Joogle

In recent years, the BDS (Boycott Divestment Sanctions) movement has positioned itself as a leading voice in a campaign to oppose what it characterizes as Israeli “oppression of Palestinians.”

While BDS organizers refer to their effort as “a vibrant global movement made up of unions, academic associations, churches and grassroots movements across the world,” beneath the surface, the real nature of the BDS movement is much more nefarious.

The BDS campaign makes claims such as that Israel is guilty of “occupying and colonising Palestinian land, discriminating against Palestinian citizens of Israel and denying Palestinian refugees the right to return to their homes.”

While these allegations are either false or highly misleading, the major flaw in the BDS movement is not merely that their criticisms of Israel are illegitimate, but that the BDS movement seeks to delegitimize Israel’s entire right to exist as a Jewish State, demonizes Israel’s very character, as well as applies double standards which it would not apply anywhere else.

These three actions on the part of BDS activists (Delegitimize, Demonize, Double Standards) are what famed human rights activist Natan Sharansky calls the “3D test,” to help separate legitimate criticism of Israel from overt antisemitism.

Delegitimization: According to the BDS movement and its leading activists, Israel has no right to exist. It was formed through “ethnic cleansing,” and exists only to “drive as many of the indigenous Palestinian population from the land as it can.”

It is therefore unsurprising that the BDS movement gives no airtime to the Jewish People’s three thousand years of history in the Land of Israel, their ancestral homeland, nor to the extensive legal rights that Israel possesses to the land.

In the words of As’ad Abu Khalil, a professor of political science at California State University, and a prominent member of the BDS movement, “here should not be any equivocation on the subject. Justice and freedom for the Palestinians are incompatible with the existence of the state of Israel.” Ahmed Moor, a pro-BDS author, has stated unequivocally that “BDS does mean the end of the Jewish state…Ending the occupation doesn’t mean anything if it doesn’t mean upending the Jewish state itself.”

Demonization: The BDS movement and its senior activists do more than critique Israeli government policy; they regularly describe the Jewish State in terms reminiscent of Nazi Germany, including accusations that Israel commits genocide against the Palestinians. The BDS movement, on its official website, claims Israel is based on “racist ideology of late 19th century European colonialism.” By redefining Zionism into a racist colonialist effort, BDS activists are completely erasing both ancient Jewish ties to Israel, but also to the true meaning of Zionism, ie the Jewish campaign for self-determination in their ancestral homeland.

Double Standards: While critiquing Israel is an entirely valid exercise, BDS activists regularly hold Israel to a standard which is rarely if ever applied to other countries, in particular other states in the Middle East.

For instance, during the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, held in Durban, South Africa, in September 2001, one of the most influential documents supported by BDS activists was created which called for “the imposition of mandatory and comprehensive sanctions and embargoes, the full cessation of all links” between the world and Israel. To demand complete global opposition to Israel – a liberal, democratic state which provides equal rights to all its citizens, regardless of race, religion or gender – while remaining silent on brutal dictatorships such as Iran and Saudi Arabia, is one of the most cogent examples of how the BDS movement is remarkably selective when it comes to delivering opprobrium.

While BDS activists claim their movement is a grassroots effort created out of a moral opposition to Israel’s alleged crimes, the truth could not be more different. The BDS campaign against Israel is little more than one of delegitimization and demonization, where Israel’s existence is denied, where three millennia of Jewish history is all but erased, and where the world’s only Jewish State is rewritten, not as a vibrant bastion of freedom, but as a murderous, apartheid-like regime hell-bent on carrying out ethnic cleansing and genocide.

The fabricated disinformation peddled by the BDS movement, despite its absurdity, has nevertheless continued to spread, on college and university campuses, to anti-Israel protests, and even into the halls of the United Nations.

It is therefore imperative that the BDS campaign against Israel be unmasked for what it is: an antisemitic effort aimed not at delivering justice for Palestinians, but at demonizing the world’s only Jewish State based on falsehoods.

Whenever a Palestinian terrorist attack is committed which leads to the murder of innocent Israeli civilians, which may or may not spur on an Israeli retaliation, news outlets frequently refer to a “cycle of violence” taking place between Israelis and Palestinians.

However, beyond this favourite trope of a constant tit-for-tat, the reality on the ground is far different.

Palestinians who commit terrorist attacks against Israelis, whether they are members of an established terrorist organization or are acting as independent “lone wolves,” receive significant encouragement and financial incentive from the Palestinian Authority (PA) leadership.

In addition to the widespread incitement against Israelis and Jews taking place in PA mosques, school textbooks and official media outlets, the Palestinian leadership also directly and unabashedly engages in a scheme which provides financial compensation to the families of those who murder Israelis.

