A Canadian comeback

Editorial

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s lonely position in support of Israel paid huge dividends this week. Taking his uncompromising stand against mindless anti-Israel demands to the G8 summit, Harper prevented consensus on a statement that would have repeated the global swarming that pins the blame on Israel for the lack of a negotiated peace.

Harper made an unprecedented stand on principle at the meeting of the Group of Eight, the club of major economic powers including Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States. He prevented a consensus statement that would have echoed recent American demands that negotiations begin from an assumption that final borders will largely reflect pre-1967 realities.

At least one Canadian commentator has suggested that Harper’s stand is a fundamental realignment of this country’s foreign policy position away from support for a two-state solution. This is certainly an overstatement. In fact, Harper’s position is probably more of an affirmation that one of the states in any two-state solution should be a Jewish one. As obvious and unnecessary as such an affirmation should seem, perhaps it is only Harper, of all the assembled leaders, who recognizes that this fundamental right of Israel to exist is very much a part of this discussion. As such, Harper is less the idealist and more the realist of the crowd assembled in Deauville, France, last week.

Harper’s position is all the more admirable for having required him to stand up to the pressures of our closest allies, especially U.S. President Barack Obama, whose demands that pre-1967 borders, with swaps, be a starting point for revived negotiations. The assertion that pre-1967 borders will form a rough guideline for any final status is merely stating the obvious, many commentators have said in the two weeks since Obama’s major address on the topic. True as this may be, to single out the one issue of borders as predetermined even before the parties are back at the table is presumptuous and unhelpful. More significantly, of all the issues Obama (and the global community of concern) could have prioritized, the simple right for Israel to be recognized as existing and with the right to continue to exist should be the first of any preconditions.

Yet, on the contrary, the “moderate” Fatah government of the West Bank is moving in precisely the opposite direction in its rapprochement with the nihilist Hamas, which controls Gaza. The fact that G8 members would demonstrate more concern about the precise position of borders than they do with the very existence of Israel exemplifies their misreading of the entire regional reality. Harper’s stand is all the more notable for its contrariness when he could have just gone along to get along.

On another Canadian front, a group of zealots has raised $300,000 to fund a Canadian boat in a planned June flotilla to break Israel’s security blockade. The exercise is a dangerous game, as the world saw when a similar effort a year ago attacked Israeli soldiers, resulting in the deaths of nine of the provocateurs. Addressing the plan for Canadians to join the flotilla, John Baird, Canada’s new foreign affairs minister, called for reason and compliance with international law.

“I strongly urge those wishing to deliver humanitarian goods to the Gaza Strip to do so through established channels,” Baird said in a statement issued Monday. “Unauthorized efforts to deliver aid are provocative and, ultimately, unhelpful to the people of Gaza.”

Baird also reiterated Canada’s commitment to Israel’s right to security, which is the purpose of the blockade of importations to Gaza.

The Harper-led government’s position as Israel’s most vocal ally in the world, while always welcome and deeply appreciated, had, up until now, seemed merely the moral support of a comparatively small power in the world of diplomacy. It had an air of fruitless do-gooding. But the G8 Summit shows how one voice of reason can influence events. Not to put more stock in the G8 than it deserves, Harper has prevented another one-sided statement of demands for Israeli concessions without parallel pressures on the other side.

As much as he would almost certainly recoil at the comparison, Harper may be leading Canada back to a lost era of respect on the global stage epitomized by Pierre Trudeau, whose contrarian positions often put him at odds with our closest allies. At the G8, Harper demonstrated the might a small power can wield. He has also put Canada back on the world map as a country that punches above its weight in the diplomatic realm. This was no small feat.

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