Montreal, April 24, 2023 — Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) is calling on the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) to publicly denounce the provocative and anti-Palestinian remarks of their Israel Office Director, David M. Weinberg. As a frequent columnist in Israeli media, Mr. Weinberg has recently called on Israel to “retake control” of Al-Aqsa/Temple Mount, expel the family members of Palestinian “terrorists,” and compared the bombing of Gaza to “mowing your front lawn,” while likening Palestinians to “weeds” and “snakes.” CJPME insists that CIJA clarify that they reject and condemn their director’s extremist positions.

Montreal, February 27, 2023 — Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) demands that the Canadian government hold Israeli officials responsible for acts of settler terrorism in the Palestinian town of Huwara and several other villages near Nablus in the occupied West Bank. Over a period of five hours last evening, more than 400 Israeli settlers attacked Huwara, Zaatara, Burin, and Asira al-Qibliya, killing at least 1 Palestinian and wounding at least 390, while torching at least 75 homes (35 of which were destroyed completely) and 100 vehicles. At least 9 families reportedly had to be rescued from their burning homes. Although a public announcement for the pogrom was widely circulated hours in advance, Israeli forces allowed settlers to enter the town freely and did not intervene until hours after the start of the violence; eyewitnesses say that soldiers protected settlers and were a “partner” in the attacks. CJPME argues that action from Canada and the rest of the international community is necessary to protect Palestinians from future atrocities committed by Israeli settler and state forces.

Montreal, February 22, 2023 — Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) demands that the Canadian government condemn Israel’s deadly military invasion of Nablus today in the occupied West Bank, which reportedly killed at least 10 Palestinians and injured more than 100. Today’s attack comes less than one month after a similar attack in Jenin which killed 10 Palestinians, including at least three civilians. CJPME argues that international condemnation and sanctions are necessary to hold Israeli officials accountable for these actions, which may amount to war crimes, and to prevent Israel from committing further aggressive acts.

Montreal, January 30, 2023 — Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) is urging the Canadian government to strongly condemn Israel’s plans for collective punishment against Palestinians, following a week of heightened violence sparked by Israeli aggression. Israel’s far-right government is preparing to punitively target the family members of a Palestinian attacker who killed 7 Israelis in an East Jerusalem settlement, which took place one day after a deadly Israeli military raid on the Jenin refugee camp which killed at least 10 Palestinians. CJPME warns that Israel’s plan for collective punishment is prohibited under international law, and that such oppressive measures will only inflame further violence.

CJPME Factsheet No. 229, published August 2022: This factsheet explores the claim that Israel is committing apartheid against Palestinians. It looks at the main organizations which have accused Israel of apartheid, reviews the claims that Israel is a democracy, and provides a few examples of apartheid in Israel and in the occupied Palestinian territories.

In this position paper, CJPME outlines the problem of Canada's accelerating arms exports to Israel at a time when Israeli practices are increasingly recognized as amounting to apartheid.

Photo credit: Hersi Osman / Association of Palestinian Arab Canadians.

This analysis explores the problem of Canada's arms exports to Israel, given that the latter stands accused of significant human rights abuses and of maintaining a regime of apartheid against Palestinians. The analysis examines Canada’s exports of military goods to Israel, including the current values and historical trends, and the potential risk that these exports may contribute to a deteriorating situation for human rights and international law. This analysis also reveals that there is precedent in recent Canadian history for restricting sales to Israel over concerns about human rights and military aggression.

Issued April 13, 2022

A mere three days prior to Israel’s April 9, 2019 elections, incumbent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to annex Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank if given a fifth consecutive term. This position paper argues that Canada should leverage its relationship with Israel to uphold international law and human rights. 

CJPME Factsheet, published May, 2019. This factsheet discusses how the Israeli government intends to formally annex the illegal settlements within the West Bank and the implications of such an action. 

By Neil Macdonald, CBC, October 24, 2017 

The time has come to call the duck a duck. It's time to agree with a long list of Israeli political leaders, academics and public figures on both the political left and right, including three former prime ministers, a winner of the Israel prize, two former heads of the Israeli internal security service Shin Bet, and one of the country's principal newspapers, all of whom have warned that the Jewish state is becoming, or already is, an apartheid state.

I would choose the latter characterization.    

It's interesting that within the Israeli discourse, the assertion seems to have become routine, while it remains radioactive in the West, where energetic pro-Israel activists scrutinize the media, the academy and the polity, ready to declare anti-Semitism or incitement at any use of the word.