Each year, the Palestinian Authority disburses roughly $400 million (CAD) in payments to Palestinian terrorists and their families, who have committed terror attacks against Israelis. The PA says that these monthly payments are made in order to provide a “dignified life” to those jailed by Israel or for those who were killed by Israeli forces, for their “participation in the struggle against the occupation.”

According to a report compiled by UN Watch, in 2020, the Palestinian Authority paid roughly $240 million (CAD) to jailed or released Palestinian terrorists, not including payments made to the families of so-called “martyrs,” meaning those who died in the process of carrying out a terrorist attack against Israel.

Lest there be any doubt that these payments constitute rewards for those who have committed terrorism against Israel, and are not simply subsidies for those financially struggling, the report points out that these monies are distinct from welfare payments made by the Palestinian Authority.

Palestinian terrorists who served at least one year in an Israeli jail are exempted from tuition fees at schools and universities, health insurance payments, and more.

These payments represent a significant percentage of the total Palestinian Authority budget, which in recent years has been approximately $6 billion dollars (CAD).

Despite ongoing economic challenges faced by Palestinians, the Palestinian Authority has made it clear that these payments are a top priority, instead of, for example, reducing poverty, creating jobs, and building necessary institutions for statehood.

Hussein Al-Sheikh, Secretary General of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Executive Committee, told a crowd gathered to commemorate Palestinian Martyr’s Day on January 7, 2023 that “Even if we have one penny left, it will be spent on the families of the martyrs and prisoners. They are our purest, most permanent, loftiest, and most precious jewel.”

These sums, dubbed “pay for slay,” represent more than just a grotesque expenditure by the Palestinian leadership. These payments reflect the true priority of the Palestinian Authority: to continue to perpetuate violence against Israelis, no matter the cost.

While Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas preaches peace to foreign audiences, his government has made it clear that terrorism against Israel takes precedence over improving the quality of life for his own people.

The Palestinian Authority’s budget does not only come from Palestinians, but from other countries and multinational groups, including the European Union, World Bank, Saudi Arabia, the United States, Japan, and others, meant to improve the living standards of Palestinians.

As Palestinians continue to suffer with 26% unemployment, their leadership continues to pour huge amounts of money into perpetuating violence against Israel, and directly incentivizing Palestinians into committing terrorist attacks against Israelis.

Despite the rhetoric of supporting peace with Israel, the actions of the Palestinian Authority speak louder than flowery talk.

As such, when an act of Palestinian terrorism is executed against Israeli civilians, and Israel responds, the news media is duty-bound to report not only on the gruesome violence perpetrated by Palestinians, but also on how the Palestinian Authority leadership actively encourages Palestinians to take up arms to kill and maim Israelis.

It is indisputable that these “pay for slay” expenses only perpetuate violence, and keep any prospect of peace between Israelis and Palestinians a distant dream rather than a realistic prospect. Any reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict must therefore give this proper context, which includes shining a light on these payments.

For years, world powers have attempted to negotiate a lasting nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) failed to stop Iran’s nuclear ambitions, nor did it thwart its malign activities locally and abroad.

After negotiators from the European Union (EU) in 2022 delivered a “final offer,” the Iranians presented a counter-offer, described by one US official as “not constructive,” adding that the Iranian response, rather than providing a good-faith reaction, shows that “we appear to be moving backwards.”

While the exact details of the 2022 Iranian response are not publicly known, this behaviour on the part of the Islamic Republic should come as a surprise to no one. After all, when it comes to Tehran’s interactions with the West, honesty and transparency has always taken a back seat to deception, duplicity and subterfuge.

In the aftermath of the 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Tehran wasted no time in violating key tenets of the agreement.

In 2016, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported that Iran had exceeded a key threshold governing heavy water, used in the cooling of nuclear reactors. Perhaps more importantly, under the terms of the JCPOA, Iran was obligated to divulge its past nuclear weapons research. But when then-Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu unveiled in 2018 tens of thousands of pages of documents and files secretly seized from a clandestine Iranian facility by Israel, he revealed that Iran had in fact hidden a great deal of its research on nuclear weapons.

Even under the weak terms of the 2015 agreement, which did not address Iran’s financial and logistical support for regional Islamist terrorism, or its development of ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles), Tehran was not satisfied.

Iran’s regime cheated even when it succeeded in achieving a sweetheart deal. It did so because for Iran’s leaders, the latest agreement with Western powers are never an end in themselves; they are just a means to squeeze more concessions and evade accountability.

For years, Iran has been the primary patron of its terror proxy Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based Shiite Islamist group which is in many ways the de facto government of southern Lebanon. More recently, Tehran has financed and armed the Houthis, a Yemen-based terrorist group, in their conflict with Saudi Arabia and Iran continues its stealthy military encroachment in Syria by placing Iranian missile and weapons production centres at Israel’s doorstep.

