User:WikiFouf/Canada—Israel relations (Sources)

Livres

+ Human Rights in Canadian Foreign Policy (1988)

EDITED BY ROBERT O. MATTHEWS AND CRANFORD PRATT

Ernie Regehr

• Direct Canadian military sales to the Third World currently account for less than one-half of one per cent of world arms sales to the Third World. These averaged about $150 million a year 1980-5 (compared with world-wide military sales to the Third World of $35-$50 billion). However, almost 80 per cent of Canadian military exports in the 1980s has gone to the United States; as about 10 per cent of us military production goes to the Third World, about 10 per cent of Canada's contribution to US production probably also reaches the Third World. Thus, in 1985, another $165 million in Canadian military exports also reached the Third World.
• Other indirect sales occur through export of Canadian engines and components to aircraft industries in countries such as Brazil, Israel, Italy, and Switzerland (which in turn re-export them as part of their military exports). Most of these engines leave Canada classified as civilian, due to size and weight, but are used in military aircraft, such as the Israeli short take-off and landing aircraft (the ARAVA) or patrol and trainer aircraft of the Brazilian manufacturer Embraer. These sales add about $20- $30 million to Canada's military sales each year. During the 1980s, therefore, combined direct and indirect military transfers from Canada to the Third World have averaged over $300 million a year, approaching 1 per cent of the annual world total.

The Diplomacy of Prudence: Canada and Israel, 1948-1958 (1996)

Zachariah Kay

American Jewish Year Book 1998 (1998 - Google)

Edited by David Singer

Harold M. Waller

• Canada-Israel relations suffered a severe setback in the wake of the Mossad’s abortive attempt to kill Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal in Amman in September 1997, when it was revealed that the agents carried forged Canadian passports. Canadian officials were furious over the matter and recalled Ambassador David Berger from Israel for consultations. Prime Minister Chrétien denounced the use of the passports as “completely unacceptable.” Eventually Israel apologized, promising not to use Canadian passports again, and Berger was allowed to return to his post. But the affair and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s apparent lack of contrition left residual anger in Canadian foreign policy and po- litical circles. Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy went to great lengths to emphasize that Canada had no role in the matter, despite some claims to the contrary by former ambassador to Israel Norman Spector, and stressed his view that the peace process should continue. While reiterating his government’s desire to maintain good relations with Israel, Axworthy also declined to rule out the possible imposition of sanctions on Israel. After things began to settle down, Ax- worthy visited Israel in mid-November and met with Foreign Minister David Levy and Netanyahu. He received a written guarantee that the security services would not use Canadian passports in the future.
• The Mashaal affair marred what had been a positive period in terms of bilat- eral relations, highlighted by the signing, ratification, and implementation of the Canada-Israel Free Trade Agreement, which took effect on January 1, 1997. The document was signed in an elaborate ceremony in Toronto on July 31, 1996, by Minister of International Trade Art Eggleton and Minister of Industry and Trade Natan Sharansky of Israel. The pact, Canada’s first with a country outside North America, is comprehensive and designed to bolster bilateral trade very quickly. It also includes the Palestinian Authority within its scope. Sharansky hailed the signing as “a historic occasion which further solidifies the long-standing rela- tionship” between the two countries. The ratification process in the two houses of Parliament produced some opposition, largely directed toward general Israeli policies rather than the deal itself, but the required bill passed handily.
• To follow up on the momentum produced by passage of the legislation, Eggleton led a trade mission to Israel in February 1997, accompanied by some 60 business executives representing 49 companies, the largest group of Canadian business leaders ever to visit. During the trip a bilateral research and development program was extended for three years. As a result of the free trade treaty, trade between the two countries grew at a rapid pace, increasing by 38 percent during the first eight months of 1997, compared to the same period in 1996. Canadian exports to Israel were particularly strong, vindicating the Canadian government’s determination to have such a treaty.
• Israel was also involved in enhancing its relations with Quebec. During the April 1997 visit to Israel of Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Sylvain Simard, he and Education and Culture Minister Zevulun Hammer signed an agreement of cooperation in the fields of education, culture, and science.
• Canada’s general foreign policy orientation toward the Middle East came under scrutiny in 1996 and 1997. Axworthy expressed concern during the fall of 1996 that the peace process had lost momentum after the election of Netanyahu and advocated an interventionist posture for Canada, saying that “somehow we've got to get things back on track.” However, Canada’s orientation was called into question by the Foundation for Middle East Studies, which analyzed 21 United Nations General Assembly resolutions dealing with the Middle East that were passed in 1996 and generally opposed by Israel. Research Director David Goldberg pointed out that Canada voted in favor of 15 of the resolutions, abstained on five, and was on the same side as Israel on one (supporting the peace process). The other 20 resolutions were hostile to Israel’s positions on a number of key issues, including Palestinian self-determination, Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, the UN committee on the Palestinians, Israeli settlements in the territories, nuclear weapons, and refugees. The pattern continued in March and July 1997 votes on resolutions regarding construction at Har Homah in Jerusalem, which Canada also supported. In a separate move, after a bombing in Jerusalem in July 1997, Axworthy wrote directly to Palestinian Authority (PA) chairman Yasir Arafat, asking him to act more forcefully against terrorism.
• Jewish leaders delivered their own message on terrorism directly to Axworthy in a meeting in September 1997 at which B’nai Brith Canada (BBC), the Canada- Israel Committee (CIC), the Canadian Zionist Federation (CZF), and the Cana- dian Jewish Congress (CJC) were represented. They urged him to be more active on the terrorism issue and criticized Canada’s UN voting record, claiming that there was “too much emphasis” on Israel at the world body and not enough on the failure of the PA to fulfill its obligations.
• Norman Spector made several public comments that created a stir. The former ambassador to Israel charged in an August 1996 column in the Toronto Globe and Mail that there was “political” opposition to the Free Trade Agreement in the Department of Foreign Affairs. However, he praised the prime minister for not being swayed by advice from such sources. “Mr. Chrétien’s demonstration of independence upset, but did not vanquish the Arabists,” who had not “given up on trying to derail the agreement. . . .” He provided no specific names, but his re- marks caused a furor within the department. Ultimately, Minister Axworthy de- fended his colleagues in a letter, rejecting the suggestion that there was an anti- Israel bias. Spector then produced another column escalating the attack by charging that Arabists had urged Jews in the department to make their careers elsewhere. That produced outraged statements and letters from former officials, such as Erik Wang, director-general of the Middle East Branch, who accused Spector of “an irresponsible slur.” However, some backing for Spector was found in comments reported in the Canadian Jewish News by Richard Cleroux. He cited career foreign-service officer Aharon Mayne, who claimed that there was dis- crimination against “visible” Jews. “When it comes to the treatment of visible Jews around here, none is still too many,” asserted Mayne, who charged that the de- partment did not post Jews to Israel, even though people born in other countries could be posted to those countries. Spector kept up the pressure by renewing his charges in a February 1997 speech at a Toronto synagogue. He added that Canada’s input on the Middle East was both “relatively ineffectual” and “coun- terproductive,” and that Foreign Affairs bureaucrats displayed a “systematic bias” in favor of Arab positions. The opposition to Israel, according to Spector, was “strong, evident, consistent, and sustained.”
• Another sensitive issue involved refugee claimants from Israel. Any recognition by Canada that a purported refugee had reason to flee from Israel raised hackles in that country and among Israel’s supporters in Canada. As a result of sustained pressure on the issue, only 92 refugees from Israel were accepted in 1996, the lowest total since 1990. Most were from the former Soviet Union. Eighty of them were admitted in Montreal, where officials were more sympathetic. The ac- ceptance rate dropped from about 50 percent in 1994 to 7.5 percent in 1996. Chen Ivry, speaking for the Israeli embassy, expressed his dismay at Canada’s accep- tance of refugees from Israel.
• David Sultan, Israel’s ambassador to Canada, assumed his duties in 1996, succeeding Yitzhak Shelef.

+ Pragmatic Idealism: Canadian Foreign Policy (1998)

Costas Melakopides

• The United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF), created after the Suez crisis, was a force of over five thousand men. In 1958, the Canadian contingent had reached about one thousand. The commander of UNEF, which was deployed between Israelis and Egyptians, was the Canadian, General E.L.M. Burns. In addition, Canadian officers were serving with the United Nations Truce Supervisory Organization (UNTSO), an observer group created in the late 1940s to supervise the armistice agreements between Israel and its Arab neighbours, Syria and Jordan. Canadian Lieutenant-Colonel G.A. Flint was killed by a sniper in May 1958 while serving with UNTSO.21

[...]

• From 1984 to 1987 the Conservatives inherited the peacekeeping engagements of the Trudeau era. These comprised Canada's participation in the UN Truce Supervisory Organization Palestine (UNTSO), which had began in 1954; the UN Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus (UNFICYP), in existence since 1964; and the UN Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF), created in June 1974 to supervise the ceasefire between Israel and Syria.

[...]

• It should be noted that Canada has also participated in non-UN peacekeeping missions. The most important recent one is Multinational Force and Observers (MFO), created to monitor the implementation of the 1974 Camp David Accord between Israel and Egypt. Canada joined the MFO in 1986, at times with 140 personnel.

+ Striking First: Preemptive and Preventive Attack in U.S. National Security Policy (2006 - Google)

• The loss of the Mossad’s Amman station following the attack seriously undermined Israel's intelligence-gathering against both regional terrorist groups and states such as Iran, Iraq, and Syria. The station had been in place since 1994, when a peace treaty was signed between the two countries and an Israeli embassy opened in Jordan. The treaty included security accords and Israel and Jordan had developed a strong working relationship in that sphere. Following the attack on Mishal, however, King Hussein ordered all Mossad personnel out of Jordan and cut off security cooperation with Israel, despite the fact that regional Islamists posed as large a threat to his monarchy as they did to Israel.
• Israel's ties with Canada were damaged by the incident as well. Canada recalled its ambassador to Israel over the Mossad team’s use of Canadian passports in the strike against Mishal. Following the discovery that Canadian passports had been used in a failed 1973 Mossad operation, Canada had redesigned its passports and extracted an Israeli agreement not to use Canadian travel documents in the future.” The strike on Mishal revealed that Israel had violated that agreement, compounding the damage to Israeli-Canadian relations. When a second agreement was negotiated between the two countries in the wake of the 1997 incident, some Canadian decisionmakers cited the earlier violation in questioning the new agreement's value.
• Domestically, opposition leaders and segments of the press called for the resignation of the Prime Minister and the Mossad chief.® The latter did resign after a commission appointed by Netanyahu to study the failure laid most of the blame for the failure on him. The prestige of Israel’s foreign intelligence service, widely believed to be the most capable in the region, also suffered following the failed attack, as regional Islamists were able to turn the failed attempt on Mishal into significant political capital.
• The planned attack on Mishal thus appears to have been a strategic as well as an operational failure. The damage to Israel’s relations with its most important Arab ally seems to have outweighed any benefits Israel might have reasonably expected to gain by killing Mishal. The failed strike cost Israel not only significant counterterrorism coop- eration against groups such as Hamas, but also a key intelligence post against threatening enemies such as Iran, Iraq, and Syria. It under mined the Israeli publics confidence in its government and undermined the Mossad’s deterrent power throughout the region. These significant costs could have been foreseen, and risking them seems ill-conceived in exchange for the vague and relatively insignificant potential benefits of the attack.
• Note 33: In 1973, Mossad operatives traveling on Canadian passports were caught after killing a North African waiter in Lillehammer, Norway, having mistaken him for the chief of operations of Black September, the Palestinian group suspected of carrying out the attack on Israel’s athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

+ The Politics of Canadian Foreign Policy, 4th edition (2015)

• Canada’s original duality has been overlaid by the consequences of an expanded pool of immigrants that has resulted in a much more diverse population. Many recent immigrants, no less than the newly arrived English in the nineteenth century, have been prone to define their foreign policy interests in terms of ethnicity. These interests are diverse. More often than not, these groups are most concerned with the maintenance of good relations between their adopted nation and their original homeland, seeking such functional goals as the negotiation of trade agreements or direct flights between Canada and their countries.
• But often the interests are overtly political. For example, one of the prime objectives of the Canada-Israel Committee, an umbrella group established by the Canadian Jewish Congress, B’nai B’rith and the Canadian Zionist Federation, is to achieve a sympathetic “tilt” in Canada’s policies toward Israel and the conflict in the Middle East. Groups such as the Canadian Islamic Congress, the Canadian Arab Federation, and the Arab Palestine Association seek to achieve a rather different end. In this, Canada becomes what David Taras and David Goldberg called a “domestic battleground”15 in which the positions of protagonists in the Middle East are reproduced and replayed—albeit without the lethal violence—in Canada, not only against each other, but often involving the state.

[...]

• But some external occurrences will be entirely unforeseen: an invasion of one country by another, an assassination of a foreign leader, a massacre, a terrorist attack, the collapse of a major financial institution, the outbreak of a riot that can lead to repression or revolution—such events will thrust themselves rudely and unexpectedly onto a government’s agenda. Thus, when he came to power in February 2006, Stephen Harper was not seeking thorny foreign policy issues to deal with. But there was no way he could avoid the issues immediately thrust onto his agenda: the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, the election of Hamas, and the Israeli bombing of Lebanon.

[...]

• When Chrétien’s successor, Paul Martin, published his foreign policy vision in April 2005, it reflected the essential principles of liberal internationalism.114 The International Policy Statement bore the clear imprint of Jennifer Welsh, a Canadian academic at Oxford University, who had articulated an internationalist vision for Canada in 2004, and who had been engaged by Martin to assist with the articulation of his foreign policy vision.115 The Martin government’s endorsement of the “responsibility to protect,” its refusal to participate in the Ballistic Missile Defense program, and its promotion of new international institutions such as the G-20 confirmed the continuing impact of internationalism. At the same time, however, some of the policies embraced by Martin foreshadowed those of the Harper Conservative government that took power in February 2006, including an increase in the defence budget, greater attention given to Arctic sovereignty, and a more favourable policy towards Israel.

[...]

• The embrace of a vision of the world divided between good and evil leads logically to a tendency to divide the world into friends and enemies. Indeed, Baird often related how when he was a young staffer in the office of Perrin Beatty, who was foreign minister in the short-lived Kim Campbell government in 1993, a Foreign Affairs official briefing Beatty recommended that Canada not take a position on Hezbollah rocket attacks on Israeli civilians, on the grounds that “it’s not that easy to tell the black hats from the white hats.” Baird recounted how he drew a black hat and a white hat on a piece of paper, put Israel under the white hat and Hezbollah under the black, and then listed the key attributes of both: Israel was “democratic” and “our friend” and Hezbollah was “centre of global terrorism” and “our enemy.” Baird told the official that it was possible to tell the white hats from the black hats, “and I certainly know who I support.”
• As Harper liked to assert, always with great pride, the big difference between him and his predecessors was that “We know where our interests lie and who our friends are. And we take strong, principled positions in our dealings with other nations—whether popular or not… And that is what the world can count on from Canada!” [...] Given this vision of the world, it is not surprising that the Harper government did not hesitate to take firm and not particularly nuanced positions in world affairs in favour of those “white hats” whom it considered friends. This was most notable in the case of Israel. The Conservative government strongly supported Israel, with Harper declaring in May 2008 that “Our government believes that those who threaten Israel also threaten Canada, because, as the last war showed, hate-fuelled bigotry against some is ultimately a threat to us all, and must be resisted wherever it may lurk.… In this on-going battle, Canada stands firmly side-by-side with the State of Israel, our friend and ally in the democratic family of nations.” This symbolism reached new heights in February 2010 when Peter Kent, a junior minister of state for foreign affairs, claimed that “an attack on Israel would be considered an attack on Canada”—an extraordinary statement given that there was no alliance between the two countries. The commitment was repeated in January 2014, when, in his speech to the Knesset, Harper echoed a Rosh Hashanah prayer: “Through fire and water, Canada will stand with you.”
• The Harper government resolutely criticized and punished those it considered “black hats.” After Hamas won the Palestinian Legislative Council elections in 2006, the newly elected Conservative government limited contacts with the Palestinian Authority and imposed sanctions. Likewise, Canada consistently moved to thwart Palestinian attempts to secure upgraded status at the UN.

[...]

• After Mulroney was elected leader of the Progressive Conservatives in 1983, he set out to “refurbish” the relationship with the United States that had steadily deteriorated since the Liberals returned to office in 1980. As opposition leader in 1983–84, Mulroney adopted a simple pro-American, anti-Soviet posture. For example, while Trudeau characterized the shootdown of Korean Air Lines flight 007 in September 1983 by Soviet fighters as an accident, Mulroney called it an act of cold-blooded murder. When the United States invaded Grenada in October 1983, the Conservatives distanced themselves from the Trudeau government’s criticism of the invasion. In his public speeches, Mulroney started to articulate the themes that would dominate the 1984 election campaign: Canada under a Conservative government would be a “better ally, a super ally” of what Mulroney claimed were the country’s “four traditional allies”—the United States, Britain, France, and Israel. (Canada in fact does not have an alliance with Israel; Israel was simply added to the list in a crass attempt to woo Jewish voters.) A Conservative government, Mulroney promised, would stop being so critical of United States policy and would give Washington the benefit of the doubt. Canada under the Conservatives would also spend more on defence. Finally, he promised to take a firmer line with the Soviet Union.

[...]

• At the Bucharest summit in 2006, for example, Egypt proposed a resolution on the war in Lebanon that expressed sympathy for the “tragedy” of Lebanese victims of Israeli bombing, and called for a “total suspension of hostilities.” While a majority of the summit members, particularly France, supported Egypt, Stephen Harper, backed by Switzerland, strongly reacted against this resolution, because it did not recognize the existence of civilian victims on the Israeli side. Jean Charest, the Québec premier, whose position was closer to that of France, played an intermediary role by proposing a suspension of the debate when the tone got too heated. Jacques Chirac, the president of France, was furious. At a press conference, he revealed the dynamics of the meeting: “Honnêtement, il y avait une très très très grande majorité, qui y était favorable. Le Canada y était hostile.”33

[...]

• Such a rudimentary division of labour meant that generally the dossiers covered by the prime minister and the external affairs minister did not come into close contact. There were occasions when Mulroney and Clark openly disagreed. For example, in March 1988, Mulroney explicitly disavowed Clark’s criticism of Israel over its human rights violations.

[...]

• Harper’s “lightning bolt” in 2006 was an example of the Conservative government’s so-called “principled foreign policy,”80 discussed in Chapter 5. This policy was marked by dividing the world into “black hats” and “white hats,” and loudly condemning and punishing the “black hats” such as Belarus (and others, such as Hamas, Iran, North Korea, the Russian Federation, and Sri Lanka), and offering unstinting support for the “white hats” (such as Israel).

[...]

• During the first intifada uprising in the territories occupied by Israel after 1987, a small pro-Arab group emerged in the Progressive Conservative caucus to oppose the more pro-Israeli perspective of Prime Minister Mulroney.36 However, it is necessary to keep in mind that these exceptions confirm the rule: On the implementation of foreign policy, MPs have little say.

+ Justin Trudeau and Canadian Foreign Policy (2018)

Editors: Norman Hillmer and Philippe Lagassé

Jerome Klassen and Yves Engler

• Given this context, how has Trudeau engaged with the current global disorder, particularly in the Middle East and Eastern Europe? To begin, in the Middle East, the Trudeau government has largely maintained the prior government’s pro-Saudi and pro-Israel policies. [...]
• The Trudeau government continued to isolate Canada from world opinion on Palestinian rights. Canada voted against numerous UN resolutions, supported by almost the entire world, upholding Palestinian rights. In November 2016, for instance, Ottawa joined Israel, the United States, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and Palau in opposing a motion titled “Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem and the occupied Syrian Golan.” 97 In all, 156 countries voted in favour of the motion, while six abstained. 98 In spring 2016, Dion criticized the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) for defending Palestinian rights and the UN Human Rights Council for appointing University of Western Ontario law professor Michael Lynk as “Special Rapporteur on Palestine.”99 In May 2017, Trudeau linked the fighting of anti-Semitism to those opposed to political Zionism, Israel’s state ideology. 100

97 United Nations. 2016. Draft resolutions on Palestine refugees, Israeli practices in occupied Arab lands among 12 approved as Fourth Committee concludes its work. United Nations, November 8. http://www.un.org/press/en/2016/gaspd628.doc.htm. Accessed 2 July 2017.

98 Ibid

99 Engler, Yves. 2016. Canada isolating itself from world opinion on Palestinian rights. Huffington Post (Canada), November 23. http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/yves-engler/justin-trudeau-palestine_b_13147828. html. Accessed 2 July 2017.

100 Trudeau, Justin. 2017. Statement by the Prime Minister of Canada on Israel Independence Day. Prime Minister’s Office, May 2. http://pm.gc.ca/eng/news/2017/05/02/statement-prime-minister-canada-israelindependence-day. Accessed 2 July 2017.

+ Israeli Foreign Policy: A People Shall Not Dwell Alone (2020 - Muse)

• In any event, Washington eventually began exerting diplomatic pressure on Israel. On December 9 of that year, US Secretary of State Christian Archibald Herter expressed to the Israeli ambassador, Avraham Harman, the grave concern of the United States regarding Israel’s nuclear activities and its attempts to conceal them from the Americans. The evidently unprepared Israeli diplomat was shown detailed satellite photos of the Dimona reactor and presented with an expert US assessment of the cost of this very big project—roughly $80 million.39 On the previous day, CIA chief Allen Dulles had told the National Security Council that in order to fund such an expensive project, Israel was using donations from Jewish individuals and organizations in the United States who then enjoyed a tax exemption for their contributions. Herter informed Harman that when the facts came to bear, they would have a devastating effect on the Middle East and on American interests. As such, the United States sought his confirmation that the reactor was intended solely for civilian purposes. Herter also noted that the Soviet Union had accused the United States of being a “silent partner” in building the reactor, that there was concern the Soviet Union might be driven to provide nuclear assistance to states in its camp, and that the United States opposed the proliferation of nuclear weapons, especially in the “powder keg” of the Middle East. As a direct result of these developments, Israel’s nuclear activity came to light in the international media a week later. These leaks, which included photographs of the reactor, came from American sources, in the view of Zaki Shalom. The leaks themselves, according to Israeli assessments, were intended to create a hostile international atmosphere focused on Israel, which would pave the way for massive pressure to shut down the Dimona project.40
• This event forced Israel to confront the US pressure and formulate an operational strategy, which had been lacking for nearly a decade. The first step was to remove, in part, the veil of secrecy surrounding its nuclear project—first and foremost with respect to the United States. On December 20, therefore, Harman provided Herter with information about the reactor in Dimona, including details about its size, an assessment that its construction would be completed within about four years with French and “other” assistance, and a pledge that it was intended for scientific research purposes that would in the future serve to advance civilian economic development. On the following day, Ben-Gurion disclosed the existence of the Dimona project before the Knesset, emphasizing that it was intended “solely for peaceful purposes.” The motive behind this false and convoluted statement was that Israel could not at this stage acknowledge the true nature of its nuclear program, as such a declaration would have obliged the superpowers, and the United States foremost, to apply heavy pressure on Jerusalem to allow close inspection of its “textile enterprise” in Dimona, something Ben-Gurion had regarded as taboo since the 1950s.
• To reinforce its message and lend it credibility, Jerusalem established two channels of indirect communication with Washington by way of Canadian diplomats. A day before Ben-Gurion’s dramatic declaration at the Knesset, the director general of the Prime Minister’s Office, Teddy Kollek, a close associate of his superior with many contacts among American officials, met with the Canadian ambassador to Israel. Kollek admitted that Israel’s leaders had discussed the issue of nuclear weapons on more than one occasion, that the political decision remained firmly negative, and that the veil of secrecy that had been imposed over the reactor’s construction constituted “unforgivable foolishness” on the part of Israeli authorities.41 On the same day, the Israeli ambassador in Ottawa, Yaakov Herzog, also a well-known “Ben-Gurionist,” met with Canadian Foreign Ministry officials and confessed that the revelations about the reactor were causing Israel discomfort, for which he blamed Israel’s own “mania for secrecy.”42 This gentle self-flagellation was presumably intended to convey to the Americans, through their traditional allies the Canadians, that Israel had no reason to conceal its activities at the reactor.

Articles académiques

+ The Evolution of Canadian Foreign Policy Toward the Middle East (1945-67) (1985 - JSTOR)

Muhammad Anwar Chohan

Introduction

• This paper attempts to trace the nature of the growth of Canadian foreign policy toward the Middle East over a period of 22 years. The major argument is that Canada developed a Middle East policy indirectly through the United Nations rather than on the basis of state-to-state relations. This policy may be analyzed in the context of the following : (i) United Nations conflict resolution procedures; (ii) great-power politics; (iii) Canada's relations with its three major allies, the US, Britain and France; (iv) subsequent to 1955-56, Canada's commercial and diplomatic state-to-state relationships with countries in the area.
• In this essay, the period under review (1945-67) is divided into following three phases, (i) 1945-48 : The significant aspect of this period was the emergence of the United Nations, and Canada's adherence to its Charter. Canada as a middle power began to develop a mediatory role and part of its initial experience in the United Nations related to the conflict regarding the partition of Palestine, (ii) 1948-55 : During this period, the changing strategies of the superpowers, in the context of the Palestine Partition plan, undermined the ability of the United Nations to maintain peace. The substance of the discussion concerning this period will therefore deal with the impact of great-power politics on Canada's mediatory behavior in the United Nations, (iii) 1956-67 : The Suez crisis and the formation of UNEF marked a turning point in Canada's Middle East policy. The stationing of its troops under UNEF provided Canada with a direct military presence in the area. However, the withdrawal of the UNEF in 1967 was a severe setback to Canada's UN responsibility and also to its national image in the area. When war broke out between Arabs and Israel, Canada's mediatory role came to an abrupt end and it was seen by the Arabs as having assumed a partisan position. This brought the indirect Canadian foreign policy toward the Middle East to an undignified conclusion, thereby forcing her to rely more heavily on state-to-state relations.

1945-1948

• Prior to the Second World War, Canadian foreign policy tended to be isolationist. Prime Minister Mackenzie King (who held this post with intervals through 1921-30 and 1935-48) was a strong proponent of this policy: ‘He deliberately made external policy as bland as milk in the 1920s and 1930s. His guideline was ‘no commitments’ ....""1 However, Canada did become actively involved in the World War 2 and this had tremendous implications for any continuation of King’s pre-war isolationism. The War brought in its wake several significant changes in Canadian foreign policy: its isolationist policy was replaced with greater participation in the allied cause; it became a bridge between the US and UK—referred to by Churchill as ‘the linchpin of the English-speaking world. Unlike its European allies, Canada emerged from the War with a stable economy and as the second largest trading nation in the world. On the domestic scene, two leaders St. Laurent and Lester Pearson3 emerged as advocates of greater Canadian involvement abroad. “They both thought alike in foreign policy and both agreed that Canada should accept more international responsibility”.4 The fact that these men were able to wed the Canadian power base to an internationalist diplomacy, enabled Canada to become an important international actor.
• The United Nations. Canada was one of the participants of the San Francisco Conference of 1945 where representatives from various countries met to devise a formula which would possibly eliminate any future catastrophes. Canada supported the idea that all states, large or small, should be equally represented in the new body proposed to be established. Its delegates emphasized ‘‘that the organization must be truly international in character, rather than a tool of a few great powers”.5 Canada argued for ‘‘equal representation of all states”. This view, called ‘‘functionalism”,6 was enthusiastically supported by many medium-size states, and was embodied in article 23 of the UN Charter which governs the election of non-permanent members of the Security Council.
• Canada’s role in the UN was divided into two categories. First, its multilateral responsibilities which found expression in the General Assembly and in the specialized UN agencies where Canada gave extensive economic aid to the UN for the developing countries. Second, Canada’s political role as a middle power, which entailed ‘mediating’ and ‘peacekeeping’ and establishing the legal authority of the United Nations.
• Great-Power Politics. This era marked the initial learning period for Canada’s indirect mediatory behaviour under United Nations’ auspices. Considering article 51 of the Charter and the veto right to big powers, it becomes clear that a mediatory power could only function if differences among the big five were minor and did not come in conflict with their central interests. Thus, it was evident that any future polarization among the great powers would diminish not only a middle-power role, but would also immobilize the United Nations. Canada’s indirect role was limited because of its status as a medium-range power. Commenting on these limitations, St. Laurent said: ““There is little point in a country of our stature recommending international action, if those who must carry the major burden of whatever action is taken are not in sympathy’’.7
• Relations with Britain, France and America. Canada has maintained close traditional ties with its two mother countries, Britain and France. After the transformation of the British empire into the Commonwealth of Nations the former colonies were given opportunity to form their own policies within a common framework, which would allow close coordination and unity within the Commonwealth nations. However, “Mackenzie King and some of his associates never overcame their suspicions, perhaps typical of the leaders of a newly independent country, that the British were only paying lip service to the new rules, and still expected the Canadians to ‘do their duty’ when the mother country needed support, with or without prior consultation” 8 King had a distrust for European politics and he tried to keep Canada aloof from political wrangling? Although he opted for the isolationist position, policies derived from this position were conducted by remaining loyal to the crown. Canada’s participation in the war was sound evidence of this loyalty. In addition, the British Foreign Office was, until 1945, the major channel for Canadian relations. As a consequence, Canadian policy could be characterized as Eurocentred.
• Canada’s relations with its geographically-proximate neighbour, the United States, have also had a strong impact on its foreign policy. The Second World War brought immense changes in the international power configuration. The United States and the Soviet Union, in terms of their capabilities, emerged as the two big powers, while the old colonial powers almost collapsed. In the bipolar world, the Soviet Union began to challenge the international status quo, while, in response, the United States assumed the leadership of the “’status quo powers”. Thus the new world scene was marked by a challenge-response phenomenon. Canada as one of the important Western allies became a defender of the status quo.
• State-to-State Relations. An important characteristic of Canadian external policy prior to the World War II, was its search for new economic markets. However, the lingering theme of isolationism and King's domination of Canadian foreign policy had direct implications for the country’s trade and diplomatic representation. The growth of Canada’s representation abroad stopped. Until 1935, Canada had only three legations, in the US, France and Japan. The principle tasks of these legations did not relate to diplomatic activity since their main duties were to promote immigration and commercial ties. In 1939 two more legations were added, one in Belgium and one in Norway; it is notable that the new legations were in Europe.
• Canada had few links with the Middle East and its policy could be characterized as one of distinct disinterest. For instance, when the War Committee suggested in 1940 that Canadian troops should be deployed in the area, King declined the suggestion.10 Canada held to Eurocentric orientation and it was in keeping with this orientation that it had no diplomatic representation in the Middle East at the time.
• In terms of Canada’s commercial ties with the Middle East, it had only one trade office in Egypt until 1945. From 1940 to 1945, Canada’s exports to the Middle East amounted to .09 per cent and imports from the area were 4.72 per cent of Canada’s total trade with foreign countries. It is also important to note that Canadian trade with Egypt during the war marked the highest proportion of total Canadian trade recorded with that country for the years 1935 to 1967. Canada’s generel lack of interest in Middle East may be attributed to the fact that the Middle East had a history of political upheaval and it was not attractive as a trade region.
• Thus, at this point, Canada’s foreign policy in the Middle East had the following characteristics. First, Canada was committed to the United Nations. Second, it had close ties with the US, Britain and France. Third, in terms of superpower politics, Canada as a status quo power, was aligned with the Western bloc. Fourth, Canada’s state-to-state relations were insignificant with the Middle Eastern countries.
• The Partition of Palestine. On 18 February 1947, British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin announced HMG's inability to implement the Palestine mandate and asked the United Nations to resolve the dilemma. On 2 April, the Secretary-General of the United Nations was requested to summon a special session of the General Assembly to consider the Palestine problem. Canada, as noted earlier, did not have any direct involvement in the area, but since the matter was referred to the United Nations, this issue fell within the scope of its foreign policy. The situation also required Canada to play its mediatory role as its two allies, Britain and the United States, were at odds.
• Canada sent a small delegation to the UN headed by Pearson, the then Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs, who was elected Chairman of the First Committee. In May, this Committee was replaced by the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), which was to investigate all questions and issues relevant to the problem and make a report, including proposals for a solution, to the September session of the General Assembly. Justice Ivan Rand represented Canada on the Committee. The UNSCOP conducted its inquiries in the Middle East from 16 June to 24 July 1947.
• When the Second Assembly met in the autumn of 1947, it was presented with two reports. The first, a majority report, was strongly supported by Rand. It recommended the partition of Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. The minority report recommended a federal state for Palestine. On 22 October, the Second General Assembly established an ad hoc Committee to consider UNSCOP’s majority and minority reports. This Committee further established two sub-committees to study the two proposals. Pearson was appointed chairman of the sub-committee entrusted with the task of devising a detailed plan based on the majority recommendation. As chairman of the sub-committee, Pearson played an important role. In particular, ““he was active in seeking to reconcile objections to the partition plan’.1!
• The report of the first sub-committee was approved by a majority of the ad hoc Committee on 25 November 1947, according to which the British mandate would terminate not later than 1 August 1948. Palestine would then be partitioned into Jewish and Arab states. Britain, along with the Arab states and Third World countries, warned the Assembly that partition would mean full-scale war in the Middle East. But, for Canada and the United States, partition was inevitable. The Canadian position, as stated by its representative during the final voting in the General Assembly on 29 November, was as follows : "... We are voting for the partition . . . had it not been for the Balfour Declaration, the League of Nations Mandate, the encouragement given to the immigration of Jews into Palestine over a quarter of a century, [and] the establishment of a well-rooted community of nearly 700,000 Jews in Palestine, who as we are told, have invested there six hundred million dollars. ..."12
• In an atmosphere of conflicting opinions, the partition plan was accepted by the Assembly by a vote of thirty-three to thirteen, with ten abstentions.
• During the partition debate, the Canadian delegation’s activities were confined to various committees whose major task was to establish the legal authority of the United Nations. Canada’s involvement was facilitated by its relative lack of direct interests in the area of conflict. It decided to vote for the partition because, in its view, as Pearson argued, ‘no practicable alternative was put forward which had any chance of adoption’. The partition, he said, ‘“alone offered a settlement in which the USA and the USSR could co-operate, thereby preventing, at least for the time being, direct intervention in the area by Moscow or Washington on opposite sides”.13 Thus, by favouring the partition, Canada, in its opinion, was supporting cooperation, rather than confrontation, between the two big powers. Another reason for Canada’s affirmative vote was its close relations with the United States and Britain, none of which cast a negative vote. The US supported the partition while Britain abstained.

1948-1955

• The situation in the Middle East deteriorated rapidly after the General Assembly's decision to divide Palestine. On 19 March 1948 US Senator Austin told the Council that ‘“as all parties had agreed that partition could not be implemented peaceably, the United States recommended a UN trusteeship to give Jews and Arabs a further opportunity to reach agreement’’.14 Pearson, who always believed in the practicability of the partition plan, remarked that the partition “failed to bring peace” because of the ‘shifting policies of the Big Powers” and because of ‘their inability to work together, inside and outside the Security Council, in search of a good solution"".1s Consequently, on 24 March 1948, General McNaughton, Canadian representative to the United Nations, declined any participation in peace negotiations, until assurance had been given that the big powers would work in harmony. In May 1948 the state of Israel was proclaimed, followed by open fighting between the Zionists and Arabs. Canada recognized Israel on 24 December “in line with the observation of the United Nations mediator in September 1948, that the state of Israel had become a living reality” 16 In the middle of September 1949, both parties agreed to a cease-fire, armistice agreements were signed between Israel and the Arabs, and the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO) was deployed in the area. Canada became involved with UNTSO when in 1954 Major General E. L. M. Burns was appointed as the Chief of Staff at UNTSO.
• It may be noted that Canada’s indirect behaviour since 1947 was gradually maturing in the Middle East. Through its participation in the partition debate in 1947 and its status as an observer in UNTSO, Canada had obtained considerable experience regarding the Middle East. It was out of this experience that in 1954 it established diplomatic relations with Israel and Egypt, and a year later with Lebanon. But this representation was incomplete and unimpressive.
• "For, the Ambassador to Israel was also Ambassador to Greece, and divided his time between Athens (where he was resident) and Tel Aviv; while the Minister to Lebanon was resident in Cairo, the legation at Beirut being under the supervision of a charge d'affaires. A Commercial Secretary, attached to the Cairo Embassy, acted as Trade Commissioner for Egypt, the Sudan, Cyprus, Aden, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia and Yemen..." .17
• This kind of confused and complicated diplomatic relationship owed much to Canada’s previous lack of direct involvement in the area. However it added relatively more weight to Canada’s state-to-state relations in the area, which had been at a low level until that time.
• Meanwhile, in accordance with the US policy to contain Communism, a regional alliance in the form of the Baghdad Pact was founded. The pact was criticized by Nasser. His reaction received a favourable response from the Soviet Union and in September 1955, Egypt concluded an arms deal with Czechoslovakia.18
• Coinciding with these developments was Pearson's visit to Cairo, as Secretary of State, on his way back from a Colombo conference, on 10 November 1955. He held one-hour meeting with President Nasser. ‘Pearson stated :
• "I ventured to give Colonel Nasser my own view that the United States and United Kingdom were far less prejudiced in favour of Israel than he thought... Colonel Nasser was interested in my trip to Russia and this gave me a chance not only to mention Russia's power and expansive strength, but the danger of encouraging her in the old Russian designs, against the Mediterranean and the Middle East." 19
• Though Nasser’s adherence to the Soviet policies had frustrated John Foster Dulles he still refrained from antagonizing Nasser. But, when Israel asked Canada for 24 F-86 jet interceptors, Dulles encouraged the shipment from Canada. Canada’s response to Dulles’ suggestion revealed the major aspect of its policy in the Middle East, i.e. emphasis on solving the problem through the UN. Pearson wrote in his memoirs :
• "I told Mr Dulles that requests of this kind from Israel were a very serious problem for Canada which was not any more anxious than the US to become identified with one side or the other in this quarrel, but was anxious to assist in preserving the peace. We realized that for this purpose some additional armed strength for Israel might be advisable, but we were even more conscious of the need to reach a political settlement which would stop the arms race and give both Israel and her neighbours some guarantee of security. For that purpose, the three major powers should act quickly and effectively, through the United Nations, and bring the Soviet Union into consultation with them from the beginning."20
• Nasser’s refusal to join the Western alliance, his acceptance of arms from Czechoslovakia, and recognition of the People's Republic of China, ran counter to the policy of containment and resulted in the West's withdrawal of its commitment to finance the Aswan High Dam.2! This led Nasser to accept the Soviet aid offer. Thus, a chain of reactions evolved which ultimately brought the nationalization of the Suez Canal.
• The Nationalization of the Suez Canal. On 26 July 1956, Nasser announced the nationalization of the Suez Canal. The nationalization entailed heavy costs for some Western industrialized states, particularly Britain for which the Canal was of vital importance, as it provided the shortest route to the resources of parts of the Commonwealth. The passage also linked the British with its bases in Africa and the Middle East.
• The British government, therefore, strongly opposed the nationalization.22 In his 8 August broadcast Prime Minister Anthony Eden declared that his government could not agree that the act “which threatens the livelihood of many nations... be allowed to succeed”.23 The French government, then confronted with a movement in Algeria that had Egypt's support, sided with the British as it thought that ‘the successful solution of the Algerian problem was dependent in large measure, upon the establishment of a new and compliant regime in Cairo”.24 However, the United States insisted on solving the problem through negotiation. As far as Canada was concerned, nationalization was not important in terms of Canadian usage. It, however, insisted that its allies do not use force against Egypt. The original difference of opinion came to the surface on 28 July when the British Foreign Office dispatched a message to the Canadian government asking it to support British policies. The request tended to take Canada for granted and it was not well received by St. Laurent,2 who was already opposed to the British idea of using force. Meanwhile, in the Canadian Parliament, Progressive Conservative party leader Dietenbaker brought up the issue and urged the government to condemn Nasser. St. Laurent’s response to Diefenbaker’'s remarks showed his belief in international organization. While he “largely shared the opinion of the Egyptian leader, he was convinced that to meet force with force, except under the aegis of the United Nations, would alienate the leaders of neutral nations’’.26
• The first London Conference as proposed during the July tripartite talks, met from 16 to 24 August 1956. Although Canada was not invited, it was apprehensive about the idea of using force and wished to prevent Anglo-American discord. As “the US and UK were likely to disagree openly in the event of an invasion of the Suez Canal area, ... Anglo-American cooperation was the single most important consideration in Canadian foreign policy’.2? The conference gave two proposals. A majority proposal, put forward by the United States, urged the internationalization of the canal, while the minority proposal rejected the internationalization and urged that Egypt should be given autonomy to operate the canal subject to some form of responsibility to the United Nations and the canal users. On 30 August 1956, Canada, though not a participant, supported the majority proposal.
• To negotiate the majority proposals with Nasser, a delegation was set up, headed by Menzies, the Prime Minister of Australia. Menzies’ mission failed for various reasons.28 Dulles then came forward with a new plan known as the Suez Canal Users Association (SCUA), which was considered to be a middle course between political pressure and the use of force. Under this plan an association of nations using the Suez Canal would hire its own pilots and collect the tolls. Egypt would be asked to cooperate and be paid for providing facilities. By introducing SCUA, Dulles hoped that the British and French would refrain from using force and would try to solve the issue through negotiation. For Britain and France, SCUA was a means of securing general approval of an Anglo-French plan which, if rejected, was to be followed by armed intervention to secure Nasser's compliance. The Canadian government favoured the US position as against that of Britain or France and, in general, insisted on the non-use of force for resolving the conflict. For Nasser and the Soviet Union, SCUA was an imperialist trap designed to overthrow the Egyptian regime by using economic and political pressure. Given this perception, Nasser rejected this plan.
• Meanwhile, the Second London Conference met on 12 September 1956, to consider the SCUA plan and, much to Edens frustration, ended in failure. Britain then along with France, took the issue to the Security Council on 23 September. The Canadian delegation was not optimistic about the outcome of the discussions at the UN. R. A. Mackay, Canada’s permanent representative, was less hopeful now that the Western powers could win a favourable response from the Afro-Asian countries who were closer to Nasser. In his opinion “The western powers must get rid of the idea [that] Egypt should be hauled into court. There has been too much provocation ..too much appearance that might is right”.2 At the same time, the Canadian stand on the non-use of force was at least superficially respected in London, as the British Defence Minister, Sir Walter Monckton told Pearson during a NATO dinner ‘that he shared Pearson's anxieties about the possible use of force... "30
• After the general debate, the Security Council discussed the problem in three closed meetings from 9 to 12 October. Conversations with the UN Secretary-General were also held by the Foreign Ministers of Egypt, France and the United Kingdom. These resulted in a resolution unanimously adopted by the Council on 13 October which laid down six principles, including respect of Egypt's sovereignty, to solve this issue.31 Pearson was gratified that the matter had heen brought before the UN and that subsequent decisions by the UN had, at least, laid down the principles for further negotiations. However, it was easier, he admitted, to agree on principles than to translate them into action; but, the way was now open for this to be done.
• In New York, the Secretary-General used extensive private talks with the parties concerned in an attempt to reach a basis for negotiating along the lines embodied in the Security Council resolution. In Paris, at the same time, France and Britain along with Israel, had planned to attack Egypt. Israel was to take the initiative and it was given large amount of aid by Britain and France.32 Overlooking the delicacy of the situation and ignoring the Security Council's efforts, the Israeli forces struck their first blow on 29 October followed by an Anglo-French ultimatum to Israel and Egypt. The ultimatum threatened military action and demanded a cessation of fighting and withdrawal of all forces to ten miles from the canal. At a press conference, on 30 October, when Pearson was asked about his opinion of the British and French ultimatum to Israel, he replied: ““l regret, and I am sure we all regret, that they found it necessary to take this action while the Security Council was seized of this matter... "".33 The answer reflected the Canadian official attitude to Anglo-French action. But not all the news media ‘‘regretted’””. Commenting editorially on the Anglo-French action and government response to it, the Winnipeg Free Press remarked: “If the Israeli thrust and proposed Anglo-French landings were pre-arranged, the two leaders [Eden and Mollet] are open to a charge of Machiavellianism ... No Canadian can be happy in this miserable situation’’.34
• Following the Anglo-French ultimatum, an emergency session of the General Assembly was called for 1 November. An American resolution was put forward which demanded an immediate cease-fire, the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Sinai, and a general embargo on the entry of military goods into the area. The American proposal was opposed by Britain, France and Israel. Canada abstained. ‘‘Her first consideration, however, was to forestall any move to have Britain and France arraigned before the United Nations on charges of conspiring to commit an act of war against a weak and sovereign state”.35 But the situation went beyond rapprochement when, disregarding the recommendation of the Security Council, Anglo-French forces landed in Egypt on 5 November. The same day, the Soviet Union delivered an ultimatum to Britain and France, threatening to use nuclear weapons and urging upon them an immediate ceasefire. Dulles, on the other hand, was furious with his unruly allies. Pearson met with Dulles and argued that Britain and France ‘are in a difficult situation, and we feel it necessary to help them out of it. Anything else is purely negative’ .36
• During the Assembly proceedings, an American resolution calling for a ceasefire and withdrawal of forces was supported by 64 votes. Britain, France, New Zealand, Australia and Israel voted against. Canada abstained, revealings its "position of balance, not between Arab and Israel, but between Britain and its supporters on the one hand, and the remainder of the world, especially the US, on the other. Canada was seeking a compromise between the aims of British and French aggression and the attack levelled against that aggression by the majority of nations. It could not antagonize either camp."37
• In his speech before the Assembly, Pearson expressed ‘‘sadness’ for “not being able to support the position taken by two countries” whose ties with Canada ‘‘are and will remain close and intimate”. He said ‘this resolution does provide for a ceasefire... it does not provide for any steps to be taken by the United Nations for a peace settlement”. He also proposed that the Secretary-General be authorized to begin making arrangements with member states for a UN force ‘large enough to keep these borders at peace while a political settlement is being worked out”.338 The Canadian proposal was adopted by the Assembly in a 75 to 0 vote. The United States wholeheartedly supported a revised Canadian resolution and its objectives.
• Several inferences can be drawn from the Canadian experience in the Suez crisis. First, Canada’s act of abstention during Assembly proceeding in order to leave room for independent action were “at the time the least understood and most bitterly criticized of all Canadian actions during the crisis”. Subsequently, it became accepted at the United Nations as ‘“a classic example of skillful application of international diplomatic techniques”.39 It is true that abstention was also a plausible activity given the ambiguities of Canadian policy in the area. These ambiguities had been identified by the Canadian media, as the following quote from the Toronto Globe & Mail shows :
• "If Canada had had policies of her own, obligations of her own, in the Middle East, she could have taken a firm position toward Egypt's action. On the basis of that position, she could have exerted strong influence in both capitals —particularly in Washington, which failed to understand the gravity of the issue. But Canada took no position on Suez that Parliament or Press, or the public could find out. Only later —and in Washington, not in Ottawa— was it discovered that having no viewpoint of her own, Canada was going with the United States."40
• Second, it appears that Canada’s primary concern in the Suez crisis ‘‘was not the resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict”, rather, ““the resolution of differences of opinion within the Western Alliance and within the Commonwealth’ was desired. “In a word, Canada wanted to solve a NATO and Commonwealth problem, not the Arab-Israeli problem”.41 This also revealed that Canada still lacked a Middle Eastern policy. As Pearson later told Canada’s House of Commons :
• "We were anxious to do everything we could down there to prevent any formal condemnation of the United Kingdom and France as aggressors under the Charter, any demand that sanctions be imposed against them, and also to do what we could to help repair the line of communications and contact between Washington, London and Paris..."42
• Third, Canadian troops were included in the UNEF, which added a new dimension to Canadian foreign policy in the Middle East. These troops in turn became direct Canadian stakes in the area, which meant that any future development in UNEF had direct implications for Canadian foreign policy. Fourth, during the crisis, a majority of the Commonwealth members resented British policy and threatened to quit the Commonwealth. Canadian diplomacy restored their trust in the alliance at a very sensitive point. And, finally, Canada had no direct policy in the Middle East up to this point.

