Not one to mince his words, in an interview with the United Church Observer in its February 2017 edition, Michael Bell, a contributor to the Globe and Mail, resorted to hyperbole and inflammatory rhetoric by saying that Israeli settlements “with over half a million nationalist Israelis in them — are a growing and cancerous obstacle.”

Would Mr. Bell prefer to remove what he sees as a growing and cancerous tumour, namely all of Israel’s settlements and ethnically cleanse over half a million Israelis who reside in areas of east Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria (west bank)?

Michael Bell (pictured) is the Paul Martin Senior Scholar in International Relations, and a director of the Jerusalem Old City Initiative in Windsor’s Department of Political Science. Bell is a former Canadian Ambassador to Jordan, Egypt and Israel. In 2014, Bell was appointed as one of 14 international affairs advisors who were part of a key foreign policy team to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Bell’s pejoratively describing Israeli settlements, and ultimately the 500,000 Israeli “settlers” who reside within them as “cancerous obstacle(s)” was inflammatory and beyond the pale.