This country should be a sanctuary from such conflicts, not another battleground
Fact: If the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict represents a crisis for Canadian society, then it’s not a crisis we are going to police our way out of. Many people insist that the daily protests we see outside synagogues, Jewish community centres and Jewish-owned businesses are transparently illegal. But we have admirably robust free-speech protections in this country, which extend well into the realm of offensiveness. And in any case, if police aren’t willing to deal with these protests as if they were illegal, then it’s rather a moot point.
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York Regional Police announced three arrests late last week after protesters loudly descended on the synagogue Beth Avraham Yoseph of Toronto, nominally on grounds that a real-estate event it was hosting offered property for sale in West Bank settlements. (The majority of communities mentioned in promotional materials for the Great Israeli Real Estate Event are not in such settlements, for the record.)
The people arrested were called Kevin Haas, Meier Gerichter and Ina Sandler. I make no warrants as to their behaviour, but presumably this is not the police action that aggrieved Israel supporters hoped to see.
Events since Oct. 7 have demonstrated that political pressure can lead to police action, for better or for worse. After pro-Palestinian protesters spent several weekends blocking a highway overpass leading into a prominently Jewish Toronto neighbourhood, the city’s police chief promised to start viewing such action through “a criminal lens” — as if we want police chiefs to start talking like sociology professors.
There were a few arrests. I’m intrigued to see how many of the charges ever even make as far as a plea bargain. I suspect it won’t be very many, and it could take years to get to that point in any event. That should disturb all free-speech believers: Procedural punishments for speaking one’s mind are just as chilling and pernicious in a free society as legal ones — maybe more so. A sentence, at least, you can appeal. The sclerosis of Canada’s justice system, you cannot.
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Ultimately I think all these appeals to law enforcement and government to solve the problems involved here are misguided. Like most western countries, Canada has enough passionate Jews and other democratic-minded people to make backing Israel a political and moral imperative. And it has enough passionate Palestinian supporters to make supporting Palestinians’ rights a political and moral imperative as well.
We can’t seriously expect the two sides to get along on the front lines of protest. We can, however — and we do — expect Jewish and pro-Israeli Canadians to get along with Muslim and pro-Palestinian Canadians in everyday life, and vice versa. Maintaining that is really the best we can hope for, and not many countries seem to be doing conspicuously better than we are on that front.
If I were in a Pollyanna state of mind, I might propose some rules we could perhaps all get behind. These rules would be grounded in the simple reality that Israel and Judaism simply aren’t quite like other countries and religions or ethnicities — on account of roughly two-thirds of Jews living in Europe having been murdered, in a few horrifying years, not very long ago at all, and then being given their ancestral homeland as a protection against further menace.
Those rules would also be grounded in the recognition that the Palestinians were treated shabbily, to say the least, after the war, and have suffered greatly in the intervening decades — not least thanks to their nominal leadership.
Rules for living in Canada might include: Don’t protest places of worship, even if they’re holding real-estate seminars you don’t like. Don’t protest religious or ethnic community centres and day-care facilities. Don’t harass businesses, even if their owners have strong opinions about things, and definitely not just because of the owners’ religion, ethnicity or country of origin. Avoid protesting in neighbourhoods where your presence will be seen as antagonistic or frightening, even if you think your presence shouldn’t be seen as such or your cause is righteous enough to justify it.
Basic respect for your fellow Canadians, in other words, offered in knowledge that there’s bugger-all Ottawa could do to alleviate the nightmare in Gaza even if it wanted to, and that it’s a blessing to be living here rather than there.
But at the end of the day, I’m only really talking to one side here, aren’t I? No one needs to tell pro-Israel Canadians to leave pro-Palestinian Canadians alone.
National Post
cselley@postmedia.com
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