The Road to June War

• The Suez crisis and the formation of UNEF marked a turning point in Canada’s Middle East policy The stationing of Canadian troops under UNEF provided Canada with a direct military presence —a presence which had political costs and benefits. The emergence of UNEF and the subsequent withdrawal of the Anglo-French forces from Egypt brought a temporary truce in the region. Nevertheless, the Soviet Union increased its presence rapidly in the Middle East, through military and technical assistance.43 Regional Arab politics then also changed markedly. In 1958, an army coup took place in Iraq, as a result of which it withdrew from the Baghdad Pact. After the coup, in response to an appeal from Lebanese government, US troops landed in Lebanon on 15 July 1958, and Britain did the same in Jordan on the 17th. In 1962 a civil war also broke out in Yemen; the anti-royalist forces were supported by Nasser and the royalist by Saudi Arabia.4¢ In 1963, the Ba'athists took power in Iraq and Syria, and immediately adhered to Nasser's leadership. Iraq joined a military command with the UAR in 1964 and Syria followed suit in 1966. The alliance was supported by Moscow.45
• Meanwhile, tension mounted on Arab-Israel borders‘ and clashes occurred frequently. In May 1967, Syria requested Egypt for military help under the mutual defence treaty. ‘‘Feeling that he would have a serious problem at the Israeli frontier because of the United Nations Emergency Force, Nasser requested U Thant to remove these troops from their places’ .47 After negotiating the issue with the Advisory Committee, Secretary-General U Thant decided to withdraw UNEF. Canada opposed this step. Its reluctance to withdraw its troops created anti-Canadian feelings amongst the Arab countries, resulting in the disappearance of Canadian influence from the Middle East.48
• Canadian officials severely criticized U Thant's decision of withdrawal. ~~ Secretary of State, Paul Martin, recalled in the House of Commons, on 18 May, ‘that both Dag Hammarskjold and Mr. Pearson had taken the position in 1957 that in giving its consent to the establishment of the force the Egyptian government accepted a limitation to its sovereignty, and that it is now the prerogative of the United Nations, rather than the U.A.R. Government, to determine whether UNEF has completed its task by restoring peace and when it should be withdrawn" .49
• However, the circumstances which prompted the Secretary-General to make such a decision, should also be taken into account. First, the decision to deploy UNEF on its borders was a voluntary act on the part of Egyptian government. Israel, on the other hand, had flatly refused to accept UNEF on its borders. Even at the time of UNEF’'s withdrawal, “Martin, frantically trying to salvage the Peace Force in some form, suggested to the Israeli Ambassador in Ottawa that Israel might invite UNEF to occupy its territory. The idea was not accepted”.50 Second, there was a split in the UNEF Advisory Committee over the withdrawal issue. Yugoslavia and India supported U Thant’s view that he had no choice but to accede to Egypt's demand for withdrawal. Canada, along with Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Brazil took the view that “‘withdrawal could only come on the orders of the Security Council or the General Assembly”.51 Thus, in view of the ambiguous response from the Advisory Committee, and the explosive situation in the Middle East, the Secretary General had no choice but to comply with the Egyptian demand.
• On 22 May Nasser announced closure of the Gulf of Aqaba to Israeli shipping. He denounced the stand taken by the US, Canada and Britain, and accused them of turning the UNEF into a force serving neo-imperialism. Nasser's arguments for closing the Gulf of Agaba were that the Gulf constituted UAR territorial waters and no norms of maritime law could justify Israel’s demand for a free passage through the Tiran Straits as a state of belligerency still existed between the UAR and Israel. Second, the UAR was not a signatory to any international agreement guaranteeing navigational rights to Israel in the Gulf. The Canadian government did not subscribe to Nasser’'s view, and reacted quickly. Martin declared that Nasser’s action was illegal and urged the right of innocent passage for every nation without discrimination.
• On 24 May, at Canada’s request, the Security Council conducted its first meeting to consider the problem. The Secretary-General at this time was in Cairo, negotiating with President Nasser. Canada, at this point, also drafted a resolution along with Denmark expressing full support for the efforts of the Secretary-General and requesting all member states to refrain from taking steps which might worsen the situation. The resolution was in accordance with the US policy.
• However, the resolution became a victim of polarization in the Security Council. The net result was that not only was Canada accused of being an American stooge by the Arabs, but also the Security Council adjourned without taking a vote or even setting a date for its next meeting.52 This meeting proved to be a severe setback to Canada’s mediatory role.
• Two more events further intensified Arab suspicions of Canada’s role. First was Pearson's speech in the parliament on 24 May, in which he said that ‘the basic issue in this situation... is the recognition of Israel's right to live in peace and security... So long as Israel's neighbours, or some of them, refuse to recognize the right of Israel to exist as a state, then we move from one crisis to another’ .53
• Second, coinciding with Pearson's speech was his meeting with President Johnson who visited Canada on 26 May. Next day Pearson informed the House that “he and the President agreed on the importance of maintaining the right of access to innocent passage through the Gulf of Aquaba...and the grave and great importance of placing on that border a United Nations presence’”.54
• Nasser reacted immediately to Pearson's statements and ordered the UNEF Canadian contingent to withdraw from Egyptian territory within forty-eight hours. The withdrawal of Canadian forces was a final blow to Canada’s indirect policy in the Middle East. “Canadian policy there—always so careful and circumspect—was suddenly portrayed as quite the opposite” .55
• In June 1967, Nasser broke off diplomatic relations with the United States and Britain. War broke out between Arabs and Israel, with the US and the USSR supporting the two sides. Under tight bipolarity, the opportunities for UN intervention diminished and Canada’s mediatory role came to an abrupt end, thereby forcing it to rely more heavily on state-to-state relations, which had remained insignificant until that time.

Conclusions

• Canada’s involvement in the Middle East developed mainly within the context of United Nations mediatory and peacekeeping efforts. Its state-to-state relations with the Middle Eastern states, outside the international forum provided by the UN, were modest. This conclusion reassesses the question: why did Canada develop its Middle Eastern foreign policy orientation in this way ?
• Prior to the Second World War, Canada had little international status of its own; instead, it had relations with other countries largely as a consequence of its relationship with the British empire. Canada’s participation in the War enhanced its credibility as an independent nation and gave it sufficient experience in multilateral relations. Unlike some other middle powers, Canada lacked a well-defined set of goals and institutions for conducting bilateral relations with the outside world. The internationalist orientation of prominent Canadian foreign-policy personnel favoured activity within an international organization framework. Canada’s enhanced economic capability and its membership in a victorious wartime alliance further provided a basis for expanded international activity as well as a sense of responsibility to strengthen economic and legal constraints on conflicts. Under these conditions, Canada tended to favour multilateralism and this tendency found expression particularly in the United Nations and its specialized agencies where Canada began exercising and refining a set of foreign policy principles. Through the UN and its agencies Canada not only extended economic aid to underdeveloped countries but also developed new market relationships.
• Canada’s involvement in the Middle East through the UN was the central issue in the foregoing discussion. It is noted that with regard to the UN, the effort to make collective security a mechanism for collective coercion, capable of deterring or suppressing aggression, was not realized. Article 43 of the UN Charter became the victim of great-power distrust, which in turn weakened the ability of the Organization to deal with conflicts. This weakness in the United Nations’ conflict resolution mechanism created ambiguities for Canada’s role as a mediator.
• Second, as Inis L. Claude, Jr., remarks, ““if collective security is to operate impartially, governments and peoples must exhibit a fundamental flexibility of policy and sentiment... Collective security recognizes no traditional friendships and no inveterate enmities, and permits no alliance with or alliances against”. Canada’s lack of a firm diplomatic tradition did allow some flexibility and put some distance between Canadian and European attitudes. However, Canada had ties with Britain and the United States which came in conflict with some of the basic requirements of involvement in a collective security role through the UN.
• Third, overt competition between the United States and the Soviet Union increased soon after the War, particularly in Europe. The West however, did not seriously contemplate placing major reliance upon the United Nations to use collective coercion to meet the perceived Soviet threat. Instead, the Western policies found expression in the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and NATO. Canada was involved in all these policy thrusts, which in turn constrained her ability to mediate as a middle power.
• Fourth, Canada’s state-to-state relations in the Middle East increased only moderately between 1949 to 1955. Its bilateral trade with countries of the area also remained at a low level. Under these circumstances the multilateral context provided by the United Nations tended to dominate most aspects of Canadian policy in the area. However the withdrawal of UNEF from the Middle East revealed that the opportunities for United Nations activity in the area had decreased substantially. Canada’s capability as a mediator, dependent as it was upon the United Nations, also declined simultaneously.
• This situation prompted Canadian policy-makers to re-evaluate their policies towards the UN and the region. In 1970, the Canadian government published a series of articles entitled ‘‘Foreign Policy for Canadians”. This review gave top priority to Canada’s bilateral trade relations and less emphasis to the United Nations and came to serve as a guideline for Canada’s future relations with the Middle East.'

+ Next Year in Jerusalem: Joe Clark and the Jerusalem Embassy Affair (2002 - JSTOR)

Charles Flicker

• On 25 April 1979 the leader of Canada’s Progressive Conservative party, Joe Clark, announced before the Canada-Israel Committee in Toronto that, if elected, his administration would move the Canadian embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. ‘Next year in Jerusalem,’ he declaimed, ‘is a Jewish prayer which we intend to make a Canadian reality.” Some four months earlier, at a press conference in Jordan, Clark had shied away from that pledge when he told reporters that any decision on an embassy move would require a successful resolution of the Egyptian-Israeli peace process. On 5 June, at his first official press conference as prime minister, Clark reaffirmed his election promise in no uncertain terms. The embassy would move; all he ‘would be seeking from the public service was advice as to how best to accomplish what we have undertaken to do.” A mere 18 days later, he announced that the move would be deferred for at least a year.* On 29 October 1979 Clark informed the House of Commons that Canada would take no action on its Israeli embassy ‘until the status of Jerusalem is clarified within a comprehensive agreement between Israel and her Arab neighbours.”
• In 1980, Howard Adelman examined the evolution of Tory strategy on Jerusalem from a ‘no-policy’ position, to a staunchly pro-Israel policy, to a government commitment to that policy, to a neutral position on the standing of Jerusalem, to a pro-Arab policy in the span of one year. Why, he asked, ‘did the Tories make the moves they did? Adelman’s impressive article, written only months after the events, has two shortcomings. The lack of a bibliography or references renders his account essentially unverifiable, and, as Adelman himself acknowledged, there were ‘still significant gaps in the information available’ and ‘a more definitive examination of this issue may be expected in the future.”
• In his account, George Takach relies only on press clippings and confidential interviews to support his findings,” as do other students of the Clark administration who have examined the embassy affair. Norrin Ripsman and Jean-Marc Blanchard were the first to publish an article on the events that cited interviews with three players involved in the process.’ Their analysis, however, deals mainly with the economic implications of the proposed embassy shift. They do not analyze the development of Conservative policy and devote little attention to the political causes of the policy reversal.
• This article draws heavily on interviews with 15 people, all of them either first-hand witnesses to or key players in the generation, implementation, or cancellation of Clark's policy. Four senior Canadian Jewish lobby executives were also interviewed. All agreed to speak ‘on the record.” A significant portion of this article is also based on policy memos and personal communications from 1979 that were declassified by the government of Canada for the purposes of this study.

THE PLEDGE

• Between November 1967 and June 1979, Canadian policy on the status of Jerusalem was based on full support of United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, which called, inter alia, for the withdrawal of Israeli forces from territories occupied during the Six-Day War (including Eastern Jerusalem and the Old City). After 1967, Israeli foreign policy pursued international recognition of its annexation of Jerusalem by encouraging states to transfer their embassies from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.” The initiative was unsuccessful. In 1979 the only embassies in Jerusalem were those of the Netherlands and 12 Latin American countries - and they had all been there since before the creation of Israel in 1948. The Camp David negotiations spurred Israel to increase its efforts to persuade sympathetic states to relocate their embassies so as to provide de facto international support for Israel’s position that all of Jerusalem should be excluded from territories designated for autonomous status by the Camp David accords. Consequently, Prime Minister Menachem Begin began earnestly to solicit embassy transfers.
• When Begin visited Canada in November 1978, he tried unsuccessfully to persuade Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau to move Canada’s embassy to Jerusalem. Trudeau told Begin that he did not wish to prejudice ongoing peace negotiations and thus could not support the Israeli position." Begin initially reacted aggressively and implied that he would make the location of the embassy an issue in the upcoming Canadian federal election. Trudeau angrily replied that he did not think that would be ‘very courteous or very effective.” Begin then softened his line and promised Trudeau he would not make relocation of the embassy a campaign issue within the Jewish community."
• Nonetheless, two days later, in a meeting with the Canada-Israel Committee (CIC) - the operational arm of the Canadian Zionist Federation (CZF), B'nai Brith, and the Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC) on matters relating to Israel - Begin explicitly asked the CIC to make the embassy location an issue in the upcoming election."

The Genesis of Clark’s Policy

• In January 1979, Joe Clark embarked on a world tour that included a stopover in Israel and a meeting with Begin. Among those who joined Clark for the Israel portion of his tour were William Neville (Clark's chief of staff), Jeffrey Lyons (a close friend and adviser), and Ron Atkey and Rob Parker (both Conservative candidates in the upcoming election). Before Clark left Canada, Michael Shenstone (director-general, External Affairs, Africa and Middle East Division) thoroughly briefed him on the government's Jerusalem policy and cautioned against straying from that line if Begin raised the subject.’ Clark was also given a briefing document, prepared by Douglas Roche (the Conservative foreign policy critic), which set out over a dozen reasons why the embassy should remain in Tel Aviv.” In Israel, Clark met with Canada’s ambassador, Edward Lee, who warned him that Begin would raise the subject of the embassy and cautioned him against joining the issue. Lee, too, outlined several reasons why the move should not be made, including the adverse effect it would have on Canada’s relationship with the Arab world, the possibility of retaliatory economic boycotts, lost contracts with Arab countries, fewer Canadian jobs, and interference with the American-brokered Camp David initiative."
• Begin, who knew that Clark stood an excellent chance of being elected prime minister, pressed him hard.” So did Rob Parker and Ron Atkey. Parker thought that a pledge to move the embassy would help him win his riding - as it would other candidates in ridings with a substantial Jewish vote; Atkey focused more on the intellectual merits of the embassy shift. In Israel, Atkey prepared a briefing note for Clark suggesting that Israel had a valid legal and moral claim to Jerusalem and advised him to recognize that by announcing his intention to move the embassy there. Although Atkey did not focus on the timing, tactics, or political ramifications of the move, he did advise against implementing the policy pledge until a peace accord was concluded between Egypt and Israel and Canada procured American support for the initiative. Additional pressure came from Jeffrey Lyons and Reva Gerstein, Jewish friends of Clark who worked on his campaign.
• According to Takach, Gerstein and Lyons exerted significant influence on Clark by virtue of their close relationship with him and ultimately played a crucial role in convincing Clark to make his campaign pledge.
• Despite pressure from Begin and the counsel of his friends and advisers, Clark did not speak out in support of a Jerusalem embassy during his Middle East tour. When asked by reporters in Israel and Jordan, Clark said that an embassy move would be ill-advised as it might upset the Egyptian-Israeli peace process.” What made Clark change his mind?

Pressure from Jewish Lobbies

• Arguments that present Clark's election promise mainly as a response to pressure from the Jewish lobby have the virtue of simplicity and the drawback of inaccuracy. The three major Jewish organizations in the CIC were split over the Jerusalem issue. Although the executive leadership of all three believed the embassy ought to be in Jerusalem, which they unanimously considered Israel's rightful capital, they disagreed over whether to mobilize over the issue. The CZF and B’nai Brith supported the Jerusalem move enthusiastically and threw their weight behind the initiative. The Canadian Jewish Congress did not. The CIC chair, Aaron Pollack, and the executive leadership sided with CZF and B’nai Brith and saw the forthcoming election campaign as a way to advance the Jerusalem embassy cause.” The two CJC representatives in the CIC - Rabbi Gunther Plaut and Milton Harris - strongly opposed the politicization of the embassy issue for several reasons.
• Plaut and Harris knew from their connections in the Liberal party that Trudeau would not support the initiative. They believed that a CIC lobbying effort would render the issue a partisan political one that the Conservatives would use to get elected but would never implement.” As Plaut wrote in his memoirs, he did not want such an important issue to become ‘a political football in the election.” Through their connections at External Affairs, the CJC leadership knew that in the unlikely event that the Conservatives followed through on their promise, a unilateral move without United States support would jeopardize Canada’s economic, commercial, and national interests and destabilize the peace process. Nor did the CJC want to divert resources from what it saw as the CIC's primary mission, lobbying for tough anti—Arab boycott legislation.
• For months after Begin’s visit, the CIC board debated mobilizing its lobbying efforts for the embassy issue. The discussions were so intense and so fraught with personal differences that the debate nearly caused the breakup of the CIC.* Eventually a compromise was reached when the CJC agreed to a low-key CIC information campaign on the subject. But, without the support of CJC, the most articulate and influential of the Jewish lobby organizations, the issue never gathered much momentum. CJC reluctance to support the initiative effectively ‘killed’ the lobby effort. Unlike the Arab boycott, the embassy issue never became the subject of rabbinical sermons or a regular topic of discussion within the Jewish community prior to April 1979.” The majority did not seem to mind much that the embassy was located in Tel Aviv.
• Although there was no overt, co-ordinated pressure from the Jewish community, a campaign, however subtle, aimed at educating the public can be construed as an application of pressure. If there was pressure, it was so minimal that those allegedly applying it were entirely taken aback by Clark's announcement of 25 April.” These findings are, of course, subject to question because the evidence is primarily the oral testimony of the lobbyists. A sceptic might argue that they had reason to distance themselves from a failed initiative. The findings are, however, convincing for two reasons. They correspond with the general perception of the position of the Jewish lobby in the literature, and, more importantly, they correspond with the recollections of advisers who played a prominent role in Clark’s 25 April pledge. As Jeffrey Lyons recalled, ‘I don’t remember it [the location of the embassy] ever being a major issue in the Jewish community.” According to Clark's senior policy adviser, Jim Gillies: ‘My impression from the Jewish community was that there was never any real pressure in any sense.” Clark's campaign chair, Lowell Murray, could recall no lobbying on the subject. Clark's pledge was less a result of the Jewish community trying to win the hearts of the Progressive Conservatives than the Conservatives trying to win the votes of the Jewish community.

Political and Other Factors

• Before 1979, the vast majority of Canadian Jews consistently voted for the Liberal party in federal elections. The party, however, alienated a sizeable percentage of Jewish voters when it failed to enact any anti-Arab boycott legislation during its four-year mandate. Clark and his advisers saw an opportunity. They believed that a pledge to move the Canadian embassy to Jerusalem would strengthen their hand in the election. It would allow Clark to counter charges of ‘me-too-ism’ by distinguishing his platform from that of the Liberals, and it brought with it the prospect of winning the support of Jewish voters in the upcoming election.
• Whereas Jeffrey Simpson argues that the election promise was the result of a ‘numbing mixture of unforgivable stupidity and crass politics,” Takach and Adelman attribute the pledge to other causes as well. Both pay a good deal of attention to Clark's personal beliefs. They contend that partly because of his religious background and partly because of his view of Israel as a democratic ally surrounded by despotic regimes, Clark's perception of Middle East politics was decidedly pro-Israel. That partiality grew stronger during his visit to the Middle East. Upon his return to Ottawa, he commented on the contrast between ‘Arab inhospitality’ and ‘Israeli friendliness.” For him, the embassy move was a sign of unambiguous support for the government and citizens of Israel. His pledge, or so the argument goes, was a product not so much of political consideration as of the belief that recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital was the right thing to do.
• Adelman maintains that to see Clark's pledge mainly as a crass ploy to capture the Jewish vote is ‘a gross distortion’ of the historical record.” Nonetheless, although it is entirely possible that Clark's motives were less bluntly political than those of some his advisers, electoral concerns were undoubtedly the main impetus for the policy. This is certainly the consensus among Clark's foreign policy advisers and cabinet ministers who I interviewed. It is also the consensus among Clark's inner circle of advisers. For Senator Murray ‘it was largely a political decision taken in the middle of an election campaign under pressure from a couple of candidates.’ For Gillies: “This was definitely basically a politically motivated decision.” Neville was the most blunt: “What more could you call it than political opportunism? That is, we thought we could take five seats with this, so we did it.”
• Aside from the recollections of the key actors, perhaps the best evidence that the pledge was made for pragmatic purposes is its timing. When Clark visited Israel in January 1979, he believed that the policy was historically, morally, and legally justified, but he was restrained by the advice he got from Shenstone, Roche, and Lee. The argument that resonated most with him was the one he conveyed to the media, namely, its potential adverse effect on the Israeli-Egyptian peace process. Between January and April 1979, only one variable had changed significantly. Clark still believed the relocation of the embassy was justified. Pressure from the Jewish lobby, albeit minimal, remained con- stant. The advice of Atkey and Parker did not change. Neither the Department of External Affairs nor Roche had modified their views or advised Clark any differently than they had in January. In fact, between January and April other major players in the Conservative party, including the former party chair, Eddie Goodman (the most influential Jew in the party), strongly advised Clark against pursuing the policy.*
• The peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, signed in March 1979, was possible only because the most difficult issues were left to future negotiations. The status of Jerusalem, probably the most sensitive issue, remained unresolved and became a rallying point around which Arab critics of Camp David gathered to attack the peace plan. Because a treaty had been signed, the issue of Jerusalem had become even more controversial. Consequently, a pledge that implicitly recognized Israeli claims to Jerusalem as its undivided capital risked upsetting the peace process in April as much as it had in January.
• The only variable that had changed was political circumstance. By the end of April, Conservative polls indicated that the upcoming election was going to be extremely close. For Clark's advisers, Toronto's swing ridings - especially Eglinton-Lawrence, Willowdale, and St. Paul’s, in all of which only a few percentage points separated the Liberal and Conservative candidates and the Jewish vote constituted at least one-quarter of the electorate - were critical. Rob Parker, Bob Jarvis, and Ron Atkey, the Conservative candidates in those ridings, pressed Clark hard to champion the embassy issue, stressing above all its vote-winning potential. The Jewish vote in the ridings, Clark and his advisers believed, might make the difference between a Conservative majority and a minority. And so Clark made his declaration.

PRIORITIZING THE ISSUE

• When Clark's cabinet was officially sworn in on 4 June 1979, the entire chain of command on the Middle East at External Affairs - from the new minister, Flora MacDonald, on down - opposed the embassy move. Clark received a memorandum in his transition package that advised against precipitate action. He also discussed briefing papers with the same message with the clerk of the Privy Council, Michael Pitfield, who echoed the department's advice. Clark, thoroughly briefed, relayed to the department the message that he would carefully consider their opinion.”
• The mandarins at External Affairs argued that the move would undermine the ongoing Israel-Egypt peace negotiations. The Arab states, the department warned, would interpret Canada’s action as a sign of pro-Israel bias in the West, which would further undermine United States credibility as a mediator - credibility that had already been called into question by the Jordanians and the Palestinians. The Jordanian/Palestinian view that Egypt's bilateral negotiation with Israel was detrimental to the interests of the Arab world would be reinforced. The move would intensify the already deep reluctance of the Arab states to be associated with the negotiations. Canada’s action might, therefore, destabilize the delicate peace process.
• The department added that the embassy move would also adversely affect Canada’s international interests. A pro-Israel position on the status of Jerusalem would certainly damage Canada’s longstanding claim to an even-handed policy on the Middle East and jeopardize Canada’s diplomatic effectiveness in the region. Canada would be foreclosed from future peacekeeping roles in the region, and Arabs states might well see Canada as an unacceptable participant in existing peacekeeping operations in the Middle East. A unilateral move would also create tension between Canada and the United States. The American deputy assistant secretary of state responsible for Canadian affairs and the secretary responsible for Middle East affairs had conveyed to Canadian officials their concern over Canadian policy.
• The initiative also threatened to destabilize relations between Canada and the Arab world. The department foresaw a harsh response from Arab states, which would seek both to punish Canada and to deter others from following its example. The anticipated responses ranged from punitive sanctions, to breaking off diplomatic relations, to terrorist reprisals. The department thought the most likely response would be a harsh denunciation followed by retaliatory measures against Canadian economic and commercial interests. A Saudi minister had already warned a Bell Canada executive that the company’s $1.2 billion contract with Saudi Arabia would be cancelled if the embassy were moved. Other corporate executives with business interests in the Middle East had been given similar warnings. Worse, the department thought it likely that Iran, Iraq, and other members of the Organisation of Petroleum-Exporting Countries (OPEC) would restrict Canadian oil supplies: “We can certainly expect to be included,’ the department warned, ‘in any future embargo like that against the U.S. and the Netherlands in 1973.” Saudi Arabia might go even further and break off diplomatic relations with Canada - an example that other Arab states ‘would feel strongly impelled to follow.” Clark was further warned that Canadian diplomatic representatives abroad, Canadian commercial centres, and Canadian tourists would become likely targets of Arab terrorist networks.
• It was not just External Affairs that opposed precipitate implementation of Clark's Jerusalem policy. The candidates and advisers who had lobbied Clark to adopt the initiative in the first place - including Atkey and Lyons - did not press the prime minister to give priority to his campaign pledge. In his memoranda to and discussions with Clark, Atkey consistently stressed that it was sound foreign policy only if it were carried out in concert with the administration of Jimmy Carter in the United States and if Canada were seen as America’s partner in the endeavour.
• Clark had many policy options. He could have abandoned his commitment outright, although that would undoubtedly have damaged his personal credibility and outraged segments of the Jewish community. More practically, he could have backed away from immediate implementation and followed the lead of Carter, whose Democratic party had undertaken during the 1976 election to move the American embassy to Jerusalem and recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Carter supported the policy during the campaign, but, once elected, placed the issue on the back burner without significant loss of political capital domestically for the Democrats. Alternatively, Clark could have delayed implementation by establishing a fact-finding mission to the Middle East to report on how best to implement the policy. Or, he could have established a consular presence in West Jerusalem in the short term and announced his intention to establish an embassy there once negotiations between Israel and its Arab neighbours on the status of Jerusalem had borne fruit. Clark would then not have had to rescind his statement of 25 April but would have fallen short of explicit recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital. Nor would it have been a unilateral step unsupported by Canada’s leading allies. Many of them (including the United States and Britain) already had consulates in Jerusalem.
• Nonetheless, Clark elected to draw attention to a policy that External Affairs strongly opposed and over which his own advisers were not exerting pressure. He did not do so because of pressure from the Jewish lobby. His ministers were not urging it. In fact, it was not something he had discussed with any of his ministers, including the minister of external affairs. According to his finance minister, John Crosbie, the embassy issue was not considered or debated either in the caucus or by cabinet. Rather, ‘this was the leader carrying on on his own.” Why did he?

The Political Becomes Personal

• Clark and his advisers were sensitive to the charge that he was ‘flip-flopping.’ Clark had made a number of bold promises during the election campaign - that Petro Canada would be privatized and Loto-Canada dismantled; that mortgage interest would be tax-deductible; that 60,000 civil service jobs would be eliminated; and that Canada would expand its grain-handling capacity by 50 per cent within six years. He was eager to be seen as a man of his word who would not renege on his campaign promises as soon as he was elected.
• Even more than appearing accountable, Clark wanted to appear prime ministerial. At 39, he was the youngest prime minister in Canadian history. He had no cabinet experience. His rise to his party's leadership had been a surprise: he was generally regarded as everyone's second choice. He was so obscure that the day after he won the leadership, the media dubbed him ‘Joe Who?’ Journalists tended to portray him as inexperienced and maladroit. A trip abroad in 1978 was a public image nightmare for Clark after he lost his luggage and nearly impaled himself on an honour guard's bayonet. The Canadian media coverage of the trip reinforced an image of ineptitude by focusing on Clark's bumbles. After that trip, ‘the so-called wimp watch was under way." At his first Ottawa press conference, Clark had to appear strong and decisive. Only by standing firm on his promises, Simpson argues, could he demonstrate ‘an inner strength that the public doubted he possessed.” He refused to reconsider his Jerusalem policy, lest he be seen as weak and vacillating.
• Be that as it may, the main explanation in the literature is that Clark and his advisers agreed to give the issue priority precisely because External Affairs opposed it. According to Takach, Adelman, and Ripsman and Blanchard, Clark’s team was influenced by media speculation that the new administration would be no different from Trudeau’s because policy would continue to be made by the same Liberal-appointed bureaucracy that had worked for Trudeau for 11 years. The Clark team wanted to make it patently clear from the outset that the new prime minister was in charge of the civil service and not vice versa. And Clark used the embassy issue to drive the point home.
• But, in fact, Clark's principal advisers did not urge him to act. On 5 June, as he prepared for his press conference, Clark met with his advisers, including Gillies and Neville, to rehearse answers to likely questions. Although no one counselled Clark to drop the Jerusalem promise, Clark agreed to equivocate if he was asked about it.“ Late in the press conference, Allan Fotheringham of the Globe and Mail asked when the promise to move the embassy would be honoured. Instead of following the script, Clark made it clear that he was not prepared to discuss the initiative’s merits, only the best means of implementation. “We certainly intend to do that. Miss MacDonald will be indicating to officials in External Affairs that we will be expecting from them recommendations fairly directly as to how it can be accomplished ... I say that simply to indicate that the position she and other ministers will be taking in relation to matters that have been part of party policy in the election campaign will be to indicate that those questions are now beyond discussion as to their appropriateness and that what we will be seeking from the Public Service will be indications as to how we can accomplish what we have undertaken to do.”
• Clark imparted a sense of immediacy that was not shared by his advisers at the time. According to Gillies, he ‘hardened the thing up way past what he had planned. As a result it looked like we were going to move tomorrow. He gave the issue a sense of priority which we really didn't believe and which was not our agreed position.” Clark's chief of staff watched the press conference on television and was shocked by Clark's unrehearsed response. Neville recalled: ‘I nearly dropped my teeth.’
• The explanation in the literature for Clark's actions on 5 June - that the new government intended to use the embassy issue as a means to impose their will on the Liberal-oriented bureaucracy - holds up only in small part. Clark and his advisers did want to give the impression that a new man was in charge and make it clear that the bureaucracy worked for him. Yet the issue that Clark was advised to use and agreed to use for that purpose was not the embassy move, but rather the issue of mortgage interest deductibility, thought to be the most popular of his campaign promises. As Neville recalled: ‘Nobody said let's go to the press conference and up the ante on the embassy issue. Quite the opposite. It just happened. It just got away from him.” The young and inexperienced prime minister was so consumed by the need to appear firm and prime ministerial that he used the wrong issue to make the point. At the press conference, Clark gave the mortgage deductibility answer to the embassy question.

THE REVERSAL

• Once Clark declared himself on 5 June, he was determined to keep his word. He gave the policy priority less on its merits than because of his desire to appear decisive and strong and to convey the impression that he led the bureaucracy rather than vice versa. Reversing his decisions would give the appearance of weakness and vacillation. So, why then did he change his mind?

Arab-Quebec Arrangement

• Ripsman and Blanchard contend that concerns about Canadian national unity played a role in Clark's decision. They suggest that Arab states threatened to recognize Quebec as an independent state if it won the upcoming sovereignty referendum in return for Canadian recognition of the Israeli claim to a united Jerusalem. They rely on articles published in the Canadian French-language press in 1979 that speculated about an Arab-Quebec understanding: ‘plusieurs gouvernements arabes ont en effet entrepris d’explorer l'hypothèse d'une éventuelle reconnaissance du Québec en tant que “gouvernement souverain”... si jamais M. Joe Clark mettait vraiment à exécution son projet de déménagement.’ There is no compelling evidence for the existence of any such arrangement. Jacques Parizeau, a former premier but at that time the Quebec revenue minister, maintains that such suggestions were ‘pie in the sky speculation’ by writers fishing for a story.” He had never heard of any such arrangement and stated that the Quebec cabinet had never spoken about the issue. If an Arab-Quebec arrangement had existed, Clark's advisers would have to have been aware of it for it to have any effect on their policy calculus. According to all my sources, they were not and it did not.

American Pressure

• American pressure has also been claimed as a reason for Clark's decision. Ripsman and Blanchard contend the United States ‘applied intense diplomatic pressure to persuade Clark to recant on his promise. While the United States may have informed Canada that it did not support the initiative, there is no evidence of ‘intense pressure.” Ripsman and Blanchard cite articles in the New York Times Abstracts as evidence for their findings. Specifically, they argue that the United States effort culminated in a meeting between the American secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, and Flora MacDonald at the United Nations and a meeting between Carter and Clark in Tokyo. MacDonald, who was present at the only meeting between Clark and Carter at Tokyo, says that the issue never arose.” An examination of External Affairs records of the meeting discloses no mention of the embassy issue.” Moreover, neither MacDonald nor her executive assistant, who attended all her diplomatic meetings, recalls Vance ever mentioning the sub- ject at the United Nations. Nor is there any mention of an American campaign to dissuade Clark from proceeding on the embassy move in any policy documents dated between 5 June and 24 June.

Two Political Factors

• Ripsman and Blanchard posit two political considerations for Clark's policy reversal. The first concerns the effect the embassy move would have on the delicate situation in the Middle East; the second, the damage the initiative would arguably pose to Canada’s reputation as an international peacekeeper. They argue that Clark pledged to move the embassy partly because he wanted to reward Begin for his compromises at Camp David: ‘It seems that he had not realized that doing so could lend legitimacy to the Israeli claim to a united Jerusalem.’ Consequently, when the Arab states and the United States stressed that the embassy move could prejudice future peace negotiations, the prime minister had diplomatic reason to reconsider.
• There are numerous flaws in this line of reasoning. It is unlikely that Clark wished to reward Begin for his concessions during the peace negotiations with Egypt. Like the Egyptians, the Israelis benefited from the peace process and did not need to be rewarded by Canada. The main impetus for Clark's pledge, as discussed above, was not the desire to reward, but rather the desire to be rewarded through Jewish votes. Further, as demonstrated above, Clark was not unaware of the potential consequences associated with moving the embassy. He was briefed about them on numerous occasions. He was well aware that moving the embassy would likely jeopardize Canada’s status as a peacekeeper in the Middle East and subject Canada to pressure from the Arab world. It is possible that these secondary considerations may have reinforced his decision, but they were not the primary motivators.

Arab Reaction

• Until 5 June, Arab officials were hopeful that Clark's minority government status, the realities of office, and briefings from External Affairs would convince Clark to reconsider his Jerusalem policy.” After the election, External Affairs officials informed Arab ambassadors in Canada that Clark's initiative was unlikely to become government policy.” But when, on 5 June, Clark said he would implement imminently, Arab reaction was immediate and fierce. The secretary general of the Islamic International League warned that the move would constitute an act of direct aggression against the Arab world. Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), spoke of the need to ‘teach the Canadian scoundrels a lesson.’ The Syrian government threatened ‘appropriate retaliation’ if the embassy were moved. Arab officials did not voice their displeasure only to the media. The ambassadors of Morocco, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Somalia, Sudan, Iran, Tunisia, and Jordan, met with MacDonald on 7 June, and with Clark on 23 June to express their outrage over the policy and to threaten retaliatory action if it were implemented.
• Arab officials publicly and privately threatened the Clark administration with economic reprisals. In Economic Sanctions Reconsidered, the seminal study on the effectiveness of sanctions, Gary Hufbauer, Jeffrey Schott, and Kimberly Elliott include Arab League v Canada in 1979 as one of 40 cases in the Twentieth Century in which sanctions were effective in bringing about a policy shift by the target country. Sanctions sceptic Joseph Pape argues that of those 40 cases, sanctions were effective in only five, one of which was the Arab League boycott of Canada. Undoubtedly, sanctions-related pressure contributed to Clark’s about-face. Yet as Ripsman and Blanchard observe, Clark had already reversed his position when Arab League sanctions were imposed on 29 June. Iraq's threat to suspend its oil sales to Canada on 27 June also postdated that reversal. The only tangible economic penalty imposed between 5 June and 23 June was the Arab Monetary Fund's (AMF) announcement of 18 June that it would withdraw its holdings from Canadian financial institutions. But, at most, the AMF had only $10 million invested in Canada, and there is reason to believe it had withdrawn it all at the beginning of 1979.
• A case can be made that Canada acted more out of fear of threatened sanctions than in reaction to any actual sanctions. Ripsman and Blanchard contend that Canada would have suffered significant (though supportable) economic losses if its trade, financial, and monetary links with Arab League member states had been severed. If sanctions were going to have a significant effect on Clark's policy calculus, Canada would have to have been economically vulnerable to them. Arab League sanctions would likely have caused Canada’s gross national product to drop by less than one per cent. More serious were the potential effects on oil supply. In the event of an oil embargo, Canada would have been forced to look elsewhere for the 10 to 15 per cent of its oil consumption it purchased from Arab states. Canada, however, produced enough energy and oil to be self-sufficient, although undoubtedly there would have been some transaction costs associated with either purchasing oil elsewhere or exploiting domestic resources. Canadian financial and monetary sensitivities were higher than its trade sensitivity. If public and private Arab investors had withdrawn all of the approximately $2 billion they had invested in Canada, it would likely have caused the Canadian dollar to drop in relation to the American dollar by three to six cents, inflation (already near 15 per cent) to increase, and Canada’s sizeable $5 billion current account deficit to rise.” According to Crosbie, though sanctions might have been inconvenient, they would not have brought the Canadian economy to its knees.

Domestic Considerations

• What registered more acutely with the prime minister was the anxious reaction of the Canadian business community to potential sanctions. Although the economy might not have been badly hurt by sanctions, Canadian corporations with actual or potential interests in Arab countries stood to lose billions of dollars. An unidentified source at the Department of Industry, Trade, and Commerce told reporters that if the embassy move went ahead, Canada would lose over $1 billion in business and some 55,700 jobs.” After 5 June, major unions and employer organizations, such as the Chamber of Commerce, Canadian Manufacturers Association, the Canadian Exporters Association, the Canadian Construction Association, the Air Industries Association of Canada, and the Canadian Federation of Independent Business lobbied against the move. Among major corporations, Bell Canada was the most vocal. It had the most to lose: a $1.2 billion dollar contract to modernize the Saudi teleccommunications system. Other major Canadian corporations that spoke out included Canadair, Air Canada, Royal Bank, Westinghouse Canada, Alberta Trailer Company (ATCO), and Arthur Erikson Associates.” Clark could ill afford to alienate these and other companies on whose financial support his party depended. (ATCO in particular was a major donor from Clark's home province.) Canadian companies with interests in the Middle East embarked on a major lobbying effort directed at several ministers, particularly finance, external affairs, and trade. They also lobbied Clark personally and his senior political staff to cancel the embassy move.
• The threat of sanctions and pressure from the Canadian business community certainly affected Clark's policy calculus. But that pressure might well have been supportable if there had been any significant counter-pressure from an international or domestic constituency. Aside from Israel, no state publicly supported Clark's position. Nor was there widespread support even from the Canadian Jewish community. While some leaders thought that Clark should not be deterred by Arab pressure, ‘the majority,” as Plaut put it, ‘reasoned that Clark should be let off the hook as quickly and painlessly as possible.” The Jewish community, like most minority groups, did not relish being the focal point of public controversy. Many in the community ‘were scared silly’ of an anti-semitic backlash.” Consequently, there was little pressure from the Canadian Jewish lobby (which had never wholeheartedly supported the initiative in the first place). As Murray put it, ‘the Jewish lobby ducked, and I dont blame them.’
• The Canadian media seized on the Jerusalem issue. The story was a fixture on the front pages of English and French language Canadian newspapers from 6 June until 23 June, when Clark found his escape route in the appointment of Robert Stanfield to undertake a fact-finding mission. The majority of editorials opposed the embassy move. Jeffrey Simpson, Geoffrey Stevens, and Allan Fotheringham, three of Canada’s most influential columnists, openly criticized the initiative. Conservative party polling indicated that a solid majority of Canadians agreed with the media. Unfortunately, no polls used by the party decision-makers between 5 June and 23 are available to substantiate this claim. A Gallup poll conducted in early July did find that 69 per cent of Canadians opposed the move. Although by no means a perfect gauge of Canadian thinking between 5 and 23 June, the poll does provide a sense of the mood at the time. Perhaps more telling, the Prime Minster’s Office and the Department of External Affairs were inundated with mail overwhelmingly critical of the move.”
• Not the bureaucracy, or the cabinet, or Clark's political staff exhorted Clark to stay the course. External Affairs had opposed the policy from its inception and continued to do so after 5 June. By 6 June, the under-secretary of state for external affairs, Allan Gotlieb, and his deputy, Klaus Goldschlag, were already searching for a graceful avenue of retreat for Clark, which Neville, Gillies, and Murray all favoured. Aside from Atkey, the cabinet unanimously opposed the embassy move. According to both Crosbie and MacDonald, there was widespread resentment that Clark did not first consult with cabinet. An examination of the Cabinet Minutes shows that the embassy issue arose three times (7, 19, 21 June) during the 18 days in question, but was never debated.” On all three occasions, Clark informed rather than consulted his ministers. The cabinet was shut out of the decision-making process, including the decision to create the Stanfield mission. Perhaps Clark excluded cabinet because he knew his ministers opposed the initiative. Regardless, cabinet, like the Department of External Affairs, certainly did not pressure Clark to implement.
• The question of whether the threat of sanctions would have been effective if powerful Canadian interest groups, the Canadian business community, the majority of the Canadian public, the media, the Department of External Affairs, the cabinet, and the prime ministers inner circle of advisers supported the initiative cannot be answered with any certainty. Significantly, none of those constituencies supported implementation. As Clark’s chief of staff put it, ‘we woke up 48 hours after the press conference and we [had] nobody sticking up for us and everybody dumping on us.’
• Finally, in examining Clark's actions, it is useful to keep his original motives in mind. The initiative was never designed to serve Canada’s international interests. It was promised and given priority for political and personal reasons. Once Clark won the election, the vote-winning potential of the initiative was no longer relevant. As pressure mounted from all sides - the Arab world, the media, the public, the business community, the bureaucracy, and his own advisers - Clark's ability to lead and his administration's ability to govern was affected. A ‘tangential problem,” ‘a nothing issue,” a policy that was ‘88th on the PC agenda™® was taking up the bulk of Clark's time and that of his ministers, and preventing him from governing effectively. Indeed, in explaining his reversal to cabinet, Clark acknowledged that the Stanfield mission would provide the government with ‘breathing space’ to govern.” More important, as a peripheral issue took up more and more of his time, Clark began to look less and less competent. As Neville put it, ‘It made us look as though we couldn't manage a two-car funeral.” The desire to appear competent that was the underlying motive for Clark's statement on 5 June also motivated his turnabout on 23 June. Eventually, Clark and his administration were better served by a strategic retreat than by clinging to a hastily and ill-conceived policy.

Stanfield Mission

• In announcing the Stanfield mission on 23 June, Clark retreated from but did not fully retract his 5 June pledge. According to Michael Bell, the External Affairs representative who accompanied Stanfield on his fact-finding tour, neither Clark nor anybody else ever expressly instructed Stanfield on what to find. Yet the mission, conceived by Gotlieb and Goldschlag and managed by the Department of External Affairs, was designed to provide Clark with a graceful retreat.” Stanfield was asked to examine (i) ways in which Canada could enhance its bilateral relations with Middle Eastern states and (ii) how Clark's policy could be implemented in a manner compatible with Canadian efforts to contribute to a just and lasting peace in the Middle East.? Although Stanfield was allowed a year for his study, he was in the Middle East for just six weeks before he reported back that moving the embassy would prejudice ongoing peace negotiations and run counter to the peace process.
• Clark might have preferred Stanfield to take longer and allow more time for the issue to diffuse. Still, he got essentially what he wanted. As Neville put it: “The whole object of this exercise was to get this thing off the agenda by backing off.” Stanfield’s mission bought time for the issue to cool off, and his report provided Clark with the rationale he needed to legitimize his tergiversation.

