Canada's Israel lobby is cracking up over Palestinian statehood recognition
At an Aug. 6 webinar, pro-Israel advocates blamed PM Mark Carney's decision to recognize Palestinian statehood for the antisemitic vandalism of Victoria's oldest synagogue.
Canada’s pre-eminent pro-Israel lobbying group knows it’s losing the battle for public opinion and is increasingly unhinged, blaming any semblance of increased pro-Palestinian sentiment for all acts of antisemitism, both real and imagined.
That was my major takeaway from the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs’s (CIJA) Wednesday webinar to brief supporters on Prime Minister Mark Carney’s decision to conditionally recognize Palestinian statehood come September, alongside similar pledges from France and the U.K.
This state would be somewhat unique in the annals of history. It would be forbidden from having a military by outside powers, with elections conducted on a timeline scheduled by these powers who yield veto power over which parties can run in them.
But for CIJA—clearly accustomed to always getting its way—this is still a bridge too far.
CIJA is encouraging supporters of Israel—or what CIJA’s CEO refers to as “Jews and allies”—to flood the prime minister’s inbox with pre-written emails decrying his impending recognition of a “failed terrorist state.” It’s also encouraging supporters to call their MPs directly and set up meetings to pressure them to object to Carney’s decision.
The Israel lobbying group says statehood recognition contradicts Carney’s asinine statement in June that a Palestinian state must be “Zionist,” which is like saying the United States should have been forced to pledge loyalty to the British Crown before it secured independence.
At the outset of the Aug. 6 virtual event, CIJA CEO Noah Shack proclaimed that “even under the most generous interpretation, this policy shift is an empty symbolic gesture that advances neither Palestinian nor Israeli interests, and does nothing to alleviate the region's tragic humanitarian crisis or move the cause of peace forward.”
CIJA’s idea of alleviating the “tragic humanitarian crisis” in Gaza is to sue the federal government over its funding of the United Nations Reliefs and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees, which played a key role in aid distribution, because the Israeli government accused a dozen of the agency’s 13,000 employees in Gaza of participating in the Oct. 7 attacks with evidence nobody has seen.
Its idea of advancing “the cause of peace” appears to consist of adopting the most extreme positions of the Israeli government and demanding the Canadian government support them.
Ignoring Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s well-documented, repeated sabotaging of ceasefire negotiations, Shack claimed that Hamas pulled out of ceasefire negotiations because of Canada, the U.K. and France’s pseudo-statehood recognition.
“Hamas is now calling for an escalation in violence and intimidation in cities, capitals and public squares around the world, including here in Canada,” he claimed, in apparent reference to the organization’s call earlier that day for “marches and sit-ins” outside Israeli and American embassies.
Shack cited the horrible antisemitic vandalism of Victoria’s oldest synagogue as an example of the impact of Carney’s “premature and dangerous” decision to recognize Palestinian statehood—a baseless insinuation that was repeated later by his colleague, Alexandra Fallus.
The notion that Hamas is actively calling for “violence and intimidation” against Jews everywhere harkens to the fictitious “Day of Jihad” of October 13, 2023, which resulted directly in the murder of a six-year-old Palestinian-American child based on remarks former Hamas leader Khaled Mashal never made.
But what’s another dead Palestinian kid to CIJA?
The main attraction at the CIJA event was former Global Affairs Canada legal counsel Alan Kessel, who is now a senior fellow at the neoconservative Macdonald-Laurier Institute (MLI) think tank.
Kessel opened his remarks by referring to a video Hamas’s armed wing released on Aug. 1 of an emaciated Evyatar David, who was reportedly kidnapped from the Nova musical festival on Oct. 7, 2023, while feigning empathy for “innocent Palestinian civilians in Gaza who we also think about at this time as they are living under a very difficult situation with Hamas as their leadership.”
This stated compassion, even as an afterthought and with the caveat that Hamas is the only party to blame for Palestinian suffering, didn’t last long.
Half an hour later, Kessel was reverting to conspiracy theories about how the only people truly being starved in Gaza are Israeli hostages.
“We’ve seen pictures of starving children. Many of them we’ve been shown are not real,” he said.
“There may be a real hunger starting there, but even with the pictures of the Israeli hostages, we have seen the hands and the bodies of those handing them a cup of something to be incredibly well-fed.”
I suspect it’s rather difficult to tell how well-fed somebody is based on a picture of their arm alone, but this is the latest Israeli Foreign Ministry talking point, so Israel’s minions are going to repeat it as indisputable fact.
Kessel didn’t specify which images he believes to be fake.