The recent attempted Iranian plot to assassinate former U.S. national security adviser John Bolton and the violent attack against writer Salman Rushdie, more than three decades after Ayatollah Khomeini placed a fatwa on his head calling for his murder, is a painful reminder that Iran’s leaders see no boundaries or borders with respect to propagating their extreme ideology.

It should be clear to any sanguine observer that Iran seeks to wrangle more concessions out of Western powers in an attempt to strengthen and solidify its regional power and hegemony in the Middle East, and not in a good-faith attempt to find common ground when it comes to its nuclear program.

Even now, during ongoing negotiations aimed at reviving the 2015 agreement, Iran’s President, Ebrahim Raisi, has made clear that he considers key IAEA inspections of Iranian nuclear sites to be a deal-breaker.

“Without resolving safeguards issues, talking about an agreement would be meaningless,” Raisi said at a news conference in Tehran on August 29, 2022.

At the same time, Iran continues its uranium enrichment programme by rolling out advanced IR-6 centrifuges as Natanz. Meanwhile, the IAEA says Iran has enough enriched uranium for two nuclear bombs and the chief of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization has said they have the technical capabilities to build a nuclear weapon.

A new nuclear deal between Iran and Western powers must address Iran’s state-sponsored support for terrorism and its ballistic missile development, in addition to dramatically strengthening nuclear enforcement and verification mechanisms, in order to serve any meaningful hope of curtailing Iran’s atomic appetite. To put it succinctly, instead of being shorter and weaker, the new deal must be longer and stronger.

Tragically, however, that does not appear to be in the cards. Conversely, a new deal at this stage lacking those elements and that reportedly enriches Iran with $100 billion dollars annually ($1 trillion in over a decade) in sanctions relief, would only strengthen groups like Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations who receive Iranian support and do its bidding.

This is why a bipartisan group of 50 US Members of Congress in 2022 sounded the alarm bell on the looming deal, and 5,000 Israeli security experts said that: “Based on our collective experience and assessment, we believe that this deal is catastrophic for American, Israeli and global peace and security for a broad range of reasons.”

This is precisely why Canada needs to speak out about the dangers of any weak nuclear deal with Iran, so that the Canadian public can understand not only the threat that the Iranian regime represents, but why this revived agreement does little to stop Tehran in its unyielding quest for regional dominance, nuclear weapons proliferation, and malevolent terrorist activities worldwide.

Often given a platform by the mainstream media, the biggest accusation leveled against Israel is that it’s an “illegal occupier of Palestinian land.”

Accordingly, when Israel fought a defensive war against annihilation by its Arab neighbours in 1967 – gaining control of a wide swath of land including Judea & Samaria (otherwise known today as the “West Bank”) – Israel was a colonizer that made an illegal land grab.

Often ignored, the basis for Israel’s legal rights to Judea and Samaria is the 1920 San Remo conference. At San Remo, the international community recognized the Jewish people’s 3,000-year historical connection to the lands of what became British Mandate Palestine whose territory was designated for the establishment of a Jewish national homeland. The Mandate for Palestine was a League of Nations mandate for British administration of the territories of Palestine and Transjordan, both of which had been conceded by the Ottoman Empire following the end of World War I in 1918.

International law defines a state’s borders as being determined by the borders of the political entity that existed beforehand. If Israel is said to be “occupying” land, who was it occupying it from? In Israel’s case, that would be the British Mandate, whose borders stretched from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River.

During Israel’s War of Independence in 1948 following the Partition Plan, it was immediately attacked by its neighbours, and Jordan ended up occupying Judea, Samaria and parts of Jerusalem, including the Old City, where it destroyed 58 synagogues. Jordan had a 19-year illegal occupation over this land which it unilaterally annexed, but never claimed sovereignty to from 1948 until 1967. Jordan held the land in trust only as custodians until a resolution could be procured.

Jordan never claimed to have legal title. Israel merely took back the land in the Six Day War, and in essence, reclaimed the land it was legally entitled to under the original Mandate for Palestine.

Many critics will say that according to the laws of occupation under the Geneva Convention, Jordan was still the last country to hold the land, so Israel is occupying Jordan’s land. But Jordan relinquished claims to Judea & Samaria under its 1994 peace treaty with Israel, which supersedes the Geneva Convention. Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention is limited to transfers or deportations into or out of occupied territories which are forcible, and no one, neither Israeli or Palestinian, have been deported or transferred forcibly to these areas. Furthermore, there’s no element of international law that can be used to prohibit the voluntary return of individuals to the towns and villages from which they or their ancestors had been previously evicted by forcible means.