CONCLUSION

• The early literature on Clark's pledge, addressed in the first part of this article, concluded that it was the result of both political expediency and Clark's sense that it was the right thing to do. New evidence gathered from interviews and recently declassified archival material establishes that bald political considerations to win seats in a number of ‘swing ridings’ with a significant proportion of Jewish voters played a more prominent role than originally believed. It also confirms earlier findings that the pressure from the Jewish community was not intense; Jewish lobby groups were indeed surprised by Clark's original announcement. Moreover, the policy was formed without the concur- rence of cabinet and contrary to the advice of the Department of External Affairs.
• Some analysts saw the embassy issue as a move by Clark to establish authority over the civil service. Although this was undoubtedly a factor, Clark was motivated far more by a desire to outgrow his image as a callow leader of dubious decisiveness.
• In considering the causes for the policy reversal addressed above, the literature refers to an Arab-Quebec accord, American pressure, consideration arising from Canada’s role as a peacekeeper, and destabilization of the peace process as possible considerations. These were found not to be prime motivators. Rather, Clark was motivated by a combination of factors, including pressure from the Arab world and the Canadian business community, negative media coverage and editorial response, adverse public opinion, perceived damage to the reputation and ability to govern of Clark and his government, and the virtual absence of support from both cabinet and External Affairs. Literally no significant constituency pressed from the retention of the embassy move.
• ‘When it became apparent that the policy could not withstand stresses from both within and without, the Stanfield mission was crafted as a convenient and decorous escape route.
• This issue deserves greater academic study because it had significant domestic, foreign policy, and geopolitical implications. In 1980, only months after the resolution of the affair, all 13 states with embassies in Jerusalem moved them to Tel Aviv for reasons not unconnected with the growing confidence of Arab states after their success with Canada. Moreover, the affair reverberated in the 1980 Canadian federal election when the Liberals used it to impugn Clark's competency. While the embassy affair alone was not responsible for Clark's defeat, it was certainly a contributing factor. Finally, the affair had a profound impact on Canada’s Middle East policy, which shifted from a pro-Israel bias to a more even-handed treatment in the 1980s. After Trudeau was elected in 1980, Canada established relations with the PLO, its voting record at the United Nations was more balanced, and it strongly criticized the invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

The ‘Good-Natured Bastard’: Canada and the Middle East Refugee Question (2004)

David Goldberg & Tilly Shames

+ Canada’s Middle-East Policy and the “Jewish Lobby” (2006)

Adam Cutler

• An examination of the role interest groups play in the formation of foreign policy, particularly Middle-East policy, can quickly turn into a polemical argument. While this paper examines the extent to which the organized Canadian Jewish community has been able to mould Canadian Middle-East foreign policy with respect to the Middle-East, it does not take a normative stance on the issue. However, ethnic group influence on policy development can have considerable theoretical significance depending on one’s view of democracy. For those who believe that foreign policy development should remain within the realm of governmental bureaucracy, then a finding of considerable influence by the ““Jewish Lobby” will be disconcerting. In contrast, those who believe that members of civil society should play a strong role in policy formation may be comforted by a finding that the Jewish community has been able to sway foreign policy to its liking. However, if the “Jewish Lobby” has influenced foreign policy out of proportion to its representation in the Canadian population, especially when compared with the country’s Arab-Canadian population, then this may be an issue of concern. Moreover, using the “Jewish Lobby” as a model, professional lobbyists can discover best and worst lobbying practices. The theoretical implications of this study are clear, even if Canada’s influence in the Middle-East peace process is minimal. As Janice Gross Stein writes, “Canada has a policy on the Middle-East but not in the Middle-East” (Stein’s emphasis) (1976-1977:272).
• Yet, the bulk of scholarly literature on this subject focuses not on the question of Canada’s influence, but rather on what sort of bias is present in Canadian policy-making. The literature presents a wide range of opinions as to whether Canadian foreign policy has had a pro-Israel tilt and, if such a tilt exists, whether it can be attributed to the “Jewish Lobby.” Consequently, this paper will study Canadian foreign policy vis-à-vis the Middle-East from 1945 until the present, focusing on doctrines, major decisions, and resource allocation. It will include an examination of the different factors contributing to Canada’s foreign policy, with an eye towards the role of the “Jewish Lobby.” A critique of select writings in this area will also be given. This paper shall argue that the “Jewish Lobby” has had little influence in the development of Canada’s Middle-East foreign policy.

Introduction: Canada’s Behaviour Regarding the Middle-East from 1945-2004

The Birth of Israel

• Canada became a reluctant, yet involved participant in the Palestine question following World War Two. Britain handed its mandate over Palestine to the United Nations in 1947 and Canada, though attempting to stay uninvolved was out-manoeuvred and appointed to the United National Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP). In order not to be bound by any decision emanating from UNSCOP, Canada appointed a Supreme Court Justice, Ivan Rand, rather than a career bureaucrat to the committee. UNSCOP’s majority report, supported by Rand, called for the partition of Palestine and the creation of one Arab and one Jewish state. Canada eventually voted for this motion at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) (Bercusson 1984).

The Early Years of Israeli Statehood from 1950-1967

• The 1950’s was an era of major changes in the Middle-East. The English and French withdrew, while the United States and Soviet Union moved in. Arms trade soon became a major issue. Israel, lacking a habitual source, turned to Canada for help. After much internal wrangling, Lester Pearson, then Secretary of State for External Affairs, agreed to sell weapons to Israel. The deal eventually fell through, due to the onset of the Suez Crisis of 1956. Nevertheless, Israel was still thankful to Canada and was even pleased that it was able to get out of the deal for business reasons (Oren 1990).
• Canada’s initial reaction to the Suez crisis was an abstention to a UNGA vote (Ismael 1994:17). Following the war’s end, Canadian involvement was assured when Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson spearheaded the creation of UN peacekeeping. Canada committed troops and significant diplomatic resources to the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF), the UN’s first peacekeeping force.
• Following the 1967 war, Canada again provided troops for peacekeeping forces. Additionally, Canada supported United National Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 242, which called for, upon other things, “[w]ithdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.” It also called for a just settlement of the refuge problem and the security of all states in the region.

The Trudeau Years

• Canada’s approach to peacekeeping was modified under Trudeau. While Canada was unconditionally willing to join the UN in peacekeeping missions in 1956 and 1967, following the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, Canada set restrictions to its involvement (Miller 1991:26-27). In the diplomatic arena, by 1975, Canada announced the opening of two new embassies in Arab countries and began official relations with three others. By 1983, Canada had diplomatic relations with all the countries in the Middle-East and North Africa, with ten embassies in the area (Stein 1984:8-9). More than any other objective, Canada pursued its economic interests in the region.
• Related to economic objectives was the Arab boycott of Israel. Through the secondary boycott and tertiary boycott Arab states attempted to prevent Canada and Canadian businesses from doing business with Israel, Israeli corporations, Canadian corporations that did business with Israel and Canadian corporations that did business with Israeli corporations. While the United States easily passed anti-boycott legislation, preventing American businesses from knowingly partaking in the Arab boycott, Canada did not legislate on the issue, choosing only to draft administrative guidelines with strong enforcement mechanisms (Taras and Weinfeld 1990:671; Stanislawski 1989:70-71). Ontario, however, did pass anti-boycott measures (Taras 1989:56).
• In 1982, Israel invaded South Lebanon. Canada was the first Western country to criticise Israel and call for an immediate and unconditional withdrawal. Canada, however, did not enact sanctions against Israel (Miller 1991:59).
• Several other smaller issues came about during Trudeau’s reign. First, there was a growing trend in international circles to recognise not only individual Palestinian rights, something Canada had done since 1949, but collective Palestinian rights as well. Canada did begin to recognise those rights; however, it refused, for an extended period of time to recognise the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as the legitimate voice of the Palestinian people. Second, the 1975 UN Crime Conference was scheduled for Toronto. Because they had UN recognition, the PLO planned on attending the conference. This was problematic because Canada regarded the PLO as a terrorist organisation. Canada postponed the conference, ensuring it would not be held in Toronto. Third, Canada voted against the UN Zionism is Racism resolution in Nov. 1975 (Miller 1991).

The Jerusalem Embassy Affair

• On April 25, 1979, Joe Clark, then leader of Canada’s Progressive Conservative Party, announced that if elected he would move Canada’s embassy from Tel-Aviv to Jerusalem. This promise continued until October 29, 1979, when as Prime Minister, Clark confirmed that the embassy would not move until the status of Jerusalem was determined through peace negotiations (Flicker 2002-2003).

The Mulroney and Chrétien Years

• The major events under Mulroney and Chrétien in the Middle-East were the two Palestinian uprisings, lasting from 1987 to 1993 and 2000 until the present. The initial reaction of Canada’s government to the first Palestinian uprising was a pronouncement by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney in which he stated that Israel had acted with “restraint” in response to Palestinian violence (Miller 1991:82). However, soon afterwards, then Secretary of State for External Affairs Joe Clark gave a strongly worded speech in which he accused Israel of human rights abuses such as withholding food as a form of collective punishment, and violating international law (Miller 1991:100). Mulroney, too busy negotiating a free-trade agreement with the United States, let Clark handle the Middle-East portfolio. Regarding the second uprising, Canada’s reaction has generally been muted. Canada continues to support direct peace negotiations and UNSCR 242. With respect to non-conflict issues, Canada has continued to pursue its strategy of bilateralism by signing free trade agreements with Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority.

Determining Factors in Canada’s Middle-East Foreign Policy

Doctrines

• Due to the fact that the Middle-East has never been a main priority for Canada’s foreign policy makers, detailed policy statements are largely absent. Declarations by parliamentarians at the annual Canada-Israel Committee (CIC) dinner are potentially fruitful grounds for a foreign policy doctrine; however, these statements often emanate from guests who are “pressed to outdo one another in their tributes to Israel and pledges of support” (Lyon 1992-1993:8) and are therefore not overly dependable sources. Doctrine must therefore be drawn from comments made in Parliament and foreign policy decisions that extend beyond the Middle-East.
• Canada’s Middle-East foreign policy doctrine from the end of the Second World War until Trudeau’s foreign policy review is one of detached liberal internationalism. Prime Minister Mackenzie King, who ended his term in 1948, tried to stay as uninvolved in the region as possible. In a July 16, 1946 statement, King proclaimed, “I do not believe that any useful purpose would be served by a statement on the situation in Palestine by the Canadian government at the present moment” (Kay 1978:71). Under St. Laurent, Diefenbaker, and Pearson, Ottawa felt more compelled to act and was guided by a dedication to the UN, while attempting at the same time to act as a middle-man between the US and UK (Bercusson 1984).
• The major shift in doctrine came under Trudeau, soon after his 1968 election. He called for a foreign policy review, eventually culminating in a publication titled Foreign Policy for Canadians. This signified a significant shift in tone for Canada with respect to the Middle-East. Canada’s new goals in the region would be to pursue its national interest by maximizing its own national security, economic growth and independence (Stein 1976-1977:275). This approach included the pursuit of bilateralism in Middle-East affairs (Stein 1984). Under Trudeau and beyond, Canada’s Middle-East doctrine also endorsed a commitment to UNSCR 242, a recognition of the legitimacy and secured existence of all states in the region and a stated dedication to peacekeeping and the care of refugees (Ismael 1994; Sucharov 2003). A more recent element of this doctrine is Canada’s commitment to human security (Sucharov 2003). However, with respect to the Arab-Israeli conflict, the term, “human security” is most often used in reference to refugee issues.
• Seemingly, neither Canada’s initial doctrine of multilateralism or subsequent preference of pursuing its national interests indicates a tilt in its Middle-East foreign policy one way or another. A look at some major decisions made in the past fifty years will help determine if such a tilt exists, and if so, whether the “Jewish Lobby” is responsible for it.

Major Decisions: The “Jewish Lobby” and other Influences

• In the words of one cabinet member of Mackenzie King’s government, Canada supported the partition of Mandate Palestine into Jewish and Arab territories in 1948 because it was “the best of four unattractive and difficult alternatives” (Bercusson 1989:30). Canada’s decision to vote for partition also fit into Canada’s doctrine of acting as a voice of reason between major powers while supporting the United Nations (Ismael 1994:12). According to a secret Department of External Affairs (DEA) report, the government feared that a failure to adopt partition may discredit the Jewish Agency,6 thereby thrusting Jewish extremists into power and creating internal strife within Palestine’s Jewish community, an outcome that would only further strain UN-UK relations. In accordance with Canadian doctrine, Ottawa also wanted to ensure that the US-UK relationship was stable, particularly in light of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) discussions then being held (Bercusson 1984:16). Additionally, the report concluded, if the UN failed to act on the Palestine Question, it would be discredited as a useful agency, and partition was the only plan likely to garner the two-thirds majority vote required for a resolution to pass (Bercusson 1989:30-31). In the case of partition, “official Canadian views and the aspirations of Canadian Zionists were parallel but unconnected” (Bercusson 1989:31).7
• This is not to say that Jewish/Zionist lobby groups were not active during this period. Letters were sent to the government and presentations were made to politicians (Kay 1978:115-127). An attempt by King to curry the Jewish vote should not be considered as the impetus for Canada’s vote on partition because the Liberal leadership knew that Jews were very unlikely to vote for the Conservative party and that the Jewish leadership was integrally tied to Liberal politics (Bercusson 1989:29). A few months after the partition vote, Canada agreed to a special UN session called at the request of the US, which had as one suggestion the removal of partition and the implementation of trusteeship, an idea loathed by Zionists. This demonstrates the lack of influence the “Jewish Lobby” had at that time. Yet it is important that both Bercusson (1989:31) and Taras (1989:45) at least partially credit “Jewish Lobby”ing for Canada’s eventual recognition of the Jewish state in December 1948.
• After voting for partition, Canada’s next major Middle-East decision was the creation of the United Nations Peacekeeping force during the Suez crisis. Again, this can be linked to Canada’s interest in maintaining a strong relationship between the US and UK. The peacekeeping plan enabled the French and English to withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula without losing face, as demanded by the Americans (Ismael 1994:18). Little is written about Jewish lobbying during this time. However, the presence of the peacekeeping forces proved beneficial to both Israel and Egypt. For Israel, a guarantee was made for free navigation in the Gulf of Eilat, the Straits of Tiran were opened, and an international military force created a buffer between Israel and what was perceived to be a hostile Egyptian enemy (Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2004). In the meantime, Egypt witnessed a withdrawal of hostile international troops from its sovereign territory. Canada acted in a similarly multilateralist fashion following the 1967 war, remaining even-handed while supporting another peacekeeping mission. The “Jewish Lobby” during these years likely had little effect on Canadian policy because it was “intermittent, ad hoc, and inconsistent” (Taras 1989:51).
• Six years later came the 1973 Middle-East war. In this instance, Canada’s refusal to condemn the attacking Arab states and conditional commitment to further peacekeeping could be explained by Trudeau’s policy of pursuing national interests. While it was clear that Arab states had initiated the violence, Ottawa did not rebuke them, thereby avoiding the potentially devastating effects of an Arab oil embargo on the Canadian economy. Moreover, Ottawa’s provisional commitment to peacekeeping, juxtaposed to its unconditional commitment in 1956 and 1967, could be explained by Canada’s new unwillingness to support ventures that would be detrimental to the country’s well being (Miller 1991:26; Goldberg 1989:106-108). Canada wanted guarantees that it would have the full backing of the UN Security Council and that all parties involved in the Middle-East conflict were supportive of the peacekeeping force (Ismael 1994:26).
• Like most Middle-East issues, the 1973 war brought about lobbying by Jewish and Arab communities in Canada. Jewish communities wanted the government to fully condemn the attacking Arab states, whereas the Arab communities wished for the Canadian government to recognise that the war’s cause was Israel’s continuing denial of the Palestinian right to self-determination. The government appears to have walked a fine line between both lobby groups while acting in accordance with its own doctrine of pursuing national interests. Generally, despite the lack of a condemnation from Ottawa, the Jewish community was pleased with the government’s reaction to the war because they felt that they had support in parliament (Goldberg 1989:107).
• Following the 1973 war, Canada’s next major decision vis-à-vis the Middle-East was the recognition of the PLO. The primary showdown in this area was the UN Crime Conference debacle. Here, no clear argument for national interest can be made.10 Additionally, the conference was to take place in Toronto, home of Canada’s largest Jewish community and the “Jewish Lobby” fought hard to have the PLO denied entrance. The Arab community, in their first real foray into Canadian foreign policy lobbying, fought equally hard to have the PLO invited (Goldberg 1989:108-110). The third important domestic actor was the Department of External Affairs. They opted for a conciliatory approach, which would involve only denying entry to those PLO representatives known to be terrorists (Stein 1976-1977:286). It would be easy to hold the “Jewish Lobby” responsible for having the government postpone the conference, thereby effectively denying the PLO admission into Canada. However, several other vocal groups 11 opposed the PLO’s presence in Canada, arguing that Canada’s laws and opposition to terrorism prohibited the entrance of PLO members (Stein 1976-1977:285). Additionally important is that Canada had not yet recognised the PLO as the legitimate voice of the Palestinian people (Ismael 1994:52). It follows, then, that Canada would have no reason to want PLO representatives at the conference. Furthermore, analysts argued that Canada’s failure to recognise the PLO would not impede improved relations with the Arab world (Stein 1976-1977:282). Notwithstanding the last few points, in the case of the UN Crime Conference, it can be reasonably argued that the “Jewish Lobby” had some effect.
• However, whatever power the “Jewish Lobby” had did not last for long. Despite their prolonged efforts to have Canada enact anti-boycott legislation, the CIC completely failed. The Arab-Canadian community was fairly silent on the issue, but very satisfied with the government’s inaction. Furthermore, the Canadian business community, a new player in foreign policy lobbying, had fought hard and won against anti-boycott legislation that could negatively impact the newly discovered “Arab market.” The DEA’s interpretation mirrored that of the business community (Goldberg 1989:110-112; Stanislawski 1989:69). Under the rubric of Trudeauvian foreign policy doctrine, Canadian industries could legitimately claim that their economic welfare was beneficial to the national interest (Stanislawski 1989:63-64). The battle against anti-boycott legislation was won by the corporate lobby and Canadian Middle-East foreign policy doctrine.
• The Jerusalem Embassy affair was won by the same combination of doctrine and lobbying.. Again, corporate Canada lobbied, claiming that they stood to lose Arab business if Canada moved the embassy to Jerusalem.14 The Jewish community was ultimately united in their feelings of disappointment toward the handling of the whole affair, upset by the transformation of Jerusalem and Israel into a partisan issue during an election campaign and Joe Clark’s “flip-flop” on the matter. Arab-Canadians, however were fairly pleased with the result of the affair, having been very involved in lobbying and stressing that the embassy should not be moved. The Stanfield Report, upon which Clark made his final decision not to move the embassy, reflected the arguments of corporate Canada and the DEA. (Flicker 2002-2003; Goldberg 1989:112-114; Takach 1989; Taras 1984:21).
• By the time the Lebanon War broke-out three years later, the economic significance of the Middle-East was in decline and Lebanon was particularly inconsequential for the Canadian market. This may help to explain why the corporate sector was noticeably uninvolved in lobbying surrounding the war. In point of fact, there was little time for lobbying on the issue because Prime Minister Trudeau almost immediately condemned Israel for its invasion of Lebanon. This upset the Jewish community, who wanted Trudeau to make more balanced statements and call on all foreign armies including the PLO and the Syrian army to leave the country. The DEA approved of Trudeau’s approach, which the Prime Minister himself viewed one as effective neutrality.15 Canada’s Arab communities would have preferred an even stronger condemnation of Israel, along with sanctions (Goldberg 1989:114-116; Miller 1991; Taras 1984:21).
• Trudeau’s condemnation of the invasion was in line with the Canadian policy toward sovereignty and territoriality as expressed in UNSCR 242. Furthermore, his avoidance of sanctions against Israel was in accordance with Canada’s economic approach to the Middle-East. While the media’s affect on Trudeau was unknown, Dewitt and Kirton (1989) demonstrate that it was able to affect the attitude of Canadian parliamentarians more than any other factor, perhaps explaining their increasing antiIsrael stances during the Lebanon War. Moreover, Trudeau was by this point developing a strong dislike for the “Jewish Lobby.” He refused to meet with the CIC and the Canadian Jewish Congress was unable to persuade him to take a less hostile stance toward Israel (Miller 1991:58-60).
• Also upsetting for the Jewish-Canadian communities was their government’s response to the first Palestinian uprising. While the communities welcomed Prime Minister Mulroney’s initial reaction that Israel was acting with “restraint,” the comments of Joe Clark were less warmly accepted. The Canadian-Arab community had the exact opposite reaction, while the corporate sector did not comment. The DEA bureaucrats were pleased with Clark and saw his statements as taking Canadian Middle-East foreign policy towards a more pro-Palestinian position, something they encouraged. Clark, however, may not have been developing new policy. The CIC had long noticed a trend toward greater sympathy for the Palestinians in Canadian Middle-East policy, and Clarke’s position could be understood as proceeding with Canada’s long-term policy focus on refugees. It was his “tone, insensitivity, and timing” that led to the Jewish community’s harsh reaction (Miller 1991:97). Additionally, as opposed to the oft felt feeling that Middle-East policy was out of their hands (Lyon 1992-1993), the DEA believed they were successful in crafting Canada’s stance during this time (Goldberg 1989:116-118). Dewitt (1989) posits that the uprising changed the “facts on the ground” and that the Mulroney government in turn began to sympathise with the Palestinians and develop a more balanced policy.
• In terms of the second Palestinian uprising beginning in 2000, Canada’s position on the Arab-Israeli conflict has remained consistent with previously stated positions, namely the support for direct negotiations and UNSCR 242. This was particularly clear under Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, who placed little emphasis on the Middle-East. Canada’s increased concern with human security issues within and outside of the MiddleEast has heartened some in the Arab community (Sucharov 2003). As for the business community, it remains relatively uninvolved.
• Of all the aforementioned major decisions in Canadian foreign policy, only Canada’s partition plan position, recognition of Israel, peace-keeping position and UN Crime Conference position can be regarded as specifically pro-Israel. Among these, only Canada’s position on the recognition of Israel and the UN Crime Conference can be somewhat ascribed to pressure from the “Jewish Lobby.” While this is not supportive of the notion that the “Jewish Lobby” controls Canadian Middle-East foreign policy, perhaps a look at the lobby’s affect on Canadian resource distribution in the Middle-East will.

Resource Distribution and its Determinants

• Canada’s resource distribution in the Middle-East has largely been in the form of supporting peacekeeping missions, official development assistance, involvement in multilateral working groups, diplomatic missions and trips abroad. They demonstrate a focus on refugee issues, even-handedness, and bilateralism. Recognising its limits in affecting the Middle-East political situation since the 1970s, Canada has focused its resources on attempting to create an environment conducive to peacemaking (Ismael 1994:110-111). Canadians have served on the UNSCOP, as director generals of UNRWA, as chiefs of staff for observers, and on the Conciliation Committee negotiating team. Prime Minister Pearson spent significant time developing the idea of peacekeeping. All this is in addition to the money spent on the Canadian peacekeeping forces that have served in all six Arab-Israeli peacekeeping missions (Ismael 1994:9,13-14).
• In the years following Trudeau’s foreign policy review, Canada demonstrated an increased desire to associate with the Arab world outside of the context of the ArabIsraeli conflict (Miller 1991:10). By 1975, Canada had announced the opening of embassies in Saudi Arabia and Iraq along with diplomatic relations with Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates. By 1983, Canada had diplomatic relations with all the countries in the Middle-East and North Africa, with ten embassies in the region. Such a commitment of resources from a limited pool reflects devotion to the area (Stein 1984:8-9). This increased association included the funding of 34 projects with Arab aid agencies through an allocation of $384 million from the Canada International Development Agency (CIDA). CIDA also funded one project with Israel to the Dominican Republic (Stein 1984:9). Under Trudeau, Canada continued to support peacekeeping missions. In 1975, the UN assessed Canada for $3.8 million for the UNEF and the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF), which supervises the Golan Heights disengagement. This fee was in addition to the cost of maintaining troops at home (Stein 1976-1977:278-279).
• Most recently, Canada’s primary multilateral working group served as chair for the working group on refugees that emerged from the 1991 Madrid peace conference. While the group effectively disbanded in 1996, Canada continues to be engaged in modest humanitarian efforts, providing about $130 million to development in the region. Additionally, Canada is a member of the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee, which coordinates aid to the Palestinian people (Sucharov 2003). Furthermore, Canada is one of UNRWA’s top donors to this day (Ismael 1994:14).
• During the first Gulf War, Canada provided $5 million and 10 000 gas masks to the Palestinians, while giving $500 000 in support to Israeli civilians affected by Iraqi missile attacks. Canada also gave $1 million in medical aid to refugees and another $2 million in emergency food aid (Ismael 1994:96). From 1991-1992 Canada provided a total of $295 million in humanitarian assistance to the Middle-East (Ismael 1994:110).
• None of the resources distributed above indicate a pro-Israel tilt. As a developed country, Israel does not receive official development assistance, while many Arab states and the Palestinian Authority receive assistance from Canada. Canada’s UNRWA contributions go directly to assist Palestinian refugees. Trips abroad, diplomatic missions and involvement in peacekeeping and working groups are all neutral activities designed for the pursuit of peace or to enhance bilateral relations. While Canada has more diplomatic missions in the Arab world than the Jewish world, that is because there are twenty-two Arab states (along with the Palestinian Authority) and only one Jewish state. If Canada’s resource distribution in the Middle-East indicates any tilt at all, it is toward the Arab states. Nothing indicates that the “Jewish Lobby” has sought Canadian resources.

Summation, Suggestions, and Conclusion

• Neither doctrine nor resource distribution indicates a pro-Israel tilt in Canada’s Middle-East policy. Certain major decisions can be construed as being pro-Israel, yet only few of them can be attributed to the influence of the “Jewish Lobby.” Why, then, do some authors posit that Canada’s Middle-East policy has a pro-Israel tilt? Additionally, why is there a widespread perception that domestic interests have a stranglehold on Canada’s Middle-East policy (Taras 1984:17)? Moreover, how is it that in a 1987 poll of DEA bureaucrats, the “Jewish Lobby” was ranked as having the most influence over Canada’s Middle-East foreign policy, even more than the Prime Minister (Kirton and Lyon 1989)?
• Concerning why some authors argue that Canada’s Middle-East policies have a pro-Israel tilt, this paper suggests the following: firstly, in some decisions, Canada’s position has been pro-Israel. However, rather than understanding these positions as being pro-Israel, they should be understood as having been made for national self interest. This selfishness was guided by an attempt to mediate between major powers in the 1950’s and 60’s, and later guided by the pursuit of economic goals. Secondly, those who argue that Canada’s policy has a pro-Israel tilt focus their claims on minor rather than major decisions. Foreign policy involves many issues including trade, peacekeeping, migration, environment and culture. While governmental decisions concerning minor issues may indicate a particular foreign policy, they cannot be used to refute foreign policy understandings based on major decisions unless they are aggregated and interpreted in a systematic way. Ismael (1994) overly relies on Canada’s UN voting record, which is a predominantly minor issue, in his judgement that Canada’s foreign policy has a pro-Israel tilt, while underestimating the significance of the Jerusalem Embassy affair and other major issues. Thirdly, both Ismael (1994) and Lyon (1992-1993), come to mistaken conclusions due to their clear anti-Israel stances. For Ismael, his anti-Israel attitude is apparent to any student of the Middle-East. In addition to the omission of Israel on the book’s cover-map of the Middle-East,16 he never misses an opportunity to criticize Israel for alleged violations of international law or for abusing Palestinian human rights. He misrepresents Israel’s foundational ideology despite overwhelming support against his assertions in Israel’s declaration of independence. Furthermore, he makes unsubstantiated references such as one referring to the “Zionist-dominated media” in Canada (51). Lyon’s (1992-1993), negative attitude towards the “Jewish Lobby” is much more subtle than Ismael’s; nevertheless, he lets his own sympathies show in his footnotes (22-25). Ismael’s negative attitude towards Israel and Peyton’s negative attitude towards the pro-Israel lobby can affect the objectivity of their scholarship.
• As for the belief that Canada’s foreign policy is dominated by domestic interests and that the CIC is a “powerful and feared Zionist lobby” (Ismael 1994:51), it would be easy to dismiss these allegations as unsubstantiated hype with perhaps a modicum of antiSemitic underpinnings. However, that would not be the entire truth. The CIC is a wellorganized and well-funded lobby. It has been able to court influential individuals into defending the Jewish state (Taras 1984:18). Yet, as has been demonstrated, Canadian foreign policy has been largely self-serving and not always responsive to the “Jewish Lobby.” However, the success of lobby groups representing a constituency of approximately 1.4% of the entire Canadian population (Taras and Weinfeld 1990:666) does attest to the lobbies’ strength.
• More difficult to dismiss is the 1987 poll of DEA bureaucrats who ranked the “Jewish Lobby” as having the highest influence in the formation of Canada’s MiddleEast policy. This could be attributed to a general feeling in the DEA that Canada’s foreign policy should be more sympathetic to Arab causes. In other words, since the policy is not as sympathetic as the DEA would like it to be, they conclude that the “Jewish Lobby” is to blame. Moreover, the DEA is not the final decision-maker and may not fully understand the factors that eventually determine the policy outcome. While a more satisfying answer is hard to reach, an oddity in the poll, namely that the Prime Minister and the cabinet rank second and fifth respectively in their influence on Canada’s Middle-East policy, might somewhat discredit the whole survey. In an executive driven parliamentary system, it is curious that anyone, particularly bureaucrats who are well versed in government procedures, could conceive of the Prime Minister and the cabinet as not holding the top two decision-making positions.
• This paper has demonstrated that Canada’s Middle-East foreign policy has generally reflected the government of Canada’s own interests, rather than the sectarian goals of ethnic interest groups, particularly those of Jewish-Canadian communities. Canada’s early policies attempted to reinforce the relationships among great Western powers, while its later policies reflected a will toward economic gains, largely through bilateral relationships. While Jewish, Arab, and business groups all lobbied, Canada’s national interest won out. Whether or not this is positive or negative is a normative question and depends entirely on one’s vantage point.

References

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Bercusson, David J. (1989), “The Zionist Lobby and Canada’s Palestine Policy 1941- 1948,” in David Taras and David H. Goldberg, eds. (1989), The Domestic Battle Ground: Canada and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press), pp. 17-36.

Dewitt, David B. (1989), “Intifada and Canadian Foreign Policy: Pressures and Constraints for Policy Adjustment,” Middle-East Focus (Winter): 21-24.

Dewitt, David B. and John Kirton, “Foreign Policy Making Towards the Middle-East: Parliament, the Media, and the 1982 Lebanon War,” in David Taras and David H. Goldberg, eds. (1989), The Domestic Battle Ground: Canada and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press), pp. 167-185.

Flicker, Charles (2002-2003), “Next Year in Jerusalem: Joe Clark and the Jerusalem Embassy Affair,” International Journal 58:1: 115-138.

Goldberg, David H. (1989), “Keeping Score: From the Yom Kippur War to the Palestinian Uprising,” in David Taras and David H. Goldberg, eds. (1989), The Domestic Battle Ground: Canada and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press), pp. 102-122.

Ismael, Tareq Y. (1994), Canada and the Middle-East: The Foreign Policy of a Client State (Calgary, Detselig Enterprises Ltd). Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2004), Facts About Israel (www.mfa.gov.il). Jewish Agency-American Section (1964), The Story of the Jewish Agency for Israel (New York: The Agency).

Kay, Zachariah (1978), Canada and Palestine: The Politics of Non-Commitment (Jerusalem: Israel Universities Press).

Kirton, John J. and Peyton Lyon (1989), “Perceptions of the Middle-East in the Department of External Affairs and Mulroney’s Policy 1984-1988,” in David Taras and David H. Goldberg, eds. (1989), The Domestic Battle Ground: Canada and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press), pp. 186-206.

Lyon, Peyton (1992 – 1993), “The Canada Israel Committee and Canada’s Middle-East Policy,” Journal of Canadian Studies 27:4: 5-25.

Miller, Ronnie (1991), From Lebanon to the Intifada: The “Jewish Lobby” and Canadian Middle-East Policy (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America).

Oren, Michael B. (1990), “Canada, the Great Powers, and the Middle-Eastern Arms Race, 1950-1956,” International History Review 12:2 (May): 280-300. Riddell-Dixon, Elizabeth M. (1985), The Domestic Mosaic: Domestic Groups and Canadian Foreign Policy (Toronto: Canadian Institute of International Affairs).

Stanislawski, Howard (1977), Canada and the Arab Boycott: Developments and Proposals (Montreal: Canada-Israel Committee).

Stanislawski, Howard (1989), “Canadian Corporations and Their Middle-East Interests,” in David Taras and David H. Goldberg, eds. (1989), The Domestic Battle Ground: Canada and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press), pp. 63-86.

Stein, Janice G. (1976-1977), “Canadian Foreign Policy in the Middle-East after the October War,” Social Praxis 4:3-4: 271-298.

Stein, Janice G. (1984), “An Experiment in Bilateralism: Canadian Policy in the MiddleEast,” Middle-East Focus 6:5 (January): 6-11.

Sucharov, Mira (2003), “A Multilateral Affair: Canadian Foreign Policy in the MiddleEast,” in David Carment, Fen O. Hampson, and Norman Hillmer, ed. (1989), Canada Among Nations 2003: Coping with the American Colossus (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Takach, George (1989), “Clark and the Jerusalem Embassy Affair: Initiative and Constraint, “in David Taras and David H. Goldberg, eds. (1989), The Domestic Battle Ground: Canada and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s), pp. 186- 206.

Taras, David (1984), “Parliament and Middle-East Interest Groups: The Politics of Canadian and American Diplomacy During the 1973 War,” Middle-East Focus (January): 17-25.

Taras, David (1989), “From Passivity to Politics: Canada’s Jewish Community and Political Support for Israel,” in David Taras and David H. Goldberg, eds. (1989), The Domestic Battle Ground: Canada and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press), pp. 37-62.

Taras, David and Morton Weinfeld (1990), “Continuity and Criticism; North American Jews and Israel,” International Journal 45:3 (Summer): 661-684.

+ Le lobby pro-israélien et la politique étrangère canadienne (2006)

Marc-André Gagnon

• Avec son soutien inconditionnel aux bombardements israéliens au Liban, le gouvernement Harper a mis fin en juillet à la longue tradition de modération canadienne dans le conflit israélo-arabe. Ce changement de cap en a surpris plusieurs qui voyaient le Canada en interlocuteur modéré, engagé dans une tradition de maintien de la paix. Mais cela n’intervient pas sur un coup de tête du gouvernement conservateur puisque déjà, sous le gouvernement Martin, le Canada cessait de critiquer à l’ONU l’occupation israélienne des territoires occupés [1].
• Ce changement de cap dans la politique étrangère canadienne intervient peu après un séisme institutionnel survenu au sein de la communauté juive canadienne pour consolider le lobby pro-israélien. Historiquement, trois organisations représentaient la communauté juive canadienne [2] : 1 - le Congrès Juif Canadien (CJC, véritable parlement démocratique représentant la diversité des opinions) ; 2 - le B’nai Brith (très engagé dans la défense de la communauté) ; 3 - la Fédération Sioniste Canadienne (supportant Israël). Ces trois organisations ont convenu ensemble de mettre sur pied une structure unifiée de collecte de fonds et de financement qui deviendra la United Israel Appeal Federations of Canada (UIAFC), ainsi qu’une organisation commune de défense des intérêts israéliens, le Comité Canada Israël (CCI).
• Le CCI, réflétant la diversité des opinions des organisations juives canadiennes, était considéré par certains comme peu efficace pour défendre Israël puisque sous Trudeau, Mulroney et Chrétien, le Canada avait maintenu un point de vue de modération en faveur de la paix dans le dossier du Proche-Orient, peu favorable aux politiques belliqueuses de la droite israélienne. Le Canada avait vivement condamné l’invasion israélienne au Liban en 1982 et dénoncé les abus israéliens contre les droits humains, comme le blocus alimentaire lors de la première Intifada [3].
• En 2003, à la suite des manifestations pro-palestinienne à l’Université Concordia et de la baisse de popularité d’Israël dans l’opinion canadienne avec le redéploiement de l’armée israélienne dans les territoires occupés, un groupe de riches hommes d’affaires mettra sur pied un « cabinet d’urgence pour Israël » visant à restructurer les organisations de la communauté juive. Le cabinet, initié par le couple Gerry Schwartz (Onex [4]) et Heither Reisman (Indigo/Chapters), regroupera de riches donateurs dont Israel Asper (Canwest [5]), Larry Tanenbaum (Kilmer Group et Maple Leafs de Toronto), Brent Belzberg (TorQuest Partners), Ron Stern (FP Canadian Newspapers), Stephen Reitman (Reitman’s), Stephen Cummings (Maxwell Cummings & Sons), Dennis Bennie (XDL Capital), le sénateur Léo Kolber (auparavant PDG de Banque TD et Seagram) et Hershell Ezrin (GPC International) [6]. Appuyé par l’UIAFC, le cabinet d’urgence prendra le contrôle du CCI et du CJC et fondera alors le Conseil Canadien pour la Défense et la Promotion des Droits des Juifs et d’Israël (CIJA), tout en doublant les budgets auparavant alloués à la promotion d’Israël [7].
• Les dirigeants du CIJA ne sont toutefois pas élus démocratiquement, comme c’était le cas au CJC ou au CCI : ils sont nommés par les donateurs. La liste des membres nommés au conseil d’administration de cette organisation qui prétend parler pour l’ensemble de la communauté juive est toutefois restée secrète [8]. De plus, le lobbying politique de l’organisation est directement coordonné par le puissant think tank états-unien AIPAC, reconnu pour faire voter au Congrès états-unien une centaine de lois en faveur d’Israël chaque année et qui fait en sorte que le cinquième de l’aide étrangère états-unienne est dirigée vers Israël. Les riches donateurs ont donc pris le contrôle des organisations juives canadiennes pour en faire un satellite de l’organisation états-unienne, jugée plus efficace. Les médias juifs ont souligné l’indignation soulevée dans la communauté quant à cette prise de contrôle hostile par des intérêts financiers [9]. Thomas Hecht, du CCI-Québec, déplorera que ces financiers parlant maintenant au nom de la communauté «  n’ont aucun lien avec les amcha [populations] juives et défendent plutôt un agenda bien à eux ». Frank Dimant, du B’nai Brith, condamnera ce qu’il considère être une « centralisation de la pensée et de l’opinion dans la communauté juive en vue de réduire au silence les militants de la communauté ». Rivka Augenfeld, militante active au CJC, confiera que c’est maintenant l’argent qui dirige la communauté : « quand les gens critiquent la communauté juive de fonctionner ainsi, qu’allons-nous répondre désormais ? »
• Si certains considèrent que la réingénierie récente du lobby pro-israélien était nécessaire, étant donné la trop grande faiblesse des organisations de la communauté juive face à un antisémitisme et une menace terroriste considérés grandissants, d’autres soutiendront que la communauté juive est la première victime d’une telle réingénierie : elle perd sa capacité démocratique d’organisation en faveur d’une élite financière, elle doit taire ses réserves pour soutenir le discours monolithique de la droite israélienne et elle perd sa crédibilité au sein des institutions citoyennes canadiennes.
• En attendant, le CIJA déploie une capacité d’influence peu commune. Schwartz et Reisman ont ainsi organisé un dîner en 2003 pour le Parti libéral de Paul Martin : ils ont réuni 4 000 gens d’affaires et amassé 2,8 millions $ [10]. Le président du CIJA vantait quant à lui que le souper d’inauguration de l’organisation a réuni plus de parlementaires que n’importe quel autre événement à Ottawa, mise à part la rentrée parlementaire. Avec d’importants moyens financiers, mais surtout un réseau de relations politiques impressionnant, le CIJA s’est donné les moyens pour défendre avec vigueur le point de vue israélien et pour peser dans la balance politique canadienne. À noter qu’il s’est aussi doté d’une branche politique, le CJPAC, blâmé régulièrement par les médias juifs pour son manque de transparence quasi loufoque alors qu’il prétend parler au nom de l’ensemble de la communauté [11].
• Puisque la communauté juive vote traditionnellement en faveur des Libéraux, l’occasion est belle pour le gouvernement Harper, dont l’obédience néoconservatrice proche des positions de l’AIPAC n’est plus un secret, de modifier cet état de fait. L’inflation verbale en faveur d’Israël peut ainsi lui rapporter plusieurs dividendes politiques d’un lobby pourvu d’un impressionnant réseau d’affaires mais aussi capable d’influencer le vote d’une communauté éprouvée par les événements au Proche-Orient. Dans la crainte de perdre un appui important, on peut penser que le Parti libéral jouera le jeu de l’appui inconditionnel à Israël, tel qu’entamé par Paul Martin.
• En attendant, plusieurs considèrent que le duo Harper/CIJA a été d’une efficacité redoutable pour que le Canada fournisse un appui inconditionnel à Israël dans le conflit contre le Liban : toutes les critiques envers Israël ou les interventions en faveur de la paix ont été dépeintes comme un appui à la barbarie et au terrorisme. Mais il nous semble que le discours pro-israélien radical tenu par ce duo devient, à terme, indéfendable aux yeux de la population canadienne et surtout québécoise ; les sondages récents sont clairs à ce sujet. Et plus l’urgence de la guerre cèdera la place à une analyse froide et critique, plus nous croyons que les tenants de ce discours seront complètement discrédités aux yeux de la population, y compris de la communauté juive elle-même qui, nous l’espérons, reprendra alors le contrôle démocratique des organisations qui la représentent.

[1] John Ibbitson, « In case you missed it, our Mideast policy has shifted », The Globe and Mail, 3 décembre 2004.

[2] Voir Adam Cutler, « Canada’s Middle-East Policy and the “Jewish Lobby” », Student Journal of Canadian Jewish Studies, vol. 1, 2006, et Daniel Freeman-Maloy, « “Israel Advocacy” in Canada », Znet, 26 juin 2006.

[3] Ronnie Miller, From Lebanon to the Intifada : The “Jewish Lobby” and Canadian Middle-East Policy, Lanham, University Press of America, 1991.

[4] Notons qu’Onex possède CMC Électronique (ex-Marconi), un des principaux fournisseurs de systèmes de guidage pour les avions et missiles de l’armée israélienne ; voir Richard Sanders, « Canadian Military Components used in Israel’s War Against Lebanon », Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade, juillet 2006.

[5] L’empire médiatique Canwest se compose entre autres de la chaîne de télévision Global, des journaux Jerusalem Post, National Post, The Gazette (Montréal), The Ottawa Citizen, Windsor Star, Edmonton Journal, The Calgary Herald, The Vancouver Sun et des journaux Metro. L’empire Canwest, souvent critiqué pour appuyer systématiquement les politiques de la droite israélienne, a soulevé un tollé chez les journalistes en 2001 lorsqu’il a choisi d’imposer une ligne éditoriale commune pour l’ensemble de ses journaux.

[6] Voir Marci McDonald, « The Heather & Gerry Show », Toronto Life, juin 2005, p. 54-65 et American Jewish Year Book 2004, vol. 104, New York, American Jewish Committee, 2004.

[7] Oakland Ross, « Spending on Jewish Advocacy to be Doubled ; Canadian Jewish Congress, Canada-Israel Committee to get $5M extra ; New Council Places Lobbying Efforts in Hands of Wealthy Few, Critics Say », Toronto Star, 9 octobre 2003.

[8] Julie Lesser, « UIA Federations Delays CIJA Review, Keeps Staff List Secret », The Jewish Tribune, 4 mai 2006.

[9] Voir par exemple David Lazarus, « CJC-Q Looking for a Restructuring Plan B », The Canadian Jewish News, 27 novembre 2003 ; Sheldon Gordon, « Mega-donors Bid for Control of Canadian Bodies », The Forward, 19 septembre 2003. Les citations qui suivent sont tirées de ces articles.

[10] CBC News, « Record Liberal Fundraiser Nets $2,8 millions », 10 décembre 2003.

[11] Voir par exemple Julie Lesser, « CJPAC’s wall of silence not in spirit of lobbyist’s code of conduct », The Jewish Tribune, 2 mars 2006 et Rick Kardonne, « Mystery surrounds Jewish political committee CJPAC », The Jewish Tribune, 13 décembre 2005.

+ A "Middle Power" in Action: Canada and the Partition of Palestine (2008 - JSTOR)

Hassan Husseini

INTRODUCTION

• Canada played a key role in the drafting of the United Nation's Partition Plan for Palestine in 1947. Supreme Court of Canada Justice Ivan C. Rand, was a central figure in drafting the United Nations Spec Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) Majority Report, which proposed partition, and in bringing the Committee to its final decision. Lester B. Pearson, then a senior Canadian diplomat and later the Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs, became the chairman of the UN sub-committee responsible for drawing up a detailed plan of partition. He played a pivotal role in securing compromise in support of partition at the UN General Assembly in November 1947. Some historians have credited Pearson's efforts with securing the positive vote in favour of partition at the UN (Bercuson 1985). In fact, "Zionists so appreciated Pearson's and Rand's role that they called the Under-Secretary State the 'Balfour of Canada' and they established the Ivan C. Rand Chair Law at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem" (Hillmer 1981, 166).
• Was Canada's support for the Partition Plan compatible with our own system of bi-national federalism? And was it compatible with our domestic as well as foreign policy objectives? On what grounds did Canada not support the one-state or bi-national state solution (federalism)? What factors contributed to Canada's position on partition? These are some of the questions that I will address in this paper as a way of trying to understand Canada's motivation on an issue that continues to be the source of much strife and conflict in the Middle East and internationally.
• Canada's support for the Partition of Palestine in 1947 and the subsequent recognition of the State of Israel in 1948, is considered by many (in government as well as in academia) to have been made after much deliberation and with the best of intentions grounded in legal and practical considerations. I will argue in this paper, however, that Canada's position on this issue was influenced by factors that go beyond the legality and the practicality of the matter. Close examinations of the facts reveal the legality and the practicality of the decision to partition Palestine are tenuous at best. I will investigate a number of internal, external and personal factors that made Canada opt for partition instead of federalism, and hence conclude that supporting partition and extending recognition to the Jewish state was inconsistent with Canada's own history of bi-national federalism, its professed goal of humanitarianism and the fostering of better relations between people and nations. I will further argue that Canada used its stature as a "middle power" not necessarily to secure a lasting solution to the Palestine question but to further the interests of the Western alliance in the face of perceived Soviet encroachment in the region and internationally.
• The paper is divided into three sections: section one discusses Canada’s place in the post-war period. Section two provides a brief outline of the history of Palestine and Canada’s role. Section three investigates the internal, external and personal factors that shaped Canada’s position on the Palestine problem in general and the Partition Resolution in particular.

