagues and praised Rabbi and Rebbetzin Acoca's leadership and focus on education. He also revealed that, not only is his wife, Ariela, of Sephardi (Iraqi) origin, but that she was "able to trace back my maternal grandmother's roots to discover that I, too, have a Sephardic origin." He said he always knew about his Ashkenazi roots, but not his Sephardi ones.

Cotler said that, when he saw the suggested topic for the evening's talk, Justice for All, "You don't know how much it resonated for me; the notion in the Talmud of justice for all and pursuing justice and peace." He said the one overriding lesson that his father taught him long before he understood its profundity, was "justice, justice, shall you pursue." His father told him, "This is equal to all the other commandments combined." As well, his father pointed out that the word tzedeck in Hebrew "requires three words in English, in terms of justice and charity and righteousness."

His father, said Cotler, was a "rodef tzedeck," someone who pursued justice, while his mother was a "rodef shalom," a pursuer of peace. "I have wonderful role models in terms of my two parents, zichronah livracha, of blessed memory."

In leading up to a discussion of what humanity has learned since the horrors of the Holocaust, Cotler referred to the Rwandan genocide and how it was preventable, and "that's what makes it so unspeakable. Nobody can say we did not know. We knew, but we did not act. Just as no one can say that we did not know what was happening in Darfur. We know, we knew, we did not act and we meet now on the sixth anniversary, it's shocking to say it, the sixth anniversary of the genocide by attrition in Darfur. Now, there's a crime whose name we should shudder to mention, [but which] is being repeated yet again in the 21st century and we are in the sixth anniversary of its continuation, which brings me, in that sense, to the next lesson, that of Holocaust remembrance, whose commemoration we just experienced, of things too terrible to be believed but not too terrible to have happened."

Cotler shared four lessons: "the danger of state-sanctioned incitement to genocide ... genocides have occurred not simply because of the machinery of death, but because of the teaching of contempt, because of the demonizing of the other"; "indifference and inaction in the face of incitement and in the face of the atrocities that followed, it is ... these conspiracies of silence, which took us down the road to genocide"; "the danger of a culture of impunity ... so must there not be any safe haven for these genocidaires"; and "the danger of the vulnerability of the powerless and the powerlessness of the vulnerable, one of the first victims when these atrocities begin, and so we must always remember that it is our responsibility to give voice to the voiceless as we empower the powerless."

He then moved into a discussion about the Israeli-Palestinian situation. He spoke about a woman who questioned him after a similar talk on justice that he gave in Quebec. When asked why he didn't mention the Palestinians' suffering in his examples of injustice, Cotler said he explained to the woman that, 60 years ago, the United Nations proposed a two-state, two-people solution to the conflict; the Jewish leadership at the time accepted the resolution, the Arab/Palestinian leadership did not.

"In my view," he said, "they had a right not to accept the resolution, they had a right to reject it.... What they didn't have a right to do was to then launch a war against the nascent Jewish state, which they spoke – it's not me attributing – which they spoke of as a war of extermination against Israel at the time. And what they didn't have a right to do was to then turn on their nationalists living in the Arab countries, disenfranchising them of their citizenship, dispossessing them of their property; detaining, imprisoning, torturing them.... As a result of these two acts of aggression ... two sets of refugees were created, Palestinian Arab refugees and Jewish refugees from Arab countries."

Cotler said he was sharing this story, "not only because I believe that the time has come to rectify this historical injustice, to return the plight of Jewish refugees from Arab countries to the peace and justice narrative from which it has been expunged and eclipsed these last 60 years and because these last 60 years have witnessed what I would call the dynamic of double rejectionism, which is the parallel of the double aggression at the time 60 years ago.

"And what do I mean by double rejection?" he continued. "That is where the Arab and Palestinian leadership were and are very often prepared to forgo the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state [if it comes with an] Israeli state in any borders. So that a tragic root cause remains 61 years later: the unwillingness of many in the Arab and Palestinian leadership to accept the legitimacy, as distinct from just existence, of a Jewish state, as distinct from a state called Israel, in the Middle East. And this leads to a narrative that is very skewered in terms of our understanding of the conflict; a narrative in which we have a selective narrative, in which we have a partial narrative, in which we have a prejudicial narrative."