What then about the claim that Israel “occupies” the Palestinian people?

International law states that peoples have the right to self-determination, but that is not necessarily the same thing as an independent state. In fact, Israel does grant Arab residents of Judea & Samaria self-determination. For example, Israel does not pass legislation that governs the lives of Palestinians – they are governed by the Palestinian Authority and Knesset-enacted laws don’t apply to them. As well, Palestinian-Arabs pay taxes to the Palestinian Authority which is their official self-government and representative on the international stage. While Israel’s military presence in the area ensures its safety, international law recognizes that the Palestinian-Arabs in fact do have self-determination already and that the only land Israel “occupies” is in fact its own.

Accordingly, these binding instruments of international law provide for the legitimacy for Israel’s presence in Judea and Samaria.

Israel is regularly accused of a host of crimes against the Palestinians, ranging from practicing an apartheid system, being a “settler-colonialist” state, committing mass atrocities, and more.

But tying these allegations together is one larger claim that fundamentally seeks to delegitimize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish nation-state, namely that the Jewish People have no legitimate claim to the land in question.

Denying the Jewish connection to the land of Israel remains at the core of the disinformation campaign targeting the country, but it relies on an almost wholesale rejection of three thousand years of Jewish history in the Middle East.

Jewish history begins with Abraham, considered to be the father of the Jewish People, and of the three major Abrahamic monotheistic faiths, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Roughly 3,900 years ago, he settled in what is today Israel.

Later, his descendants were forced to leave for Egypt due to a famine, where they lived for hundreds of years, eventually becoming slaves under the Pharaoh, widely considered to be Ramses II.

About 3,300 years ago, the Israelites left slavery in what has become known as the Exodus, settling back in the land of Canaan under the leadership of Joshua.

The Jews soon developed a civilization in the land where their ancestor Abraham had lived centuries before, and in the year 1020 BCE, Saul became the first King of Israel. The Israelites, who had been split into 12 familial tribes, each occupied a different part of the land.

Only a few years later, King David, the second King of Israel, continues the monarchy and designates Jerusalem as the capital of the kingdom.

The city was selected both for its strategic value as well as for its historic connection to the Israelites through their ancestor Abraham.

Forty years later, King David’s son, Solomon, builds the First Temple in Jerusalem as a replacement for the traveling tabernacle which the Israelites had used during their exodus from Egypt. The Temple served as the religious and spiritual, as well as the civic centre of Jewish life, both in Jerusalem and throughout the region.

But upon King Solomon’s death around 930 BCE, the Israelites split into two kingdoms, Israel and Judah. This separation lasted two centuries, until the Northern Kingdom of Israel was invaded and conquered by the neighbouring Assyrians. Home to 10 of the 12 tribes, the inhabitants of this kingdom were exiled and otherwise assimilated into the wider Assyrian population.

For its part, the remaining half of Judea, weakened, later was invaded by the powerful Babylonian Empire in the 6^th century BCE. The Babylonians, led by King Nebuchadnezzar II, destroyed the Jewish Temple and exiled the people, forcibly transferring them to Babylon.

For 70 years, the Israelites lived in exile, until the Babylonians were defeated by the Persian Empire, who allowed them to return to their ancestral homeland. They soon began construction on the Second Temple in Jerusalem.

Though the exact details of when the shift in name took place is unknown, it is during the period of the Babylonian exile that the Israelites began to become known as Jews after the land of Judah from which they had been taken.

Over the following centuries, the Jews continued to face invasion from powerful regional powers, including the Syrian-Greeks, and the Romans, who in the first century CE, conquered Judea, destroyed the Second Temple, and exiled a large number of Jews from their homeland.

Despite this cataclysmic defeat, Jewish history in the Land of Israel did not end. There remained a Jewish population in the land, and over time, a growing number of Jews began to return to their ancestral homeland.

Even during this Roman exile, Israel in general, and Jerusalem in particular, remained central to the Jewish collective psyche. The land was prominently featured in Jewish writings including the Hebrew Bible, and Jews around the world prayed in the direction of Jerusalem.

In the 19^th century, this return to Israel picked up steam with the rise of the contemporary Zionist movement, which, while non-religious, nonetheless recognized the ancient Jewish connections to Israel. The modern-day Zionist movement, founded by Theodor Herzl, laid the groundwork for the State of Israel.

While the Jewish presence in Israel has been far from a straight line, it has stretched back more than three thousand years, during periods of both peace and war. The Jewish connection to the Land of Israel is not an article of faith, but is one of demonstrated fact.