Look at the outrage and venom poured upon former President Jimmy Carter, under whose brokerage the peace accord between Israel and Egypt was signed, when he titled a 2006 book Palestine: Peace not Apartheid.

Suddenly, Carter was transformed from a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and statesman to a dotty old man under the sway of terrorists, at least in the eyes of Israel's supporters, including a significant fraction of his own cohort, Evangelical American Christians.

But reality is reality, and a duck is a duck. As the late Yossi Sarid, longtime leader of Israel's Meretz party and former education minister once put it: "What acts like apartheid, is run like apartheid and harasses like apartheid, is not a duck — it is apartheid."

This past June, former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak re-stated a position he's held for years: "If we keep controlling the whole area from the Mediterranean to the river Jordan where some 13 million people are living — eight million Israelis, five million Palestinians ... if only one entity reigned over this whole area, named Israel, it would become inevitably — that's the key word, inevitably – either non-Jewish or non-democratic." The country is, he repeated, "on a slippery slope" that ends in apartheid.

The dividing line between prominent Israelis who use the term in the here and now, rather than as a warning of what's coming, seems to be the continued existence of the "peace process," with its promise of a Palestinian state, and self-governance.

And when I was posted in Jerusalem for CBC News, back in the late '90s, that actually did seem like a possibility, if an unlikely one.

Since then, the peace process — always half-hearted — has utterly collapsed. Expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank continued, and since the election of Donald Trump, colonization has surged with an invigorated enthusiasm.

Their existence is in fact currently being celebrated in a series of appearances by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

"We are here to stay, forever," he declared two months ago in the settlement of Barkan, commemorating the 50th anniversary of Israel's occupation of the West Bank.

"There will be no more uprooting of settlements in the land of Israel." (The "Land of Israel," as opposed to the State of Israel, is a term used by the Israeli right to describe all the territory between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, and sometimes even further).

Ayelet Shaked and Naftali Bennett, respectively Israel's justice and education ministers, have said the Palestinians must understand they will never have a state. Defence Minister Avigdor Liberman, a settler, has said there is "no hope" of a mutually agreed upon Palestinian state, but has warned Naftali Bennett against promoting outright annexation:

"What Bennett and his Jewish Home party are proposing is a classical bi-national state," Liberman said two years ago. "They need to decide if they're talking about a bi-national state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean … or whether they're talking about an apartheid state."

Liberman's logic seems to be that as long as the Palestinians are simply occupied and governed by a different set of laws, with far fewer rights than Israelis (as opposed to denying them a state but giving them a vote in some expanded version of Israel, which the Israeli right considers national suicide), then it is not really apartheid.

But annexation at this point would merely amount to staging a home already sold.

In the past decade, Ze'ev Jabotinsky's "Iron Wall" doctrine has given rise to an actual wall, sometimes an iron one, running roughly along the 1967 borders of the West Bank and Gaza. The main roads from Jerusalem north to Ramallah and Nablus and south to Bethlehem and Hebron are now blocked by gigantic, fortified military barriers. The roughly three quarters of a million Jewish settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem have complete freedom of movement and their own set of roads, effectively forbidden to the disenfranchised Palestinian underclass.

Settlers suspected of crimes are entitled to full rights in Israeli courts; Palestinians endure military tribunals, indefinite imprisonment without charge ("administrative detention") and collective punishment. Settlers are entitled to carry arms and use them in self-defence; Palestinians are not. Settlers have property rights. Palestinians have property claims. Et cetera.

Netanyahu frames it all as a matter of national survival, warning that any land conceded will immediately be occupied by fundamentalist terrorists determined to destroy the State of Israel, with its nuclear weapons, tanks, fighter jets, layered missile defence systems and 600,000-plus active and reserve troops.

His definition of terrorism is a nuanced one; at an event a few years ago commemorating the 60th anniversary of the bombing of the King David Hotel by Irgun fighters, considered a terrorist act by the British government to this day, Netanyahu characterized the perpetrators as legitimate military fighters, and warned the outraged British government to watch its language.

But then, an elastic worldview is apparently necessary to maintain the status quo; when Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah party signed a formal reconciliation recently with the "terrorists" of Hamas, who rule Gaza, both Israel and the United States objected, saying such a union endangers, yes, the peace process. The fact that today's terrorists tend to become tomorrow's statesmen (the Irgun bombers later joined the nascent government of Israel, and former Irgun chief Menachem Begin became prime minister) is apparently irrelevant in this context.

At any rate, Ehud Barak's slippery slope is now in the rearview mirror. Yossi Sarid's duck has arrived. Let's accept that, drop the pretense, and move on.