CANADA IN THE POST-WWII PERIOD

• After WWII Canada tried hard to assert and enhance the economic, military and, some would argue, the political position it occupied during the war period. Canadian politicians, diplomats and other bureaucrats coined the term of Middle Power status and worked to assert Canada’s position as the ultimate middle power. Hence, the Middle Power concept has become closely associated with the position that Canada occupied in the international system after WWII. After the war, Canada found itself in a position of considerable strength stemming from its position as an important war time ally to the allied powers. Canada had the third largest navy and the fourth largest air force after the war. Over one million Canadians served in the Allied forces. More importantly, Canada supported the allied war effort (and reconstruction) from agricultural and industrial resources that like the US, were not directly affected by the war itself (Bercuson 1985, 32).
• At a conceptual level, Middle Power is a concept that is based on the practice of middle power internationalism by certain states (Chapnick 1999). As J. L. Granatstein argued, after WWII, “Canada exercised a power disproportionate to her pre-war status” (Granatstein 1973, 2). The first enunciation of the Middle Power concept came with the “functionalism statement” of Mackenzie King in 1943 when he declared that “in areas where Canada and other middle-sized powers had the capability to play the part of a major power, they should be so treated” (Granatstein 1973, 2). Middle Power status is also associated with the tendency of certain countries to pursue multilateral solutions to international problems and disputes. Multilateral solutions, however, needed certain institutional frameworks and Canada had that much needed mechanism to enhance its middle power status and some would argue to “balance the incredible might and power of the post-war United States” in the United Nations (Bercuson 1985, 110) as well as to check Soviet influence on the diplomatic front.
• It was in the above post-war context that Canada started to take an interest and to assert an active role at the international level, primarily through putting the emphasis on building such multilateral internationalist organizations such as the United Nations. Canada’s role in the emerging post-war international system was conditioned as much by the emerging cold war rivalry (US-USSR) as it was by an Anglo-American discord on Palestine and other issues as well as the rising power of the US. According to the historian Robert Spenser, Canada’s oldest tradition in external relations was one of using “what influence she possessed to secure her interests from Great Britain and the United States [...]” (Spenser 1959, 9). However, in the new world of the East-West conflict, “Canadian policies had to conform to those pursued by the United States” (Spenser 1959, 11). In other words, as important as the concept of Middle Power status is for our analysis, we must also recognize that in the context of the period under discussion, Canada was gaining more independence from the British Empire but becoming more tied down to the rising power of the United States.
• Canada’s public post-war foreign policy objectives were numerous but chief among them were: (1) To maintain the North Atlantic relationship between Britain and the US; (2) To contain increasing Soviet influence in Europe and the Third World; (3) To build international organizations such as the UN through which Canada’s status as a Middle Power may be recognized and enhanced; (4) And to maintain and build post-war peace on the basis of humanitarian internationalism.

CANADA AND THE ROAD TO THE PARTITION OF PALESTINE

• Plans to divide the Middle East region (as spoils of war) between major European powers were being designed even before World War I had been won. The Sykes-Picot Agreement between France and Britain, signed in 1916, divided the area into zones of influence which became officially part of the mandate granted to these powers by the League of Nations in 1922. According to this division, Britain was “granted” Iraq and Palestine and France was given Syria and Lebanon. Upon being made public, the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration (discussed below) infuriated the Arabs as they saw them to be in contradiction with the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence (1915-1916) in which Britain promised the Sherif Hussein of Mecca, Arab independence and statehood in return for Arab support for Britain’s war effort against the Ottoman and German armies in the region.
• Before 1918 Palestine was a province within the Ottoman Empire and after 1918, it officially entered into Britain’s sphere of influence through the form of Mandate. Britain made a commitment contained in a declaration from its Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothchild, head of the British Zionist Organization in which “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a National Home for the Jewish people....”
• Throughout the period of the Mandate, Britain endeavored to facilitate the attainment of the objective of establishing a Jewish national home in Palestine while at the same time trying to maintain good relations with the Arabs. Faced with this contradiction and its inability to reach an agreement that both Arabs and Jews would accept and to deal with the rising Jewish and Arab revolts against British rule, the UK decided in 1947 to hand the matter over to the United Nations for resolution.
• In April 1947, the United Nations set up a Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) in order to deal with the question of Palestine through the investigation and the drawing up of recommendations for consideration by the UN. UNSCOP consisted of 11 “neutral” member states’ including Canada which named Supreme Court of Canada Justice Ivan C. Rand as its representative.
• After some deliberation, it became clear that UNSCOP itself was bitterly divided and could not achieve a consensus. As a result, the majority (seven countries)? recommended partition of Palestine and the minority (three countries)’ recommended a bi-national state with proportional representation and guaranteed positions for both groups in the various arms of the government. This was not the first time that the Partition of Palestine had been proposed. In 1937 the Peel Commission recommended the Partition of Palestine and it was not followed up since both Arabs and Jews rejected it. This time around however, the Arabs represented by the Arab Higher Committee again rejected Partition* but the Jews represented by the Jewish Agency for Palestine’ agreed to it only “if it would make possible the immediate re-establishment of the Jewish state” (NAC, Rand Papers — my emphasis).
• UNSCOP recommended partition to an Ad Hoc Committee (made up of 55 countries) and the latter voted (25 in favour, 13 against with 17 abstaining) to present the partition resolution to the General Assembly (GA) for debate and approval. On November 29, 1947, the GA approved Partition Resolution 181 by a vote of 33 for, 13 against and 10 abstentions.® One would have expected that voting on this issue at this time would be strictly influenced by cold war rivalry, but the fact that the Soviet Union ended up supporting partition, meant that the vote had a different dynamic. Only Yugoslavia abstained and the rest of the Socialist countries voted for partition. On 15 May 1948, the day that the British mandate over Palestine was to expire, the Jewish Agency announced the establishment of the State of Israel. The United States recognized the new state within hours of the declaration and the USSR recognized Israel the next day. Canada extended de facto recognition to Israel on 24 December 1948, seven months after Israel’s establishment.
• As expected, the Palestinian Arabs and all the neighboring Arab states rejected partition and upon the creation of Israel, Egyptian, Jordanian, Iraqi, Syrian and Lebanese forces moved into the mainly Arab parts of the country and engaged the newly created Israeli army in battle at the end of which, Israel was able to occupy the greater part of the country — more territory than Israel was allotted in Resolution 181 (partition resolution).
• It has often been claimed that Canada’s support for the Partition of Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state was based on two elements: (1) Pragmatic considerations centered on the notion that no other option was viable or practicable under the circumstances; (2) It was based on legal considerations centered on the legality of the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate in promising the Jews “a Jewish national home in Palestine.”
• Canadian diplomats argued throughout the deliberations into the Palestine problem that there is a need to arrive at a practicable solution and the Partition Plan offered the only workable one. According to the head of the Canadian delegation, Justice Minister J. L. Ilsley, “Canada might have favoured a federal state if both the Arabs and the Jews had not flatly refused it” (Kay 1978, 133). According to Bercuson, Ilsley was more receptive to the notion of a federation and pointed out that UNSCOP’s minority plan had “certain elements of attractiveness to Canadians because Canada was a federal country” (Bercuson 1985, 130). Commentators in Canada also raised the issue of federation as an alternative to partition as the Ottawa Citizen observed on 21 August 1946 that “the Canadian way of self-government with autonomous provinces should be worth considering for Palestine” (Kay 1978, 108).
• Pearson spoke of the same dilemma but in the context of the great powers when he wrote in his memoirs that “the Canadian government did not support partition without a great deal of heart-searching and careful consideration; and only after we were convinced that there was no possibility of an agreement between Britain, the USA, and the USSR which might make possible any other solution” (Munro & Inglis 1973, 214).
• Right before the final vote on 29 November, Mr. Ilsley stated that Canada is indeed going to vote for the partition plan but only “with heavy hearts and many misgivings,” as “the least objectionable” (Spenser 1959, 147). These declarations however, do not seem to be consistent with Canada’s active support for and lobbying in favour of partition at all levels of the process. From the drafting of the majority report to the final vote, Canada played a pivotal role in mediating the dispute between the US and Great Britain as well as in bringing about a compromise between the US and the USSR on the question of the date of the termination of the British Mandate — actions that constitute active support for partition rather than passive “reluctance.”
• As for the evidence that Canada would have preferred a bi-racial/bi- national state, primary as well as the secondary sources only point to general statements such as the one outlined above but fail to elaborate on what concrete steps Canada (through its representatives) might have taken in investigating the possibility of such an outcome. In fact the evidence from the records of the UN itself, on the eve of the vote on 29 November reveals that the countries who supported partition voted down attempts by other members of the UN to delay the vote on partition in favour of expending further efforts to try to reach an agreement that may be acceptable for Arabs and Jews or to seek an advisory legal opinion from the International Court of Justice under Article 96 of the Charter of the UN (NAC, Rand Papers). For his part, Spenser questions Mr. IIsley’s assertion that “to vote for partition was better than taking no action at all [for] it is difficult to imagine that its defeat could have produced more floundering than occurred in the months after November 29” (Spenser 1959, 147). For Spenser, “reaching an agreement for agreement’s sake...was both a betrayal of the role of a middle power and in defiance of the repeated declarations on the need for keeping UN action within the realm of the practicable” (Spenser 1959, 148).
• Pearson was more dismissive of solutions that did not involve partition when he declared that “the unitary state proposal meant nothing — a recommendation ‘out of the blue and into the blue’ (Kay 1978, 134). The main reason for this assessment is that it was not “practicable.”
• But how practicable was the recommendation contained in the Majority Report to form an economic union (integration or cooperation) between the partitioned states? This was one of the most inconsistent assumptions and weaknesses in the Majority Report because it entailed a great deal of cooperation between Arabs and Jews that UNSCOP and the promoters of partition found to be gravely lacking. In fact, the UN approved the Partition Resolution on the premise that a unitary or a federal state was not a practicable solution because of this deep seated animosity and hatred between Arabs and Jews which made cooperation impossible and that was evident in their rejection of it. How then could one accept the assumption that economic union (which was also critical for the viability of partition) was achievable under such circumstances. Either the promoters of partition (Canada included) knew all along that partition was bound to fail (as impracticable as the unitary state solution) or as Pearson wrote a year after partition, “it is clear that some assumptions had to be accepted or no recommendation could have been made and this would simply have meant that nature would have been allowed to take its course” (Hillmer 1981, 162).
• Once again no concrete attempts (as far as I can see) were made by Canada to use its domestic example of building a relatively successful and prosperous bi-national federation as a model among many solutions to the Palestine problem.
• As previously mentioned, partition of Palestine was bitterly opposed by the Palestinian Arabs as well as the neighbouring Arab states, and despite this vehement opposition “and irrespective of Arab declarations that any attempt to violate the integrity of Palestine would be challenged, the plan was considered a realistic solution” (Ismael 1984, 11). Furthermore, after the obvious failure of the Partition Plan, and instead of advocating for a return to the option of a federal, bi-national state, Canada (Pearson) declared that an Arab recognition “that Israel had come to stay” was the only way that a solution could be found (Spenser 1959, 150).
• Years later, Pearson recorded in his memoirs that “[p]artition was certainly no ideal solution but it seemed, certainly to me, the best that could possibly be achieved... Provision was made for a Jewish state in Palestine, a ‘national home,” something which I felt was a sine qua non of any settlement” (Munro & Inglis 1973, 214). One may get the impression from such statements that Canada was more interested in seeing the establishment of a Jewish state than seeing the success of the two-state solution (partition) or of emulating its own model of federalism.
• As for the argument that partition fulfilled pre-established legal requirements to create a Jewish National Home in Palestine, “Rand believed that an Arab state in all of Palestine would be a ‘betrayal of the Jewish people and a violation of international agreements’ (Bercuson 1985, 96). The international agreements that Rand was referring to were the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the Mandate granted in 1922, which the Zionists used effectively to facilitate the creation of a “national home for the Jews in Palestine.”
• What is striking about a great deal of material on the subject is how secondary the creation and the viability of an Arab Palestinian state was in the deliberations of the various committees as well as in the historical accounts of the period, starting with the Balfour Declaration. [Zionism’s transformative project, resembled the colonialist project of Britain with its appeal to the superiority of its “interest, cause, or mission” (Said 1980, 15). The Arab Palestinian natives become “not worth considering and therefore nonexistent...” (Said 1980, 15).]
• Edward Said questioned the legality of the Balfour Declaration which he acknowledged “has long formed the judicial basis of Zionist claims for Palestine [...]” (Said 1980, 15). For Said, “the declaration was made (a) by a European power, (b) about a non-European territory, (c) in a flat disregard of both the presence and the wishes of the native majority resident in that territory, and (d) it took the form of a promise about this same territory to another foreign group, so that this foreign group might, quite literally, make this territory a national home for the Jewish people” (Said 1980, 15-16).
• Similar arguments were made at the time of partition by the Arab Higher Committee, and despite how compelling such arguments may have been, Canada maintained its support for the legality of the Balfour Declaration and the British Mandate that enshrined it and gave it life.

INTERNAL, EXTERNAL AND PERSONAL FACTORS IN THE MAKING OF CANADA’S POLICY ON PALESTINE

• In his book, Canada and Palestine: The Politics of Non-Commitment, Zachariah Kay investigates the impact of various factors on determining attitudes and policies effecting national and international issues and puts them in the context of the Palestine crisis and the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. The three main factors for Kay are: (1) The leadership factor (the Prime Minister); (2) The government factor (cabinet and the bureaucracy); and (3) societal factors (Kay 1978, 31). For Kay, “the primary factor affecting Canadian attitudes and policies towards the establishment of the Jewish state was leadership [in the office of the PM].” The government factor was secondary “while societal factors were virtually negligible in their effect on the decision-making process” (Kay 1978, 170).
• Those who claim that Canada’s policy on the question of Palestine (partition and recognition of Israel) was due only to pragmatic and legal considerations, are over-simplifying and legitimizing Canada’s position. The complexity of the issue necessitates that we delve deeper than realpolitik explanations to come to grips with Canada’s role in the Palestine problem. There were external, internal, and personal factors with which to understand Canada’s position and the motivation behind it. In certain respects these considerations rehabilitate certain factors that were considered secondary or “negligible” by authors such as Kay (1978), Bercuson (1985), Hillmer (1981) and Tauber (2002).

EXTERNAL FACTORS

Anglo-American Discord and the Cold War

• Senator Heath Macquarrie attributes the major motivation for the prominent role that Canadians played in the Palestine problem as the “amelioration of tensions among larger powers, the United states and Britain and later the United States and the Soviet Union” (Macquarrie in Ismael 1984, 62). Canada’s relationship with Britain was a major factor attributed by Senator Macquarrie for our delay in granting recognition to the new state of Israel, and in fact recognition was not extended until PM Mackenzie King, an ardent pro- British and UN skeptic, was out of the way.
• Ameliorating tensions between the US and Britain was different in objective from that of ameliorating tensions between the US and the USSR. At this period in time, both were perhaps in some ways connected to the cold war however, while the former aimed at strengthening the western alliance, the latter’s goal was to minimize and curtail the rising Soviet influence.
• Lester B. Pearson believed that rejecting partition would have resulted in violence and bloodshed, “placing even greater strain on Anglo-American relations and [more ominously] an increased danger of exploitation of the situation by the USSR” (Munro & Inglis 1973, 214).
• Pearson’s preoccupation with blocking Soviet influence in the region was an important element in his thinking during the Palestine crisis and after. Pearson considered Israel “an outpost, if you will of the West in the Middle East,” which was increasingly dependent on Western help while the Arabs looked to Moscow for military and diplomatic support (Munro & Inglis 1973, 219).

The Holocaust and Western Guilt

• The Nazi atrocities in Europe during WWII had a profound effect on the thinking of Canadian officials, including Lester B. Pearson, which Hillmer considered to be the most important reason for “the subsequent UN recommendation that a Jewish state be created in Palestine” (Hillmer 1981, 21).
• The Holocaust had an impact on the public as well as on the policies of political parties in Canada and around the world. This unspeakable atrocity against the European Jews convinced many who were reticent before of the need to establish a Jewish homeland / refuge in Palestine, as per the Balfour Declaration.
• Eliezer Tauber argues that individual Canadian foreign service officials at the UN pursued a line of action in support of partition “not out of considerations of realpolitik, but out of humanitarian concerns. It was the impact of the Holocaust and the plight of the Jewish refugees that convinced them that the establishment of a Jewish state was “a sine qua non for any settlement” (Tauber 2002, 117).
• Historians such as David Bercuson give the example of the Canadian Commonwealth Federation (CCF) to explain the impact that the Holocaust had on the changing attitudes towards the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine. He writes that prior to WWII, CCF leaders such as Woodsworth were very weary of supporting Zionism as they considered it a form of narrow and “ultra-nationalism” that could only give rise to counter-nationalism and instability in the region. After WWII however, things changed dramatically, in part due to having a new and more sympathetic leader take the helm from Woodsworth, and in the effort to gain electoral support from the Jewish community who were being wooed not only by the Liberals but also by the Communists. WWII and the Holocaust “dramatically altered the dimensions of the Palestine question and linked it with the fate of the Holocaust survivors” (Bercuson 1984, 21). The impact on public opinion in Canada as well as on the positions of the various political parties (with the exception the Social Credit Party) was notable. In the case of the CCF, it became “more vigorous in its support for Zionism than any other major party in Canada” (Bercuson 1984, 19).
• With the exception of the Social Credit Party, the Holocaust (which can also be attributed in part to the changing Soviet position regarding Zionism and partition) meant that there was near unanimous partisan support in Canada for the aspirations of the Jews and Zionism.

INTERNAL FACTORS

Zionist Lobby in Canada and Abroad

• The relative impact of the Zionist lobby to influence Canadian foreign policy on the Palestine question (and later the larger Arab-Israeli Conflict) was perhaps much more effective during the 1940s and 1950s in large part because of the fact that the Arab-Canadian community was fewer in numbers and, for the most part, divided along sectarian and religious lines and less well organized. In her MA thesis, Anne Trowel Hillmer quoted a Canadian government official from 1944 as saying that the Liberal government was “habitually in receipt of telegrams from Zionist organizations in Canada, the United States and elsewhere]...] a pro-Arab missive ‘was something of a novelty” (Hillmer 1981, 10). Perhaps the only counter-balancing opinion heard by the government was that of Elizabeth MacCallum, a long time foreign service officer at External Affairs and the only expert on the Middle East (Hillmer 1981, 19).
• Although Kay (1978) and Bercuson (1985) discount/underestimate the impact of the Zionist lobby on Canada’s foreign policy during the period in question, both include a much more detailed analysis of the intricate working of the various Zionist organizations, their international connections and lobby efforts than writers (Ismael 1984) who overemphasize the role of the Zionist lobby in Canadian policy towards the Palestine crisis and the Partition Plan. As an example, the conclusions of Kay and Bercuson did not entirely correspond with the fact that while the King government did not vehemently raise the issues brought to its attention by the Zionist lobby with Britain, Canada was and continued to be publicly supportive of the goals and aspirations of the Zionist movement. The impact of the Zionist lobby must also be measured in relation to public opinion, which Kay argued was changing in favour of Zionism.
• Bercuson traces the beginning of Zionist lobbying in Canada to the year 1919 when representatives from the Federation of Canadian Zionists and the Canadian Jewish Congress pressed the government to plead with the British government and PM Lloyd George to “include that area east of the Jordan River and north to the Litani River in what is now Lebanon” in the Palestine Mandate (Bercuson 1985, 17). Zionist Lobbying continued throughout the period of the British mandate and escalated in 1939 in reaction to the imposition by Britain of the White Paper policy restricting Jewish immigration to Palestine.
• Another form of Zionist lobbying was directed at the members of UNSCOP and this was all the more important as there were not any similar exposure to the Arab view since the Arab Higher Committee imposed a boycott on dealings or cooperating with the UN committee. According to Bercuson, “[T]he time Rand, and other committee members, spent with Horowitz, Eban, and men like Hull [dispatched by the Jewish Agency to lobby the committee] was important in moulding their thinking about the Palestine question because pro-Zionist positions were presented in an intimate atmosphere and at an informal and personal level” (Bercuson 1985, 86).
• Hillmer relies on quotes from interviews with George Ignatieff and Elizabeth MacCallum about the Zionist influence on the Canadian government and in particular on Pearson and the Canadian delegation at the UN, and concludes that “Jewish and Zionist pressure was felt, and doubtless acted upon, in Ottawa and New York” (Hillmer 1981, 175).

PERSONAL FACTORS

Judeo-Christian Values and Beliefs

• Tareq Ismael has argued that “the Christian religion and a certain orientation to the Holy Land; World War II and western civilization’s guilt over an age-old anti-Semitism...; the consequent sympathetic view of Zionism; ethnocentric European view of Asian and African people’s — all these lead Canada to a position compatible with the basic premises of the Israeli argument” (Ismael 1984, 28). The two most prominent Canadians involved in the UN discussion on Palestine held views that conveyed a certain religious and ethnocentric undertones that in the final analysis shaped their views of the issue. In the words of Justice Ivan Rand himself “because Israel placed such importance on the value of individual freedom, the new state was proving a “beacon light” in an otherwise darkened section of humanity. Israel was also an anchorage in the Middle East for ethical values and civilizing influence of the West” (NAC, Rand Papers — my emphasis).
• In a speech celebrating the 4® Anniversary of Israel’s ‘Independence’ Day in Winnipeg, Justice Ivan Rand declared with clear religious undertones that “I always regard the creation of the state of Israel as the world’s act of restitution after eighteen centuries of Jewish wondering” (NAC, Rand Papers).
• In yet another speech delivered the year after Israel was created, Justice Rand said: . . . the day you commemorate is of historical significance for two reasons: one relates to the Jewish people... The other relates to civilized mankind, it represents the first significant collective act of international justice to an oppressed people...” and in describing the conditions of the land of Palestine he declared: “But to these people [Jewish immigrants] with galvanizing energies released, it is a land already beginning to blossom like a rose. These men and women are draining and cleansing and transforming poisonous swamps into fertile fields... They are terracing and reclaiming the stony hills, they have multiplied the abundance of the coastal plain where the Philistines once lived[...]” (NAC, Rand Papers).
• In his book The Question of Palestine, Edward Said links the Zionist project with the tradition of western colonialism that is dehumanizing of indigenous populations. Said argues that “Zionism and Israel were associated with Liberalism, with freedom and democracy, with knowledge and light, with what “we” understand and fight for. By contrast, Zionism’s enemies were simply a twentieth-century version of the alien spirit of Oriental despotism, sensuality, ignorance, and similar forms of backwardness” (Said 1980, 29).
• Rand’s speeches upon returning home from his duties as a member of UNSCOP were short on legal justifications of partition and the establishment of the state of Israel and long on the superiority and the benevolence of the Jewish immigrants in comparison to the indigenous Palestinians. In a speech at a rally in 1949 Rand declared that Zionist leadership “faces the task also of showing the way to the rehabilitation of the life of the Middle East. The mass of humanity of that region today is sunk in squalor and degradation; no other people on earth can bring to it the intelligence, energy and effective work that the Jews canl...]” (NAC, Rand papers).
• Many Canadians became convinced that the Jews, having suffered one of the worst crimes at the hands of the Nazis in several other European countries, and discrimination even in Canada, were entitled to an independent state of their own. The idea that it should be in the biblical homeland of the Jews appealed to many Canadians of Christian persuasions, most notably Pearson, who had been influenced by the Bible to believe that the Jews belonged in the “Holy Land” of Palestine.
• In 1949 Pearson wrote that Canada was well positioned to play a role in finding a solution to the Palestine problem and “of all the people. ..we were best able to be objective” (NAC, Pearson Papers).
• In his memoirs however, Pearson did not seem to be very “objective” when he wrote that, “I must admit that I became emotionally involved in a very special way because we were dealing with the Holy Land — the land of my Sunday School lessons. At one stage in my life I knew far more about the geography of Palestine than I did about the geography of Canada. I think that in the back of my mind I felt I was concerning myself with something close to my early life and religious background” (Munro & Inglis 1973, 213).
• Many Christian faiths in Canada fostered a sentimental interest in the holy land that was certainly not sympathetic to the majority Arab-Muslim inhabitants of the land. This was evident in the lobby efforts undertaken by non- Jewish promoters of the Zionist cause such as Henry Janes who led the short- lived Christian Council for Palestine and Herbert Mowat, a former Anglican minister who led the Canadian Palestine Committee (Bercuson 1984, 24-25).
• While David Bercuson had a point when he wrote that, “Canada was far more concerned about the impact of the Palestine question on British- American relations than it was about the fate of Jews or Arabs” (Bercuson 1985, ix), he was dismissive from the outset of views and analysis that revealed the pro-Zionist sympathies of some of the Canadian key players in the Palestine question.
• Bercuson’s view is certainly not shared by Eliezer Tauber who considered that Canada’s role in the adoption of the 1947 Palestine Partition resolution “was a matter of personal policy making by a small group of Canadian foreign service officials determined to promote the idea [partition], which seemed to them morally right” (Tauber 2002, x). Tauber argues, “Pearson and his colleagues pursued this policy of their own accord, and not as representatives of an official Canadian foreign policy” (Tauber 2002, 117).

CONCLUSIONS

• Canada’s motivation in support of the Partition of Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states was conditioned by the various and at times contradictory factors outlined above. Canada’s position in the world after WWII and its increasing attention to international issues within the context of the functionalism of middle power status (whether real or perceived) led Canada not only to get involved in the Palestine question (somewhat reluctantly at first) but also to play a prominent role in the formulation and the passing of the partition resolution at the UN.
• Most mainstream writers and historians stress that Canada “sought pragmatic and realistic solutions” (Hillmer 1981; Bercuson 1985; Kay 1978) based on legality (Balfour Declaration) and practicality (Partition) to solve the Palestine problem. While these may be important factors to consider, a combination of external (Anglo-American discord and the cold war, the Holocaust), internal (Zionist lobby and the near unanimous partisan support for Zionist aims) and personal factors (religious beliefs and a Eurocentric view of the world) are also important elements in understanding Canada’s position and the motivation behind it.
• Stressing one or more of the factors discussed above may be linked to one's ideological position on the question of Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict in general. One has to contend, however, with the fact that the practical, pragmatic and legal explanations are tenuous and unconvincing. If history is any proof, the practicality argument behind Canada’s support for partition proved to be disastrous, especially to the Palestinians.
• As pointed out in the text, Canada’s position was also heavily influenced by factors such as the western alliance against Soviet influence, the Zionist lobby in Canada and abroad, the impact of the Holocaust on policy makers in the West, and the religious and Eurocentric views of prominent members of Canada’s delegation to the United Nations and the political elite in general. On a certain level, Canada’s support for partition instead of federalism based on democratic participation and representation of Arabs and Jews is inconsistent with its own model of a bi-national federation. On another level, however, support for partition and the creation of Israel as the bulwark of the West in the Middle East is compatible and consistent with Canada’s post-war foreign policy objectives.

WORKS CITED

Bercuson, David J. 1985. Canada and the Birth of Israel: A Study in Canadian Foreign Policy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Bickerton, Ian J., and Carla L. Klausner. 1991. A Concise History of the Arab-Israeli Conflict. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall.

Canada, The Standing Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs. 1985. Report on Canada’s Relations with the Countries of the Middle East and North Africa. Ottawa.

Canada-Israel Committee. 1979. Canada-Israel Friendship: The First Thirty Years. Toronto.

Eban, Abba. 1977. Abba Eban: An Autobiography. New York: Random House.

Elath, Eliahu. (Translation from Hebrew by Michael Ben-Yitzhak). 1976. Zionism at the UN: A Diary of the First Days. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America.

Granatstein, J. L. (ed.). 1969. Canadian Foreign Policy Since 1945: Middle Power or Satellite? Toronto: The Copp Clark Publishing Company.

Hadawi, Sami. 1979. Bitter Harvest: Palestine between 1914-1979. New York: The Caravan Books.

Hillmer, Anne Trowel. 1981. Canadian Policy on the Partition of Palestine, 1947. Ottawa: Carleton University (unpublished thesis).

Holmes, John W. 1982. The Shaping of Peace: Canada and the Search for World Order 1943-1957, Volume 2. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Ismael, Tareq Y. 1974. The Middle East in World Politics: A Study in Contemporary International Relations. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.

_ . 1984. Canadian Arab Relations: Policy and Perspectives. Ottawa: Jerusalem International Publishing House.

Kay, Zachariah. 1978. Canada and Palestine: The Politics of Non- Commitment. Jerusalem: Israel Universities Press.

_ . 1996. The Diplomacy of Prudence: Canada and Israel, 1948-1958. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Krammer, Amold. 1974. The Forgotten Friendship: Israel and the Soviet Bloc, 1947-53. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Mackay, R. A. (ed.). 1970. Canadian Foreign Policy 1945-1954: Selected Speeches and Documents. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.

Macquarrie, Heath. 1982. Canada and the Palestinians, 1947-1982. Ottawa: The League of Arab States Information Office.

Miller, Ronnie. 1991. From Lebanon to the Intifada: The Jewish Lobby and Canadian Middle East Policy. Lanham: University Press of America.

Munro, John A. and Alex Inglis (eds.). 1973. Mike: The Memoirs of The Right Honourable Lester B. Pearson, Volume 2, 1948-1957. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

National Archives of Canada (NAC). Ivan C. Rand Papers — MG30E77 Vol. 2.

National Archives of Canada (NAC). Lester B. Pearson Papers — MG26N9, Vol. 2.

Said, Edward W. 1979. The Question of Palestine. New York: Vintage Books.

Spencer, Robert A. 1959. Canada in World Affairs From UN to NATO, 1946-1949. Toronto: Oxford University Press.

Tauber, Eliezer. 2002. Personal Policy Making: Canada’s Role in the Adoption of the Palestine Partition Plan. Westport: Greenwood Press. Random House.

+ The racial contract: Israel/Palestine and Canada (2008 - WL)

Yasmeen Abu-Laban & Abigail Bakan, Social Identities, Vol. 14, Issue 5

• In this paper we adapt political philosopher Charles Mills' notion of the racial contract to consider the fraught context of Israel/Palestine and its interface with other states, particularly Canada. Specifically, we argue the racialization of categories commonly considered to be race-neutral – including: religion; nationality; citizenship; democracy; security; historic claims to or denial of claims to land; and interpretation, implementation or circumvention of international law – must be explicitly recognized in the exercise of power. To illustrate this we address how anti-Semitism, Orientalism and Islamophobia are key historic components of the racial contract in Canada and internationally. We consider how the racial contract has defined the state of Israel since 1948, and how the international racial contract assigns a common interest between the state of Israel and international political allies, including Canada. This process depends upon absenting Palestinians as simultaneously non-white, the subjects of extreme repression, and stateless.

Introduction: The racial contract and Israel/Palestine

• In current post 9/11 conditions, it is nearly impossible to avoid the realities of race and racism as part of the fabric of international political economy (Frankenberg, [45]). The 'war on terror' that animated the US administration of George W. Bush resonates in Canada, currently under a federal minority government led by staunch conservative (lower case 'c'), and Conservative (upper case 'C', the name of the governing political party), Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Bush and allies like Harper implicitly leant institutional legitimacy to racial profiling and have simultaneously politicized and racialized the borders of every country, not least that which divides the US and Canada (Bakan, [13]; Abu-Laban, [ 3]).

• However, the analytical tools on offer in both mainstream scholarly and public discourses have tended to minimize the reality of racialization of the post 9/11 period. Instead, global relations have been reduced to Samuel Huntington's 'clash of civilizations', where race and culture are first rendered synonymous, and then simultaneously obscured in racialized stereotypes (Huntington, [62]). Moreover, the Israel/Palestine conflict, though significantly pre-dating 9/11, has become subsumed in post 9/11 ideological and political framings.

• It is therefore useful to revisit the analytical framework suggested in Charles W. Mills' The Racial Contract (1997). Rather than identifying racism and racialization as exceptional interruptions in an otherwise race-neutral polity of democratic liberalism, Mills maintains that systemic racism is embedded in the fabric of western society. More pointedly, Mills theorizes the entrenchment of 'white supremacy', identifying this as an 'unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today' (Mills, [87], p. 1). The study of 'race' has been unevenly taken up across disciplines of the modern academy. In light of this, the theory of the racial contract should be regarded as a significant contribution for underscoring how 'races' come into existence, and are continually socially and politically re-constructed through a series of formal and informal agreements between those defined as white over those defined as non-white.

• In this paper we consider how the work of Charles Mills is helpful to focusing on the fraught context of Israel/Palestine and its interface with other states, in particular Canada. To do this we proceed in four parts. First we address how the racial contract is a useful heuristic device that can help to better understand the contemporary internal dynamics of countries formed as settler-colonies, as well as international politics. Second, following from this general discussion, we turn to address how concepts such as anti-Judaism, Orientalism and anti-Semitism are key historic components of the racial contract in Canada and internationally. Third, we consider the racial contract that has defined the state of Israel since 1948, which posits the non-identity of Palestinians, while asserting the democratic contractarian nature of an Israeli state grounded in 'Jewish nationality'. This is effectively a non-contractarian relationship, one that is not based on consent but on coercion through force, exile, occupation and imprisonment. Since 1948, this pattern has been, however, blurred though the establishment of an international racial contract that assigns a common interest between the state of Israel and international political allies, including Canada, while absenting Palestinians as simultaneously non-white, the subjects of extreme repression, and stateless. This feature is addressed in the fourth part of the paper, which considers a series of United Nations votes and accords. We argue that in order to understand these varied dimensions, the racialization of categories commonly considered to be race-neutral – including citizenship, religion and democracy – must be explicitly recognized as part of the continued exercise and reproduction of state power. In particular, these categories are part of the continued imperialism and an ideological privileging of a constructed and hegemonic whiteness (Bakan, [14]).

• Before this argument proceeds, a note regarding the conduct of the discourse and our own positionality is in order. Discussions of Israel/Palestine from the perspective of state racialization processes have tended to be treated as exceptional, and have not been normalized in the Canadian scholarly tradition. This characteristic is common, though varying in degree, within the Western academy. Instead, such discussions tend to operate within a model that legitimizes, and often prioritizes, emotion and an emphasis on personal identities. The motives of the scholars may be questioned more intensively than the research results, or the inquiry may be placed under unusual scrutiny. In particular, scholarly criticism of Israel is often assumed to be criticism of its ostensibly 'Jewish' character, rather than the particular policies, political structures, historical traditions or ideologies of the state. Or, alternatively, recognition of the context of emotion and its accompanying moralism can lead to an elision of the state of Israel from the standard canon of intellectual analysis. We take it as significant that introductory texts in such fields as comparative politics, or even race relations, are typically silent regarding Israel.

• This pattern of disrupted discourse is unusual, not commonly associated with in-depth analyses of most states regardless of their levels of support or violation of democratic norms, and regardless of the level of scholarly challenge. However, there may be similarities with discussions of racism among communities that perceive themselves to be progressive. For example, Sarita Srivastava has analyzed the emotional atmosphere that has tended to accompany conversations of racism in the Canadian feminist movement. She notes that it is important to consider 'how and why these emotional reactions have been able to block, defuse, and distract from change in feminist, pedagogical, and social movement sites' (Srivastava, [109], p. 30). The presence of similar processes of blocking, defusing and distracting may help to explain the lack of a developed critical discourse regarding Israel/Palestine in contemporary scholarship. Moreover, a theoretical and analytical framework that starts from the recognition of Palestinian oppression and the experience of dispossession in the foundation of the state of Israel has been the target of a particularly aggressive campaign of ideological dismissal. Israeli historian Ilan Pappe maintains that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the Palestinians in 1948 'has been erased almost totally from the global political memory'. This is despite the fact that since the Jewish holocaust, and more recently with the advent of electronic media, 'it has become almost impossible to conceal large scale crimes against humanity' (Pappe, [89], p. xiii).

• Our investigation exploring the implication of Canada's racial contract with Israel is presented with recognition of the limited acceptance of such critiques, and even of such a line of questioning, in normalized western academic discourse. This is no less the case in the Canadian context. To this end, some notes regarding our subject positions as authors may be beneficial in explaining our assumptions, approach and methodology.

• We write as respective members of what the Canadian media have dubbed 'the new solitudes' of the post 9/11 era. Such a view delineates Arab and Jewish Canadians as 'standing, in a more or less orderly fashion, behind metal barricades', demonstrating contesting loyalties to the state of Israel (Gatehouse, [48], p. 1). In our argument regarding the racial contract between the states of Canada and Israel, we stand together, articulating an alternative and growing collectivity of those who express shared opposition to systemic racism regardless of the rhetorical or emotional atmosphere in which it emerges.

• Abigail Bakan is Jewish, one of six children of parents who were both raised in New York City in the US. Her parents were in turn the children of survivors of and refugees from the east European pogroms. Like most North American Jews, Bakan lost her relatives who were unable to leave eastern Europe in the death camps of the Jewish holocaust. One relative who was a survivor and emigrated after World War Two was spared because he was selected during the Nazi occupation of Poland to serve as a grave digger for the bodies of slaughtered Jewish victims. Yasmeen Abu-Laban is part of the Palestinian diaspora. In 1948, her father's family was forced out of Palestine by Zionist violence preceding the creation of the state of Israel, becoming refugees. Unlike many Palestinian refugees who remain stateless, often confined in camps, her father eventually immigrated to Canada, along with her American-born mother. Abu-Laban grew up in a peaceable 'east-west' household that challenged the 'clash of civilizations' thesis. Both Bakan and Abu-Laban have lived in Canada in spaces that cross and intersect oppression and privilege, racist discrimination an d 'passing' as white, identity and refusal of acceptance of identity. While we reject an essentialist, identity-based analytical framework (Stasiulis, [110] pp. 366–70), we identify our particular subject locations on both sides of the 'new solitudes' as a way to challenge prior politically or morally constructed stereotypes or discourses that could distract from the focus of our argument.

• We adopt a shared analytical approach that disputes the claim that a challenge to Israel's racialized practices is traceable to the interests of 'Arab terrorists' or grounded in anti-Semitism, here meaning anti-Jewish racism. We similarly do not hold that all Jews inside or outside the state of Israel start from a naturalized identification with and support for the policies, practices, and historical claims of the Israeli state. We find it problematic however that Jews who have refused to act as foreign policy diplomats for the state of Israel, and who stand as vocal critics of Israel's racist policies, are commonly met either as curiously exceptional or 'self-haters' (Finkelstein, [44]; Kushner & Solomon, [78]). We find it equally problematic that non-Jews who question the policies of the state of Israel may be labeled anti-Semitic; if they are Palestinian, such questioning likely augments the 'quintessential Palestinian experience' (Khalidi, [75], p. 1) of being treated as a security threat at any state border or where there is heightened fear of 'terrorism'.

• Our aims are to understand the significance of thinking about the racial contract in addressing Israel/Palestine and to bring Canada's racial contract with Israel into the purview of anti-racist analysis. This approach is consistent with a growing literature that attempts to explain the linkages among race, class, political economy, imperialism, colonialism, hegemony and ideology (Mills, [87]; Said, [100]; James, [67]; Williams, [125]; Roediger, [96]; Baum, [22]; Abu-Laban, [ 4]; Abu-Laban & Gabriel, [ 5]; Bakan & Stasiulis, [16], [17]; Bakan, [13]; Bannerji, [18], [19], [20]; Bolaria & Li, [24]; Bristow et al., [26]; Cooper, [34]; Clarke, [32]; Galabuzi, [46]; Henry, Tator, Mattis, & Rees, [58]; Henry & Tator, [57]; Lawrence, [79]; McKittrick, [84]; Razack, [91], [92], [93]). We also seek to place this analysis in a framework marked by a parallel literature that disrupts the equation linking Judaism, as a religion or cultural identity, with Zionism, a political strategy and ideology. Uri Davis puts forward the same argument in different terms:

• Judaism is not Zionism. Judaism, as a confessional preference, should be strictly an individual matter, and generally speaking, like other individual preferences... should not be the concern of the law. Zionism, a political programme, is a matter of public debate... [T]he political Zionist school of thought and practice is committed to the normative statement that it is a good idea to establish and consolidate in the country of Palestine a sovereign state, a Jewish state, that attempts to guarantee in law and in practice a demographic majority of the Jewish tribes in the territory under its control (Davis, [37], p. 12)

• We believe that a perspective that is anti-racist legitimately challenges Zionism – as an ideology that has supported the racist practices of Israel as a settler state – but is in no way grounded in a view that is anti-Semitic. Similarly, analyses that identify the ethnicized 'whiteness' of the Israeli state, and put forward analogies with the apartheid state of pre-1994 South Africa, are consistent with such an anti-racist perspective (Rodinson, [95]; Davis, [37]; Tilley, [120]; Carter, [30]; Cook, [33]; Pappe, [89]; Karmi, [70]; Finkelstein, [43]; Neumann, [88]).

The racial contract as a heuristic device

• Charles Mills' work The Racial Contract takes as its starting point the way that the discipline of philosophy has been, both demographically and conceptually, one of the 'whitest' of the humanities (1997, p. 2). As such, Mills argues that much work in the discipline can not adequately deal with the contributions of Indigenous, African-American, Third World and Fourth World (stateless) political thinkers (1997, p. 3). Mills offers the 'racial contract' as a way to conceptually bridge mainstream political ethics and philosophy (with its emphasis on social contract theory) and that of more critical work which explicitly takes up themes such as history, conquest, slavery, colonialism, imperialism, apartheid, and reparations (1997, p. 4). For Mills, the racial contract is not a contract between individuals who are equal, but rather a contract between those who count, a difference that he expresses in distinguishing 'we the people', from 'we the white people' (1997, p. 3). As such, the racial contract is both a nonideal theory, and a way of explaining the genesis of state and society with the aim of generating criticism. In Mills' words:

• If the ideal contract is to be endorsed and emulated, this nonideal/naturalized contract is to be demystified and condemned. So the point of analyzing the nonideal contract is not to ratify it but to use it to explain and expose the inequities of the actual nonideal polity and to help us to see through the theories and moral justifications offered in defence of them. It gives us a kind of X-ray vision into the real internal logic of the sociopolitical system. Thus it does normative work for us not through its own values, which are detestable, but by enabling us to understand the polity's actual history and how these values and concepts have functioned to rationalize oppression, so as to reform them. (1997, pp. 5–6)

• For Mills then, 'the modern world was ... expressly created [through contracts over slavery, colonialism and the like] as a racially hierarchical polity, globally dominated by Europeans' (1997, p. 27, italics in original). In essence then, Mills offers a way to grapple with 'race' in Western societies and modernity, by showing how non-whites have been subordinated. The Racial Contract does not, however, offer a theory of how particular groups come to be categorized, or the abundance of categories that might be constructed. To be fair, Mills acknowledges that the 'white/nonwhite divide does not fully deal with "borderline" Europeans, white people with a question mark – the Irish, Slavs, Mediterraneans, and above all, of course, Jews' (1997, pp. 78–79). Similarly, he also notes that 'other subordinate Racial Contracts exist which do not involve white/nonwhite relations' (1997, p. 127). In the end however, Mills maintains that the white/non-white dichotomy carries a simplicity that is all the more important because 'Whiteness is not really a color at all, but a set of power relations' (Mills, [87], p. 127, italics in original).

• Mills' foundational work provokes a series of important questions when applied to particular states and the international arena. There is now an extensive literature in the area of critical whiteness studies, and there is room to debate the specific nature of the relationships among race, class, gender and state power in advanced capitalist societies and global relations (Roediger, [96]; Allen, [ 8], [ 9]; Baum, [22]; Bakan, [14]; Galabuzi, [47]; Hale, [54]). However, Mills' contribution continues to compel questions that explore racialized contractual relations that have become embedded in the hegemonic liberal capitalist project of Western ruling elites. Such a perspective can explain the way in which racism, though formally illegal and in violation of commonly accepted principles of human rights, continues to be systemic, perpetuated and reproduced in conditions of modern democracies. As a heuristic device, therefore, the notion of the racial contract can usefully serve to focus attention on the intersections of state power and systemic racism that would otherwise escape critical scrutiny.

Situating 'the questions': The rise of the racial contract

• We situate our understanding of the emergence of 'the Jewish question', as well as 'the question of Palestine' in relation to the rise of a European-based racial contract which drew from pre-existing strains of anti-Judaism and Orientalism, and had far-reaching consequences both in and outside of Europe. As Bruce Baum has pointed out, the idea of 'the Caucasian race' (and its more informal popular offshoot, 'white') is socially constructed, historically specific, and the product of specific relations of power (2006, pp. 7–8). Emerging from the seventeenth century, and becoming more firmly rooted in the eighteenth century, European race scientists (and race-thinking) variously distinguished 'white' (European) people from 'non-white' (non-Europeans) in a hierarchical way. Dividing humanity into imaginary 'races', was not only a process intimately tied to nationalism, but served to sustain the real inequities produced through capitalism, colonialism and imperialism. Put differently, race thinking helped to justify the perception of 'white' privilege in economic, cultural and political spheres within countries of Europe and globally. Whether or not such perceptions of privilege coincided with real material advantage, or in fact served to cover for material disadvantage, was variable and contingent, depending on specific historical circumstances (Bakan, [14]).

• By the eighteenth century in the very 'era when European peoples were increasingly rallying behind new liberal and egalitarian ideas concerning "the rights of Man"', pseudoscientific discourses on race asserted that there were 'natural (i.e. racial) limits to which peoples were suited for freedom and equality' (Baum, [22], p. 59). Such hierarchical thinking about the world's people then clearly laid the ideological justification for colonialism. Colonialism was 'literally' represented in Rudyard Kipling's famous 1899 poem about the 'white man's burden'. Colonialism was materially represented in the complex privileges (and denial of privileges) ascribed by virtue of race, ethnicity, gender and class in the formation of settler colonies (Stasiulis & Yuval-Davis, [112]). Thus, for example, the historic project of modeling Canada after Britain politically, economically, culturally, socially, and demographically as a white settler colony frequently led to prohibiting the entry of 'non-white' groups, or to assimilative and discriminatory measures directed at indigenous peoples and other 'non-whites' (Stasiulis & Jhappan, [111]).