The IHRA definition, which was formally created in 2016 by dozens of countries, with the support of mainstream Jewish communities around the world, seeks to clarify what antisemitism is, so it can be effectively countered. It has been adopted by dozens of countries around the world, including Canada, as well as a number of provincial governments, including Ontario, Alberta, Manitoba, and New Brunswick.

In response, critics have attempted to portray the definition as a threat to free expression and an attempt to stifle legitimate criticism of Israel. Following the widespread adoption of the IHRA definition, there have been a flurry of commentaries and critiques of the definition, much of it based on a misunderstanding of what the adoption represents.

And while certainly reasonable minds may disagree on the best strategies to combat antisemitism, the first basis must be the truth.

The goal of the IHRA working definition is to clearly define antisemitism, to help authorities such as governments and police services, for instance, delineate the difference between Jew-hatred and criticism of Israel. This issue has become particularly acute in recent years as anti-Israel activists often claim their views are not necessarily antisemitic, but merely critical of Israel.

Thus, the IHRA definition is aimed, not at attacking critics of Israel, but at clarifying where criticism ends and anti-Jewish hate begins.

One common criticism of the IHRA definition is that it conflates legitimate criticism of Israel with antisemitism. Critics often cite one of the illustrative examples used by IHRA to demonstrate contemporary examples of antisemitism – that claiming the existence of Israel is a racist endeavour – and attempt to demonstrate that it seeks to clamp down on anti-Israel views.

However, this is absolutely not the case. As explicitly stated in the IHRA definition, “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.”

This clear and unambiguous statement, freely available on IHRA’s website – that criticism of Israel does not constitute antisemitism – nevertheless has not stopped critics from attacking the definition baselessly.

What the IHRA definition seeks to address is not criticism of Israel, but the delegitimization of the Jewish People’s right to exist, and enjoy self-determination in their historical and ancestral homeland. To deny that right goes far beyond any simple critique of the State of Israel; it is a denial of the collective rights of the Jewish People to determine their own future.

The IHRA definition, as it makes abundantly clear, does not seek to clamp down on criticism of Israel, even if it’s factually inaccurate.

Another common criticism of the IHRA definition is that by adopting it, governments are all but criminalizing pro-Palestinian activists, and opening the door up for them to be censored due to their views.

Such an accusation has no basis in what the IHRA definitions stands for, or seeks to achieve, and the definition’s growing acceptance, both in the international arena, and within Canada, demonstrates its mainstream bona fides.

The IHRA definition seeks to make clear that in contemporary times, much of antisemitism has found a way to masquerade itself as being anti-Zionist; in other words, by allowing Jews as individuals to have rights, but by denying the Jewish People as a collective entity the right those same rights that are provided to everyone else.

Despite attempts by critics to conflate the attempts to delegitimize the Jewish People’s collective rights with simple criticism of Israel, they remain very much two separate issues. And that is precisely why the IHRA definition is so critically important in helping to distinguish criticism from delegitimization.

According to Statistics Canada, Canadian Jews remain the country’s single largest target of religiously-motivated hate crimes, and as such, it is imperative that they – like all groups – define for themselves what constitutes hatred. The IHRA definition has achieved widespread acceptance among both governments and Jewish communities across Canada, and because it helps to clearly delineate between legitimate criticism of Israel and Jew-hatred, it will help authorities to better focus their energies on combatting antisemitism in society.

One of the most common claims made against Israel is that the country practices apartheid against the Palestinians. Groups like Human Rights Watch, among others, have accused the Jewish State of apartheid. In early 2022, Amnesty International, an organization which has shown a consistent anti-Israel obsession in recent years, joined the fray and released a report accusing Israel of apartheid.

But despite the claim of apartheid lobbed by such groups, there is no evidence to buttress the allegation that Israel is an apartheid state, and in fact, significant evidence demonstrating that Israel is the polar opposite of how its detractors depict it.

Under apartheid South Africa, interracial marriages were against the law, and Blacks were forced to live in specific neighbourhoods, were denied the right to vote, and suffered manifold abuses to their civil liberties.

Does this resemble Israel at all?

Israel is a liberal democracy of nearly 9.5 million people, of which roughly 2.5 million are Arabs (predominantly Muslim, Christian, and Druze). These 2.5 million Israeli Arabs enjoy full civil and democratic rights, including the right to vote and to be elected to political office. Israeli Arabs – who sometimes identify themselves as Palestinians – can live anywhere they want, hold any job they want, and travel freely through the country with just as many freedoms as their Jewish neighbours. In the eyes of Israeli law, all Israeli citizens regardless of religion or ethnicity are fully equal.

For many years, Arabs have been represented in Israel’s Knesset, or federal parliament, but in Israel’s 2021 election, Ra’am, an Arab Islamist political party led by Mansour Abbas, was elected to Israel’s coalition government. Such an event would have simply been inconceivable in apartheid South Africa. Blacks could not vote, could not hold political office, and certainly could not serve in the government itself.