Pro-Israel propagandists made a big fuss about a New York Times photo of a starving 18-month-old Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, arguing that it didn’t count because he suffered from pre-existing brain and muscular conditions.
The Times issued a clarification noting his pre-existing condition, which his physician confirmed, but that doesn’t change the reality that he’s suffering from severe malnutrition.
The usual suspects accused Time magazine of staging a cover photo depicting starving Palestinians waiting to receive aid, apparently based on a shot from another angle that showed the photographer.
The photo was, of course, entirely authentic, as evidenced by video of the aid distribution taken immediately afterwards.
German news outlet Deutsche Welle found a grand total of three AI-generated images depicting starving children in Gaza.
AI-generated imagery is no doubt going to be a problem for global news coverage for the foreseeable future, but using the existence of a handful of fake images to delegitimize hundreds, if not thousands, of real ones, in addition to the testimony of survivors and witnesses, is nothing short of depraved.
Kessel’s argument against Palestinian statehood was rooted in his understanding of the Montevideo Convention, which outlines four conditions for countries achieving statehood:
a permanent population;
a defined territory;
government;
capacity to enter into relations with other states.
“Does this entity that Canada wants to recognize and call a state of Palestine actually meet those criteria? The answer is no, or maybe it meets some of them,” said Kessel, “but it certainly doesn't meet the high threshold of recognizing a state.”
Kessel cited Taiwan, a nation whose foreign ministry has funded the think tank he works for, is an example of a state that would meet criteria under the Montevideo Convention, but that Canada won’t officially recognize it for “political reasons.”
Yet unlike the Palestinian state that Carney envisions, even without formal statehood, Taiwan has a standing army and nobody tells it which parties can or cannot run in its election.
“If you do look at what's going on in the territories and in Gaza, that does not demonstrate the criteria of a state that you'd want to recognize, certainly not as Canada,” Kessel said, citing the fact that Hamas is designated as a terrorist entity in Canada and the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority’s corruption.
But let’s take a closer look at the Montevideo criteria that Kessel cites.
Palestine undeniably has a permanent population, otherwise known as Palestinians. Contrary to the feverish dreams of the Israeli settler movement, it has an internationally recognized land base—Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. And Palestine already has varying degrees of relations with foreign states, including Canada.
The question of having a government is thornier, but not for the reasons the speaker suggested.
As Kessel tells it, using a clumsy analogy with Canadian federalism, Hamas won local elections in Gaza in 2005, which he likened to a provincial election, and then two years later launched a “coup” against the Fatah-led “federal government” in the West Bank.
He ignores that in between, Hamas won the 2006 legislative elections across Gaza and the West Bank on an anti-corruption platform before entering a unity government with Fatah later that year.
After three months of tenuous unity, in January 2007, Muhammad Dahlan of Fatah attempted to launch a U.S. backed coup against Hamas in Gaza, with arms shipments that were coordinated by Israel, according to an investigative report from journalist David Rose in Vanity Fair.
Hamas pre-empted Dahlan’s attempted coup and expelled Fatah from Gaza, leading to the situation today in which Hamas nominally governs Gaza and Fatah nominally governs the West Bank, both of which are illegally occupied by Israel, as per the International Court of Justice’s advisory July 2024 ruling.
It’s the height of cynicism for supporters of Israel to oppose recognition of a Palestinian state on the basis that there is no unified Palestinian government.
Kessel correctly conceded that Carney’s recognition of Palestine is “largely symbolic,” but at the same time he argued it’s a “reward for terror.”
The argument could also be made for Kosovo, which Canada had no problem recognizing in 2008, Algeria or Ireland, not to mention Israel, whose pre-state Haganah, Irgun and Stern Gang militias terrorized British soldiers and Palestinian civilians.
Instead, Kessel likened recognizing Palestine to pressuring Ukraine to recognize the Russian-backed breakaway republic of Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine before they “come to the table with Russia.”
This ignores the broad international consensus for a two-state solution, which is at least on paper supported by Canada’s government and every party in Parliament. What do opponents of statehood recognition think the second state should be? Israel 2?
Acknowledging that the vast majority of the world recognizes Palestine—Canada, France and the U.K. would make 150 countries—Kessel argued that statehood recognition would put Canada “out of step with one of our important allies, which is the United States.”
“Canada has enough to deal with without putting itself out of step with the U.S.,” he said, as if the major issue Canada is dealing with isn’t the U.S. administration’s explicit threats to its sovereignty.
According to a recent Angus Reid poll, almost two-thirds of Canadians support recognizing Palestine, even if it damages relations with the U.S., contrary to Kessel’s assertion that “Canadians don’t want to see” Palestinian statehood recognized.