• To understand the distinctive character of discourses animating 'the Jewish and Palestine questions' it is important to note that the development of modern scientific racism in Europe meshed with earlier, or pre-modern, ideas. A central one, as argued by Harle, was the idea of 'the enemy' rooted in Western conceptions of 'good' versus 'evil'. As a result, for example, anti-Judaism was prevalent in the ancient world, and when Christianity became Rome's official religion, Jews were prohibited from marrying Christians or owning property (Harle, [56], p. 63). Myths reached a new level from the time of the first Crusade, when 'Jews were presented as children of the Devil, agents employed by Satan for the express purpose of harming Christians' (Harle, [56], p. 63). Moreover, Muslims, as pointed out by Said in his classic discussion of Orientalism, served from the time of the Crusades as 'Europe's Other' (1979). As Harle also notes, Muslims formed the quintessential foe:

• The religious and political patterns of Enemy thinking were strengthened by historical experiences. Among the enemies that have threatened Europe and against which Europe has fought, the Arabs have kept the major place – together with their religion, Islam. Due to this religious nature of the threat, we can speak of Muslims as the Enemy of Europe. Their role is connected to a more general role of the Orient; therefore we have a rather long tradition here ... (2000, p. 67)

• Given the inter-relationship between the rise of race-thinking and imperial power, as Arabs and Jews came to be depicted as 'Semites' in many 'race' classifications, it is notable that both were variably placed as a branch of, and completely outside of, the 'Caucasian race' (Baum, [22], p. 113 and 133). Questioning the 'Caucasian identity' of Jews grew as anti-Semitism (i.e. the belief in the specifically racial inferiority of Jews) deepened in Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Baum, [22], pp. 154–161). Similarly, the tendency to view Arabs/Muslims as biologically inferior increased with the rise of imperialism and subjugation of ostensibly 'backward' races/cultures/societies (Said, [100], p. 206). In this way adherence to Islam, even apart from a perception of ascribed 'dark skin', emerged as a critical mark of non-whiteness (Massad, [83] p. 108).

• The globalizing context of imperialism and colonialism, as well as the deepening of nationalism and persecution of Jews in Europe (from the pogroms of the 1880s to the infamous 1894 Dreyfus trial in France to the forgery of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion) forms the backdrop to the emergence of Zionism, a Jewish nationalist political movement initially inspired by Theodor Herzl ([60][1896]). Although the nationalist project may have conceivably taken different forms, after Herzl convened the first World Zionist Congress in Switzerland in 1897 it was clear that land acquisition and settlement – in particular securing a state in historic Palestine then under Ottoman control – developed as the ultimate goal (John & Hadawi, [68], p. 1).

• While the Zionist movement was a response specifically to anti-Semitism and its violence in the context of Europe (Khalidy, [76], p. 37), the movement initially did not have more than minimal support among European Jews. Some European Jews saw Zionism's overt political agenda as incompatible with religious/spiritual practice; others saw it as further threatening their precarious status in the countries in which they lived (Mallison Jr, 1971, p. 61; Rabkin, [90]). Further, alternative strategic and political responses to anti-Semitism were much more influential, including socialist organizations such as the Bund and the Bolsheviks (Bakan, [12]; Rose, [97]). Zionism also failed to garner mass support of Jews living outside Europe in Palestine (at the time less than 10 percent of the population) (Chomsky, [31], p. 461). Nonetheless, the movement came to synergize with European, and specifically British, race-thinking and colonial aspirations over those deemed less worthy, forming part of elite, or ruling class, ideology. Consider, for example, the 1903 'offer' by the British government of the future colony of Kenya, as a Jewish state. While this proposed option was ultimately rejected, it was not passed over without debate between Theodor Herzl and his eventual successor Chaim Weizmann (Mallison Jr, [82], p. 63). Moreover, Arthur James Balfour, who as British Foreign Secretary penned the 1917 letter that came to be known as the Balfour Declaration, promising 'the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people', was himself 'uncomfortable' with the place of Jews within British (Christian) society (Stein, [113], p. 165). Underscoring this discomfort, in 1905 as British Prime Minister, Balfour enacted immigration laws aimed to curb the entrance of Jews who were deemed 'undesirable foreigners' (Tibawi, [119], p.1).

• Zionism as a political movement was not monolithic in the early years of the twentieth century (Habib, [52], pp. 27–28). However, the Zionist movement did coalesce ultimately around the particular claim to Palestine based on ostensible historical and/or religious interpretations (as in 'a chosen land for a chosen people') that served to make the indigenous Muslim and Christian Arabs in Palestine, and their claims, invisible. Their invisibility, as human beings and as political and social claims-makers, in the Zionist imaginary was perhaps most graphically exemplified in British-born playwright Israel Zangwill's famous slogan, describing Palestine as 'a land without a people for a people without a land'. In its European roots, and in its erasure of indigenous people, Zionism can be understood as an ideology associated with a settler-colonial movement, and the state of Israel as a settler-colony akin to South Africa (Abu-Lughod & Abu-Laban, [ 6]; Said, [100]; Khalidi, [75]). The European Zionist tradition also notably treated Palestinian Arabs in classically Orientalist fashion. Thus Herzl himself spoke critically of Palestine's 'dirty Arabs', as well as 'blackened Arab villages whose inhabitants looked like brigands'; and Chaim Weizmann spoke of 'the desert' (i.e. Arabs) 'against civilization' (i.e. European Jews) (Massad, [83], pp. 101–102). Through the assertion of Zionism, the non-white Jewish victims of anti-Semitism could assert a bridge from non-whiteness to whiteness, identifying with European global hegemony, Orientalism, and colonial settlement of coveted Third World lands. An alternative anti-racist strategy grounded in challenging imperialism and colonial structures, and forging bonds of solidarity with non-Jewish allies in the workers' and socialist movements, originally proved more attractive to the largely poor and working class Jewish European population (Riddell, [94], pp. 282–291).

• The Zionist nationalist project and the Balfour Declaration in particular were also to be countered by Arab nationalism. The exact date of emergence of the Arab nationalist movement can be debated, but certainly by the early 1900s there were strong sentiments in favour of empowering all Arabs, regardless of religion, from foreign domination. These aspirations for self-rule are reflected in the correspondence (from July 14, 1915) between Sherif Hussein from Mecca, and Sir Henry McMahon, the British High Commissioner for Egypt. Hussein offered to assist the British Empire in its war effort against Turkey on the expectation that the British would acknowledge the independence of the Arab countries, which included the area of Palestine (John & Hadawi, [68], pp. 35–52).

• The Balfour Declaration was intentionally vague, giving some recognition to the majority 'existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine' and their 'civil and religious rights', but betrayed the principle of national self-determination. This did not stop the Balfour Declaration from acquiring approval from the League of Nations, including Canada at the time as Britain's Dominion. After World War One the text was incorporated into the British Mandate for Palestine, now freed from Ottoman rule. In light of the British government's ambiguity as reflected in the Balfour Declaration and the Hussein-McMahon correspondence, it is sometimes said that Palestine was the 'twice promised land'. That Britain was in a position to 'promise' (or not) had much to do with colonialism and the whiteness associated with state power in and outside Europe; this was power that left those outside – Arab Muslims, Arab Christians and Jews – ultimately fighting each other.

• Until 1939, the British Mandate was marked by increasing Jewish immigration to Palestine, a practice that garnered support from Zionists and signaled the beginnings of a demographic transformation. Throughout the mandatory period Arab-Palestinian resistance to British colonial rule continued, taking the form of strikes, demonstrations, and sporadic violent clashes (Swedenburg, [114]). By May 1939, the British Government issued a White Paper (sic.) (re)stating its policy in Palestine. The White Paper refuted the basic interpretation previously established in the Balfour Declaration, arguing that the framers of the Mandate 'could not have intended that Palestine should be converted into a Jewish state against the will of the Arab population of the country' (Britain, [27]). Additionally, it called for a decrease in Jewish immigration, and an independent state in Palestine for both Arabs and Jews. After the issuing of the White Paper, Zionist groups began to militarily resist the British. However, the horrendous conditions in Europe that triggered migration (even after the White Paper) also need to be situated in relation to the historic racial contract.

• The racial contract which gave rise to 'the Jewish Question' in Europe took a genocidal turn with the installation of Germany's Adolf Hitler in 1933, Nazism's embrac e of 'Aryan' supremacy, and death camps as the 'final solution'. Throughout the 1930s, successive efforts to deprive Jewish Germans of basic rights and ultimately threatened genocide led to emigration, and by the culmination of World War Two there were more than 400,000 Jewish refugees (Lilienthal, [81], p. 50). By 1938, international pressures to accept Jewish refugees led to the convening of a conference in Evian, France, where delegates from 32 countries were represented. However, refuge in other countries, particularly the United States and Canada, was not forthcoming (Habib, [52], p. 29).

• Indeed, the case of Canada is especially illustrative here. For much of its history Canada maintained its status as a white settler-colony by enforcing a preference for white, British-origin Protestants in its immigration intake (Abu-Laban, [ 2]). As Irving Abella and Harold Troper (1983) have shown, the prevailing attitude of Canadian elected and immigration officials towards Jewish refugees in the period 1933–1948 was that 'none is too many', an attitude that was reflected in a policy of extremely limited intake. Indeed, Canada (along with Cuba and the United States) in 1939 refused entry to the SS St Louis, forcing over 900 Jews fleeing Nazi persecution to turn back to Europe, and for many to face imminent death.

• The Jewish holocaust, and the Jewish refugees whose lives were a testimony to this reality, contributed a widespread despair in the prospect of normalizing Jewish life in the context of liberal western European capitalism. While Nazi racism towards the Jews of Germany and Eastern Europe was extreme in it use of modern capitalist technology and its systemic nature, anti-Jewish racism was not new to the region. Earlier generations of European Jews had turned to other strategies to challenge racism, particularly the socialist and labour movements. There is an extensive literature regarding socialist and labour responses to anti-Semitism, forging a tradition that was originally far more influential than the marginalized Zionist strategy (Bakan, [12]). However, with the consolidation of Stalinism in Russia in the late 1920s and early 1930s, a capitulation to patterns of pre-revolutionary state-led anti-Semitism developed in the Soviet Union. The combined rise of Nazism and Stalinism in Europe, and the failure of liberal democracies in the West and North America to embrace Jewish refugees, opened the door to the isolationism and xenophobia that would fuel the Zionist settlement of Palestine (Bakan, [12]). Moreover, this ideological current was met with an interest in colonial expansion, from Britain and then the United States, providing a tragic combination in the post-World War Two period of realpolitik that absented the reality of Palestine and the Palestinians (Rose, [97]; Schlaim, [102]).

• As the continuing revelations concerning Nazi treatment of Jews unfolded after World War Two, a new perceived legitimacy became attached to the Zionist goal of a Jewish state in Palestine. The Partition Plan (Resolution 181) which sought to create a Jewish and an Arab state was passed November 29, 1947 by a majority vote in the United Nations General Assembly (with Canada, and both the United States and the Soviet Union, in favour, and Britain abstaining).

• The newly emerged United Nations, like the League of Nations before it, reflected the historic global racial contract in so far as the countries that were members were heavily from the West, and many parts of the developing world were still under foreign rule. It is questionable whether such a plan would have ever passed in a General Assembly composed of newly independent states. Indeed, the Partition Plan was challenged by Palestinian Arabs, as / whereas Jewish ownership of land amounted to only 5.67 percent of the total land area of Palestine, more than half of the country was allotted to the Jewish state, including the majority of the fertile and highly developed coastal and other plains. (John & Hadawi, [69], p. 268)

• Nonetheless, on May 15, 1948, an independent state of Israel was declared, and the British mandate came to an end. As a result, open warfare between the surrounding Arab states and Israel erupted. Sections of the Israeli military conducted a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing to ensure that land previously held by indigenous Palestinians could be declared vacant and open to permanent Jewish-only settlement (Pappe, [89]). By the end of the war, there was more land taken by Israel than had even been allotted under the Partition Plan. Israeli leaders immediately indicated that the new state belonged to all the Jewish people around the world and invited immigration on the promise of immediate citizenship, ushering in a new era of racial contract.

• Two states that are the subject of our investigation here are particularly prone to escape such analysis: Canada and Israel. Canada is commonly seen as race-neutral space, a state founded in the afterglow of anti-racist 'rescue' of fugitive black American slaves in a mythologized ideological legacy of the underground railroad (Bakan, [15]). Canada's establishment as a white settler state, though well documented, continues to be obscured in this accepted notion of democratic neutrality (Razack, [93]; Stasiulis & Yuval-Davis, [112]; McKittrick, [84]; Baum, [22]). Israel is a state established on the grounds of separate citizenship for those defined as 'Jewish' who receive privileged status on the basis of a legally defined ethnic-religious identity. Israel's version of modernity therefore fuses theology and politics. It has commonly been seen as a uniquely democratic nation in the Middle East, even though post-Enlightenment democratic traditions have emphasized the separation of religion and the state. More specifically, even though the Israeli state has no record of equality in relation to Palestinians or even Palestinian Israelis, academic scholars have 'explained' this contradiction by employing the qualifier of 'ethnic democracy' (Smooha, [107]; and for the critique, Sa'di, [99]).

• It is more useful to consider an amended notion of a racial contract to unpack the apparently normalized conditions of racism in both Canada and Israel, where the settler character of each state has been obscured. Moreover, the contracts have extended across nationally defined borders, to construct a type of international racial contract where there is an assumed collusion of interests between the Canadian and Israeli states. Canada, for example, was the first state to cut off aid to the democratically elected government of the Palestinian Authority in the Occupied Territories in March of 2006. During Israel's war on Lebanon in July of the same year, Stephen Harper identified Israel's violent response as 'measured', while the actions of Hezbollah were termed 'genocidal' (Weiss, 2008). In January 2008, Canada distinguished itself as the sole country to vote against a resolution of the United Nations Human Rights Council calling for Israel to 'lift immediately the siege that it has imposed on the occupied Gaza Strip, restore continued supply of fuel, food and medicine and reopen the border crossings' and for the 'immediate protection of the Palestinian civilians in the Occupied Palestinian Territory in compliance with human rights law and international humanitarian law and to refrain from violence against the civilian population' (UN Office of High Commissioner of Human Rights, [122]). In the same month, Jason Kenney, the Conservative Government's secretary of state for multiculturalism, announced that Canada would decline participation in the second United Nations World Conference on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance (UN WCAR) scheduled to take place in Geneva, Switzerland, in 2009. The grounds for the refusal to participate were related to criticism of Israel in the first UN WCAR in Durban in 2001. These discussions were identified by Kenney as 'a circus for intolerance and bigotry' that was particularly 'directed at the Jewish people' (CTV.ca, [35]). And, in March, 2008, the Department of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness of Canada signed a 'Declaration of Intent' with the Ministry of Public Security of the Government of the State of Israel. The two governments agreed to prioritize and 'manage cooperation' in several sectors, including border management and 'security', correctional services and prisons, illegal immigration and 'terrorist financing'. Moreover, the two governments agreed to establish a joint 'Management Committee' that would monitor the exchange of information and expertise, and establish 'clear lines of communication' in pursuit of 'common goals' (Government of Canada, [51]).

• While criticisms of its racist practices are readily dismissed by governments such as Canada's, Israel continues to act in defiance of international law and the standard human rights norms associated with liberal democracies. At the same time, the hegemonic discourse associated with the racial contract serves to deny the reality and applicability of critical notions of racism; it marginalizes or silences discussions grounded in critical anti-racism of Israel's role in the Israel/Palestine conflict. Alternatively, a new language of anti-racist opposition to Israel's oppressive policies has been introduced through analogies with the apartheid system of pre-1994 South Africa. Analyses that follow from such an analogy identify the ethnicized 'whiteness' of the Israeli state, and are consistent, moreover, with an anti-racist perspective (Rodinson, [95]; Davis, [37]; Tilley, [120]; Carter, [30]; Cook, [33]; Karmi, [70]; Pappe, [89]; Ferguson, [41]; Finkelstein, [43]; Neumann, [88]). This present reality is complicated, however, by the historic oppression of Jews in Eastern Europe and Nazi Germany. The claim commonly presented is a Zionist response, where a state in the land of Palestine is described as the only viable permanent antidote to European and global anti-Semitism. The combination of a highlighted emphasis on the experience of European racism towards the Jewish population, with a minimization or absenting of Israel's apartheid-like and settler structure, has tended to diminish the level of scholarly discourse regarding the racialization of Palestine and the Palestinians. The Zionist response has rendered the racialized whiteness and apartheid character of the Israeli state the subject of a fraught and emotionally charged atmosphere. Not least, the assertion of a tight association between the state of Israel and the interests of all Jewish people, inside Israel and in every country of the world, has further limited constructive exchange amongst scholars and activists al ike.

• The emphasis placed here on the racial contract between Canada and Israel is suggested as a means to normalize such discourse. We also intend to shine a light on the conditions and rights of the indigenous Palestinian population, within the boundaries of Israel proper, in the Occupied Territories, and in the Palestinian diaspora. Such an analysis is consistent with a growing field of scholarship that is premised on recognition of the capitalist and racist character of the Canadian state, contrary to the mythologized image of a race-neutral and multicultural 'peacekeeper' (Razack, [91], [92], [93]; Kellogg, [73], [74]; Engler & Fenton, [40]).

• This general formulation presented is, in broad strokes, rather obvious. The relationship between Israel and the Palestinian population is not dissimilar from many colonial settler experiences where conquest, war, occupation, legislated discrimination and systemic violation of human rights is endemic to the structure of the state and civil society. For those who have studied the realities of the region from a critical anti-racist or Marxist perspective, there is no room to maintain that this is a conflict of two equal and equivalent 'sides'. It is complicated, however, as referred to above, by historic forms of racialization, as well as the particular racialized character of the Israeli state.

• The history of the Jewish holocaust and the decades of experience of anti-Semitism in Europe have tended to produce another dimension to our understanding of the role of a racial contract in international relations. Following from Mills' analysis, it can be argued that the Jewish population of Germany and Eastern Europe, racialized and scapegoated on the basis of assigned phenotypical characteristics, were treated as the non-white victims of Tsarist and Nazi regimes. Moreover, liberal democratic reforms in Western Europe, the US and Canada, did not automatically moderate racialization, indicated by the uniform rejection of the claims of Jewish refugees for asylum in the face of threatened genocide. Jews in America and Canada, for example, over this period of time clearly 'were less than white' (Brodkin, [28] p. 23; Abella & Troper, [ 1]). But this pattern is not static. In liberal democracies, from the post-World War Two period through to the present, a notable and dramatic transition in the socio-economic and racial positioning of Jewish citizens developed. Jewishness, as a cultural and ethnic identity distinct from a religiously-specific identity with Judaism, in liberal democracies (and here we are not including Israel), rests in a position of unstable (and non-Christian) whiteness (Brodkin, [28]; Levine-Rasky, [80]; Goldstein, [50]). The association of whiteness with hegemonic power structures includes not only domestic socio-economic positioning, but also changes in western foreign policy and new renditions of Orientalism (Said, [100]). The historic experiences of anti-Jewish oppression and racialized patterns of discrimination in Europe and North America have been artificially used in part to justify western imperialist foreign policy in the Middle East (Finkelstein, [42]). The racial contract between Israel and Canada therefore influences, and has been influenced by, discourse regarding racism and anti-racism both domestically and internationally.

• The relationship between Zionism and anti-racism has therefore become complicated by these conflations. As a nationalist ideology, and simultaneously a conservative ideological response to European anti-Semitism, modern Zionism developed in close association and identification with colonialism and imperialist expansion. The claim that Israel is an exclusively and ethnically-defined 'Jewish state', even in an age of ostensibly enlightened western secularism, has arisen in the context of extensive strategic geopolitical interests in the non-western Middle East. Through this process, Zionism – a political strategy and response against anti-Semitism through the construction of an ethnically-defined and exclusively 'Jewish' modern capitalist national state – has moved from a marginal view to one that is hegemonic in global politics. Concomitantly, Zionism has become falsely identified as equivalent to and conflated with Jewish identity and Judaism (Herzberg, [59]; and from a critical perspective: Said, [100]; [101]; Rose, [97]; Finkelstein, [42], [43], [44]; Cook, [33]). Further, the mythologized notion of a 2000-year Jewish 'return' to a land that was far from unpopulated was grounded on the parallel myth of an absented Palestinian reality. The forced removal, punishment, and occupation of an indigenous Palestinian population in the aftermath of World War Two (Pappe, [89]; Siegel, [105]) has coincided with the 'whitening' of the Jewish population in the west. The road to 'whiteness' for ethnically defined 'Jews' has been associated with an assumption of an ideological acceptance of Zionism, and the related uncritical stance towards the state of Israel, including its origin, historical claims, and domestic and international politics and linkages.

• Unpacking these various artificial conflations demands a critical approach. Following from Charles Mills' work The Racial Contract, and from our own understanding that 'race' is socially created and historically variable, in what follows we employ the idea of the racial contract, and its particular categorization of white and non-white, as a heuristic device for understanding Israel/Palestine and its European and global dimensions both historically and today.

Israel's racial contract

• The events of 1948 are subject to conflicting national narratives on the parts of Palestinians and Israelis. For Israelis whose sense of citizenship entitlement was forged in the Zionist and colonialist occupation of Palestine, the years 1947 and 1948 are seen as a period of the birth of an independent national state. The establishment of Israel became intimately connected in this national narrative to the Jewish holocaust, shaped both as a form of apparent reparation for European Nazism, and as a regionally-based 'War of Independence'. In contrast, for Palestinians the year 1948 represents a catastrophe (in Arabic 'Al-Nakba'), characterized by half of the Arab population losing homes and property and becoming stateless refugees outside of historic Palestine. Indeed, from 1949, Palestinian national identity crystallized around the loss of homeland, the longing to return, and the desire for self-determination. This identity found institutional support with the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1964, and the organization's political and social institutions (Rubenberg, [98]). A series of wars in the region (in 1956, 1967, 1973 and 1982) served to reconfigure control of the land in favour of the state of Israel. For example, after the 1967 war, the territories of the West Bank and Gaza (known as the Occupied Territories) came under Israeli control. The Oslo agreement signed in 1993 by Israel and the PLO allowed for parts of these two territories to be handed over to Palestinian rule (the Palestinian Authority). Hopes in the promise of peace accorded by the Oslo agreement have, however, proved to be tragically misplaced.

• We suggest that just as the geographic boundaries of the Israeli state have been extended over historic Palestine, the legal-juridical framework of the Israeli state has worked to propel ethnically defined Jews (and more specifically Ashkanazi Jews originating from European and/or Western countries) to the apex of economic, cultural and political power. This legal-juridical framework has allowed for state expropriation of land through a variety of 'legal' means as well as three 'fundamental laws' which work to provide separate and preferential legal statuses for Jewish as opposed to non-Jewish citizens (Tekiner, [117], pp. 48–51). These fundamental laws are: ( 1) the Law of Return (which grants all Jews, and Jews alone, nationality status in Israel with the right to settle); ( 2) the Law of Citizenship (which provides means for acquiring Israeli citizenship on specific terms for Jews and non-Jews); and ( 3) the World Zionist Organization/Jewish Agency (Status) Law (charging this organization and its subsidiaries with 'gathering in the exiles' through a partnership with the Israeli state) (Tekiner, [117], pp. 48–51). These, in summary, form the juridical basis of the racial contract, and codify the racialized, apartheid character of the Israeli state.

• Of course the bases of social power in a capitalist and demographically diverse society like Israel, which continues to receive immigrants, is complex. As [ 7] notes in regard to race and racism in Israel today:

• Israeli society is comprised of a diverse population in which multi-layered ethnic, racial, religious and national identities intersect on a number of levels. This mix includes Ashkenazi Jews (of European and American background), Mizrahi Jews (North African and Middle Eastern background), new Jewish immigrants (from places such as the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia), a Muslim/Christian/Druze Palestinian Arab minority, and non-citizen foreign labourers. (2004, p. 7)

• It is beyond the scope of this paper to address comprehensively all of these dimensions of Israeli society (Sela-Sheffy, [103]), but for our purposes the case of Israeli Palestinians and Sephardic/Mizrahi Jews is particularly important. This example highlights the power of Jews (in relation to non-Jews) and the power of Ashkenazi (European/Western) Jews in particular. The legal and institutional premise of a state defined by the ethnically and racially ascribed character of its empowered citizens serves to enforce and reproduce apartheid (Tilley, [120]; Davis, [37]).

• A starting point for understanding 1948 era Israel and its present-day reverberations relates to how the area was demographically transformed from being characterized by an Arab majority before the war, into an area in which Arabs were a minority (Hadawi, [53], p. 194). Palestinian Israelis continue to be a demographic minority, as well as a minority in relation to power. This is due to their subordinate class position, which also takes on complex gender dimensions (Zureik, [126]; Herzog, [61]). Additionally, it should be noted that this group has been the subject of a particularly tenacious form of cultural racism (evident in school texts and popular culture) which highlights negative themes relating to their 'intrinsic' thieving, dirtiness, corruption, untrustworthiness and violence (El Asmar, [39]; Bar-Tal & Teichman, [21]).

• Within the Israeli Jewish majority there are also complex class, race and gender dimensions that have served to advantage the Ashkenazi. As noted, the Zionist movement, both in its conception and its eventual application through legal-juridical state structures, was a response initially to the experience of Western/European racism against Jews. After the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 however, large waves of immigration came from Middle Eastern and North African countries. Uri Davis notes that [m]any of the Jews from Asia and Africa were in fact part of the cultural elite of their countries – but when they emigrated to Israel they were confronted by the racism implicit in the fear of 'Orientalization' which so animated the Ashkenazi establishment who controlled the state. (Davis, [36], p. 39)

• The experience of this grouping has led Ella Shohat ([104]) to speak of the 'Jewish victims' of Zionism. To quote:

• The Zionist denial of the Arab-Moslem [sic] and Palestinian East, then, has as its corollary the denial of the Jewish 'Mizrahim' (the 'Eastern Ones') who, like the Palestinians, but by more subtle and less obviously brutal mechanisms, have also been stripped of the right of self-representation. Within Israel, and on the stage of world opinion, the hegemonic voice of Israel has almost invariably been that of European Jews, the Ashkenazim, while the Sephardi voice has been largely muffled or silenced (Shohat, [104], p.1)

• Further adding to the complexity of the racial contract is the ongoing occupation as well as the broader Palestinian diaspora. In other words, the events of 1948 produced more than 'Israeli Palestinians' – they also produced Palestinian refugees, some of whom became citizens of other Arab, Western and non-Western countries, and many of whom to this day live in refugee camps.

• Statistics on the refugee population are notoriously difficult to collect, but an increasing body of research reveals a consistent pattern, summarized by Ilan Pappe as 'the ethnic cleansing of Palestine' (Pappe, [89]), and captured by Brynen and El-Rifai as 'the twin misfortunes' befalling Palestinians as both the largest and one of the oldest refugee population globally (Brynen & El-Rifai, [29], p. 1). A 2003 survey reports that there are approximately 7.5 million Palestinian refugees and internally displaced persons; put in global terms two in five refugees worldwide today is Palestinian (BADIL Resource Center, [11], pp. 32–33). Of these, the largest group is comprised of Palestinians and their descendants displaced or expelled from their places of origin as a result of the war of 1948 – approximately 4.1 million of whom registered for assistance from the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, while 1.6 million did not register or are not eligible for UN assistance. The second largest group is comprised of Palestinians displaced for the first time as a result of the 1967 war (780,000). The third group, mainly from the Occupied Territories, are those that are outside of historic Palestine and are unable to return owing to revocation of residency, denial of family reunification or fear of persecution (838,000). Internally displaced Palestinians include those in Israel that were displaced after 1948 due to population transfer, land expropriation and house demolition (325,000) as well as Palestinians internally displaced in the Occupied Territories during or after the 1967 war (38,000) (BADIL Resource Center, [11], p. 33).

• It is the reality of the forced Palestinian displacement, transfer and collective punishment, that compels to the fore issues relating to the right of return for refugees. These issues include recognition of the legal right of return as well as compensation for lost property and the need for a 'truth and justice' style commission. In contrast, the approach of the Israeli state has been to reject outright any historical responsibility for the refugee problem. Israel has called for Arab states to implement measures for the permanent settlement of Palestinians, and at best to offer the most limited avenues for return – for example through contested family reunification – while rejecting in principle the Palestinian refugees' right of return (Hammer, [55], pp. 88–92). This stands in contrast with Israel's Law of Return that grants all Jews world wide the right to settle permanently.

• For those Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the 1967 war created a new era in the economic situation of these areas. Over the 1970s and 1980s, these areas became both increasingly dependent on the Israeli economy, and at the same time a source of an expendable labour force for Israel in marginalized areas. Additionally, and coinciding with the occupation, was the expropriation of land for the building of settlements for Jewish settlers and the expropriation of water for Israel (Aruri, [10]). These developments were not only fundamentally unaltered by the Oslo Accords, but were in fact augmented. In May 1996, then Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu declared a localized 'war on terror' and shattered any remnants of the Oslo Accords. As Hammer notes:

• The closure of the territories, their re-occupation and other Israeli measures during the Second Intifada have reversed the slow economic growth that the West Bank and Gaza had experienced [post-Oslo] and have virtually destroyed the Palestinian economy. (Hammer, [55], p. 98)

• Indeed, it is in this context of closure that Israel turned to seek international temporary workers for jobs previously performed by Palestinians. The occupation since 1967, along with the subsequent exile of Palestinians, have therefore been further key dimensions of Israel's racial contract. The 1967 occupation has worked to entrench further the hegemony of Jews over non-Jews in ways that have played on racialized Orientalist themes of inferiority, incapacity for self-rule and the 'enemy' that is the Muslim other.

• In light of this, van Teeffelen's analysis of best selling English language novels over the 1970s and 1980s on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is instructive. The study finds that these novels have made use of metaphors that distinguish Israelis/Europeans from Palestinians/Arabs according to racialized stereotypes grounded in Orientalism. Thus the metaphor of desert (Palestinian) is contrasted with civilization (Jew); the metaphor of attack (Palestinian) is contrasted with non-violence (Jew); and the metaphor of threat (Palestinian) is contrasted with vulnerability (Jew) (van Teeffelen, [123]).

• This brings us to a consideration of Canada, and its non-neutrality, regarding both racism within Canadian society and its own racial contract, and in regard to Israel's racial contract.

Non-neutrality and the case of Canada

• As noted, there is a long history that has shaped Canada's formation as a settler-colony and the complex and inequitable dimensions this has taken. This history has included close identification with European colonial projects and the threatened genocide and extreme racism towards the indigenous population (Lawrence, [79]). It has also included specifically racialized patterns of immigration, with a hierarchy of state institutionalized preference for white Anglo-Celtic settlement defined as 'Canadian', while visible minorities from points of origin in the global south are treated as cheap and/or expendable labour (Galabuzi, [46]; Bakan & Stasiulis, [16], [17]; Thobani, [118]). This is despite important changes over the post-World War Two period, from the removal of the overt legal racism governing immigration to the introduction of 'multiculturalism' as official state policy, to the discussion of forms of indigenous self-government. The continued reality of racism and inequality in contemporary Canada is, however, well documented (Galabuzi, [46]; Smith, [106]). Despite this reality, Canada has tended to be seen as a model internationally of multi-nation and multi-cultural formal democracy. This operates in contradictory ways. This projected image tempers and obfuscates the racial contract, but does not eliminate it. Instead it serves to hide the reality of racism in an ideology of deep denial or mythologized equality. It also provides a normative standard, however, against which overtly undemocratic racialized practices can potentially be challenged. These nuanced relationships between systemic racism and legal equality contrast with the overtly apartheid character of the state of Israel.

• There is also, however, a way in which racial contracts in other countries are supported by ostensibly 'race' neutral countries like Canada. This is a particularly interesting case to consider as Canada, both during and after the Cold War, has maintained a nominal peacekeeping tradition and 'quiet diplomacy' image, projecting a state persona as the helpful fixer both internationally and domestically (Razack, [93]). This image of middle power statesmanship has provoked ongoing debates among scholars of Canadian foreign policy and the Middle East. Issues of contention include: whether policy-makers have been merely non-committed or actively prudent in regard to Israel (Kay, [71], [72]); whether particular individuals made a difference in fostering support for an Israeli state (Tauber, [116]); whether policy was forged in relation to national self-interest (Bercuson, [23]); or whether the Canadian state and its Middle Eastern policy has been profoundly and increasingly shaped by American dominance in the region and over Canada (Ismael, [65]). Added to this, there is debate about the relative weight of 'the Jewish' and 'the Arab' lobbies in Canada in shaping foreign policy (Goldberg, [49]; Tauber, [115]).

• Rather than entering into the existing terms upon which the debates over Canada's peacekeeping image have been structured, we instead stress that Canada's particular constructed international image belies the underlying racial contract generally, and the particular international racial contract between Canada and Israel/Palestine. There is no ground for neutrality, as we have demonstrated, when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian issue. Indeed as the discussion suggests thus far, both the relevance of race-thinking and the racial contract have infused global power relations. And the state of Israel and the question of Palestine are both very much outgrowths of the international order, including the United Nations and the League of Nations that preceded it.

• Over the course of the post-World War Two period, Canada's position on some key dimensions of the Israeli-Palestinian debates has placed it squarely in a complicit position in the dispossession of the Palestinian people through the creation of the state of Israel, as well as Israel's post-1948 racial contract. Canada not only voted in favour of the Partition Plan, despite Britain's abstention, but played a central role in developing this option (Jacoby, [66], p. 84). Further, as symbolized by admission into the United Nations in 1949, Israel rapidly gained the recognition of the two extant global superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. Despite the abstention of Britain, Canada also voted in favour (General Assembly Resolution 273; Security Council Resolution 69).

• In 1968, a year when Canada had membership on the Security Council, Canada was the only country to join the United States in abstaining on a resolution condemning the acquisition of territory through military conquest and the status of Jerusalem (Resolution 252). Canada again abstained (with the United States and Denmark) on requesting that the Secretary-General send a representative to the Occupied Territories and that Israel cooperate with this representative (Resolution 259).

• Some General Assembly resolutions are also notable. In 1974, in the context of a UN that now contained countries that were formerly European colonies, the PLO was granted observer status in the United Nations General Assembly. It was in this period that a divide between ('white') countries of the West and ('non-white') countries of the developing world became more obvious. In the words of PLO leader Yasser Arafat in his first address to the Assembly: '[T]oday's United Nations represents 138 nations, a number that more clearly reflects the will of the international community' (Speech of Yasser Arafat, [108]). Notably, on the resolution granting the PLO observer status (Resolution 3237), while 95 countries voted in favour, 17 voted against it (including Canada, the United States and Israel) and there were 19 abstentions.

• In 1975, the General Assembly passed a resolution calling Zionism 'a form of racism and racial discrimination' (Resolution 3379) which similarly reflected a divide between countries of the West and countries of the developing world. This resolution was adopted by 72 votes in favour, 35 against, including Britain, Canada, the United States and Israel, and 32 abstentions. In the words of then adviser to the League of Arab States in explaining this outcome, 'From the perspective of an Afro-Asian, it is not difficult to see Israel as yet another manifestation of a racist form of colonialization – namely, settler colonialism' (UN Resolution of Zionism, [121]). It should be noted that Israel's precondition for participation in the Madrid talks was the revocation of this resolution, which occurred on December 16, 1991 with Canada voting in favour (Resolution 4686).

• The impact in Israel is important to consider. Arie Dayan observes that in 1975 'all Israel rose up in arms', and that the 'local "Avenue of the United Nations" was suddenly renamed "Avenue of Zionism"' (1993, p. 96). In contrast, the response to the revocation of the resolution was silence, leading [38] to reflect:

• One possible explanation [for the difference] is that the Israel of 1991 was very different from the Israel of 1975. Back then, for example, who would have imagined that a man such as Meir Kahane, whose political program called for the outlawing of marriage between a Jewish woman and an Arab man, could be elected to the Knesset? And who would have believed at the time that a man like Rehavam Zeevi, whose sole political credo is the 'transfer' of Arabs out of the country, could become a government minister in Israel? Is it possible that most Israelis preferred not to exult too noisily when the resolution was revoked so as not to alert those who might be tempted to reexamine the UN's comparison? (1994, pp. 96–97)

• More recently, on March 16, 2006, Canada was one of only two countries, the other being the United States, to vote against a non-binding resolution adopted by the United Nations Economic and Social Council calling on Israel to allow all Palestinian refugee women and children to return to their homes. This was the first resolution regarding the Middle East to come before a UN body after the government of Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper was sworn in the previous month. One year earlier, the same resolution was put forward, and the Liberal government under then Prime Minister Paul Martin abstained. However, the right of return of Palestinian refugees has been repeatedly passed by the United Nations General Assembly. While only the US and Israel have opposed this, Israel has faced no sanctions for its failure to recognize this right or to adhere to the UN resolution (Resolution 194, December 11, 1948).

• Finally, and not least, it is of note that on July 9, 2004, an historic ruling of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) found that the so-called separation wall under construction in the Occupied Territories was illegal. The ICJ also ruled, by recurrent votes of 14 to 1, that the Israeli state must stop further construction, remove the parts of the wall already constructed, and compensate Palestinian families for losses of land and livelihood resulting from the construction of the wall. The ICJ press statement included a note on the importance of international law:

• The Court concludes by stating that the construction of the wall must be placed in a more general context. In this regard, the Court notes that Israel and Palestine are 'under an obligation scrupulously to observe the rules of international humanitarian law'. In the Court's view, the tragic situation in the region can be brought to an end only through implementation in good faith of all relevant Security Council resolutions. The Court further draws the attention of the General Assembly to the 'need for... efforts to be encouraged with a view to achieving as soon as possible, on the basis of international law, a negotiated solution to the outstanding problems and the establishment of a Palestinian State, existing side by side with Israel and its other neighbours, with peace and security for all in the region'. (International Court of Justice, [64], July 9)

• On July 20, 2004 the UN General Assembly voted that Israel comply with the Court's decision. 150 nations voted in favour, including 25 from the European Union. Six nations voted against the resolution, not surprisingly including Israel and the US. Canada was one of 10 countries to abstain on the vote. However, Israel refused to recognize the ruling and the illegal construction of the wall has continued unabated. While international law is clear, the notion that Israel is a race-neutral democracy, and not subject to the scrutiny applied to other countries in the Middle East or other parts of the developing world, has in practical terms rendered the ICJ ruling moot.

• Our point in highlighting the place of Canada in these deliberations of the United Nations is to suggest that the racial contract as it has existed in post-1948 Israel finds both support and points of resistance in the United Nations itself. The Canadian government has, however, operated to further entrench the realities of racism against the Palestinians in Israel and in the diaspora, extending the racial contract internationally. We conclude by suggesting that this racial contract also has points of support and resistance in Canadian and Israeli civil societies. It is the points of resistance that provide guideposts for considering a consistent anti-racist response.

In conclusion: Towards breaking the contract?

• Though the notion of a 'clash of civilizations' was not a creation of September 11, 2001, this framing of world politics has gained popularity in the post 9/11 period. The 'war on terror', ostensibly in retaliation of 9/11 and in prevention of a repeated attack, has shaped US foreign policy and global politics in the aftermath (Huntington, [62]; Bakan, [13]). For example, a textbook that is circulated to instructors of political science for consideration in university teaching uses the phrase 'clash of civilizations' in the introduction, suggested as the understood common sense of global politics today.

• Before September 11, 2001, the economic aspects of globalization and the growing development gap was paramount. Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, concern about the 'clash of civilizations' between the West and the Muslim world, the problem of security against terror, and questions about how American power will recast global alliances and affect both national politics and people's lives throughout the world, have partially refocused our thinking about globalization. (Krieger, [77], p. x)

• In this context, many social and political constructs that appear to be race-neutral have in fact become racialized. Notably, Samuel Huntington explicitly traces the 'clash' to a 'demographic' challenge posed by the populations of 'Islam and Asia' who threaten 'Western civilization'. The latter in this view are presumed to be non-Islamic and, ostensibly, white (Huntington, [62]). This perspective is extended in Huntington's later works to incorporate the apparent threat of Hispanic Americans (Huntington, [63]).

• The racialization of social and political categories has been normalized in ideological and popular usage, but also serves in many instances as a guideline for states to enforce borders, construct barriers and limit or permit access to a wide variety of services and rights. This phenomenon is not new, but its increasing transparency is notable. From this perspective, Israel's constructed wall is not an entirely unique example. Another case of the erection of walls in the name of security is encroaching on the US-Mexico border. US President George W. Bush has called for the development of 698 miles of new fencing along the US-Mexico border. Congress has budgeted US$1.2 billion towards the project and, notably, the Department of Homeland Security is committed to completing 370 miles of the fence by the end of 2008 (Brezosky, [25]).

• The construction of walls in the name of security runs counter to the generalized impulse towards globalization, or even regionalization, that has marked post-Cold War world politics. However, in the aftermath of 9/11, the politicization and racialization of borders is becoming more common. This is consistent with the notion of a separation of peoples whose 'civilizations' inevitably 'clash'. The risk is that the racialized divisions that are presented to be race-neutral in Israel/Palestine are becoming further normalized internationally as an acceptable standard. There is a problematic acceptance of the 'new solitudes' approach to relations among citizens that is consistent with the racial contract, where complicity with racialized norms and practices becomes compatible with conditions of liberal democratic ideology and institutions.

• Charles Mills usefully suggests that a widening of critical analysis of the ideas underpinningin the notion of a racial contract can be extended to explain a racial polity, which is framed by a paradigm that 'takes race, normative whiteness, and white supremacy to be central to US and indeed global history' (Mills, [87], p.119). It is significant that in Mills' original framework, along with the insistence of the systemic nature of racism in modern society, there is also a substantial place for agency and resistance.

• Canada's role as an international ally of Israeli apartheid can be and is being challenged by a growing social movement. The Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid (CAIA), Not In Our Name: Jewish Voices Opposing Zionism (NION), the Stop the Wall Campaign in Palestine, and in Israel Women in Black and the movement of 'refuseniks' – Israeli conscripts who refuse to serve in the Israeli Defense Force – are only some of the organizational expressions of anti-racist solidarity. A movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel is raising international awareness and provoking extensive debates, comparable to the movement that challenged the apartheid regime of South Africa. The contradictory notion of a racial contract that cultivates systemic inequality and is at the same time posited as part of an open democracy in countries like Canada, offers political space for those who choose to challenge, and eventually, to break the racial contract. There is space afforded therefore to challenge not only the racialized practices of the state of Israel, but also of the Canadian state and other examples of western democracies that are complicit in international racial contracts.

• While such spaces of resistance have not fundamentally dislodged the close association of Zionism with western hegemony, there are indications that even among elite pro-western theorists there is a concern to normalize the atmosphere of dialogue and allow greater freedom of debate. A notable example is the publication of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy ([86]). The analysis is consistent with the most conservative views of empire, but attempts to challenge the deep historic ties between Israel and the US. Failing to see the role of hegemony and rejecting arguments that point to geopolitical strategic alliances as explanatory factors, the study relies on a traditional interest group framework. The authors give undue import to the activities of specific lobby groups in shaping US state policy. The consistency of the approach with contemporary neoliberalism is clear; the authors notably dedicate their book to none other than Samuel Huntington. However, the widespread attention Mearsheimer and Walt have received, beginning with their article on the same theme in the London Review of Books ([85]), suggests the possibility of a crack in the hegemonic bloc regarding the racial contract between countries like the US and Canada, with Israel. Divisions such as these are important indicators of a potential weakening in the hegemonic bloc, which could allow greater scope for social movements to break the racial contract and build new bonds of anti-racist solidarity within and beyond state borders.

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+ Canada and the Middle East Today: Electoral Politics and Foreign Policy (2010 - JSTOR)

Donald Barry, Arab Studies Quarterly, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Fall 2010), pp. 191-217 (27 pages)

• Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper came to power in 2006 with little experience in foreign affairs but with a well developed plan to transform his minority Conservative administration into a majority government replacing the Liberals as Canada's "natural governing party."1 Because his party's core of Anglo-Protestant supporters was not large enough to achieve this goal, Harper appealed to non- traditional Conservatives, including Jews, on the basis of shared social values. His efforts were matched by those of Jewish leaders and the government of Israel to win the backing of the government and its followers in the face of declining domestic support for Israel and the rise of militant Islamic fundamentalism. These factors accelerated a change in Canada's Middle East policy that began under Prime Minister Paul Martin, from a carefully balanced stance to one that overwhelmingly favors Israel. Harper's "pro-Israel politics," Michelle Collins observes, has "won the respect - and support - of a large segment of Canada's organized Jewish community."2 However, it has isolated Canada from significant shifts in Middle East diplomacy and marginalized its ability to play a constructive role in the region.