The rights of Israeli Arabs are so comprehensive and protected, that to accuse Israel of Apartheid is simply misinformation.

In its report, Amnesty International also accused Israel of practicing Apartheid against Palestinians who live in the Gaza Strip, and under control of the Palestinian Authority (PA).

This allegation is also patently false, but for different reasons.

Palestinians who live in both Gaza and under the Palestinian Authority are not Israeli citizens, do not pay Israeli taxes, and are not beholden to Israeli civil law.

In 2005, Israel forcibly removed all its civilians and soldiers from Gaza, some of whom had lived there for generations, in an attempt at peace. The enclave is entirely disassociated with Israel, which neither occupies nor controls a square inch of the land.

In 2007, Hamas, the Islamist terrorist group, waged a civil war against its rival Fatah and seized control of Gaza. Therefore, not only is Israel not in control of Gaza, but a separate, independent Palestinian movement has full control over the roughly two million Palestinians who live there.

In the west bank, the large majority of Palestinians live under the control of the Palestinian Authority, the successor to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which was founded in 1964 by Yasser Arafat.

Israel has not legally annexed Judea & Samaria, and the Palestinians who live there live under the civil control of the PA, not Israel.

Furthermore, Israel has made repeated peace offers to the Palestinian Authority, most notably at Camp David in 2000, when Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered then-PA Chairman Yasser Arafat the entirety of the Gaza Strip, eastern Jerusalem, and virtually all of Judea & Samaria, as an independent Palestinian state. The offer was rejected in favour of a violent uprising, or intifada.

The last apartheid claim is that Israel’s system of checkpoints in Judea & Samaria effectively means that Palestinians do not enjoy unfettered freedom to travel.

However, these checkpoints are necessary security measures to prevent suicide bombers and other malicious actors from entering Israel, and murdering innocent civilians. Had the Palestinian leadership accepted Israel’s previous offer of peace, it would have meant an end to the conflict, and a likely end to the checkpoints.

As pointed out by Professor Eugene Kontorovich, an expert in International Law at George Mason University, it is the PA, not Israel, which is an active apartheid regime, “where it is impossible for Jews to live in its jurisdiction, and actively campaigns for the expulsion of all Jews from the West Bank.”

Amnesty International’s apartheid smear against Israel is agenda-driven misinformation, and should not be used to support the claim that Israel is an Apartheid state.

In recent escalations of Palestinian terrorism against Israel, including in the spring of 2023, as well as in May 2021, the violence originated with tensions in Jerusalem’s Old City, and on the Temple Mount specifically.

During these conflicts, Israel was falsely accused of attempting to harm Muslims who were praying inside Jerusalem’s Al Aqsa Mosque, a Muslim place of worship constructed in the year 1065. And while these specific allegations are false, due to the heightened sensitivity of the area, Palestinian terrorist groups like Hamas are often able to cynically use the religious significance of the mosque in Islam to promote violence against Israel.

However, in much of the news media coverage of violence in and around the Al Aqsa Mosque, news media outlets frequently fail to give proper historical context, referring to the area only in reference to it being a Muslim holy site. In reality, the Al Aqsa Mosque and its vicinity hold profound historical and religious significance for Jews as well.

The Al Aqsa Mosque is built atop the Temple Mount, an elevated platform spanning 37 acres in Jerusalem’s Old City. The Temple Mount refers to the two ancient Jewish temples which were destroyed in 586 BCE, by the Babylonian and Roman Empires, respectively, which previously existed on the platform.

In fact, today, the Western Wall, a symbol of the Jewish People’s historical connection to their ancestral homeland, is part of the ancient retaining wall for the Temple Mount.

The first temple, also known as Solomon’s Temple, was completed around the year 957 BCE, during the reign of Solomon, the king of Israel. It served as a central focus of both religious and much of civil life in ancient Israel.

In fact, the location of the temples were considered – and remain – the holiest place in the world for the Jewish People.

The first temple was destroyed by the Babylonian Empire and its leader, King Nebuchadnezzar II, during the conquest of Jerusalem in the 6^th century BCE. Following the conquest, many of the Jews in the land of Israel were forcibly brought to Babylonia as slaves.

Roughly 70 years later, after the Babylonian Empire was defeated by King Cyrus of the Persian Empire, the Jews were permitted to return to Jerusalem, where they built the second temple, in the same location as its predecessor.

The second temple was constructed by the returning Jews around the year 516 BCE, and it stood for nearly 600 years, until it was destroyed by the Roman Empire, which also massacred the Jewish population in the land of Israel.