But, most importantly to Kessel, recognizing a Palestinian state in name would damage Canada’s relationship with Israel, which he described as “extraordinarily good until now.”
For someone who’s critical of the Canadian government’s approach towards Israel, however, Kessel had no issue amplifying Canadian government disinformation on arms sales to Israel.
“We’re cutting off arms sales, not that we have arms sales,” he said, regurgitating the Liberal Party line that Canada both hasn’t sold arms to Israel since October 2023 and cut off arms sales to Israel (which don’t exist) in January 2024 (except for export permits that were approved previously).
As readers of this newsletter will know, both are outright lies.
A report released last week by a coalition of groups calling for an arms embargo on Israel details how Canada has continued shipping arms to Israel with export permits new and old, including hundreds of thousands of bullets and various components that are integral for the Israeli war machine.
Much was made of the fact that Hamas leaders have expressed gratitude towards Canada, France and the U.K. for recognizing Palestinian statehood.
Even though the conditions imposed explicitly preclude Hamas from being part of any Palestinian government, senior Hamas official Basem Naim has already relayed the group’s commitment “to step back from governance” at the end of ceasefire negotiations.
Hamas has also committed to disarming once Palestinian statehood is achieved.
Israel’s supporters are keen to point to Hamas’s blatantly antisemitic founding charter from 1988, but they’re less keen to acknowledge Israel’s Hamas’s updated 2017 manifesto, which draws an explicit distinction between Judaism and Zionism, and commits to a two-state solution.
“When terrorists are saying thank you, there's something wrong. If the Taliban had thanked us, there's something wrong. If ISIS had thanked us, there's something wrong,” said a cocksure Kessel.
After 9/11, which Kessel emphasized killed two dozen Canadians, Canada joined the U.S. and other NATO nations “and we bombed the living daylights out of al-Qaeda and the Taliban.”
“We affected regime change and we stayed there for 10 years, because 24 Canadians and the world [were] threatened by this terrorist group, which is no different in its ideology of caliphate creation than Hamas,” he said.
The notion that Hamas seeks to establish a global caliphate that operates under the strictest interpretation of Islamic law—like ISIS or al-Qaeda—simply has no basis in reality.
Hamas is a religiously conservative organization that has undoubtedly engaged in brutal acts (not unlike the Irish Republican Army), but its ambitions are strictly local.
As Tareq Baconi notes in his excellent book, Hamas Contained, the group never imposed a harsh interpretation of sharia law in Gaza after it drove Fatah out.
Aaron Zelin of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy—not exactly a think tank known for its pro-Palestinian sympathies—noted that ISIS “literally views Hamas as apostates.”
It’s probably worth noting in this context that the Israeli government is literally funding ISIS-affiliated militias in Gaza, and the al-Qaeda-linked president of Syria is entertaining normalizing relations with Israel.
Despite speaking at a webinar for a pro-Israel lobbying outfit, Kessel maintained that he is a totally objective observer, describing his approach to this issue is “facts before flags.”
“People say to me, ‘you’re getting your information from the Jerusalem Post and Times of Israel,’ and things like that,” he said. “I'm saying, no, no, no, I was there. I was on the ground.”
I was there. I was on the ground. Except he wasn’t.
Kessel listed some locations he visited—the site of the Nova rave, Kibbutz Nir Oz and the Gaza border town of Sderot. None of these places are in Gaza.
Bigger names in the pro-Israel-sphere, like Douglas Murray or John Spencer, get taken on guided tours of Gaza by the Israeli military, return home and repeat whatever their Israeli state handlers told them as the objective truth; they were there after all.
Never mind the humanitarian aid workers being blocked from delivering aid by Israeli forces or the dozens of doctors who have seen repeated sniper wounds in children’s heads and chests. CIJA and its fellow travellers want you to believe they’re all liars.
“This is not genocide. Defending yourself is not genocide. It’s war,” said Kessel. “The word has been kidnapped.”
When it comes to the question of genocide, you’re being asked to choose between trusting some of the world’s leading authorities on genocide, or an increasingly desperate lobbying outfit for the country accused of committing genocide and its flunkies.
I know whom I believe.
Jeremy has kindly, yet again, taken one for the team by having to listen for an extended time to these absolutely ghoulish, fanatical and increasingly unhinged genociders.
Feck, Jeremy, thanks a heap for doing the heavy lifting on this warmed-over hasbara. Didja happen to notice who else was at the webinar? CIJA are such control freaks that I wonder how many regional pro-ISR reps actually live outside the GTA or Montreal.