Harper and the Jewish Vote

• When he became leader of the Canadian Alliance party, which merged with the Progressive Conservatives to form the Conservative Party of Canada in 2004, Tom Flanagan says that Harper realized “The traditional Conservative base of Anglophone Protestants [was] too narrow to win modern Canadian elections.” In a speech to the conservative organization Civitas, in 2003, Harper argued that the only way to achieve power :
• "was to focus not on the tired wish list of economic conservatives or “neo-cons,” as they'd become known, but on what he called “theo-cons”—those social conservatives who care passionately about hot-button issues that turn on family, crime, and defense. Even foreign policy had become a theo-con issue, he pointed out, driven by moral and religious convictions. “The truth of the matter is that the real agenda and the defining issues have shifted from economic issues to social values,” he said, “so conservatives must do the same.” Arguing that the party had to come up with tough, principled stands on everything from parents’ right to spank their children to putting “hard power” behind the country’s foreign policy commitments, he cautioned that it also had to choose its battlefronts with care. “The social-conservative issues we choose should not be denominational,” he said, “but should unite social conservatives of different denominations and even different faiths.”"
• In the 2006 election, the victorious Conservatives elected 124 members of parliament (MPs) to the 308 seat House of Commons, subsequently adding three more members.’ The party maintained its stranglehold on western Canada, increased its representation in Ontario and made a breakthrough in Quebec. It swept cities in Alberta but fared less well in other urban centers where the largest multicultural populations reside. Increasing support among Quebeckers and minority voters is critical to Harper’s goal of forming a majority government. As Flanagan puts it, “The suburbs of Toronto, Vancouver, and to a lesser extent of other cities are now filling up with people who, based on their social values and capitalist work ethic, should be natural Conservative voters, but who are still emotionally tied to the Liberal Party.” The main targets are the Chinese, Korean, Hindu, Jewish, Persian, Italian, and Vietnamese communities.”
• Flanagan claims Harper “has done all he can” to win their support, “starting with his anti-same-sex-marriage advertising campaign of early 2005. He insisted that the 2005-06 [election] platform contain specific measures, such as an apology for the Chinese head tax, lower landing fees for immigrants, and better recognition of their credentials; and he has worked hard to fulfill these promises as quickly as possible after forming government.” After taking power, Harper created an “ethnic outreach team” directed by the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) and Jason Kenney, currently Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism, to wage a “focused direct voter campaign to build support” for the Conservatives in order to “replace the Liberals as the primary voice of new Canadians and ethnic minorities.” The PMO is in charge of statements in parliament concerning ethnic communities and of securing the attendance of the prime minister or senior ministers at “major ethnic events.” Kenney and designated MPs liaise with minority leaders and communities.’
• Although only 371,000 strong, Canadian Jews are an established part of the country’s economic and political landscape. Most also “have a strong affinity for and identification with Israel.”'® Concentrated primarily in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and Winnipeg, they are an important focus of Harper’s attention. In a 2007 briefing paper, the ethnic outreach team used the Toronto area constituency of Thornhill, the most Jewish riding in the country, to show how the recruitment strategy works. Comprising 37 percent of the electorate, Jews were a key target in the effort to secure the 5,000 additional votes the Conservatives estimated they would need to unseat the Liberal incumbent. The approach included maintaining an up-to-date database of Jewish and other ethnic group electors, championing the party’s positions on issues that concern the community, targeted mailings, and individual contact at various events. Harper also assigned a PMO official to keep in touch with Jewish groups."
• Conservative strategists estimate that 20 percent of minority voters are not “accessible” to the party. This figure appears to include Arab Canadians, although the Conservatives have begun to make overtures to carefully chosen Muslim groups. Arab Canadians are almost twice as numerous as their Jewish counterparts, but they are not as well established and are more reluctant to engage in politics. The community, moreover, is “divided along national, regional and religious lines, which has actively prevented it from presenting a united front to policy makers.”'
• The Conservative party’s interest in the Middle East is relatively recent. The Reform Party of Canada, which was established in 1987 and became the Canadian Alliance thirteen years later, paid little attention. But under Stockwell Day, an evangelical Christian who was the first leader of the Alliance, the party began taking strong stands on issues affecting Israel. After taking over the leadership in 2002, Harper, who had no record of speaking out on the Middle East, made it clear that the party would remain firmly in Israel’s corner. Reportedly, his thinking was influenced by neoconservatives in the United States, including expatriate Canadians David Frum, then a speechwriter in President George W. Bush’s White House, and Charles Krauthammer, a syndicated columnist for the Washington Post." Accusing the Liberals of “moral neutrality” in world affairs, Harper said an Alliance government would adopt a “value-oriented foreign policy” with “a stronger sense of Canada as a member of an alliance, a member of a family of western democratic nations that share certain political values—and our determination to work with those countries to achieve these things. We have a view of Israel...as an ally and part of our western democratic family.”'* Lloyd Mackey credits Day with building ties to the conservative Jewish community when he was Harper's foreign affairs critic. Mackey identifies Charles McVety, president of Canada Christian College, and Frank Dimant, executive vice-president of B'nai Brith Canada, as key contacts. “The tradeoff is that B’nai Brith provides social conservatives with access to the conservative Jewish community, while McVety encourages the ‘bonding’ of Christians and Jews as an alternative to Christians proselytizing Jews.”'s
• According to Mackey, “the evangelical Christian viewpoint,” embraced by many members of the dominant Alliance wing of the Conservative party “has always tended to be quite pro-Israel.” Pollster Conrad Winn agrees, citing surveys indicating that “churchgoers and Christians show the most support for the religious rights of Jews in Canada and also the strongest support for Israel.”!” The Conservative caucus contains up to seventy MPs who can be called evangelical Christians.'® This has enhanced the party’s appeal to Jewish voters and helped to blunt criticism that the adoption of positions favoring Israel is not simply a response to pressures from the Jewish lobby and the Israeli government.

The Jewish Lobby and Israeli Government

• For their part, Canada’s Jewish leaders were alarmed that Canadian support for Israel was falling at a time when threats to that country were on the rise. “In particular,” says Harold Waller, “there was concern that Israel’s position in both public opinion in general and in elite opinion was deteriorating, that the media was not treating Israel fairly, and that government policy, especially at the United Nations, had tilted away from Israel.”'” Underlying these trends, Waller claims, was “the growing clout of Muslim voters (especially in some key areas), an entrenched foreign affairs bureaucracy that tilted toward the Arabs, and declining enthusiasm for Israel among party elites as Israel struggled to combat Palestinian terrorism through the use of techniques that were controversial in some circles.”
• In 2002, an ad hoc group, consisting “mainly of wealthy Jewish businesspeople,” reviewed the community’s lobbying efforts.?' Calling itself the “Israel Emergency Cabinet,” it engaged GPC International, a public affairs firm, to devise a strategy to improve Jewish advocacy. This led to the creation of the Canadian Council for Israel and Jewish Advocacy (CIJA), which “oversees and coordinates the advocacy work” of five agencies: the Canadian Jewish Congress, the Canada-Israel Committee, the Quebec-Israel Committee, National Jewish Campus Life, and the University Outreach Committee. The right-leaning B’nai Brith has remained outside the arrangement.
• A study of Canadian attitudes toward Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, commissioned by the CIJA in the fall of 2004, offered a sobering assessment. Of those who considered themselves knowledgeable, 32 percent supported the Palestinians while 26 percent backed Israel. Overall, 89 percent held Israelis and Palestinians equally responsible for ongoing violence; 57 percent thought the conflict involved the human rights of Palestinians rather than the protection of Israelis from terrorism. Eighty-three percent did not want Canada to take sides, and 50 percent thought it should not play a role in settling the conflict. Unlike Jewish Canadians, only 11 percent thought the media viewed Israel unfavorably, while 33 percent saw the media as biased against Palestinians.”
• The fact that conservative Christians are most supportive of Israel would make Harper’s party a target for Jewish lobbying efforts. The CIJA adopted a two-fold strategy, “to underscore the shared values of an enlightened democracy between Canadians and Israelis and to downplay the significance of whatever the Palestinians were or were not doing.” B’nai Brith was also active in strengthening ties to evangelical Christians.
• In the meantime, building on a strategy begun by Prime Minister Menachem Begin in the 1970s, the Israeli government began encouraging visits by Christian evangelical groups to build support for Israel and to increase tourist income. In 2003, paralleling similar visits by their US counterparts, twenty prominent Canadian evangelical clergymen, commentators and educators went to Israel at the invitation of the country’s chief rabbi to strengthen ties between Christians and Jews. The group was led by Charles McVety, who, in addition to leading Canada Christian College, represented the US-based John Hagee Ministries in Canada. Hagee, a prominent figure in the Christian Zionist movement, heads Christians United for Israel, which lobbies on behalf of Israel in the United States. The goal of this and subsequent visits was to rally support within Canada’s estimated 2.5 million member evangelical community.”
• In 2007, the Israeli Knesset established the Christian Allies Caucus to expand Christian support for Israel. The Canadian Israel Allies Caucus was launched in February 2007, with Harper in attendance.” An executive assistant at Israel’s embassy in Ottawa is the Jewish representative of the Christian Allies Caucus in Canada. The caucus also has a Canadian Christian representative based in Ottawa. Activities have included speaking tours of major Canadian cities to encourage evangelical Christians to back Israel. According to a caucus representative, support within the evangelical community continues to grow.”

The Liberals and Jewish Voters

• Historically Canadian Jews backed the Liberal Party because of its support for Israel and its progressive social policies. By the 1970s Jewish support for the Liberals was 20 percent above the national average. Joe Clark’s Progressive Conservative Party attempted to sway Jewish voters in the 1979 election by promising to move Canada’s embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau had resisted pressure from Menachem Begin to do so, but Clark succumbed to the urgings of party candidates in closely contested Toronto ridings with a substantial Jewish vote. The Conservatives won four of those seats to the Liberals’ two, although party organizers said the embassy pledge was marginal to the outcomes. Clark tried to implement the plan after he became prime minister. However, he retreated in the face of strong opposition, including the threat of sanctions from Arab states, concern among Canadian businesses, adverse public opinion, and the reaction of the Jewish community, which did not want to become embroiled in the controversy.
• The issue helped to defeat the Conservatives in the 1980 election, which returned Trudeau’s Liberals to power. According to Charles Flicker, it also had a long-term impact on Canada’s Middle East policy, “which shifted from a pro-Israel bias to a more even-handed treatment.... Canada established relations with the PLO, its voting record at the United Nations was more balanced, and it strongly criticized the invasion of Lebanon in 1982." Still, Canadian Jewry, which “flourished” under Trudeau’s policy of multiculturalism that sought to promote social cohesion by recognizing the equality of Canada’s ethnic populations, remained loyal to the Liberals. “Jews were not only well represented in virtually all sectors of Canadian society,” says David Goldberg, “they also held leadership positions in, and were making important contributions to, many of these sectors.” The connection remained strong during the 1984-93 period when Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservative government held power, although its policies were not substantially different from those of its predecessor.
• However, the “increasingly controversial nature of Israeli foreign and domestic politics” soon ushered in a new era in Canada’s relations with Israel. Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s Liberal government, in office from 1993 until 2003, supported Israel’s right to exist within secure borders and the establishment of a Palestinian state. It opposed Jewish settlements in the Palestinian territories and Israel’s security fence inside the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and condemned Palestinian terrorism and excessive retaliation by Israel. At the United Nations, Canada parted company with the United States and Australia, and joined the dominant European and developing country majority in supporting or abstaining on resolutions sponsored by Arab states criticizing Israel’s occupation of the territories, its attacks against civilians, and its nuclear weapons program. “Although these votes were clearly biased against Israel,” columnist John Ibbitson observes, Canada saw them “as one of the few forums through which the Palestinian people [could] make their voices heard.” At home, Jewish voters, who showed greater willingness “to openly express competing perspectives on Israel,” continued to vote for the Liberals at a rate 8 to 10 percent above the national average.
• Canadian policy began to shift under Chrétien’s successor, Paul Martin. According to the Jewish Independent, “pro-Israel” parliamentarians gained “significantly more strength” in government, with six members of the recently formed “Liberals for Israel” caucus receiving cabinet appointments. Cabinet and caucus supporters “pushed hard” for a change in Canada’s votes at the UN, as did Jewish organizations, including the Canada-Israel Committee, which lobbied the government to adopt criteria to assess resolutions it considered biased against Israel. “One of the most powerful voices” says Ibbitson, was that of Gerald Schwartz, a close advisor to Martin and a key fundraiser for his party leadership campaign. Liberal MPs with large Arab Canadian populations and foreign affairs officials warned that a change in policy would not be welcomed by Arab states.” But the views of Israel’s supporters prevailed.
• The shift began in the summer of 2004 when Canada abstained on a heavily supported resolution that took note of a finding by the International Court of Justice that Israel’s security barrier contravened international law. It continued during the General Assembly’s annual fall debate when Canada joined the United States and a few other countries in voting against resolutions condemning Israeli violence against Palestinians and the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza on which it had abstained in the past. The government argued that it could not support unbalanced measures condemning Israeli attacks against Palestinians while ignoring Palestinian assaults on Israelis. But Ottawa reversed earlier abstentions in supporting another resolution aimed at Israel, which called for a nuclear-free Middle East. The change in Canada’s voting record was confirmed in November 2005 when Ottawa opposed three more resolutions on the basis that they were one-sided and hindered peace negotiations. But by then Martin’s government had been defeated in parliament forcing an election that would bring Stephen Harper to power as head of a minority Conservative government.

Harper Comes to Power

• During the election campaign Harper assured the CIJA that the Jewish community had “a good friend in the Conservative Party.” Describing Israel as “the only fully fledged, developed democracy in that part of the world,” he said “We share a unique relationship...that we believe all freedom oriented, democratic countries should share in.” A Harper government would “not support resolutions at the UN that are aimed specifically at Israel or designed to create a bias in the resolution of the Middle East conflict.” Harper’s comments drew praise from Shimon Fogel, CEO of the Canada-Israel Committee, who expected Canada would be more active in “encouraging the kind of reforms that would allow the UN to fulfill the objectives it was initially designed to address,” including an end to “the annual cycle of Israel-bashing.”*

Dealing with Hamas

• While the Canadian campaign was under way Palestinians were in the midst of an election of their own to choose a new Palestinian Legislative Assembly. It was apparent that Hamas, running on an anti-corruption platform, would defeat the ruling Fatah, confronting Canada and its allies with the challenge of how to deal with a democratically elected party espousing terrorism, and whether to continue their aid programs to the Palestinian Authority. In a conference call with Marc Gold, chairman of the Canada-Israel Committee, and Ed Morgan and Victor Goldbloom, the president and national executive chairman of the Canadian Jewish Congress, Harper credited his party with forcing Chrétien’s government to declare Hamas a terrorist organization in 2002. He added, “if institutions committed to terrorism are playing a role in the Palestinian state, whether elected or not, that is an indication to me that the road to democracy has not been travelled very far.” The representatives seemed pleased. “I think you have answered fully,” Gold replied.
• On February 14, after speaking with President Mahmoud Abbas, Prime Minister Harper indicated that future Canadian aid to the Palestinian Authority would depend upon the new Hamas government’s commitment to non-violence, recognition of Israel, and acceptance of previous agreements, including the “road map,” sponsored by the United States, the European Union, Russia and the UN, which called for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Confusion over the government’s stand arose when foreign affairs minister Peter MacKay met with his Russian counterpart, who claimed Hamas had agreed to a “monitoring mechanism” to assure that aid would not be used for military purposes. Appearing to abandon his government’s conditions, MacKay said the mechanism would ensure that aid reached civilians and that Canada would continue to provide some assistance. But he backtracked after receiving “a flurry of phone calls from pro-Israeli groups.”
• Knowing that the United States and the European Union would soon suspend their aid programs to the Palestinian Authority, Harper decided that Canada would be the first country after Israel to do so. MacKay declared that Canada would have no contact with the Hamas government and would withhold aid until Harper’s conditions had been met. The action would reduce by a third Canada’s annual $25 million assistance package to the West Bank and Gaza. Another $10 million would continue to go to the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East via the Canadian International Development Agency. “We cannot send any direct aid to an organization that refuses to renounce terrorist activities,” said MacKay. “There will be no contact and no funds period.”
• The announcement was praised by pro-Israel organizations and condemned by Arab and Muslim groups. “Canada has stood true to its principles by refusing to do business with a terrorist entity whose avowed aim continues to be the destruction of the Jewish state,” said B’nai Brith. “A resounding slap in the face to Canadian values,” charged the Canadian Islamic Congress, which accused Harper’s government of “blindly following the lead of Washington and of the influential pro-Jewish lobby in both [the United States and Canada].” Opposition parties in parliament urged the government to concentrate on humanitarian assistance to Palestinian civilians.
• Close observers of Middle East politics were also skeptical. Norman Spector, a former Canadian ambassador to Israel, applauded Ottawa’s decision to cut funding to the Palestinian Authority but criticized its refusal to deal with Hamas. “I think we should be finding some way to explain to Hamas what it is going to take to become an accepted and respected member of the international community, and even if there is just a one percent chance of success, we should take that chance,” said Spector. “We cannot foreclose any possible avenue to trying to resolve this conflict, and as good as it feels to say we have to cut off all contact with them, it won’t work.” However, Harper put more distance between his government and Hamas, telling a Holocaust Memorial Day ceremony that Hamas posed a threat to Israel similar to that of Nazi Germany.
• Evangelical Christians applauded Harper. Promoting his Christians United for Israel lobby group before an audience of 2,000 Canadian evangelical leaders and Jewish representatives, including Israel’s ambassador, Alan Baker, and Major General Aharon Zeevi Farkash, chief of that country’s military intelligence, at Charles McVety’s Canada Christian College in Toronto, John Hagee praised the prime minister for denouncing Hamas. McVety established Christians United for Israel-Canada as an affiliate of Hagee’s group.”
• Meanwhile, Canada joined the United States in opposing a non-binding resolution in the UN Economic and Social Council calling on Israel to allow Palestinian refugee women and children displaced in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war to return to their homes. Ottawa had abstained on the same vote a year earlier. Harper reportedly made the decision “quickly and with little consultation.” MacKay denied that the vote marked a shift in Canadian policy. But the Canada-Israel Committee’s Shimon Fogel left little doubt that this was the case, saying “This government is showing some really meaningful resolve in continuing and expanding on what the previous government had begun to do.”

War in Lebanon

• Events in the Middle East took an unexpected turn on July 12, 2006, when Hezbollah militants fired rockets into northern Israel and attacked a military patrol, killing three soldiers and abducting two others in an attempt to force Israel to return Lebanese prisoners. Calling the attack “an act of war,” Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, ordered a massive artillery, air and ground offensive to break Hezbollah’s grip on southern Lebanon. By the time the conflict ended 34 days later more than a thousand Lebanese civilians had been killed, almost a million had been displaced, and much of the country’s infrastructure lay in ruins. Forty-three Israelis perished as a result of Hezbollah rocket attacks. An Israeli government sponsored commission would later call the operation a “serious failure.”
• When hostilities broke out Harper was en route to Europe for meetings with Prime Minister Tony Blair in London, G8 colleagues in St. Petersburg, and President Jacques Chirac in Paris. Although up to 50,000 Canadians were stranded in Lebanon, Harper agreed with President George W. Bush that Israel had “the right to defend itself,” describing its response as “measured.” He also supported Blair’s call for a return to the road map approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict but saw no evidence that Hamas agreed.’
• The crisis in Lebanon dominated discussion among the G8 leaders. The United States, the United Kingdom and Canada opposed an immediate end to the fighting, in effect giving Israel a green light “to destroy as much of Hezbollah as it could.” France, Germany and Russia agreed that Hezbollah had started the conflict but condemned “Israel’s disproportionate response and insisted on an immediate cease-fire.” The communiqué tried to bridge the gap. It expressed concern about the rising death toll, destruction of infrastructure, and the impact on Lebanon’s government, and called for the return of captured Israeli soldiers, an end to rocket attacks on Israel, cessation of Israel’s military operations and early removal of its forces in Gaza, and the release of arrested Palestinian politicians. Harper backed the statement, which Canadian officials insisted was consistent with his earlier comments.
• However, the declaration was overshadowed by the bombing deaths of eight members of a Montreal family in southern Lebanon, which accelerated Ottawa’s plans to evacuate Canadian citizens from the country. Harper expressed sympathy to the relatives of the victims but moderated his earlier views only slightly. “We are not going to give in to the temptation of some to single out Israel, which was the victim of the initial attack,” he said. “The onus remains on the parties that caused the conflict,” although “We urge Israel and others to minimize civilian damage.” Asked whether he would still describe Israel’s response as “measured,” he replied, “I think our evaluation of the situation has been accurate. Obviously there has been an ongoing escalation and, frankly, ongoing escalation is inevitable once conflict begins.”
• Harper joined Bush in opposing Chirac’s call for an immediate cease-fire, which, he argued, was not “the first thing” or “the only thing” called for in the G8’s statement. But with domestic criticism growing, the prime minister, accompanied by a photographer, press aides and his security detail, diverted his aircraft to Cyprus to return the first of 15,000 Canadians rescued from Lebanon. The government would also provide a $1 million aid package for Lebanon, which would grow to $30.5 million by the time the conflict ended.'
• An opinion poll suggested that most Canadians supported the government’s handling of the evacuation, with 66 percent approving and 34 percent calling it inadequate. Criticism was strongest in Quebec, where most of the country’s 150,000 Lebanese Canadians reside. Only 45 percent agreed that Harper’s position on the conflict was “fair and balanced” versus 44 percent who thought it “decidedly too pro-Israel.” Again, opposition was highest in Quebec, where 62 percent were dissatisfied with the government’s stand.
• Apparently believing that the controversy would not damage its electoral prospects, the government stuck to its position. It participated in peace talks in Rome in late July, which failed to produce an agreement on ending the war. Canada joined the United States and the UK in insisting that a durable settlement had to precede a cease-fire, while moderate European and Arab states maintained that the fighting had to end first. Harper said Canada would not participate in a possible peacekeeping force, adding that its purpose should be to drive out terrorists, a task best performed by soldiers from nearby states.* He would ask Israel and the UN for an explanation after Israeli forces bombed a UN observer post in southern Lebanon, killing a Canadian officer and three other soldiers serving with the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization. But Harper appeared to blame the UN for putting the soldiers at risk. A Canadian Forces board of inquiry later held Israel’s military responsible for the deaths, which it called “tragic and preventable.”
• Canadian supporters lined up behind Israel’s war effort. In late July, 8000 people attended a “Stand with Israel” rally in Toronto organized by Jewish groups. The event’s master of ceremonies, film producer Robert Lantos, thanked Harper for his “unequivocal support,” and announced that he was giving up his membership in the Liberal party. Another participant, Israel’s consul general in Toronto, called the gathering a significant endorsement.® Charles McVety, who had been the principal speaker representing the Christian right at the rally, called on Christians “to stand shoulder to shoulder with our Jewish friends in their hour of need.” In his capacity as chair of Christians United for Israel-Canada, he joined B’nai Brith’s Frank Dimant and Ambassador Baker in designating August 20 as a “National Day of Prayer for Israel and the Peace of Jerusalem.”
• Conservative party officials sought to capitalize on Harper’s stand, asking supporters for “a special contribution of $150 or $75” in order “to keep the focus on principle and character and Canada’s return to its place in the world.” The Liberal and New Democratic Party opposition denounced the government for seeking to profit from the crisis. Arab Canadian groups were also outraged. But Jewish groups were not opposed. “The Liberal party has been a great beneficiary of Jewish largesse,” said Dimant. “Harper has taken a principled stand and I think that, in the next election, Canadians will respond accordingly.”

Exploiting Liberal Divisions

• Harper's stance put pressure on the Liberal Party, then in the midst of a campaign to choose a successor to former leader Paul Martin, to declare its position. With members split between those supporting Israel and those favoring Canada’s traditional peacekeeping role in the region, interim leader Bill Graham tried to steer a middle course. Reiterating the party’s friendship with Israel, he argued that the government needed to maintain its capacity “to act as an appropriate intermediary,” for only in this way could it “truly help our friends.”
• The public, too, believed the government had abandoned Canada’s traditional approach. A new poll reported that 45 percent of Canadians, including 61 percent in Quebec, disagreed with Harper’s support for Israel’s actions, while only 32 percent agreed. Seventy-seven percent wanted Canada to take a neutral position.” Saying he was “not concerned with opinion polls,” Harper refused “to be drawn into a moral equivalence between a pyromaniac and a fireman.” Ambassador Baker weighed in calling Ottawa's stand “completely consistent with Canada’s values of supporting the right of a sovereign state to act in self-defense against a terrorist organization that is part of the world Islamic jihadist attempt to destroy the state of Israel.” Setting diplomatic propriety aside, he called Graham’s statement “a continuation of the non-committal and un-useful position that was held by the previous Canadian government, which neither helped advance peace or prevented terrorism.” Jewish groups also applauded Harper. “We are enormously appreciative of the support that the government has extended to Israel,” said Shimon Fogel of the Canada-Israel Committee. This, he added, could help pry Jewish votes from the Liberals in the next election.”
• The Conservatives received another boost during their national caucus meeting in Cornwall, Ontario in early August. Gerald Schwartz, Heather Reisman and six other prominent members of the Jewish community, several of whom had been active in the Liberal party, took out an advertisement in a local newspaper praising Harper for “standing by” Israel. Frank Dimant called it a “very loud wake-up call” for the Liberals. “If Mr. Harper stays the course. ..I think this will end up being a long-term commitment [to the Conservatives] by these people.” Reisman, a life-long Liberal, joined the party shortly thereafter.”
• Dismissing the complaints of protesters outside the meeting as “very predictable,” Harper said “There are a lot of long-term strategic interests of this country and of the world at stake here and that’s why we’re taking the positions that we're taking.” However, he took a softer line in remarks in French directed at Quebeckers, most of whom remained opposed, saying, “We have a completely different situation from three weeks ago.... We have a full-blown conflict, almost a war, and it’s hard to say whether a response is proportional to another.” Still, Lebanese Canadian groups in sensitive electoral battlegrounds in Quebec and Ontario vowed to campaign against the Conservatives in the next election.”
• On August 8, two days after 15,000 people demonstrated against his government’s policy in Montreal, Harper tried to assuage the dissenters, taking the unusual step of appointing Wajid Khan, a Liberal MP for the Toronto area riding of Mississauga-Streetsville and a native of Pakistan, as his special advisor on South Asia and the Middle East. Khan’s assignment was to visit the Middle East and report on Canada’s policy involvement.” The Conservatives had tried to persuade other ethnic Liberal MPs to join the party, but Khan would not have to do so. Jason Kenney, then Harper’s parliamentary secretary responsible for ethnic outreach, called the initiative an attempt to “to reach out past partisan concerns.”
• Khan would not say where he stood on Middle East matters, claiming he had an open mind. He also denied that he would become a Conservative, insisting his appointment was “a supra-partisan issue.” But Arab Canadian groups were skeptical. Mazen Chouaib, executive director of the National Council on Canada-Arab Relations (NCCAR), said “We don’t want to see this [becoming] another public relations stunt. The government has to deal with real issues and substantive issues.”
• Khan's appointment aggravated the split within Liberal ranks. Fellow MPs forced Khan to resign as assistant defense critic and to withdraw from caucus. The divisions deepened when Senator Jerry Grafstein called on the party to put its support firmly behind Israel. MP Borys Wrzesnewskyj, who had been a member of a parliamentary delegation invited to visit Lebanon by NCCAR, suggested Canada find a way to communicate with Hezbollah. Seizing the opportunity to exploit the Liberals’ differences, Kenney declared there should be no discussions with Hezbollah, which he likened to the Nazis. Bill Graham affirmed the party considered Hezbollah a terrorist group “that should be treated as such under all applicable Canadian laws,” but MPs were entitled to their views. Still, Wrzesnewskyj was forced to resign his associate defense critic post.
• Controversy continued to follow the hapless Liberals. Leadership candidate Michael Ignatieff, who had said he was “not losing sleep” over an Israeli bomb attack that killed 29 Lebanese civilians in the village of Qana, reversed himself. In an interview on a popular Quebec television talk show in early October, he described the attack as a “war crime.” Widely seen as an attempt to regain lost support in Quebec, his comment was sharply criticized by Jewish organizations. Harper also pounced on the gaffe, accusing “virtually all” of the leadership contenders of harboring “anti-Israeli” views. B’nai Brith and other Jewish groups urged Graham to denounce Ignatieff’s remark and to ensure that “anti-Israeli rhetoric” did not become part of the leadership contest. But they were silent on the prime minister’s characterization of the Liberal candidates.
• The Toronto Globe and Mail editorialized that the comment was “illustrative of an unbecoming hyper-partisanship that Mr. Harper carries around like a chip on his shoulder.” But columnist John Ivison pointed out that Harper hoped to gain a “tactical advantage” with his attack. “The Conservatives are becoming the logical political option for many in the influential Jewish community because of Harper’s steadfast support for Israel,” he observed. In mid-October the prime minister would speak at B’nai Brith’s annual dinner with sponsorship packages available for $1 million “and, by all accounts, people are lining up to offer him their thanks.”
• Confirming Ivison’s judgment, Frank Dimant said, “I don’t predict an ovation. I predict several ovations... There is certainly a groundswell of support today in the Jewish community for the Conservative Party.” Harper did not disappoint. Fresh from preventing passage of a resolution acknowledging only Lebanese suffering in the Lebanon war at a meeting of la Francophonie, he made no apologies for his stand. “When it comes to dealing with a war between Israel and a terrorist organization, this country and this government cannot, and will not be neutral,” Harper said, “those who seek to destroy the Jews, will, for the same reason, ultimately seek to destroy us all.” The reaction was all he could have hoped for. “Every Shabbat, every Saturday, we recite [a] prayer for you, Mr. Prime Minister,” said Dimant. “I believe that the Almighty has answered our prayers.
• Some observers believed that opposition to Harper’s foreign policy, especially among Quebeckers, contributed to his party’s failure to improve its popularity. A new survey put the Conservatives in a virtual tie with the leaderless Liberals and pointed to a steady decline in support in Quebec. Another poll reported that although more Canadians approved than disapproved of the evacuation of Canadians from Lebanon, 40 percent disagreed with the governments approach to the war, while only 29 percent agreed. Fifty-five percent of francophones disapproved of Ottawa’s handling of the issue.
• Canada’s pro-Israel tilt at the UN became more pronounced when the government abstained on three more General Assembly resolutions dealing with Palestinian peoples’ right to self-determination, nuclear proliferation in the Middle East, and Israel’s exploitation of natural resources on “occupied Arab lands,” which its predecessor had supported. Harper admitted that diplomacy was the only way to achieve peace, but his government would not deal with Hamas or Hezbollah “whose objectives are ultimately genocidal.” Despite this, Ottawa could serve as an interlocutor. “My own assessment of Canada’s role in the Middle East in the past decade or so is we have been completely absent,” he asserted. “I don’t see any evidence we were playing any role.” The government was looking for ways to encourage dialogue with the Palestinian Authority through President Abbas.”

Searching for a Role?

• In January 2007, Peter MacKay visited the Middle East seeking to build on Ottawa’s role as chair of the Refugee Working Group of the Middle East Peace Process, to “find a niche where Canada can make a contribution.””' MacKay met with Abbas, who encouraged Canada to help resolve the future of Palestinian refugees in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. But a senior aide to the president charged that the decision to cut aid to the Palestinian Authority and refusal to meet with Hamas officials had diminished Canada’s influence in the region. MacKay also met with Tzipi Livni, Israel’s foreign minister, whose view of a two-state solution would not give refugees the right to return. MacKay appeared to agree, although his officials said Canada’s policy was that the issue should be settled by negotiation.”
• MacKay was mildly critical of Israel's security fence but reaffirmed that Canada stood “shoulder-to-shoulder” with Israel. Israel’s foreign ministry praised Harper’s government for maintaining “particularly warm relations,” and noted that “bilateral and diplomatic ties are currently at their peak.” However, as columnist James Travers saw it, MacKay’s visit confirmed that the Palestinians were “losing interest in what this country has to say,” and that the Israelis had “heard everything they need to know.”
• Meanwhile, to no one’s surprise, Harper’s Middle East advisor, Wajid Khan, left the Liberals and became a Conservative. Harper blamed the party’s new leader, Stéphane Dion, for forcing Khan to choose between his roles as a Liberal MP and prime ministerial advisor. But Harper had facilitated Khan’s move by appointing his Conservative opponent in the 2006 election to a citizenship court position.” Harper hailed the defection as a sign that minority voters were becoming more receptive to the Conservatives. “There’s a place for everyone within the new Conservative Party of Canada,” he boasted. “The news is getting out and the party is continuing to grow.”
• However, the government refused to release Khan's report as Khan undertook to do when he was appointed. Its claim that Khan's advice would become less valuable if it were made public led to speculation that the document did not exist or that it ran counter to government policy.” The rebuff increased Arab and Muslim Canadian skepticism about Ottawa’s intentions. “We are now suspicious that this whole thing was a charade,” said Khaled Mouammar, president of the Canadian Arab Federation. “Wajid Khan is not a professor of political science,” the Canadian Islamic Congress’s Mohamed Elmasry asserted, “and his knowledge of the Middle East is very limited. He’s a member of Parliament and he so happens to be a Muslim, and he does not represent the Muslim viewpoint.” The Canadian Muslim Forum and the Muslim Canadian Congress also called on the government to produce the report.”
• In June, Hamas fighters attacked Fatah security forces and took control of Gaza, leading President Abbas to appoint an emergency government from which Hamas was excluded. Israel responded by imposing an escalating blockade of Gaza. King Abdullah of Jordan visited Ottawa the following month to encourage support for the new government and a renewed Arab league peace initiative. Harper said the government was committed to peace. But it was only after the United States and the European Union resumed their aid that Harper agreed to do so. The Canada-Israel Committee, which had opposed restoration of the funding, said the action would not “undercut the appreciation the pro-Israel community has for the Harper government.”
• More evidence of Harper's attempts to strengthen ties to Jewish voters surfaced in the fall of 2007 when Canada’s privacy commissioner began a “preliminary enquiry” into reports that the Conservatives had compiled a mailing list of Jewish voters. It followed complaints from some recipients of personalized Rosh Hashanah greeting cards from the prime minister. Jason Kenney defended the initiative as part of the government’s commitment to multiculturalism. B’nai Brith and the Canadian Jewish Congress approved. Calling it a first, Frank Dimant hoped “it’s a tradition that prime ministers down the line will carry on.”

More of the Same

• In November, the United States launched another Middle East peace initiative at a conference attended by forty countries, including Canada. The meeting failed to produce agreement on the so-called “core issues” of borders, settlements, the status of Jerusalem, and the Palestinian right of return. But Israel and the Palestinian Authority made a best-efforts commitment to reach a deal by the end of 2008. Responding to Prime Minister Olmert’s request, Harper agreed to contribute $300 million over five years to further Palestinian security, governance and development. But the aid would be contingent on “demonstrable progress in negotiations by both sides, as well as progress in Palestinian democratic reforms.” Ottawa would ensure that it did not go to “Hamas or other terrorist groups.”'®!
• In January 2008, during a follow-up visit to the Middle East by Maxime Bernier, the new foreign affairs minister, Olmert’s government announced the expansion of existing settlements in East Jerusalem. Although Canada opposed “any new growth of settlements,” Bernier did not say whether this included expansion of existing ones. His officials called the expansion “extremely unhelpful” but added that individual settlements would be dealt with in negotiations over the final status of territories held by Israel, leading observers to speculate that Ottawa had shifted its position.'®
• In March, Bernier expressed concern over an Israeli military assault on Gaza, which killed 120 Palestinians, in retaliation for rocket attacks on cities in Israel by Hamas militants. Bernier’s comments were criticized by Israel’s vocal ambassador, Alan Baker, and the Canada-Israel Committee. However, Canada was the only member of the UN Human Rights Council to oppose a resolution accusing Israel of war crimes in its attack on Gaza. The action followed Ottawa’s decision to lead the way in withdrawing from the second UN World Conference Against Racism, to be held in Durban, South Africa (later moved to Geneva) in 2009. The government argued that the conference would provide a platform for opponents to resume attacks on Israel begun at the first conference seven years earlier. “We’re very happy that we see things in a similar way,” said an Israeli official, “Canada has adopted several times in recent months very brave positions.” In another sign of their deepening relationship, the two countries signed a “declaration of intent” to deal with “common threats” to national security.
• But relations with Israel continued to provoke controversy. In May, Ambassador Baker expressed alarm that the growing Muslim population could produce a shift in Canada’s policy. Singling out a Liberal MP, Omar Alghabra, who he claimed, “had been outspoken in his hostility toward Israel,” (though he offered no evidence) Baker suggested “that the type of political influence that we’re seeing in Britain, in France, might ultimately reach the Canadian political system.” Public safety minister Stockwell Day gently chided the ambassador for his intrusion into domestic politics, saying “we are proud of the fact that we are made up and built from people from all countries, including the Jewish people.” But Harper appeared to agree with Baker, charging that “some members of Parliament” were willing to pander to “anti-Israeli sentiment,” which he described as “a thinly disguised veil for good old-fashioned anti-Semitism.” In his address to a dinner marking the 60th anniversary of the founding of Israel, Harper assured the audience of his government’s “unshakable support.”
• Harper tried to balance his stance by praising “the moderate but theologically isolated Ahmadiyya Muslims” at the opening of their new mosque in Calgary, Alberta in July. A party source claimed the overture, similar to those made to Ismaili Muslims, was aimed at the wider Muslim audience. “It’s an important signal the prime minister is sending, not just to militant Islamists abroad, but to their sympathizers here at home, that he’s perfectly prepared to ignore them and side with persecuted minorities within the faith.” Harper’s comments provoked predictable criticism from the Arab and Muslim communities. “As a prime minister I can remind people of the danger of extremism in religion or ideology, but you don’t try to describe one Islam as better than another,” said a spokesman for the Canadian Arab Federation. The Canadian Islamic Congress’s Mohamed Elmasry contended that Harper needed to improve his understanding of Muslim issues “instead of relying on overnight experts supplying him with one or two pages [of information].” But Harper's remarks were consistent with his strategy of “digging deep into a few select social strata,” rather than seeking broad support, in order to enhance his party’s electoral prospects.

Conclusion

• Opinion polls conducted as late as August 2008 suggested the Conservatives and Liberals remained about where they stood at the time of the 2006 election. But there were signs that Harper’s strategy had begun to have an effect. For example, long-standing Jewish support for the Liberals in the Montreal riding of Outremont collapsed in a by-election in September 2007. Jews, who make up 10 percent of the constituency’s electors, voted Conservative or stayed away, contributing to the victory of the New Democratic Party candidate. The Liberal standard bearer finished a distant second.
• In another by-election in March 2008, in the British Columbia constituency of Vancouver Quadra where the Liberals had piled up impressive wins in recent years, the Liberal candidate’s margin of victory was reduced to 151 votes over the runner-up Conservative. “We have worked aggressively to court the Jewish community there,” said a party strategist. Actions included a meeting between Harper and Jewish representatives a week before the vote. “People are now trying to determine if that influenced the numbers,” the official said. “This all goes back to the government’s strong support of Israel in 2006.”
• The big test came in the October 2008 election in which the Conservatives portrayed themselves “as the only party with a staunchly pro-Israel record.” In a major speech in the Toronto riding of Eglinton-Lawrence, home to the fourth largest Jewish community in Canada, Harper reminded his audience of the government’s support for Israel in the Lebanon war and its veto of the Francophone summit resolution acknowledging only the suffering of Lebanese civilians. He also accused opposition MPs of “marching in the streets beside the flag of Hezbollah” at the August 2006 rally in Montreal opposing the government's policy toward the war." The Conservatives promised to continue to work closely with Israel on economic and security issues, and reaffirmed that a Harper-led government would not participate in the UN’s forthcoming anti-racism conference. They committed to fund a $3 million pilot Security Infrastructure Project to increase safety at places of worship, schools and other community centers for Jewish and other ethnic groups at risk of hate crimes."
• Harper’s government was returned to power with 143 seats, short of the 155 it needed to attain majority status. Early assessments suggested that the party’s ethnic outreach strategy had started to pay dividends. Although the Liberals took 48 of the 80 constituencies with ethnic minorities larger than 20 percent, the Conservatives increased their total to eighteen, six more than in 2006, and boosted their vote in others. The party lost ground in Vancouver and Winnipeg constituencies with a substantial Jewish population. It also failed to win in Montreal and Toronto, which together account for more than forty seats. However, it improved its share of the vote, in some cases dramatically, in ridings in both cities where large numbers of Jewish electors reside.!'® In the test case riding of Thornhill they helped the Conservative candidate defeat the Liberal incumbent by slightly more than the 5,000 additional votes the party’s ethnic outreach team estimated it would take to win. Liberal turned Conservative MP, Wajid Khan, though, was soundly defeated by his Liberal opponent, despite several visits by Harper.
• Bernie Farber of the Canadian Jewish Congress calls the Conservatives’ electoral strategy normal political activity. “I see both a positive outreach to communities and I see politics at play, which is not a bad thing.” Polling firm executive Paul Adams adds, “This is a game of inches in a minority [government] situation. The Jewish community is not a large demographic, but it tends to be concentrated in a small number of seats... It looks like an ethnic group that could be separated from the Liberals.” At times, Harper’s party has gone to questionable lengths to do so. In November 2009, it targeted six Liberal constituencies containing large Jewish minorities (three in Montreal, two in Toronto, one in Winnipeg) with taxpayer-funded flyers claiming the Liberals had “opposed defunding Hamas and asked that Hezbollah be delisted as a terrorist organization,” that Jean Chrétien’s government had “willingly participated” in the “overtly anti-Semitic” first World Conference Against Racism in Durban in 2001, and that Michael Ignatieff, the Liberals’ current leader, had “accused Israel of committing war crimes.” As Sheldon Gordon notes, “Only the last charge was incontestably accurate and free of distortion.” Privileging one set of interests over others to enhance its electoral prospects, moreover, does nothing to further the government’s professed goal of multiculturalism.
• Likewise, good electoral politics does not necessarily lead to good foreign policy. As James Travers puts it, “Seeing the planet through a provincial prism encourages certainty over caution and, as a glance towards the Middle East confirms, is often catastrophic... In exercising his foreign policy prerogatives, Harper [has] repositioned the country from being a small part of an elusive solution to the centre of an entrenched problem.” Former prime minister Joe Clark agrees. In a speech in 2007, he argued that the Harper government had abandoned Canada’s traditional “constructive role” in the Middle East. He took issue with Harper’s claim that Canada had absented itself from the region during the previous decade, saying, “Apart from being flatly false, that rebuke is even more unsettling as either a warning shot, or an unguarded statement of belief, by the prime minister who so dominates this government.” Harper should admit his mistake as Clark himself had to do on “one celebrated occasion.” Successive Liberal and Conservative governments had tried to be a “reliable interlocutor,” between Israel and its Arab neighbors. “Not many other countries have that reputation.”?* Harper was unmoved, telling the CIJA that a “battle between a democratic state and terrorist groups who seek to destroy it and its people is not a matter of shades of grey, it is a matter of right and wrong.”
• However, Israel has sometimes shown more flexibility than its Canadian backer, creating opportunities for states with more balanced perspectives to perform a facilitating role. For example, in May 2008, months of indirect talks between Israel and Hamas brokered by Egypt culminated in a six-month cease-fire in Gaza and a temporary end to Israel’s blockade. The following month, with Germany serving as mediator, Israel and Hezbollah agreed to exchange prisoners and the remains of the two Israeli soldiers whose capture helped ignite the 2006 Lebanon war. Turkey was also instrumental in helping Israel and Syria begin indirect negotiations aimed at achieving an overall peace settlement.
• Although Canada is not a major player in Middle East politics, it can encourage constructive solutions to the region’s problems. It can also provide expertise, as it has done elsewhere, in such areas as governance, federalism, judicial reform, economic development, border control and enforcement, and the training of security forces. But this will not happen as long as electoral politics dominates the Harper government’s foreign policy thinking.

Who Calls the Shots? An inquiry into the effect of Jewish and Arab lobbies on Canadian Middle East policy (2011)

Brent Sasley

+ Canadian peacebuilding in the Middle East: Case study of the Canada fund in Israel/Palestine and Jordan (2011 - T&F)

Tami Amanda Jacoby

• Post-Cold War Canadian foreign policy is characterized by new methods and philosophies of engagement in international zones of conflict. This reorientation takes place against the background of new forms of armed conflict and new sources of insecurity in the international system in the last few decades. In the past, Canada’s stature in diplomatic and peacekeeping initiatives was attributed to its designation as a “middle power” (Cooper et al 1999), and its reputation for impartiality in international disputes. Traditional Canadian peacekeeping was generally limited to third party intervention in wars between states, such as mediating between hostile parties, bringing them to the negotiating table, and helping to monitor a negotiated settlement.
• By way of contrast, post-Cold War Canadian initiatives differ both in scope and context. First, they address not only protracted armed conflicts that take place between states, but also conflicts of an ethnic/communal and/or tribal nature that occur within and across state borders. Second, they involve not only the military aspects of conflicts, but also the socio-political issues related both to conflict and peace negotiations in post-conflict situations. The current international context has brought about new challenges and opportunities for Canadian foreign policy development. This article explores the transition in Canadian foreign policy from peacekeeping to peacebuilding based on a case study of the Canada Fund for Dialogue and Development (CFDD) in Israel/Palestine and Jordan. The primary intent of this fund in the Middle East is to promote mutual respect and understanding through dialogue on issues related to the Peace Process between Israelis and Arabs. 1 The intention of this research is to determine the extent to which Canadian-funded projects have fulfilled these goals. This study is based on fieldwork in Israel, Palestine and Jordan, and on a series of interviews conducted by the author, between July 10 and August 10, 2000 in the field. The unique contribution of this research to Canadian foreign policy development is in assessing how a particular initiative has played out in a specific zone of conflict and in relation to the local and indigenous concerns of recipients of Canadian funding. This methodology is intended to provide necessary feedback into the policy process for enhancement of future foreign policy goals in a way that weds the interests of both the Canadian government and its local allies in the field.
• The first section of this article looks back at Canada’s traditional involvement in the Arab-Israeli Conflict as a way to distinguish the current transition from Canadian peacekeeping to peacebuilding. In the second section, the current objectives of Canadian involvement in international zones of conflict are examined with the Middle East as the immediate framework of analysis. The third section evaluates the specific case of the CFDD in Israel/Palestine and Jordan. Finally, the last section examines issues deserving further consideration with respect to the CFDD, and offers policy recommendations intended to enhance Canada’s support for inter-ethnic dialogue, both in the Middle East and worldwide.