To achieve a just and lasting peace, said Cotler, "We need to speak in terms of an inclusive, a shared and an authentic narrative.... When we speak of an independent Palestinian state, which we should, we must also speak about the legitimacy of a Jewish state. When we speak about Palestinian Arab refugees, we must also speak about Jewish refugees from Arab countries. When we speak of [Israeli] settlements, we also must speak of about their [Palestinian Arab] culture of incitement and the attending terror that takes place not only in Hamas, but ... within the Palestinian Authority itself.... A culture of incitement is not only prejudicial to Israel and the cause of peace, it's prejudicial to the Palestinian people and their right and their need for authentic self-determination and for an independent, democratic and rights-protecting Palestinian state."

Cotler, who attended the recent alternative Durban review conference in Geneva that ran parallel to Durban II, noted that the situation with Mountain Equipment Co-op, in which a motion to boycott Israeli products was brought forward at the AGM, was directly related to Durban I, "because the program to recommend boycotts, divestment, sanctions – that's known as BDS – with respect to Israel and the Jewish people grew out of Durban I that took place in August/September 2001."

He admitted that he had been excited about the first Durban conference, "but what happened at Durban I, and I was there, was something that I will never forget. In terms of the festival of hate, it still passes in front of my mind's eye as we meet. It's impacted itself on my consciousness forever."

In discussing the April conference, Cotler noted that Canada "was the first country to decide that it would not attend Durban II. And I want to say that this was a bipartisan decision ... this was not something on which we divided. This was something, and as we feel about Israel, it's a common cause. It's not the cause of a particular party because, as I've always said about the cause of Israel, I come to it not because it's a Jewish cause, but it's a just cause. And if it's a just cause, then it deserves the support of all Canadians and people of all parties."

Cotler acknowledged that seven other countries joined Canada in boycotting the conference and that there was "an incredible alternative Durban review conference organized by a coalition of human rights NGOs that I was pleased to be part of, and an incredible taking back of the narrative, an incredible taking back of the street."

He also noted that, "23 countries, to their credit, walked out when [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad began to speak," but "there is a larger lesson here, which has yet to be appreciated. And that larger lesson is that a man who incites like Ahmadinejad to hatred and genocide, that a man who defies United Nation Security Council resolutions regarding the prohibitions against developing enriched uranium on the way to becoming an atomic power, a man who massively represses the rights of his own citizens ... such a person does not deserve to be a guest and given a podium at the United Nations. Such a person belongs in the docket of the accused."

Cotler concluded: "A selective narrative leads to an inverted or false paradigm of the Middle East ... that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the source of all conflict in the Middle East, if not beyond, that the occupation is a source of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the apartheid state Israel is a source of the occupation – and it gets even worse, the apartheid Nazi state Israel is a source of all problems in the Middle East. And what do we do with apartheid Nazi states? We dismantle them. In other words, there's even an obligation to get rid of the state.

"We have to revert to the more authentic, tragically, the more authentic paradigm and that is that the source of the conflict is the manner of Islam as exemplified by Ahmadinejad, that the real apartheid is the global apartheid of Ahmadinejad's Iran that not only sees no place for any Jewish state in any borders, but indeed incites to genocide against that state and its people, and that leads, in one form or another, to exclusion, to oppression in its modest form of boycotts because of an inability to accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state in the Middle East."

This is why, said Cotler, he was so "delighted" to be at the closing rally at the alternative Durban review conference, where he witnessed not only Jews, but Rwandans, Darfurians and others supporting Israel.

Cotler stressed that there was great danger in remaining silent in the face of evil. He recalled once more the teachings of his parents, to pursue justice and peace. Ultimately, he said, "truth and justice will prevail."

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