That the Jewish temples stood on the Temple Mount is not a matter of religious belief, but of indisputable historical veracity.

Even millennia after the temples served the Jewish population in the land of Israel, archaeological evidence is regularly being unearthed providing irrefutable proof that Jewish temples stood at the site.

While the Temple Mount sits at the centre of the Jewish People’s history in the land of Israel, since the 1967 Six Day War, when Israel recaptured Jerusalem from illegal Jordanian occupation, the platform has been managed by the Jerusalem Waqf, a Jordanian Islamic organization.

Although Jerusalem and the entirety of the Temple Mount fall within Israel, since 1967, Israel has allowed the Waqf to manage the site’s religious nature. Accordingly, only Muslims are allowed to ascend the Temple Mount for prayer, and the entrance of non-Muslims is also strictly regulated.

This “status quo” by which relatively small numbers of Jews are allowed to ascend the Temple Mount, but where only Muslims are allowed to pray, has been a source of controversy in Israel for years, with opponents arguing that it weakens Israel’s control in its capital city.

Successive Israeli governments have maintained this “status quo,” insisting that removing it would inflame religious tensions across the Middle East and beyond.

Regardless of Israeli government policy, for nearly 3,000 years, the Temple Mount has been the centre of Jewish life in the land of Israel, both in Solomon’s temple, and later, the second temple. The existence of these buildings is beyond dispute.

Therefore, it is incumbent on any journalist or reporter covering Jerusalem or the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians to ensure that any coverage of Jerusalem’s Al Aqsa Mosque must also acknowledge the long and historically-verified central role that the Temple Mount has played for the Jewish People. Failing to provide this critical coverage would be akin to historical revisionism.

One of the most insidious ways that anti-Israel activists seek to delegitimize Israel’s right to exist is by denying the Jewish People’s historical connections to the land. And while some critics do claim that some Jews have no history whatsoever in Israel, others assert that while individual Jews may have presence in the Levant, the State of Israel, however, is a settler-colonialist enterprise which has no place in the Middle East.

This claim that the modern nation of Israel is little more than a colonialist state has not appeared in a vacuum; it has grown in popularity in recent years, coinciding with a wider focus on colonialism in the mainstream news media.

Anti-Israel activists often accuse Israel not just of being a colonialist state, but of being a settler-colonialist state.

As argued by the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, & Sanctions) movement’s official website, colonialism is “the practice of a foreign state or group of people exercising control over another country or area,” and Israel is allegedly guilty of this crime. But that’s not all. Israel is also allegedly a ‘settler’ state, which according to its detractors, means it seeks to “control land and resources and establish their own economy and system of governance.”

So how do these claims stand up to scrutiny?

Accusing Israel of being a settler-colonialist state, while undoubtedly politically expedient in the contemporary milieu, represents a wanton assault on three thousand years of Jewish history, and which purposefully ignores a number of key facts which separate truth from fiction.

According to the BDS movement, colonialism is “a foreign state or group of people exercising control over another country or area.”

But Israel is not a foreign state. For three thousand years, the Jewish People have had a continuous presence in the land of Israel. This indisputable fact is hardly in doubt; Israel is filled with extensive archaeological proof showing the millennia-old Jewish presence in the region.

While immigrants to pre-state Israel came from around the world, including Europe and across the Middle East, it is an inversion of history to suggest that they were foreign interlopers and colonialists. In fact, they were returning to the indigenous land of their ancestors.

Moreover, if Israel is a colonial outpost in the Middle East, it is unclear which foreign power Israel is representing in its alleged goal of conquest.

No foreign power forced Jews to settle in pre-state Israel. While the United Kingdom, as the power overseeing the British Mandate for Palestine, did support the reconstitution of a Jewish homeland in the land of Israel, it often sought to strangle the establishment of a Jewish nation-state. In a 1939 White Paper, the British government set out to severely limit Jewish immigration as well as the ability of Jews to purchase land.

As for the allegation that Israel is a settler-colonialist state, meaning that it is seeking to take land by force from its native inhabitants, this too is a falsehood.

Not only does this contention utterly omit thousands of years of Jewish history, it also rewrites the Zionist movement’s goals. The modern Zionist effort to resettle the land of Israel did not seek to impose its will on the Arab population in the region. Its goal was singular: to establish the State of Israel in the ancient Jewish lands. Prescribing a villainous agenda to the Zionist movement and attempting to tie it to European colonial powers is historical revisionism.

Perhaps the most perverse claim that Israel is a settler-colonialist state is not only that it is demonstrably false, but that it represents a total inversion of the truth.

Israel is not only not a settler-colonialist state, but it is the polar opposite. Israel, as the Jewish State, is not a foreign imposition on the Middle East, but a reconstituted homeland of a people in their ancestral homeland.