Canadian Peacekeeping in the Middle East – Historical Background

• Canada has traditionally recognized the Middle East as a region of global strategic significance. Since the start, Canada’s involvement in the Middle East has been closely linked with efforts to mediate a negotiated settlement to the Arab-Israeli Conflict. Canada’s traditional peacekeeping role in the Middle East has involved mediating between states, engaging in high-level diplomacy, and providing military troops to monitor and/or enforce border settlements, security zones, cease-fires, and other official agreements.
• In the past fifty years, Canada has witnessed five major Arab-Israeli wars, along with serious military engagements, and continual border skirmishes between Israel and the Arab states. In the pre-state period, when tensions over land between Jewish and Arab communities were heightened, Canada became involved in the debate over the future of the British Mandate in Palestine (1918- 1948). The UN General Assembly passed Resolution 181 on November 29, 1947, which proposed the Partition of Palestine into two separate states, one Arab and one Jewish. Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs, Lester B. Pearson, played a significant role in mobilizing support for this Partition Plan. However, upon departure of the British and the establishment of the State of Israel on May 14, 1948, the regular armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq advanced into Israel and subsequent fierce and intermittent fighting ensued. Following the 1948 War, Canada supported international control of Jerusalem and called upon both Arab and Jewish forces to stop fighting and resolve their dispute peacefully. Canada also became a key player in the Palestinian refugee problem established by the War, acting as the fourth largest contributor of material support for 1948 refugees.
• Since the UN partition debate and the pre-state period, Canada has served as a third party mediator in all military disputes involving Arabs and Jews in the Middle East. For example, in 1956, Canada participated in the UN Emergency Force (UNEF) stationed along the border between Egypt and Israel following the Suez War in which Egyptian President Nasser closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping. Lester B. Pearson’s role in this peacekeeping effort was honoured with a Nobel Peace Prize. Following the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, Canada helped mobilize support for Security Council Resolution 242 which called for Israeli withdrawal from territories occupied during the 1967 War in exchange for a formal peace negotiation and permanent borders between the parties. After the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, Canada participated in the resumed UN peacekeeping force in the Sinai Desert and in the UN Disengagement Observation Force on the Golan Heights, positioned on the border between Israel and Syria. This early history of Canadian involvement in the Arab-Israeli Conflict reveals Canada’s position as a mediator in inter-state military disputes. This peacekeeping role was appropriate for a period in which inter-state hostilities governed the region.
• However, the start of the Middle East Peace Process in 1991 brought about new opportunities and challenges for extra-regional involvement in the Middle East. One of Canada’s most significant roles has been as Gavel-holder of the Refugee Working Group (RWG), a committee designed to deal primarily with the plight and humanitarian needs of Palestinian refugees. In this role, Canada has continued its commitment to social, political and economic issues such as family reunification, public health, child welfare, and development. 3 Canada has also been involved in other multilateral endeavours, such as the Arms Control and Regional Security Working Group, for which Canada chairs the discussion on Maritime Confidence-Building Measures, and Canada has held workshops for Middle Eastern naval forces.
• In addition to these diplomatic endeavours, Canada has increasingly focused on civil society and non-governmental organizations as allies in the attempt to establish peace in the region. This reorientation of foreign policy objectives is particularly important at a time when rejectionist and radical fundamentalist movements have mobilized on both sides as negotiations at the state level fail to bear fruit. Political polarization in both Arab and Israeli societies has further complicated the Peace Process by creating a backlash against inter-ethnic dialogue and cooperation at the societal level. The continuation of protracted conditions of conflict and terrorist activities during the PeaceProcess era present serious obstacles for third party intervention. These circumstances have necessitated new thinking about Canadian foreign policy vis-a-vis the Middle East. The following section outlines the ideological shift in Canadian foreign policy from the diplomatic to the grassroots level as a theoretical framework through which to consider the viability of the CFDD inIsrael/Palestine and Jordan.

Canadian Peacebuilding in the Post-Cold War Era

• In the post-Cold War era, Canadian foreign policy has undergone two major paradigm shifts. The first is characterized by a transition from peacekeeping to “peacebuilding” (Stephenson, 1998: 65), while the second is defined by a shift from national security to a human security agenda. Both initiatives draw from a long history of human rights and development practices as they have evolved over many years through such organizations as the UN and other international development agencies (DFAIT, 1999; Owens & Arneil, 1999; Heinbecker, 1999).
• The first shift in Canadian foreign policy was an attempt to move away from the traditional Cold War doctrine of deterrence, i.e., containing, managing or moderating hostilities through the threat to use military force. An example of the traditional approach in the Middle East was the first case in which armed UN peacekeeping troops were deployed to the region during the Suez Crisis of 1956. Their role was to supervise a cease-fire between states, Egypt on one side and Britain, France and Israel on the other. By way of contrast with conventional deterrence, current Canadian foreign policy vis-a-vis international conflict resolution relies on the notion of peacebuilding rather than peacekeeping. Theoretically, peacebuilding is designed to respond to the more complex nature of today’s missions in war-torn societies. Peacebuilding is intended to constitute a more pro-active strategy that addresses the root causes of conflict, rather than reacting to the immediate crisis(Hay, 1999). Canadian efforts to prevent a renewal of hostilities in conflict zones have extended far beyond cease-fire agreements between states, to such activities as participation in broad-scale democratic institution building, civil society empowerment, inter-communal cooperation, and the promotion of long-term stability in ethnically divided societies. The peacebuilding paradigm also commits to building local capacity in civil institutions and infusing greater input from civilian actors, e.g. civilian police, in the diplomatic resolution of conflict through cooperation with local communities, moderate leaderships, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), youth, and women.
• The second, parallel, paradigm shift in Canadian foreign policy is the move from national security to a human security agenda. Despite its critics (Nossal 1998), human security has come to represent a broad policy and philosophy of engagement for Canada in the international arena seeking to develop in tandem with the new peacebuilding concept. 5 Human security is defined as a shift in analysis from states to human beings, taking individuals and their communities, rather than states and national boundaries, as the central point of reference for global peace and security. Human security seeks to enlarge the agenda of security by including non-military issues such as human rights, sustainable development, gender equality, cultural diversity, and the environment (DFAIT 1999). The Canada Fund for Dialogue and Development (CFDD) is a policy intended to implement Canada’s commitment both to peacebuilding and human security. The following section examines the concrete benefits and challenges of the CFDD in Israel, Palestine and Jordan, and evaluates the extent to which the outcomes of CFDD projects have fulfilled Canadian foreign policy objectives.

CFDD in Israel/Palestine and Jordan

• On October 30, 1996, Canada launched the Canadian Peacebuilding Initiative, a broad framework of principals and practices intended to coordinate Canadian peacebuilding capabilities, and strengthen Canadian peacebuilding initiatives abroad. The CFDD represents one of the key components of Canadian peacebuilding that was incorporated into the Peacebuilding Initiative. It was established in 1992 as a means to support the Middle East Peace Process through Israeli-Arab dialogue. Since 1992, over 70 short-term projects involving Israelis, Palestinians, Egyptians and Jordanians have been funded. Phase 1 of the CFDD ran from 1992 to 1994. Phase 2 ran from 1994 to 1999. And Phase 3 was scheduled to commence in May, 1999 but was frozen for administrative purposes, in particular after difficulties arose in assessing results of the programs within the framework of CIDA’s “results-based management”.
• The particular challenge for dialogue posed by the Middle East is that it is a region marred by over fifty years of protracted warfare through which generations have grown up in an atmosphere of hatred and intolerance. The idea behind the CFDD is that these attitudes are deeply rooted and cannot be eradicated by the official political process between states. Rather, the CFDD seeks to provide opportunities for former warring peoples to come together at the grassroots level, and attempt to dismantle long-standing psychological barriers, jealousies and enemy images through dialogue. To this end, the CFDD has funded a large series of short-term, cross-cultural activities inits first two phases, ranging from leadership training seminars in conflict resolution, a theatre project, a solar energy conference, media and journalism programs, and environmental summer camps for youth. These projects have been highly successful and reflect an appreciation for the role that civil society plays, particularly through education and media, in support of the diplomatic process. The participants, ranging from women’s groups, sports clubs, and youth activities, are intended to represent this grassroots constituency. However, questions have arisen about the impact of these programs beyond the experiences of the immediate participants.

Issues and Policy Recommendations for the CFDD

• A case study of the CFDD in Israel/Palestine and Jordan reveals a series of challenges necessitating further consideration in terms of administration, project design, impact, recruitment, and participation. From 1993 to 1996, during the initial period after the signing of the Declaration of Principles between Israel and the Palestinians (1993), with the establishment of the Palestinian National Authority (1993) and the Peace Treaty between Jordan and Israel (1994), many local residents were willing to participate in joint projects. However, since 1997, the ebb and flow of the Peace Process has caused a reduction in public interest, particularly among Palestinians and Jordanians. This development presents a serious challenge to the CFDD. The following are a series of reasons given by participants for the limitations on dialogue in Israel/Palestine and Jordan.
• While many of the programs funded by CFDD have been successful, particularly in the area of education, media, journalism and governance, one of the major issues raised by participants is that many projects funded by the CFDD have been limited largely to intellectuals, professionals, elites, and people in positions of political power. For example, of the four projects funded by CFDD in Jordan, one was conducted by the Jordanian Institute of Diplomacy (an institution established by royal decree with Prince Hassan acting as Chairman of the Board of Trustees). This type of quasi-governmental organization under the patronage of the royal family (Hashemite monarchy)obviously does not represent the grassroots in Jordan. 8 In the Israeli/Palestinian context, CFDD funded a Young Women’s Leadership Seminar conducted by the Jerusalem Link, a relatively successful Israeli-Palestinian women’s joint venture, that nevertheless has admitted to problems of elitism both in its membership and Board of Directors. 9 Another example of an Israeli-Palestinian project is the Israeli- Palestinian Chemical Accident Prevention and Response Program organized by the Israeli Palestine Center for Research and Information (IPCRI), a public policy think tank that “concentrates on the professional context” of environmental issues. It remains an open question whether the support of professional training/meetings of this kind furthers the aims of the Dialogue Fund. While they tackle highly practical problems and create personal links among medium level professionals (staff of fire brigades, etc.), their impact on public opinion vis-à-vis the Peace Process is somewhat limited.10 The objective of the CFDD to fund projects with ripple effects in support of peace is complicated by such cases where the activity, i.e. the dialogue, becomes an end in itself and funding is limited to meetings, salaries, travel and incidentals.
• A second major obstacle to CFDD projects is the exclusive focus on Israeli-Arab dialogue. There is a tremendous social and political pressure on activists not to engage in such inter-ethnic dialogue. In Israel, the pressure against dialogue is relatively negligible since the state provides a range of democratic freedoms, at least for its Jewish citizens. However, in the Jordanian and Palestinian contexts, dialogue often runs a fundamental risk for the individual or organization involved. For example, a growing anti-normalization tendency in Jordan is represented by powerful professional associations and unions to which all professionals (lawyers, doctors, journalists, etc.) must belong in order to work in their field. This movement has constituted a major disincentive for Jordanians to engage in dialogue with Israelis. In fact, individuals have been blacklisted for such activities in the past, resulting in their inability to work in their professions in Jordan thereafter. For this reason, not a single project proposal has been funded by CFDD in Jordan since 1994, despite the availability of funds. As well, Islamic fundamentalist movements in Palestine, such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and other rejectionist groups, have threatened Palestinian activists with personal harm and injury for engaging in dialogue with Israelis. Palestinians have been called “collaborators” and “traitors” for dealing with Israelis, particularly during periods when Israel continues to commit human rights violations in the occupied territories (home demolitions, confiscation of ID cards, closure, detainment of political prisoners, etc.).
• A third limitation on the CFDD is CIDA’s own set of objectives going into Phase 3. Jonathan Laine, Deputy Head and Head of AID in the Canadian Representative Office in Ramallah, Palestine, points out that “official CIDA policy equates peace with the official Peace Process, as compared with support for the process of peace and the elements of a sustainable peace. Instead, a strict focus on the Oslo II Agreement (1995), and its slow and painful movement towards an eventual formal agreement, has been adopted”.12 As a result of the absence of “quantifiable results” inPhases 1 and 2 of the CFDD, emphasis in Phase 3 will be more closely linked to the five final status issues (Jerusalem, final borders, waters, refugees and Jewish settlement) of the peace negotiations.Laine argues that important areas that have the potential to influence public opinion such as education, governance, and the media are not final status issues, and thus their exclusion from the next phase of CIDA funding is a problematic issue that needs further evaluation.
• The last major issue raised by the participants, particularly the Palestinians, is the reproduction of power and domination in CFDD projects themselves, related in part to the use of language. For example, the application process to CFDD funding is in English. In Israel, English is taught as a second language from primary school onwards. However, in Jordan and Palestine, command of the English language (speaking, reading and writing) is mostly limited to elites. The application process therefore, discriminates against the average Palestinian who either does not speak English or is illiterate. Naseef Mu’allam, Director of the Palestinian Centre for Peace and Democracy, argues that as a result, “most projects have been dominated by Israelis, both in terms of submitting a proposal, designing the activity, and receiving funding” to the detriment of equality, respect and joint benefit for all.

Policy recommendations

• In light of the aforementioned challenges to CFDD projects in Israel, Palestine and Jordan, the following is a list of concrete policy recommendations:
  • In order to reach the grassroots, it is necessary for CFDD funding to become a more proactive process. This may be problematic during a time of scarce resources and “donor fatigue” since it would involve increasing the number of individuals on staff who would venture out into the field to recruit participants. However, an effective strategy in Palestine and Jordan would be to focus on organizations and established structures such as schools, clubs, mosques, and neighborhood groups that already have their own constituencies in place. Since many of these grassroots organizations tend to be conservative with respect to dialogue with Israel, it would be useful to conduct an initial phase of projects on a unilateral basis (intra-Arab). These projects may involve a range of activities that encourage the participants both to express their fears of normalization, and to learn about the other side and its reality in order to debunk negative images and monolithic stereotypes. These activities would then promote the positive aspects of engaging in peace activism. After this initial reorientation phase, Palestinian and Jordanian participants may be more open to dialogue with Israelis.
  • Another way to reach the grassroots would be to focus on projects that take place outside the urban areas of Jerusalem and Ramallah, and focus instead on smaller villages and refugee camps in rural areas where people from lower socio-economic backgrounds tend to reside.In these contexts, it is also important to focus on children and youth, those impressionable groups that may not as yet have deeply-rooted views and may have a greater capacity than older generations to change their views. For this reason, CFDD must continue to reach into the public school systems (not only private schools) and find teachers that are willing to reorient their curriculum, texts, and topics to support peace.
  • CFDD must fully recognize that Israelis, Palestinians, and Jordanians have different interests in dialogue, and different stakes when participating in joint programs. For example, Israelis can generally dialogue without fear of retribution and are thus generally more interested in the social aspects of joint programs, i.e. getting to know one another. However, Palestinians are more interested in political change because of their more immediate problems, and thus they focus on trying to convince their Israeli counterparts to pressure the Israeli government. It is essential for CFDD to ensure that expectations of the joint programs are not presented unrealistically. Joint facilitators of the CFDD-funded “Double Perspectives in the Teaching of History” at Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam, School for Peace, suggest thatCFDD should include projects that focus not only on commonality, but also on difference.The reason is that “while the former sustains the status quo, the latter helps the weaker groups”. 14 Due to the high risk for Palestinians and Jordanians engaged in dialogue, it is necessary for CFDD as an institution to seek confidentiality for participants by pressuring governments and legal systems to democratize and ensure freedom of movement, expression, and association.
  • The more direct focus on final status issues planned for Phase 3 of CFDD funding should be reconsidered. The main reason is that the purpose of these small projects is to widen the circle of people interested in peace. In order to change public opinion and reach large numbers of people, it is necessary to focus not only on policy, but also on the dissemination of information about policy. As mentioned, this step may be accomplished by continuing to focus on projects involving media, journalism, and education, rather than discussions about foreign policy options such as the final status negotiations in small forums. CFDD may want to invest in disseminating a newsletter, magazine, or posters about the benefits of joint programs throughout the immediate region (both urban and rural) in order to enhance this goal.
  • CFDD-funded projects should ensure full equality for their participants in terms of access to information and language. For example, CFDD could disseminate project applications and guidelines in Hebrew and Arabic, and provide simultaneous translation throughout all the activities. CFDD should also ensure full equality in terms of participation, project design and benefit. Palestinian participants expressed concern that projects with Israelis often reproduced the occupier-occupied relationship of the larger political context due to Israeli domination of the application process and joint activity, the location of the activity in Israel, and dissemination of funding through the Israeli organization. In order to redress this concern, it is essential that both groups discuss ideas together, write proposals together, share funding, and divide the activities equally in both geographical areas in order to achieve mutual economic benefits (for example, hotels, food, and other incidentals) (Mu’allam, 1999).
  • The last policy prescription addresses the CFDD priority for projects that offer sustained and ongoing institutional relationships. It is necessary to have a more rigorous follow-up process indicating how the project outcomes will be disseminated into the community and how the joint relationships will be sustained into the future. For example, CFDD may wish to inquire about how the organizations will secure matched funding for future projects, or CFDD may wish to participate more closely with other international donors to finance longer-term projects.

Conclusion

• This article has explored the transition in Canadian foreign policy from peacekeeping to peacebuilding, and from national security to human security, based on a case study of the CFDDin Israel/Palestine and Jordan. Fieldwork in these areas in the year 2000 revealed a series of challenges and opportunities related to the CFDD in terms of its mandate and administration, and the concrete experiences of the participants. While many of the projects have been successful in fulfilling their stated objectives, there continue to be concerns about the viability of such projects during a period in which the peace negotiations have consistently faltered and public opinion inIsrael, Palestine, and Jordan has become more wary of inter-ethnic dialogue. While the intentions of peacebuilding and human security are positive and essential to the establishment of peaceful relations between peoples in the region, not only between governments, there are significant obstacles that lie in the way of joint peace activism. Canada’s role in alleviating these obstacles lies in continued involvement in the social dimension of peacebuilding with extensive knowledge about, and cultural sensitivity to, the indigenous context in which the Peace Process takes place.The future of Canadian involvement in the Middle East will depend to a large extent on refining its administration of such programs as the CFDD and participating more closely with other international donors. While difficult to quantify, the programs underwritten by such concepts as human security and peacebuilding are essential for empowering civil society and generating grassroots support for the diplomatic process, without which peace in inter-ethnic conflict zones may be unattainable in the long-term.

Reversing the Poles: How the Pro-Israeli Policy of Canada’s Conservative Government May Be Moving Jewish Voters from Left to Right (2012)

Paul C. Merkley

Crisis decision-making in Canadian foreign policy: Diplomatic representation in the Levant, 1984–1986 (2013 - JSTOR)

Michael Bell & Michael J Molloy , International Journal, Vol. 68, No. 2 (June 2013), pp. 378-394

+ Canadian Foreign Policy: An Exploration of Israel and Canada as "Best Friends" (2014 - PDF)

Sarah Tayyem

Introduction

• “Canada and Israel – best friends forever?” reads the headline from a 2013 article in the Times of Israel (Ahren). This idea that Canada and Israel are “best friends” and that the relationship between the two countries is close has been repeated multiple times in newspaper articles and by government leaders since the Conservative government led by Stephen Harper came to power in 2006:
• “Israel has ‘no better friend in the world than Canada,’ John Baird says” (2012); “Israel’s staunchest ally: Stephen Harper has transformed Canada’s Mideast policy” (Goldstein 2012); “In Israel, Harper puts Canada’s ‘best friend’ status into practice.” (Clark 2014); “‘Through fire and water, Canada will stand with you’: Harper gives historic first address to Israeli parliament.” (Ivison 2014)
• Foreign Minister John Baird and Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s statements on the closeness of the relationship between Israel and Canada, as evidenced in the above newspaper titles, are not just words: under the current government, political support for Israel is a foreign policy priority. While never mentioned in a prior Speech from the Throne, defending Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state was the first foreign policy issue mentioned in the 2013 Throne Speech (Speech from the Throne 2013). As Roland Paris points out, the Throne Speech, “…offers the best glimpse of the government’s policy intentions for the new session of Parliament. It provides a framework for ministers and their officials to follow in the months to come. […] What message did it send about Canada’s foreign policy priorities to list this [the defence of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state] as the first issue?” (2013)
• This question is central. Why would the Conservative government list Israel as its first foreign policy issue in the Throne Speech and not other high priority issues such as what he suggests: US-Canada relations, strengthening international law, or climate change (Paris 2013)? Answering this question, discovering the reasons behind this strong support for Israel, and exploring the implications this will have on Canada’s future multilateral relationships, is the heart of this major research paper. My research questions for this paper are as follows:
  • 1) What is Canada’s historical relationship with Israel, and has that relationship changed under the leadership of Stephen Harper?
  • 2) What are the driving factors that have influenced this change in relationship between Canada and Israel?
  • 3) What are the implications of this change in level of support for Israel for Canada’s role in the Israel-Palestine conflict, Canada’s relationships in the Middle East and more broadly, Canada’s relationship with the international community?
  • 4) What research gaps exist on this topic of Canada-Israel foreign policy, and how has this impacted the completion of this major research paper?
• First, this paper will start by situating the current relationship between Canada and Israel in its historical context, by tracing Canada’s relationship with Israel back to 1948. Next, the current government’s relationship with Israel will be analysed. This section will examine the political and economic ties between the two countries, and will include an analysis of Canada’s voting patterns at the United Nations. The third section of my paper will explore popular explanations for this current policy stance on Israel. Critics of the government’s policy have attributed the support for Israel to various factors, all of which will be examined: the Conservative government’s focus on tailoring its foreign policy on Israel to its domestic support base (Joe Clark), ideological support for Israel (Mira Sucharov, Gerry Nicholls, Michael Taube), a belief in economic diplomacy (Colin Robertson), and the strength of the pro-Israeli lobby. My paper will end with a discussion of the implications of this foreign policy direction for Canada’s relationships with Israel and Palestine, with the Middle East, and with the international community more broadly. This analysis will include exploring the failed Canadian bid for a seat on the Security Council in 2010, as well as the Qatari proposal in 2013 to relocate the International Civil Aviation Organization from Montreal to the Middle East, among other international rebukes.
• I will conclude by noting that while under Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government Canada has become strongly supportive of Israel, it remains to be seen whether Canada’s stance will have long-term repercussions for any potential role it may have in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. However, it has likely decreased Canadian influence in the Middle East, and contributed to a cooling of relationships with the international community that will impact Canadian multilateral relationships for years to come.

Methodology

• This paper is a critical literature review, and uses the theoretical lens of liberalism to evaluate Canada’s relationship with Israel. Liberalism defines individuals and groups as the primary actors in the international system; the relationship between these actors and government are the factor that determines state behaviour (Slaughter 1995, 728). Liberalism argues that the outcome of state interactions is due to the “configuration and intensity of state preferences” (728). In contrast to other theories of international relations such as realism (which looks at concentrations of state power measured in terms of military or economic power) or constructivism (which focuses on the construction of social context through examining identities and beliefs) (Slaughter 2011, 4-5), liberalism focuses on “the ways in which interdependence encourages and allows individuals and groups to exert different pressures on national governments” (Slaughter 1995, 724, 728). There is a theoretical overlap with realism (which assumes that states are the primary actor in an anarchical international system, who act in ways which maximize their power) (722) with the discussion of Canada as a “middle power”. With the addition of Edward Said’s concept of orientalism, post-colonial critical theory is also touched on (which is concerned with the construction of power and the State) (Slaughter 2011, 5). However, the primary lens of this paper is liberalism.
• To this end, I have examined the strength of Canada’s relationship with Israel through the measurements of economic ties (trade agreements, exports/imports, strength of business communities, etc.) and political support (financial donations, number of visits by parliamentary officials, public expressions of support, action in multilateral forums, trends in voting patterns, etc.).
• Sources used for this paper mostly include academic books, but also academic research articles on Canada’s historical relationship with Israel. It is important to point out that the existing literature on the history of relations between Canada and Israel is sparse (Bercuson, Kay, Hillmer, Ismael, Miller, Tauber, Husseini). It appears that there is a very clear divide in the existing literature between referring to Canada’s approach as being either “pro-Israeli” or “balanced and even-handed”. This is most likely due to two factors: one is the low number of academic publications on this topic; the other is the Israel-Palestine conflict. Without a large variety of academic sources, there is to date no common or agreed-upon narrative regarding the Canada-Israel relationship. In addition, the two narratives prevalent within the literature are likely an extension of the larger conflict between Israel and Palestine, as those who are sympathetic to the Israeli side are more likely to characterize the relationship as neutral or balanced, while those with Palestinian sympathies likely view the Canadian-Israeli relationship as pro-Israeli. Until this field gains additional scholars to balance out the narratives involved, it will be difficult to confidently characterize Canada’s history with Israel as one or the other.
• My research into Canada’s economic and political relationship uses governmental reports and data from official sources such as Statistics Canada, Export Canada, Parliament of Canada, and the Prime Minister’s Office. I have also used academic articles, newspaper articles, public polls, and government announcements in order to find evidence of policy changes, the details of events, the extent of public support, and analysis of these events. Furthermore, I made an effort to find analysis done by former public servants (ambassadors, diplomats, etc.). Since the conflict is a political topic, I remained skeptical of information from lobby groups and “pro-Israeli” or “pro-Palestinian” non-profit organizations. The amount of information specific to Canada’s relationship with Israel is limited: while there was plenty of analysis in newspaper articles on the relationship, the amount of academic literature on the topic was sparse, making it difficult to evaluate the differing claims made in the analysis in newspaper articles.
• I have conducted archival research into Canada’s voting history at the United Nations through the electronic archives of the Security Council (1946 to present), the Commission on Human Rights1 , and the Human Rights Council (1993 to 2009) to determine the resolutions related to Israel that Canada has voted on. For each of these bodies, I manually read through the online database of resolutions for each year that Canada was a member of these committees and double-checked each resolution that related to the Middle East for relevancy to Israel. I then cross-referenced the resolutions found manually with those listed on the “Question of Palestine” United Nations website. Due to time constraints2 , only a preliminary scan of United Nations General Assembly resolutions related to the Israel-Palestine conflict (as opposed to all resolutions related to Israel) were looked at, from 1946 to 1980.
• Lastly, it is important to note that while this paper focuses on the relationship between Israel and Canada, the Israel-Palestine conflict impacts the economic, political, and social development of Israel, and therefore Canada’s relationship with Israel. As such, Canada’s role in the Israel-Palestine peace process has also been included where significant; however, information regarding Palestine and Palestinians has only been included as it relates to the peace process or to the development of Israel.

Canada’s Historic Position on Israel: The Creation of Israel

• According to David Bercuson, the current Director of the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary, Canada played a crucial role in the selection and the securing of majority support for the partition plan that created Israel in the first place. In 1947, the Mackenzie King government sent Justice Ivan Rand to represent Canada at the United Nations Special Commission on Palestine. Due to Canada’s relationship with Britain, they were expected to follow British lead and to even be slightly pro-Arab (Bercuson 1985, 239). However, Rand and his assistant Leon Mayrand both believed in the importance of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine, and their perceived neutrality as representatives of Canada enhanced the weight given to their arguments (Tauber 2002, 12). Rand’s advocacy was essential for the selection of partition by the committee; as Mayrand put it, he was, “by far the main contributor to the partition scheme with economic union” (Mayrand cable, cited Tauber 2002, 26). The Canadian Cabinet on the other hand, and especially Mackenzie King himself, took a more pragmatic response to Canada’s involvement in this plan. King did not want to get involved in the issue (26), as he strongly wanted to follow Britain’s lead (Canada-Israel Committee 1979, 16).
• King was also in sharp contrast to his Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs, Lester Pearson. At the Ad Hoc Committee that followed UNSCOP, Pearson supported the idea of a Jewish state in the Middle East and was “forceful” in mediating between the British decision to withdraw from the mandate area and the lack of American willingness to take responsibility for any consequences of partition (Tauber 2002, 30). Without him, two-thirds majority would not have been obtained for the partition plan (Tauber 1998, 93).
• While the Zionist lobby in Canada pushed for the government to recognize the state of Israel after it was established in May 1948, Canada only granted recognition in December 1948 after King was replaced in November that year by Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent. According to Elizabeth MacCallum, the Department of External Affairs Middle-East expert in 1948, this was a form of “compensation” for not supporting Israel’s admission to the United Nations at the Security Council in December 1948 (MacCallum in Tauber 2002, 118). At the time, Canada had abstained on the resolution, citing a lack of time to consider the consequences of approving the application (S/PV.386 1948). Instead, Canada had supported France’s resolution to postpone consideration of Israel’s application for admission to the United Nations for one month (S/PV.386). 1948 was also the year that Canada supported United Nations General Assembly resolution 194, which recognized the Palestinian right of return to their homes (Heinbecker 2011, 165).
• The governmental approach to Israel following 1948 was guided by practical as well as ideological concerns. Practically, Israel was a reliable supporter of the West in the Middle East, and one of the region’s only stable democracies (Canada-Israeli Committee 1979, 32). Ideologically, as Pearson put it many years later in his memoirs: “I must admit that I became emotionally involved in a very special way” as a Christian who grew up learning about the importance of Jerusalem (Bercuson 1985, 233). Pearson never “wavered in [the] view that a solution to the problem was impossible without the recognition of a Jewish state in some form in Palestine,” and it is this emotional attachment that motivated successive Canadian governments to support Israel (239). An additional factor explaining Canada’s participation in the creation of Israel is the idea of Canada’s place as a middle power. Hassan Husseini (2008) argues that as a rising middle power, Canada invested in multilateral approaches in order to balance the power of the United States and check the Soviet influence internationally (42). Canada had not been directly affected by World War II and was in a good position after it ended in 1945 (43). The creation of the United Nations gave Canada new avenues to obtain influence, as it allowed Canada to maintain its North Atlantic relationships with Britain and the United States, build international institutions through which Canada’s “middle power” could be recognized, and contribute to creating post-war peace (43). In this way, Canada’s position on Palestine and Israel can be seen as emblematic of power positioning between the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union, as well as its response to strategic and ideological factors.

Canada’s Historic Position on Israel: 1948 to 1980

• After 1948, Canada’s position on Israel changed from one where the Prime Minister wished to “move carefully” (Pearson in Tauber 2002, 118) to one which has been characterized by Bercuson and the Canada-Israel Committee as having balanced support for the existence and security of the Israeli state on the one hand with its efforts to maintain good relations with Arab states on the other (led by St. Laurent in 1948 and later Pearson in 1963) (Canada-Israel Committee 1979, 32; Bercuson 1985, 239). It took nearly a full decade before Israel and Canada exchanged fully-fledged resident ambassadors, and when it did, Canada, along with other countries, placed its embassy in Tel Aviv instead of Jerusalem4 (Kay 1996, 100-1). In the period following the creation of Israel, while both St. Laurent and Pearson were supportive of Israel, the Canadian government resisted the pressure from Israel to move the Canadian embassy to Jerusalem, and encouraged Israel to make a symbolic donation to the Palestinian refugees (26, 28).
• As prime minister, Diefenbaker (1957-1963) was strongly supportive of Israel; however, his policies were virtually unchanged from those of his predecessor (108). Later, under Pearson’s leadership, the Suez Canal Crisis was an opportunity for Canada to flex its muscles as a mediator and to make a name for itself between the United States and the Soviet Union. Pearson also led the pack in the establishment of the first United Nations Emergency Force in 1956, which secured and supervised the ceasefire of hostilities, as well as monitored the withdrawal of French, Israeli, and British forces from Egypt. Kay argues that Canada’s first considerations in the crisis were its Western allies (again, strategic considerations are a focus for Canada as middle power), and then secondly Israel’s needs for security (2010, 105). Following the 1967 war, Canada supported UN Security Council resolution 242, which declared Israeli sovereignty over land acquired by force to be illegitimate and acknowledged the right of each state in the Middle East to live in peace within defined boundaries (Heinbecker 2011, 265).
• Under Pierre Trudeau, Canada committed itself to supporting multilateralism and the United Nations; however, he was cautious to avoid taking sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This continued through to the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. Secretary of State for External Affairs Mitchell Sharp reiterated Israel’s “right to exist within secure and recognized boundaries” in 1973; however, for the first time in Canadian history, he also held meetings with various Middle East representatives to develop and maintain relations with the Arab countries (Miller 1991, 10). This expansion was due to the fact that under Trudeau’s leadership, Canada’s main priorities were how to extend its domestic interests abroad (10). This also explained Canada’s decision to participate in the second United Nations Emergency Force at the end of October 1973: as a means of building relationships with other countries, promoting Canada, and again, exerting itself as a middle power (10).
• After the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, Canada shifted from supporting the United Nations and international liberalism to nationalism in its foreign policy as policymakers became increasingly skeptical about the role of peacekeepers in the resolution of international conflicts (11), after having gained firsthand experience in peacekeeping with the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force in the Golan Heights in 1974. This time period also marks Canada’s shift to discussing the Middle East situation outside of the UN, as Canada started to recognize the importance of the Palestinian issue as not only a refugee issue but a political problem for Israel and the Middle East (11). This shift is most likely in connection with the 1973-1974 oil embargo by Arab states, which caused Canada to disassociate itself from the American pro-Israeli Middle East policy (Hassan-Yari 2012, 316). This disassociation was not enough to overcome Canada’s interest in expanding its economic ties: in 1976, Israel and Canada explored bilateral economic cooperation through the creation of the Joint Economic Commission, and in 1977, Canada and Israel negotiated the Double Taxation Agreement in an effort to eliminate double taxation and to prevent tax evasion (“Canada-Israel Relations” 2012). In 1979, Prime Minister Joe Clark created waves when he proposed to relocate Canada’s embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. This was met by a witheringly negative reaction from Arab leaders, which prompted the Clark government to review Canada’s relationship with the Middle East (Brynen 2007, 75). The review culminated in a report that remarked upon recognizing the significance of the Palestinian refugee issue, as Palestinians have “now emerged fully conscious of their identity and anxious to give that identity political expression” (75). This was the first recognition that a policy that gave more consideration to the Palestinians would be required, and led Canada to the belief that any proposed solution needed to provide a “territorial foundation for political self-expression of the Palestinian people, consistent with the principle of self-determination” (Miller 1991, 11).

Canada’s Historic Position on Israel: 1980 and Onward

• The 1983 Israeli invasion of Lebanon was a turning point for Canada as the Secretary for State Allan MacEachen publically spoke out against Israel: “Canada strongly opposes the Israeli invasion of Lebanon […] we continue to support Israel’s immediate and unconditional withdrawal from Lebanon” (15). While the Canadian public historically had been pro-Israel and sympathetic to the plight of the Jews, this changed as the war highlighted the importance of the Palestinian Liberation Organization in the Middle East as well as the impact and reach of the first Palestinian intifada (Brynen 2007, 75). These two events were important as they sensitized the Canadian public to the rights of Palestinians (75). While this influenced the Canadian public, the government held back from changing its approach partly due to its support for Israel, and partly because there was concern about the message it would send to Quebec sovereignists by supporting Palestinian self-determination (75).
• After this, Canada became increasingly involved with the Middle East as a whole. In 1986, Canada first defined its Middle East policy in an ambassadorial speech, where Clark, now Secretary of State for External Affairs under Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, spoke of Canada’s support for the existence and security of Israel (and the need for the Palestinian Liberation Organization to acknowledge this right), a peace settlement based on Israeli withdrawal from occupied territories, and recognition of the rights of Palestinians (Joe Clark in Blanchette 1994, 17). He also talked about Canada’s initiatives (aid package for the West Bank), its support for moderation in the conflict, and he surprised Middle East governments by speaking in Israel about Canada’s commitment to a Palestinian home within a defined territory (Kirton & Lyon 200). Up until this point, while Canada had previously recognized Palestinian right of return in 1948, Canada had not recognized the principle of Palestinian “self-determination”, which was a point of embarrassment for Canadian diplomats who did not see this policy as being in Canadian best interests (Lyon 17). Following this speech, the government recognized Palestinian right to self-determinism in 1987 after years of only expressing support for a Palestinian “entity” or “homeland” (instead of a state) (Brynen 1989, 77). Recognition of these two points showed an important turning of Canada towards a more balanced approach to the conflict.
• In 1991, Canada was assigned the job of chairing the Refugee Working Group, which complemented the efforts of Israelis and Palestinians to address the refugee issue (“Middle East Peace Process” 2013). Canada was assigned this responsibility due to its reputation for balance and non-partisanship in dealing with all parties, as well as due to its knowledge of refugees after years of refugee resettlement (Goldberg & Shames 2004, 208). In fact, Israel’s foreign minister, David Levy, stated that he would only agree to the creation of the Working Group if it were chaired by Canada (Robinson 2011, 699). The Canadian government participated in this project partly so they could show various niche constituencies that Canada was impartially supporting peace in the Middle East, as well as due to the prestige attached with “doing a favour” for its biggest ally and trading partner, the United States (702). Canada also became a member of the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee and the Task Force on Palestinian Reform, both of which coordinated donor efforts, the first for the West Bank and Gaza, and the second for the Palestinian Authority (Brynen 1989, 76).
• The Chrétien (1993-2003) government made economic expansion a priority. In 1993, they renewed the Joint Economic Commission and created the Canada-Israel Industrial Research & Development Foundation, with the aim of increasing collaboration between Israel and Canada through funding a portion of research and development costs for jointly-developed technology-based products and processes (Marr n.d., 1). Canada also initiated negotiations in 1997 with Israel for a free trade agreement (“A Short History of Canadian-Israeli Relations” 2012). These agreements were in line with the priorities at the time, which were to widen Canada’s network of free trade partners (Holroyd 2002, 89). They did not stop Chrétien from recalling his ambassador to Israel, David Berger, after finding out that Israeli intelligence officials used Canadian passports to conduct an assassination attempt of a Hamas operative in Jordan (“A Short History of Canadian-Israeli Relations” 2012).
• According to Brynen, it was under Prime Minister Paul Martin (2003-2006) that the government began to tilt back towards supporting Israel: the government voted against General Assembly resolutions that Canada had previously supported, considering them to be “unbalanced” or “excessively politicized” although there were few other countries that agreed with this assessment (1989, 78). A notable example comes from 2004, when Canada abstained on United Nations General Assembly resolution ES-10/15 that called for Israel to abide by the International Court of Justice’s opinion on the illegality of the constructed barrier (“the separation barrier”) that separates the West Bank from Israel (78). Out of the Western countries, only Australia and the United States (Israel’s traditional ally) voted against it (78). At the same time, Martin also took steps to increase the security of Israel through participating in the United States Security Coordinator Mission in 2005, which directs all facets of the American security sector assistance to the Palestinian Authority and synchronizes international supporting efforts (“United States Security…” n.d.).
• In summary, looking at this past, Canada and Israel have had good relations through most of Israel’s short history. At the creation of Israel, Canadian leaders were motivated to support the new state out of sympathy, strategic considerations, and a feeling of connection with the Jews, who they perceived to be “modern” and “democratic” like them. Politically, Canada’s approach remained relatively sympathetic towards Israel until the 1970s, when the Palestinian cause started to gain attention and Canada became aware of the politics of the conflict. The 80s and 90s mark the most “fair-minded” period in Canada’s history towards Israel, followed by a tilt towards Israel again under Martin. In addition to Canada’s sympathy towards Israel, Canada’s foreign policy with this country has also been motivated by domestic and strategic considerations. As a whole, Canada’s relationship with Israel has typically been an extension of a broader foreign policy strategy for engagement with the international community, with Canada’s sympathy for Israel playing a minor role. Barring Joe Clark’s proposal to move Canada’s embassy to Jerusalem, governmental leaders have publicly stayed relatively neutral in the conflict, and Canada’s relationship with Israel, barring Martin, has generally reflected that neutrality.

Historical Voting Patterns: 1948 to Present

• [Tableaux inclus] This neutrality is reflected in Canada’s votes on Israel-related resolutions in multilateral fora. Historically, Canada has supported every resolution related to Israel in its total of ten years sitting as a non-permanent member of the Security Council (see “Error! Reference source not found.” for resolutions discussed in this section), except for two resolutions in 1968. Many of these resolutions were passed unanimously; they were also neutral in that they called for a cessation of hostilities by both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or they struck or renewed the mandate of the United Nation Disengagement Observer Force or the UN Emergency Force. However, a few resolutions were one-sided: R256 (condemning military actions launched by Israel), R262 (condemning Israeli military action against Lebanon’s civil International Airport), and especially R242 (calling for Israeli withdrawal from territories occupied in the 1967 war). The two resolutions that Canada abstained from, R252 (condemning Israeli actions and calling upon Israel to rescind measures) and R259 (dispatching a Special Representative to the Arab territories and to Israel to report on implementing a previous resolution asking Israel to ensure the safety of inhabitants in areas where military operations have taken place) were the only two resolutions where Canada (under Pierre Trudeau) followed the lead of the United States to abstain in the voting. Otherwise, while the United States voted for every resolution in the years examined, on the few occasions that the United States voted to abstain (R66 – 1948 – stabilizing the hostilities in Southern Palestine, R641 – 1989 – deploring the deportation of Palestinian civilians and calling for a return of habitants to occupied Palestinian territories, and R1322 – 2000 – supporting a peaceful conclusion to the Israel-Palestine conflict), Canada did not follow this lead. Interestingly, Canada also did not follow the lead of Britain either, notably when Britain abstained on resolution 42 (Security of Palestine) and 69 (Admitting Israel to membership in the United Nations) in 1948.
• The voting on resolutions related to the Israel-Palestinian conflict at the General Assembly from 1946 – 1980 (see “Error! Reference source not found.” for resolutions discussed in this section) also show a change during Trudeau’s years as prime minister (1968- 1984). Voting at the General Assembly prior to 1968 shows that Canada generally supported the status quo, as it supported almost all of the resolutions related to the Israel-Palestine conflict. However, between 1968 and 1980, Canada voted against or abstained on more than half of these resolutions. Over the course of Trudeau’s time in office, the Canadian voting pattern became more sympathetic and supportive of the Palestinians as a number of the “Against” votes are changed to “Abstention” or “For” during Trudeau’s later years in office. While I have not had the time to investigate the resolutions between 1980 – present day at the General Assembly, my expectation is that Canada’s voting pattern would likely show a pro-Israeli tilt in the early 1980s under the strongly pro-Israel government of Brian Mulroney that reverses in the late 1980s (as described by Kirton & Lyon 1985 ) so that Canada’s voting is in line with the defined position on the conflict as outlined by Joe Clark.
• Looking at Canada’s voting patterns at the Commission on Human Rights, and later the Human Rights Council, from 1993 and onward (see “Error! Reference source not found.” for resolutions discussed in this section), another clear trend emerges. Fairly consistently through the 1990s, Canada supported resolutions condemning Israeli settlement construction in the occupied Arab territories and the human rights situation in southern Lebanon, resolutions promoting the Middle East peace process, as well as resolutions condemning the human rights situation in Southern Lebanon and West Bekaa. During this time, Canada also consistently abstained on resolutions focusing on the human rights situation of the occupied Syrian Golan and the occupied Arab territories, as well as resolutions on the overall situation in occupied Palestine. The general pattern here was almost entirely either to support or abstain from resolutions; with only one exception (1993/2), Canada rarely voted against human rights resolutions criticizing Israel.
• All of this is in line with Canada’s current written foreign policy stance on Israel: supporting a just and lasting peace process between Israel and Palestine, supporting Israel’s right to live in peace, supporting the Palestinian right to self-determination, condemning settlement construction in occupied land, and opposing biased resolutions that are political or polemic (“Canadian Policy on Key Issues…” 2014). The rhetoric by ambassadors during this time was also in line with the written Canadian policy on issues related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: as stated by Ambassador Duval in an address to the General Assembly in 2001,
  • “Canada stresses the need for a peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Indeed, there is no way to resolve the dispute but through diplomatic channels. Violence must end, and negotiation must resume. Both Palestinians and Israelis continue to suffer, and both must take the necessary steps to end the suffering. Canada abstained in the voting on draft resolution A/56/L.22 [Peaceful settlement of the question of Palestine] because the text does not sufficiently recognize the violence inflicted against civilians on both sides of the conflict. The horrific events of the past 48 hours demonstrate the tragic scale of civilian suffering. We urge the parties to take the necessary steps to end these senseless cycles of violence.” (General Assembly resolution 56/PV.72 2001)
• Evident in Duval’s statement is the support for a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a manner that is respectful of both parties. The comment about insufficiently recognizing violence inflicted against both sides is most likely in response to the Palestinian intifada and provides the rationale for the policy position change in 2001, when Canada’s voting pattern started to change.
• This change is evident: Canada abstained on the resolution condemning Israeli settlements in the occupied Arab territories in 2001 instead of its usual pattern of supporting it; the year after (2002) voted to support it again; and lastly, in 2005, switched to abstain from this resolution. In 2002, Canada voted against a resolution that condemned the violation of human rights in the occupied Arab territories by Israel, which is a change from Canada’s historical position to abstain from this resolution. A third change is Canada’s position on the situation in occupied Palestine: while historically abstaining from this resolution, Canada voted against it in 2002, and then in 2003 voted for it. In general, between 2001 and 2005, Canada’s voting related to Israel is inconsistent and incoherent. These changing in voting records could be due to increased political pressure on Chrétien by Israel or pro-Israeli lobby groups as a result of the Palestinian intifada in 2000. It could also be related to a shift in foreign policy direction following the events of September 11.
• However, it is in 2006 that a new change in the voting pattern is apparent: Canada voted against every single resolution related to Israel that it had previously abstained or voted for. This is obvious in Table 4 and Table 5, where the “Against” vote dominates after 2006 whereas “For” and “Abstention” dominate prior to 2000. The only resolutions that Canada supported between 2006 and 2009 were those supporting the rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination and a resolution in 2007 on the human rights situation in the occupied Palestinian territory.
• The Canadian delegation explained this change in voting patterns in 2006 by stating in response to one of the resolutions (S-1/1) that Canada might have been able to “support the resolution had the text been more balanced”, and ended by calling “on Israel and the Palestinian Authority to fully respect international humanitarian law and principles… we cannot accept the Council focusing all of its criticism of Israel while ignoring that party’s legitimate security concerns” (Standing Senate Committee on Human Rights 2007 ). This voting pattern contradicts the declared Canadian policy to consider Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories to be a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, as well as its historical position on these resolutions. Canadian officials have explained this voting by arguing that the resolutions are “one-sided, unbalanced, and do […] not address the complexities of the issues, nor seeks to address the true actions and responsibilities of all parties” (Foreign Affairs Media Relations Office 2011). The government also states that this new voting pattern reflects a frustration with the current UN process, and argues that the conflict is an issue that should not be dealt with at the United Nations but should be resolved by the two parties instead (Foreign Affairs Media Relations Office 2011).
• In summary, while Canada’s voting patterns have historically shown the Canadian leadership to be relatively balanced in their approach to resolutions on issues related to Israel within multilateral forums, a clear political bias towards Israel is evident in the voting of the Canadian government (under Stephen Harper) at the United Nations. This voting pattern is quite significant because voting against resolutions critical of Israel isolates Canada internationally; the only countries other than Israel that vote against these resolutions, with few exceptions, are the United States, Australia, and some American semi-independent colonies.

