Dark days for unions

Editorial

If it sometimes seems as though the ebb and flow of international discourse on Middle East peace is a swinging pendulum, it has swung back to the loopy side this week.

The Canadian Union of Public Employees' Ontario region, representing 200,000 unionized workers, voted to boycott Israel, comparing the only democracy in the Middle East to apartheid-era South Africa.

CUPE's B.C. branch has a history of purveying a perverted fairytale in the form of a propaganda brochure called The Wall Must Fall. About the same time, the United Kingdom's largest union of college teachers opted to boycott any Israeli academic who did not condemn their nation's policies. This disloyalty oath is a grotesque affront to the concept of academic freedom.

Say the worst about Israeli government policies toward the Palestinian people, there can be no logical justification for a Canadian trade union to side in so imbalanced a manner against Israel when the evidence of human rights violations in the Middle East suggests that the target of the left's outrage should be almost any other government in the area except Israel.

Israel's critics blindly refuse to even consider that their irrational, impetuous behavior could have even the most unconscious foundations in prejudice. That may be the best proof we have that that is exactly the case. The refusal to even entertain the suggestion – in a region where every single other political entity has a worse record of human rights violations against Arabs (and women and minorities) than Israel does – serves to prove our point.

The Canadian trade union movement's obsessive and irrational hatred of Israel puts the lie to the word and spirit of "solidarity forever." Jews and Zionists built the Canadian labor movement and stood side-by-side with our brothers and sisters decade after decade, through good times and bad, only to be not just abandoned by the movement, but rebranded as the root of all evil.

This is a permanent scar on the legitimacy of the Canadian Union of Public Employees. There will come a day when rational heads prevail and the trade unionists in Canada's future will be forced to address this dark chapter in the development of their movement, akin to the xenophobic, anti-immigrant policies that have occasionally reared their heads in the union movement. This is a dark, dark time for Canadian labor.

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