Scholars may debate the impact and significance of colonialism for years to come, but one thing is clear: Israel is the furthest thing from a colonial enterprise; in fact, it represents the collective achievement of an indigenous people rebuilding a nation-state in their historic homeland.

Accusing Israel of being a settler-colonialist state is not only false and defamatory, and indeed a reversal of the facts, but it is also an insult to the memory of those around the world who suffered at the hands of colonial powers, who often traveled halfway around the world to enslave locals and plunder their natural resources. To tarnish the Jewish founders of Israel with this brush is simply beyond the pale.

Every spring, coinciding with the anniversary of Israel’s independence in 1948, anti-Israel activists around the world mark “Nakba Day.” Nakba, the Arabic word for catastrophe, refers to the Jewish People’s independence as a calamitous event worthy of mourning.

On Nakba Day, the issue of Palestinian refugees is frequently raised, with advocates demanding that Israel open its doors to the millions of descendants of Arabs who left Israel in 1948, though many left not because of Israel, but at the behest of Arab leaders.

Recognition of Palestinian refugees is no longer a topic of fringe anti-Israel activists, in 2023, for the first time, the United Nations commemorated the “nakba.”

But not all Middle Eastern refugees are treated equally.

Around the time of Israel’s independence, another group of refugees, at least as large as the number of Palestinians who left Israel, were forced to leave their homes throughout the Middle East in what was undeniably one of the largest incidents of ethnic cleansing in the modern era.

These refugees, Jews living in countries such as Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and elsewhere, had been a part of these Middle Eastern countries for centuries or longer, and become an inexorable part of society. Tens of thousands of Jews lived in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, where they represented as much as a third of the population in the early 20^th century.

But generations of Jewish life throughout the region was coming to an end.

Outside of Israel, the Jewish population in the Middle East and North Africa in the 1940s faced a rapidly increasing amount of antisemitism, much of it government sanctioned and sponsored.

In 1941, Iraqi Jews suffered the Farhud, a two day pogrom where rioters murdered hundreds of innocent Iraqi Jews and injured a thousand more.

The Farhud was just one catalyst to the roughly 900,000 Jewish refugees who fled their homes across the Middle East throughout the 1940s.

In 1945, antisemitic violence swept the Egyptian cities of Cairo and Alexandria, where synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses were attacked and demonstrators chanted “death to the Jews.” Hundreds were injured and a number of Jews were murdered in the mayhem.

That same year, more than 100 Jews in Libya were murdered during a three-day outburst of violence against Jews, carried out by their Libyan neighbours, who also destroyed hundreds of homes belonging to Jews.

After Israel’s independence was proclaimed in May, 1948, antisemitic violence continued.

In early June, Moroccan rioters carried out two days of brutal violence against their Jewish neighbours, murdering dozens of them in an orgy of violence in the towns of Jerada and Oujda.

Although these seemingly disparate pogroms were carried out by individual rioters in multiple countries, sometimes separated by a few years, they had been incited to attack Jews due to antisemitic propaganda being spread throughout the region by influential leaders.

In 1947, an Arab delegate made a thinly veiled threat to Middle Eastern Jews, suggesting that should Israel gain independence from the United Kingdom, Jews across the region would face consequences, saying that “the lives of one million Jews in Muslim countries will be jeopardized by partition.”

Stephen Wise, president of the World Jewish Congress, wrote in 1948 that the situation facing Jews in the Middle East was dire, and that pogroms could spiral into much deadlier violence.

“Between 800,000 and a million Jews in the Middle East and North Africa, exclusive of Palestine, are in ‘the greatest danger of destruction’ at the hands of Moslems being incited to holy war over the Partition of Palestine … Acts of violence already perpetrated, together with those contemplated, being clearly aimed at the total destruction of the Jews, constitute genocide, which under the resolutions of the General Assembly is a crime against humanity,” Wise wrote in his letter to U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall, requesting that action be taken.

While an estimated two-thirds of the Jewish refugees throughout the Middle East settled in Israel, the rest found their way elsewhere in the world, including significant numbers who settled in Canada, namely Montreal.

When these refugees left the Middle East, they also were forced to leave behind their assets, estimated to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars, for which they never received any reparations.

Prior to Israel’s rebirth in 1948, nearly one million Jews lived in the Middle East. Most left in the 1940s and 1950s, and more continued to leave for decades following. Today, that number is perhaps 25,000. The almost total destruction of these Jewish communities, some of which, like Iraq’s, is more than 2,500 years old, remains a crime of significant proportions.

While many of these Jews who left for Israel undoubtedly did so for ideological reasons, many were forced out of their homes due to overt antisemitism and the threat of even more violence.