It's one or the other

Editorial

"A true friend says what he thinks, and I've tried to say what I think," said Michael Ignatieff last week, after earning outrage from Canadians for accusing Israel of war crimes.

If Ignatieff wasn't plagiarizing directly from a comment made earlier this year by fellow Liberal leadership candidate Stephane Dion, he was at least singing from the same song book. Dion had used the same speaking-frankly-to-friends motif when criticizing Israel's defence against Hezbollah this summer.

But to speak frankly with friends, one needs to have a genuine and trust-imbued relationship as friends. In order to be taken seriously speaking as a friend, one has to have demonstrated friendship in the past. Canada, under the Liberals in recent years, mouthed certain platitudes recognizing Israel's right to exist, yada, yada, yada, but on the rare occasions when Canada's friendship would have actually meant anything – votes at the UN, for example, or when the entire world was dog-piling on Israel in successive diplomatic pogroms – Canada usually remained silent or, as in the annual reams of anti-Israel condemnations at the United Nations, supported Israel's enemies in whole or in part.

The Ignatieff incident may indicate an interesting evolution among Liberals. We may finally be seeing the Liberal party conclude what the Conservatives have rightly recognized. On the issue of Israel-Palestine, the one-sided, anti-Israel scapegoating perpetuated by most of the world's countries is inconsistent with Canadian values. As a democratic, pluralist country, Canada cannot stand anywhere but fully in support of a democratic, pluralistic state under attack by jihadist anti-democratic, anti-pluralist religious fanatics.

The Conservative party, now the government, realizes this. For a variety of ideological and expedient reasons to be discussed another time, the NDP has made the choice to stand with the jihadists. There were those in the Liberal party who thought you could sit on the fence between these two points and claim to hold a balanced position. But a balance between democratic pluralism and violent extremism is no balance at all. Dithering between these two positions is as morally reprehensible as siding with the jihadists.

Those who condemn Israel's defence against Hezbollah as "disproportionate" are too lacking in historical context to be able to recognize proportionality. Last summer's violence was not a war, though it has been called that, but rather a single, albeit crucial, battle in a war that began in 1947, if not before, against any Jewish presence in the region.

Since 1993, Yasser Arafat's position was to run a Western-style PR campaign convincing the West that Palestinians are committed to peace, while undermining peaceful resolution in order to provoke a final, Zionism-ending war in the region. (And Arafat was a "moderate.") Since 1993 at the latest, the Israeli position – the Zionist position – has been a negotiated settlement leading to two states living in peaceful co-existence. When violence has occurred, it has been between those who support a negotiated settlement leading to two states living in peaceful co-existence and those who do not.

Recognizing this has earned Stephen Harper the simplistic and unfair accusation that his principled position is simply Bush-lite. On the other side of the spectrum, the NDP opposes anything the Bush administration favors – including sensible policies like standing with a pluralist democracy under attack by totalitarians – and in so doing, has jumped off a ledge of fanaticism. The Liberals, in the middle, thought they could walk a line between these two positions. You can't.

Israel is the front line in the Western world's effort to hold back an onslaught of Islamist and other forms of terrorism. If Israel were to lose this battle, G-d forbid, the capitulation of Western civilization would soon follow. The Conservatives get it. The NDP never will. The moment of truth is upon the Liberal party. Will it recognize that the only place for a political party that cherishes human rights, social justice and multicultural democracy is to stand foursquare with the Israeli position of a peaceful negotiated two-state solution? Or will they try to find a middle ground that "balances" Israel's quest for a negotiated, just peace with the Islamist quest for a Jew-free Middle East?

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