Current Governmental Position

• Canada’s voting pattern at the United Nations shows that the Conservative government has a much more supportive stance towards Israel than previous governments. In addition to this tilt, it is also possible to see that the current Canadian government has taken steps to strengthen Canada’s political relationship with Israel outside of voting forums, and as well has encouraged Canada’s economic relationship with Israel.

Current Governmental Position: Political Relationship

• This change in voting at the United Nations is not surprising, given the rhetoric of the Canadian government that caters to domestic audiences. “Israel has no greater friend in the world today than Canada,” declared Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird in May 2012 (“Canada is Israel’s ‘Best Friend’” 2012). He stated this in front of an audience that included ambassadors and foreign ministers at the American Jewish Committee Global Forum; he went on to say that, “we make it clear that Israel’s right to exist is non-negotiable. We vote against one-sided and unfair 24 resolutions” (“Canada is Israel’s ‘Best Friend’ 2012). Such statements encapsulate the friendliness between the current government and Israel, as well as Canada’s approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
• This political relationship commenced in 2006 with Harper government’s unwavering support for Israel during its campaign against Hezbollah over the course of the Israeli intervention into Lebanon. In contrast to the international community’s request for moderation, the Canadian government characterized Israel’s response to the Hezbollah as “measured” at the G8 summits in St. Petersburg and used the summit and the subsequent gathering of the Francophonie to actively block ceasefire resolutions that were increasingly supported, including by the United States (Elmer 2010). In a similar way, the Harper government appeared to blame the United Nations when the Israeli Defence Force killed a Canadian peacekeeper (Major Paeta Hess von Kruedener) by bombing an unarmed United Nations observation post (Heinbecker 2011, 202), even though the Canadian Forces board of inquiry into the killing found his death was caused by the Israeli military (Pugliese 2012).
• In January 2014, during Prime Minister Harper’s visit to Israel, he was given the honour of being the first Canadian prime minister to ever address the Knesset (the Israeli parliament) (“Canada and Israel Set Course for Stronger Bilateral Relations” 2014). This was Prime Minister Harper’s first official delegation to Canada, and its size is indicative of the significance the government placed on this trip. Not only was this Harper’s first visit, but it was also the first visit by a Canadian prime minister to Israel since 2006 (“Canada and Israel Set Course for Stronger Bilateral Relations” 2014).
• This trip was pre-empted by a high number of visits by dignitaries between the two countries since 2006 where topics discussed range from trade, regional security (including concerns regarding Iran) and the peace process. Minister of Foreign Affairs Lawrence Cannon visited Israel in 2009, and Minister of International Trade as well as Minister of Public Safety Peter Van Loan visited in 2010 and 2011. Treasury Board Minister Vic Toews and Minister of State for Foreign Affairs (the Americas) Peter Kent travelled there in 2010. Minister of Defence Peter MacKay went in 2011 (“Canada-Israel Relations” 2012). Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird and the late Minister of Finance Jim Flaherty have most recently visited Israel and the West Bank in January 2014 for a series of high-level meetings on the Middle East peace process, regional security, and economic cooperation (“Canada-Israel Relations” 2012).
• These visits have in turn been reciprocated by Israel: Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu visited Canada in May 2010, followed by Minister of Industry, Trade and Labour Shalom Simhon also in 2010. Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman made an appearance the following year (2011), and President Shimon Peres made a trip to Canada in 2012. During Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Ottawa in May 2013, he was as much of a tourist (visiting the CN tower) as he was a foreign dignitary (speaking at the annual Walk with Israel event in Toronto) (“Israeli Prime Minister due in Ottawa…” 2010).
• In addition to this increasing amount of personal interaction between the leadership of both countries, the Harper government has gone a step further in signing defence pacts with Israel. This includes the 2008 Declaration of Intent on public safety, Principal Memorandum of Understanding (2011), and the 2014 Canada-Israel Strategic Partnership Memorandum of Understanding (“Canada-Israel Strategic Partnership – Memorandum…” 2014). The 2008 Declaration was the first agreement ever between Israel and Canada on cooperation on public 26 safety issues, and it paved the way for the non-binding Principal Memorandum of Understanding, which laid the cornerstone for defence cooperation between the two countries in the areas of counter-terrorism; training; search and rescue; intelligence; command, and control, and the sharing of new technologies (“Minister Nicholson welcomes…” 2011). The Strategic Partnership Memorandum built on the previous two memorandums to facilitate stronger cooperation in the energy, security, business, and academic sector (“Canada-Israel Strategic Partnership MOU” 2014). These security agreements strengthen the defence and security cooperation between Israel and Canada substantially and represent a significant investment in bringing the two countries closer together.
• The emphasis on developing a closer relationship between Israel and Canada is also reflected in the policy priorities of the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade, and Development (“the Department”), in particular in the Reports on Plans and Priorities (RPPs)7 , and the Departmental Performance Reports (DPRs)8 . Supporting Israel’s “right to security” became a yearly priority in the RPPs starting in 2011 (2011, 20; 2012, 14; 2013, 14; 2014, 18). Canada’s political position on Israel strengthened when the language changed, first in 2013 – 2014 to “supporting Israel’s right to exist” (emphasis added), and then in 2014 – 2015 to “defending Israel’s right to exist” (emphasis added) (2013, 14; 2014, 18). This change highlights a closer relationship between Canada and Israel in which Canada is prepared to not only support Israel, but also to do so against those who disagree with Israel’s position.
• While the DPRs show that the work of the Department reflects a more neutral support for traditional Canadian positions on the Middle East peace process, it should be noted that they only go up to 2012-2013, the year before the language change became evident in the RPPs9 . That being said, there are instances where unilateral support for Israel comes through in the choice of wording: in the 2008-2009 DPR, Canada “supported Middle East resolutions that foster peace and do not single out Israel” (2009, 10); in 2010-2011, Canada “maintained strong support for the State of Israel” while supporting a two-state solution (2011, 21); and, in 2012-2013, Canada supported a two-state solution “negotiated directly between the two parties”10 (2013, 22). The acknowledgement of Israel’s right to security and the opposition to one-sided resolutions is a traditional Canadian foreign policy position (“Canadian Policy on Key Issues…” 2014); however, as seen in the previous section on Historical Voting Patterns, the current government has used the argument of bias to vote against resolutions that have had longstanding Canadian support or abstention. Therefore, this emphasis on neutral resolutions is an example of the way the current government has subtly influenced the operations of the Department so that they reflect a greater level of support for Israel.
• The last noteworthy point of discussion in regards to these documents is as follows: in every DPR and RPP since 2006, any reference to the Middle East peace process has also included an implicit or explicit reference to the two-state solution. However, the term was removed in the 2014-2015 RPP (2014, 18). As this change is in contrast to Canada’s written foreign policy on the Israel-Palestine conflict that establishes support for the two-state solution, it is problematic that the reference to the two-state solution was dropped and it may signal a greater shift away from traditional Canadian foreign policy priorities within the Israel-Palestine conflict than has been exhibited to date.
• Given the relationship between the Israeli and the Canadian leadership, the strengthening of defence cooperation, the increase in pro-Israeli rhetoric, and the change in foreign policy priorities within the RPP and DPR, it is not surprising that the government has taken unprecedented steps in support of Israel. Canada was the first government to label Hamas as a terrorist organization in 2006, and the first government to withdraw aid from the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority when the party was voted in as the ruling power in 2006 (Brynen 2007, 78). At the time, Foreign Minister Peter McKay announced that “until such time as we see a change in position from the Hamas government and the Palestinian Authority, there will be no direct contact, and there will certainly be no aid flowing through that government” (CTV “Canada cuts relations with Palestinian Authority” in Kirton 2013, 17). The Canadian government also put on hold a $50 million aid package for Palestine assembled by the former Liberal government under Paul Martin in response to a G8 commitment in 2005 (17). Officially, this reaction was due to the fact that the Hamas-led government did not address the concerns raised regarding non-violence, the recognition of Israel, and acceptance of previous agreements and obligations, including the Roadmap for Peace (General Assembly resolution 61/PV.80 2006). However, the government also clearly stated that it would “continue to support and respond to the humanitarian needs of the Palestinian people” (General Assembly resolution 61/PV.80 2006). The Canadian government also boycotted the 2009 human rights conference in South Africa because of concerns of how Israel would be treated (Heinbecker 2011, 201).
• Additionally, it is important to note that Canada is at times more politically supportive of Israel than the United States, Israel’s staunchest ally. At the United Nations, Canada’s voting on 29 Israel frequently isolates it from other countries except for the United States – but Canada has gone beyond the United States in supporting Israel. Don Shapiro, US ambassador to Israel, condemned Israel for settlement construction during peace negotiations (Times of Israel Staff 2014), and John Kerry has come out in criticizing the Israeli government for their handling of the peace talks and stated that if the peace talks do not succeed, Israel may become an “apartheid state” (“Kerry: Israel risks becoming apartheid state” 2014). These are strong statements in contrast to the statements of the Canadian government. In the most recent military strike on Gaza (2014), the Conservative Party of Canada put out a video illustrating Canada’s unconditional support for Israel (“Through Fire and Water” 2014), whereas the United States government expressed support for Israel’s right to defend itself and alarm over Israel’s response (“Obama’s Statement on Israel” 2014). Furthermore, the Harper government has stayed silent on the yearslong blockade imposed on Gaza by Israel, while both Secretary of State Clinton and President Obama called the blockade unsustainable and unacceptable (Heinbecker 2011, 204). In this sense, Canada is not following the United States; in these situations, Canada is leading the United States in expressing political support for Israel.
• These moves show a marked contrast to Canada’s past, and even to the actions of the Martin government. Canada has always been characterized as “status quo” in its commitment to the preservation of the current order (Roussel 2012, 136). While Canada has historically been sympathetic towards Israel, it has never been so pro-Israeli that it has led the international community in responding to events in Israel and Palestine, or so pro-Israeli that it isolates itself from the rest of the international community through its votes on Israel. And while the Martin government showed a shift in its voting pattern at the United Nations in Israel’s favour, Stephen Harper has taken that support to unparalleled levels.

Current Governmental Position: Economic Relationship

• In addition to the close political relationship, Canada and Israel are also becoming closer economically. While Israel is not one of Canada’s top ten trading partners – in fact, Israel was Canada’s 44th trade partner in 2013 in terms of merchandise exports (“Canada’s Merchandise Exports” 2014) – Israel is Canada’s fourth-largest merchandise export market in the Middle East and North Africa. What is more, Canada’s exports to the Middle East & North Africa as a region have been increasing: the nominal value of trade to the Middle East & North Africa region has more than doubled from $2.2 billion in 2002 to $4.8 billion in 2011 (“Canada’s State of Trade…” 2012, 67).
• In 2011, bilateral merchandise trade between Canada and Israel was valued at $1.38 billion. Canada mainly imports pharmaceutical products, electrical machinery, precious metals and stones, machinery and medical instruments from Israel, while Israel receives precious metals and stones, electrical machinery, sulphurs, paper and paper products, and medical instruments from Canada in turn. Furthermore, there is a small but growing business community between Israel and Canada: there are 198 Canadian companies that Export Development Canada supports in Israel, and 354 international buyers insured (“Israel: Country at a Glance” n.d.). The total business volume of Canadian companies in Israel is $275.22 million CAD (“Israel: Country at a Glance” n.d.).
• This merchandise trade has accelerated under the Harper government. Following the negotiation of the Free Trade Agreement by Chrétien in 1997, it was expanded in April 2013 when the Canadian government negotiated a more modernized free trade agreement which eliminated tariffs on industrial products and some agricultural and fisheries products. This agreement promoted academic, security, and business partnerships (“Israeli premier…” 2013), and it is the third bilateral free trade agreement to be signed by Canada after the North American Free Trade Agreement and a bilateral free trade agreement with Chile (signed in the same year as the one with Israel) (Kirton 2013, 44). This free trade agreement precipitated an almost-doubling of Canada’s goods merchandise imports and exports with Israel: [Tableau]
• Starting in 1995 and accelerated by the free trade agreement signed with Israel in 1997, Canada’s imports from Israel have grown from just under $300 million to the current plateau of just under $1.0 billion (245% increase). Interestingly, this trade relationship is mostly an increase in imports to Canada, as exports have stagnated around $300 million. As the graph shows, there has been some deviation in this increase: exports and imports took a hit in 2001/2002 when Canada was impacted by the collapse of the telecommunications equipment industry (Dion et al. 2005, 7). This decline also coincides with, and can likely be attributed in part to, the second Palestinian intifada (2000 – 2005). Imports showed the sharpest growth rate between 2007 and 2008, Stephen Harper’s second year in office, right before the recession impacted Canada (5). Not surprisingly, given the recession, imports grew more between 1995 and 2006 (175%) than they did between 2006 and 2013 (26%); however, it is surprising that imports to Israel have been positive since 2009. Exports show a similar trend: more growth prior to 2006 (59%) than after 2006 (-32%). Considering that Canada made Israel a priority market as it is perceived to have potential for broad Canadian commercial interests, it is intriguing to note the lack of growth in exports under the Conservative government. However, Canadian investment in Israel was pegged at $258 million in 2007, whereas Israeli investment in Canada was $878 million in 2007, so the relationship is more complex than can be described through imports and exports alone (“Global Markets Action Plan” 2013, 28).
• This increase in economic relations from 1988 to 2013 is within the broader context of an increase in economic integration with the global community as a whole: Canada has become more intertwined with other countries economically over the past three decades. Canada’s merchandise exports have increased by $51.3 billion between 2002 and 2011 (“Canada’s State of Trade…” 2012, 66). Stephen Harper has made economic diplomacy, or diplomacy that ensures that “all diplomatic assets of the Government of Canada are harnessed to support the pursuit of commercial success by Canadian companies and investors in key foreign markets” (“Global Markets Action Plan”), central to his foreign policy in 2013. This focus on economic diplomacy has led to an expansion in bilateral trade agreements, including the Arrangement for Industrial Security Protection between the Israeli Ministry of Defence and Public Works and Government Services Canada (“Canada-Israel Relations” 2012), the Memorandum of Understanding on International Development Cooperation (“Canada-Israel Strategic Partnership – Memorandum…” 2014), and the Customs Mutual Assistance Agreement (2012) (“Canada and Israel sign…” 2012)). These agreements (along with the expansion of the Free Trade Agreement, as previously mentioned) are a significant step in enhancing the economic relationship of and bilateral trade between Israel and Canada.
• In addition to formal agreements, there are also four initiatives that support increased economic ties between Israel and Canada:
  • 1) The Canada-Israel Industrial Research and Development Foundation (CIIRDF) has contributed to more than 150 collaborated projects since its creation in 1993, and between 2004 and 2009, the CIIRDF helped more than 300 companies explore business-research partnerships (“Canada-Israel Diplomatic Relations…” 2009, 13). According to each year’s respective Departmental Performance Report from the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade, and Development, in recent years, the foundation has handled the initiation of an increasing number of projects: from six projects totaling $1 million in 2007-2008, to eight projects valued over $2 million in 2008-2009, to four projects worth a total of $4.5 million in 2010-2011 (“Departmental Performance Report” 2007-2008, 49; 2008-2009, 32; 2010-2011, 22).
  • 2) The foundation manages the new $5 million Canada-Israel Energy Science and Technology Fund (2012-2015) that spurs the “development of innovative energy technologies and processes that enable the responsible development of […] resources” (“Israeli premier…” 2013). Interestingly, Canada had previously rejected Israeli proposals to create this fund in the late 1980s (Kirton & Lyon 1989, 198).
  • 3) The Canada-Israel Technology Innovation Summits (2010, 2011) promoted partnerships in renewable energy, water, and neuroscience by providing project seed funding (Marr n.d., 1).
  • 4) The Harper government announced a $5 million allocation for a Canada-Israel Technology Innovation Partnership in 2011, which is expected to generate $20 to $40 million in collaborative research and development (“Canada-Israel Energy Science…” n.d.)
• These agreements actively promote economic development within both countries by building capacity for joint ventures in relations to security and research and development.
• While Canada’s trend for increased economic ties with Israel was started under Chrétien and Martin, Stephen Harper has accelerated those economic ties by expanding an existing free trade agreement, investing in new economic Memorandums, and especially by funding joint research and development. While the trade relationship has seen less growth under the Harper government, this is more likely to do with the reduction in global trade (especially during the recession) than with a lack of effort on the part of Canada. These specific Israeli-Canadian initiatives show a distinct commitment by both countries to become increasingly economically connected, especially given the context of increased global economic integration.

Underlying Motivations

• Fundamentally, this shift to being supportive of Israel, as well as cultivating closer economic and political ties with Israel, is part of a broader change of being less engaged in multilateral engagements internationally. Historically, Canada has been seen as a “model UN citizen” in that it has almost automatically been elected to any position in the UN that it has attempted to obtain (Williams 2010). Williams suggests that this is due to its “demonstrably principled international positions” and names the examples of how Canada has previously taken a different route than the United States in establishing relations with China; maintaining trade, travel, and diplomatic links with Cuba; supporting international tribunals and the International Criminal Court; and its creation and support for the “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine. However, according to Joe Clark, Stephen Harper has changed this focus by “aggressively narrow[ing]” foreign policy to 36 trade and military initiatives while “muzzling” diplomatic and development capacity (in Siddiqui 2013).
• In recent years, the government has modified this stance somewhat to re-emphasize the importance of aid and Canada’s connection to Africa (Williams 2010). Regardless, the government has had little regard for international organizations and multilateralism, to such an extent that a criticism has been leveled in the media that the Harper government almost did not notice that there was a vacancy coming up in the Security Council in 2010 and that they were not prepared for the amount of effort it would take to obtain the seat (Williams 2010). In addition, the Conservative government is paying little attention to foreign policy in general, as evidenced by a $170-million cut from a $1.4 billion operating budget of the Department of Foreign Affairs, and the closing of at least four trade consulates in the United States (out of twenty-one) and seven of the eighteen international trade offices in Canadian cities (Weston 2012). This low level of engagement and funding cuts explain and point to Canada’s shift in international politics in general; however, they play only a partial role in explaining Canada’s support for Israel.

Underlying Motivations: Harper's Personal Conviction

• Stephen Harper himself identifies as being pro-Israeli. Gerry Nicholls, a colleague of Harper’s while Harper worked at the National Citizens Coalition (a conservative think-tank), stated that, “In our conversations, he’d say ‘Gerry, I’m very pro-Israel’… He was always saying that Canada needs to do more to support Israel, they’re an important ally… he looks at them as being people who uphold Western values.” (Gollom 2012).
• Michael Taube, a Washington Times columnist and former speechwriter for Prime Minister Harper, agrees with Nicholls’ assessment. He writes that:
  • “Harper strongly supports liberal-democratic societies. He believes in greater individual rights and freedoms. He promotes a nation’s right to defend its own borders. He values intellectual discourse and freedom of speech. He has a great passion for history. He condemns hatred and religious persecution of adherents of any faith. He is firmly committed to wiping out terrorism from the face of the Earth. In short, Harper’s personal beliefs are remarkably similar to Israel’s beliefs. Hence, Harper’s position on Israel is based on principle.” (Taube 2014)
• The portrait that is drawn by these two men is of an individual who believes strongly in religious and individual freedom, who condemns violence and cowardice, and who stands up against persecution.
• This thread of strong moral conviction can be seen in the speeches given by Prime Minister Harper. In his address on Parliament Hill to a gathering of parliamentarians and experts attending a conference on combating anti-Semitism:
  • “We must be relentless in exposing this new anti-Semitism for what it is. Of course, like any country, Israel may be subjected to fair criticism. And like any free country, Israel subjects itself to such criticism – healthy, necessary, democratic debate. But when Israel, the only country in the world whose very existence is under attack – is consistently and conspicuously singled out for condemnation, I believe we are morally obligated to take a stand. Demonization, double standards, delegitimization, the 3 D’s, it is a responsibility, to stand up to them.
  • And I know, by the way, because I have the bruises to show for it, that whether it is at the United Nations, or any other international forum, the easy thing to do is simply to just get along and go along with this anti-Israeli rhetoric, to pretend it is just being even-handed, and to excuse oneself with the label of “honest broker.” There are, after all, a lot more votes, a lot more, in being anti-Israeli than in taking a stand. But, as long as I am Prime Minister, whether it is at the UN or the Francophonie or anywhere else, Canada will take that stand, whatever the cost. Not just because it is the right thing to do, but because history shows us, and the ideology of the anti- 38 Israeli mob tells us all too well, that those who threaten the existence of the Jewish people are, in the longer term, a threat to all of us.[…]
  • As I said on the 60th anniversary of its founding, the State of Israel appeared as a light, in a world emerging from deep darkness. Against all odds, that light has not been extinguished. It burns bright, upheld by the universal principles of all civilized nations – freedom, democracy, justice.
  • By working together more closely in the family of civilized nations, we affirm and strengthen those principles. And we declare our faith in humanity’s future, in the power of good over evil.” (National Post Staff 2010)
• All of the subjects referenced above come out in this speech: support for freedom of speech, standing up for a civilized nation that is demonized, taking action against persecution. His admiration for Western modern states – “freedom, democracy, justice” – is evident, as is his support for freedom of speech – his reference to the necessity of being subjected to fair criticism. The point about the rise of “new anti-Semitism” is also a repeated theme, as he spoke about it at the Knesset during his visit to Israel in early 2014.
• For his beliefs and his action, Harper has personally received support in Israel. As mentioned previously, he was the first Canadian prime minister to ever address the Knesset. He received an honorary doctorate from the Tel Aviv University (Taube 2014). The Hula Valley bird sanctuary that he visited while in Israel in 2014 will be renamed the “Stephen J. Harper Hula Valley Bird Sanctuary Visitor and Education Centre” (Taube 2014). Harper has been called a “personal friend” and a great leader by Netanyahu (Campion-Smith 2014).
• In this way, Harper can be seen as an individual who has a strong personal relationship with Israel – with its leader, its morals, and its ideology – and in turn, he is supported by many Israelis and their leaders. Harper identifies with the struggles of Israel, and in turn he feels as if it 39 is his moral responsibility to speak out – not just because it is morally right, but because to not speak out could, in his eyes, lead to much worse action taken against the Jews and the Jewish state. This personal conviction and support for Israel may explain why the Harper government was receptive to the idea of such strong statements in support of Israel. And considering the power of the prime minister in the Canadian political system, a pro-Israeli prime minister can influence Canadian foreign policy in many ways, both subtle and overt.

Underlying Motivations: Government Ideology

• It is not just Stephen Harper that exhibits evidence of being pro-Israeli, but other members of his Cabinet do as well. Junior Foreign Affairs Minister Peter Kent stated in 2010 that an “attack on Israel is an attack on Canada” (Chase 2010). He most likely felt comfortable making this statement as Harper said something similar in 2008; in 2011, this rhetoric was repeated by Defence Minister MacKay to Israel’s top military commander, Maj. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, when he said that a “threat to Israel is a threat to Canada” (Brewster 2012). While based on the nonbinding defence pacts signed between Israel and Canada, this type of unqualified rhetoric is in line with Mira Sucharov’s belief that the Conservatives’ support for Israel is based on a belief in the “rightness” of Israel’s mission (Raj 2014). Indeed, Foreign Minister John Baird has stated in Canada’s address to the UN General Assembly in September 2011 that “too often Israel is on the frontlines of our struggle and its people the victims of terror. Canada will not accept or stay silent while the Jewish state is attacked for defending its territory and its citizens.” (“AJC Applauds Canadian Foreign Minister…” 2011)
• The use of the term “Jewish state” by Baird is interesting, as other than references by governmental leaders to Israel as a “Jewish state”, no country has formally recognized Israel as a “Jewish” state. In fact, Israel is still waiting on recognition from a number of different countries including most of the Middle East (Qatar, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, among others) and parts of Africa (Niger, Morocco, Sudan, Somalia, Oman among others)(“Israel’s Diplomatic Missions Abroad: Status of relations” n.d.). Palestinians argue that recognizing Israel as a “Jewish state” relegates its Arab and non-Jewish citizens to a second-class status and that it is unnecessary as Palestinians already recognized Israel’s right to exist in 1993 (Becker 2011, 10). However, Israelis argue that Jews need a homeland where they can be safe from anti-Semitism; Israeli leaders have started to invoke more frequently a “securitist orientation”, which rests on the idea that “the Jewish state is involved in a battle for survival with its Arab neighbours, and that a major military defeat would mean [Israel’s] annihilation” (Kimmerling, quoted in Marzano 2013, 108). The claim that Israel is a “Jewish” state comes from political Zionism, and is part of the Israeli political narrative on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (Bar-Tel & Salomon 2006, 26). By recognizing Israel as a Jewish state, John Baird and Stephen Harper are not only supportive of Israel but are explicitly taking a side in the conflict, as well as playing a role in normalizing Israeli political discourse within Canada.
• Canada’s support for Israel is situated within the broader ideological context of economic conservatism. Colin Robertson, a former Canadian diplomat, believes that Harper’s goal is to position Canada as a rising power, instead of its historical position as a middle power, through making economic conservatism central to Canadian foreign policy (Robertson 2013). He defines this belief system as seeing the role of government as essential for enabling the market to create growth (so as to produce the greatest economic benefit for the most people), and according to Robertson, Harper conceptualizes Canada as an “energy superpower” and wants Canada’s bilateral relations and economic-related multilateral forums to be used to gain economic advantages (Robertson 2013). Examples of this policy shift include targeting Canada’s foreign aid to be more “effective” in Latin American countries as opposed to African countries, and merging the Canadian International Development Agency and the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade so as to make development complement and support foreign policy (Robertson 2013). Robertson points out further that economic conservatism blinds the current government to the political realities of the necessity of pragmatism in international politics and positive political multilateral relationships (Robertson 2013). And indeed, Baird’s own words support Robertson’s idea that the Conservative leadership is “blindly” supporting ideology over pragmatic foreign policy when he stated that the Canadian government “rejects the concept of moral relativism in international relations” (“Canada is Israel’s ‘Best Friend’” 2012).
• Furthermore, Canada’s position has been so “pro-Israeli” that it has gone against Israel’s wishes. For example, Israel actively lobbied against Canada’s threat to cut off funding to the Palestinian Authority after it launched a campaign to upgrade its status in the General Assembly in 2012 because of its potential for destabilizing the Palestinian Territories and the Palestinian Authority (Berthiaume 2013 “Israel urged Canadian government…”). If the underlying sentiment of this pro-Israeli ideology is to support Israel, then Canada’s reaction to the Palestinian bid for statehood comes off as a knee-jerk and blind response. This is not Canada’s only “knee-jerk” response; a second example comes in the form of Canada’s funding cut to the Palestinian Authority after the election of Hamas in 2006. A third example is when the Canadian government redirected $15 million in annual support away from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) in 2010, the Israeli government lobbied against this as well even as some of the pro-Israeli lobbies in Canada supported it (Berthiaume 2013 “Israel urged Canadian government…”; Centre for Israel & Jewish Affairs 2010 “Canada Reallocates Funding…”; “Statistical Report on International Assistance 2010-2011” 2011). The Canadian government followed this reduction in 2011-2012 by giving no aid at all to UNRWA (“Statistical Report on International Assistance 2011-2012” 2012) 12 . These responses to the Palestinians are extreme, and they are also fundamentally irrational as they are against the interest of Israel itself. This shows a disconnect between the beliefs of the Conservative government and the needs of the Israeli government. While ideological blindness explains the initial reaction of the government to the bid for statehood and the election of Hamas, it does not explain Canada’s reduction in funding to UNRWA, as UNRWA’s role is apolitical in its mandate to provide human development and humanitarian assistance to Palestinian refugees (“Who We Are” n.d.).

Underlying Motivations: Appeal to Party Base

• This strong support for Israel and this disconnect between the ideology of the Conservative government and the position of the Israeli government could also be explained as an appeal to the Conservative party base. Joe Clark argues that the Conservatives’ support for Israel is an attempt to pander to one specific diaspora:
  • “While all governments in the past have been aware of the sensitivities of several diasporas in Canada, they usually considered that in the context of broader Canadian foreign policy. But now it’s a more determining factor in the architecture of our foreign policy.” (Clark in Siddiqui 2013)
• Indeed, the Conservative Party of Canada does contains a religious wing: an Ipsos Reid exit poll from the 2011 election shows that Conservatives did the best among Protestant voters (55%), and those who frequently attend a church or temple (50%) (Todd 2011). Furthermore, 52% of Canada’s Jews voted Conservative in the past election, while only 12% of Muslims voted Conservative (Todd 2011). In comparison, the New Democratic Party only received support from one in four Canadians who are the most religiously devout, while Liberals attracted 18%. Liberals also obtained 24% of the Jewish vote, with the New Democratic Party receiving 16% (Todd 2011). Out of these religious communities come the Evangelical and Pentecostal Christians, who are more likely than other Christian groups to support Zionism (Merkley 2012). This means that not only does the Conservative party receive support from the religious rightwing communities, but it also contains a higher proportion of those communities that believe the unification of Israel is an essential precondition for Christ’s return (“Israeli Prime Minister due in Ottawa…” 2010). In fact, an Environics Institute report from 2010 shows that while few Canadians believe that the Conservative stance is not supportive enough of Israel, those who do believe that are mainly non-mainline Christians and non-Christians (Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs) (37). This indicates that the Conservatives are under pressure from some in their support base to constantly become more strongly pro-Israeli.
• Harper’s trip to Israel in January 2014 does show these close ties with pro-Israeli religious groups: with him went 208 Canadians representing diverse businesses, Jewish organizations and community groups, plus an official delegation of 30 MPs, senators, officials, and family (Carter in Do 2014). The delegation did not include any mainline Protestant leaders, but it did include ten influential evangelical Protestant pastors and leaders, as well as one evangelical Roman Catholic clergyman and 21 rabbis (Todd 2014). There were no Muslims, 44 Buddhists, Hindus, or Sikhs (Todd 2014). This delegation was unrepresentative of the religious makeup of Canadians, as more than 60% of Canadians are either mainline Protestant or Catholic while about 10% of the population are evangelical and about 1% are Jewish (Todd 2014). Considering that the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem is the third holiest site in Islam (Tucker & Roberts 2008, 70), the lack of Muslim invitees is an indication that the groups that were invited to visit Israel were chosen according to political considerations rather than religious connections. As such, the composition of this group can likely be considered to reflection the religious groups from which Harper receives his political support within the Conservative party.
• These ties are also shown at the grassroots level within the Conservative Party: at the 2013 Conservative Party convention for example, one proposal stated that the Government of Canada “must continue to defend the democratic countries of the Middle East and the right of Israel to exist” (Dickin 2013). Grassroots motions like this clear the way for Harper to be supportive of Israel without worrying about a backlash from the party base.
• These ties between pro-Israeli supporters and the Canadian government also explain part of the “irrational” aspect previously identified in the government’s support for Israel. Pro-Israeli Jews and Christians outside of Israel are less likely to be familiar with the nuances of the Israel-Palestine conflict than those living in the Middle East, and are more likely to misunderstand actions such as cutting funding to UNRWA and to the Palestinian Authority as being in Israel’s best interest.
• However, Mira Sucharov argues that the Conservatives’ support for Israel is not due to partisanship or an attempt to sway voters. She points out that the Jewish community in Canada is much smaller than other communities that would have a “natural allegiance” to the Palestinian cause (Raj 2014). There are approximately 20,000 Canadians living in Israel, as well as approximately 330,000 Jews in Canada (“Canada-Israel Relations” 2012) (as of the 2001 Census, “Population by religion…” 2001). Furthermore, about 107,000 Canadians are evangelical (“2011 National Household Survey: Data tables…” 2011), which has historically been a strong base of support for Israel (Brog 2014 n.p.). In contrast to this potentially pro-Israel group, there are approximately 276,000 Arabs and over one million Muslims in Canada (Statistics Canada 2006). This data seems to support Sucharov’s claim that the potential community of those who do not support Israel outnumber those who are potential supporters of Israel. She argues further that there are only a few seats in Toronto and Montreal where the Jewish vote is concentrated that the Conservatives could potentially lose based on their stance on Israel; moreover, they could hurt their electoral chances with the larger but dispersed Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim communities (Raj 2014).
• However, these counterpoints are unconvincing. As already stated, the Muslim community (and likely the Palestinian and Arab communities as well) makes up a small percentage of the Conservative party vote in comparison to the Jewish and religious Christian vote, so it makes little sense that the Conservative party would worry about the Muslim or Arab vote when doing so would alienate their traditional supporter base. Furthermore, Muslims do not vote monolithically on the topic of Israel; first, neither political support for Israel nor Palestine is inherent to Islam, and second, as Muslims come from a variety of different countries and cultures, many do not have a personal connection to the conflict13 . Discounting most of the Muslim population from the potential supporters of Palestinians means that the Jewish community alone outweighs the Arab population in Canada, which means that a pro-Israeli stance will likely not lose the party an election. It is also worth pointing out that Harper has successfully led his party for the duration of his mandate with a pro-Israeli stance. Lastly, if his stance had not appealed or been connected to his party base in some way, it is unlikely that he would have been able to maintain his strong support for Israel as the leader of the party. Therefore, it is likely that strategic party considerations do play a role in the government’s support for Israel.

Underlying Motivations: Public Opinion

• It is not only Conservative voters that support Harper, but public polling has showed that almost half of Canadians surveyed (48%) in 2012 believe that the federal government’s policy in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict “strikes the right balance”, which contrasts with 23% who believe it is “too pro-Israel” and 3% who say the policy is “too pro-Palestinian” (Martin 2012). However, a second poll showed that Canadians also want a neutral foreign policy, as 48% of people polled indicated that they wanted the government to favour neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians, with 19% wanting the government to favour Israelis and 6% wanting the government to favour Palestinians (Payton 2012). This preference for neutrality has been declining over the past decade, with an increase in pro-Israeli support visible: in 2002 during the second intifada, 79% of Canadians believed that Canada should not take either side in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (Ipsos 2002 “Eight-in-Ten (79%) Believe…”), with 16% expressing support for Israel and 12% expressing support for the Palestinians (Ipsos 2002 “Half (48%) of Canadians say…”). Even though the number of people who want Canada’s foreign policy to favour the Palestinians is decreasing, there is evidence of increasing Canadian dissatisfaction with the pro-Israeli policy: the number of Canadians who believe the government policy is too pro-Israeli has increased from less than 20% in the early 2000s, to 23%; then, in 2014, 26% of Canadians holding an unfavourable view of Harper’s trip to Israel (Environics Research Group 2010, 44).These trend lines likely indicate that although the current governmental policy is generating a backlash among a portion of the Canadian public, there is still a strong (and increasing) core of pro-Israeli Canadians that support the actions of the current Harper government.
• Perhaps most interesting is the fact that nearly one in three respondents could not articulate a position on the issue (Martin 2012), nor were sure which side (if any) they wanted the government to favour in the conflict (Payton 2012). While the Canadian government justified their response to the bid at the United Nations by calling the actions of the Palestinians “profoundly wrong”, most Canadians were apathetic about the issue: 53% of Canadians had no opinion on the matter, with 35% of Canadians supporting it and 11% opposed to the bid (Environics Research Group 2011, 37). Even as recent as January 2014, when Prime Minister Harper visited Israel, 42% of Canadians had no opinion on his trip to Israel, 26% held an unfavourable view, and a third held a positive view of this visit (“Poll: Third of Canadians…” 2014). The conflict is a divisive issue, and the substantial number of Canadians without an opinion on this topic is likely a reflection of a lack of interest. Ignorance is also a strong possibility as a little over half of Canadians (54%) believed that Harper’s trip to Israel in 2014 would elevate Canada’s reputation in the world (“Poll: Third of Canadians…” 2014), regardless of the fact that Israel has tense relationships with the European Union, most important European states, and even the United States (Marzano 2013, 110).
• If a substantial number of Canadians are not paying attention or are ignorant to the details of the conflict between Israel and Palestine, then it is understandable that public opinion on Canada’s foreign policy on Israel has changed so slowly. Furthermore, this disengagement 48 means that the Harper government has been able to pursue a Conservative-backed party policy without generating major disagreement from the Canadian public.

Underlying Motivations: Orientalism

• This lack of interest by the Canadian public, as well as the irrational aspect of the Canadian government’s support for Israel, may partially be explained by the underlying power structure between Israel and Palestine. An Israeli-based polling company found that 59% of the Jewish Israeli public want preference given to Jews applying for civil service jobs, 49% want the government to treat Jewish citizens better than Arab ones, and 42% say they do not want to live in the same building as Arabs, nor do they want their children to go to schools that also admit Arabs (Blomfield 2012).
• This sentiment of racism in Israel is connected to and supported by the structures of orientalism. Orientalism, according to Edward Said, is a “Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (1978, 4). As Said argues in his book The Question of Palestine, “Zionism and Israel were associated with Liberalism, with freedom and democracy, with knowledge and light, with what ‘we’ understand and fight for. By contrast, Zionism’s enemies were simply a twentieth-century version of the alien spirit of Oriental despotism, sensuality, ignorance, and similar forms of backwardness” (Said in Husseini 2008, 51). In Canada, this orientalism goes at least as far back as Canada’s visit to Palestine as a member of the UN committee to find a solution to the rioting in the British mandate area of Palestine in 1947. Committee members found the Palestinian Arabs to be “socially backward” due to their use of child labour, poor working conditions, and their practice of purchasing brides from other countries; in contrast, they were impressed by the Jews, who they saw as running their businesses and cities using modern and “democratic” practices (Tauber 2002, 14-5).
• These sorts of terms – “primitive”, “uncivilized”, “savage”, “undemocratic”, and “backward” – draw specifically on the long history of the civilized/barbarian dichotomy in European/North American identity (Salter 2002, 23). The “barbarian” lies in the middle of the spectrum, between “civilized” 14 and “savage”15; a society that is “barbaric” is one that is poly/monotheistic, lives under the presence of laws but is still ruled by despotism, and wears clothes but contains an exotic sexuality (23). This concept is rooted in the European mission to bring enlightenment and civilization to the undeveloped populations, and it lends support to the idea that “barbaric societies” (such as Arabic countries) are inferior to modern societies (98). These terms have been historically used to delegitimize Palestinians, and Palestinian aspirations within the conflict (Bar-Tel & Salomon 2006, 29).
• Moreover, this language still exists today: a hint of it can be heard in Stephen Harper’s statement in 2006 when he says that Israel is a “democratic nation” and that to fail to defend it against its enemies is not the “Canadian way” (Sasley 2011 “Why Canada’s Views…”). The reference to the “Canadian way” is important, as it serves to define Canadian identity. As Arnold summarizes, “we define ourselves as much through what or who we are not as through what or who we are” (2010, 17). Every assertion of identity necessarily consists of both what something is (“Self”) and what something is not (“Other”) (Said 1978, 332). In this case, defining Israel as a “democracy” necessitates the construction of a negative identity of what Israel is not – other “non-democratic” countries. Foreign policy is a way to produce and reaffirm internal Canadian identity (Arnold 2010, 18). In the tradition of orientalism, Harper’s statement functions to differentiate Canada from the non-democratic Middle Eastern countries, while at the same time it aligns Canada with other similar countries and reaffirms Canadian identity as a “democracy”. This occurs because distinctions, especially moral distinctions, work to form, maintain, and strengthen social identity through cultivating a sense of superiority, creating context-specific meaning, and by inspiring action (Bar-Tel & Salomon 2006, 32-3).
• A second example comes from Baird in 2011, when he stated that: “Canada does not just ‘go along’ in order to ‘get along.’ We will ‘go along’ only if we ‘go’ in a direction that advances Canada’s values: freedom, democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.” (“AJC Applauds Canadian Foreign Minister…” 2011) Canada’s foreign policy is no stranger to values: Canada has made the promotion of democracy, human rights, free market economy, social justice, and wealth redistribution an essential feature of Canadian international action since the 1940s (Roussel 2012, 132). However, in this case, the invocation of traditional Canadian values has little to do with Canada’s historical identity of peacekeeping, multilateral engagement and institutions, or human rights (132). Instead, it is used for a specific purpose. Arnold writes that foreign policy and public diplomacy are a “state-directed” mechanism for creating a “national brand” in the minds of the Canadian and international publics (2010, 17). This rhetoric is therefore used to justify and normalize the actions of the Canadian government to the Canadian public (18).
• In these two examples not only has the orientalist assertion of Canada as a “democracy” been used to legitimize the current government’s support for Israel, but through the invocation of Canadian values, the Harper government is also attempting to weave pro-Israeli narrative into Canadian identity. Furthermore, this type of word choice also tacitly encourages support for Israel among Canadians who have little knowledge of the conflict, as it predisposes them to 51 support people who are “like them” (i.e. “democratic”, “liberal”). Conversely, it also disincentives support for Palestinians, as people are less likely to be sympathetic to the struggles of those with whom they cannot easily identify. This structural factor likely impacts and shapes Canadians’ tacit support Harper’s pro-Israeli stance and lack of interest in becoming informed about the conflict. Orientalism also likely plays a role in explaining Harper’s funding cuts to UNRWA: within these structures, his personal support for Israel combined with his emphasis on a foreign policy that is aligned with morals may incline him towards classifying anything that is “pro-Palestinian” as “anti-Israeli”. This inclination against anything “pro-Palestinian” plays a role in explaining the “irrational”, “knee-jerk” aspect of the Harper government’s response to Palestinian advancements in the Israel-Palestine conflict (such as the Palestinian bid for statehood16), as well as the Harper government’s decision to defund UNRWA.

Underlying Motivations: Pro-Israeli Lobby

• It is important not to forget the existence of the pro-Israeli lobby within Canada, which may also explain part of the government’s pro-Israeli stance. The main organ of the lobby group in Canada is the Canadian Council for Israel and Jewish Advocacy. This is the primary organization responsible for coordinating and funding the activities of other groups, including the Canadian-Israel Committee, the Canadian Jewish Congress, and university outreach groups. While the political structure of Canada discourages lobbying of individual members of Parliament as the decision-making power rests in the hands of Cabinet, the Israeli lobby in Canada includes some powerful individuals, including the Asper family (who own CanWest Global Communications) and Norman Spector (Whitaker 2004, 197). In addition to the pro-Israeli lobby organizations and individuals, there are also pro-Israeli advocacy forces inside parliament. This includes the Canada-Israel Allies Caucus (which is currently headed by Conservative MP James Lunney) and the Canada-Israel Interparliamentary Group (which replaced the previously-named Canada-Israel Friendship Group). These groups work to create a greater friendship and goodwill between parliamentarians of both Canada and Israel, thereby serving to further cooperation between national parliaments of both countries (“Canada-Israel Interparliamentary Group” 2011).
• The lobby functions by arguing that Canadian values such as democracy and negotiation should encourage policies more favourable to Israel, and that Canadian identity naturally predisposes a closer relationship with Israel, as the Middle East’s only genuine democracy (Sasley 2011 “Who Calls the Shots?”). Canada’s military aid to the Middle East has typically been very restricted, as Canada only gives aid to Egypt and directly to the Palestinians; this means that the pro-Israeli lobby is mostly confined to diplomatic issues, such as the nonrecognition of the PLO and voting in the UN on Arab-Israeli issues (Lyon 1992, 11). When it comes to their effectiveness as lobby groups, there are many factors that need to be taken into consideration:
• The first of these is the fact that the Jewish community has a long history of being acclimatized in Canada economically, socially, and politically: the first Jewish synagogue was established as early as 1768 and the first Jewish member of Parliament was elected in the 1870s (Sasley 2011 “Who Calls the Shots?”). Second, most of the pro-Israeli advocacy groups are Jewish, and they have external factors that created domestic support for their cause: persecution in Europe and the Holocaust both serve to raise awareness and sympathy for their position, as well as lacking an independent homeland, which plays on nostalgic visions from the Bible among Christian Zionists (Sasley 2011 “Who Calls the Shots?”). Furthermore, because Israel plays an important role in the identity of Canadian Jews, it is easier for the Jewish community to come to agreement in support of Israel; combined with the fact that the Jewish communal institutions have become highly centralized, this makes it easier to concentrate resources (Sasley 2011 “Who Calls the Shots?”). Lastly, the advocacy methods of the pro-Israeli groups are done within the framework of mutual-gain, where support for Israel is not seen to come at the expense of Palestinians… this makes their efforts to lobby seem more reasonable and logical in contrast to the Arab lobby groups, whose arguments are frequently zero-sum and unrealistic (for example, lobbying Canada to end air and trade links between Canada and Israel) (Sasley 2011 “Who Calls the Shots?”). These factors help to make the pro-Israeli lobby groups more effective in their advocacy efforts.
• Sasley asserts that the lobby has been most effective in creating a “climate of greater understanding” for Israel’s position, and in pressuring Canada to help to normalize Israel internationally (2011 “Who Calls the Shots?”). An example of where their lobbying has had an influence is in Canada’s efforts to help move Israel from being isolated into the official Western European and Other Group grouping (2011 “Who Calls the Shots?”). A second example is when Canada voted for Israel to be accepted into the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (2011 “Who Calls the Shots?”). These are areas in which the pro-Israeli lobby has been able to have an impact, although these issues are not high profile. This group also played an instrumental role in convincing the Canadian Cabinet to list Hamas as a terrorist organization in 2006, as well as ensuring that Al Jazeera was not broadcast in Canada in 2003 (Whitaker 2004, 207 – 8).
• However, Sasley argues that the pro-Israeli lobby cannot be considered to be influential as it has not been successful in achieving change on major policy positions, such as Canada’s position on the status of Jerusalem, the illegality of settlements, or the right to an independent and viable Palestinian state (2011 “Who Calls the Shots?”). This argument against the effectiveness of the pro-Israeli lobby is not very convincing. Jerusalem, Joe Clark promised in 1980 to move the Canadian embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem as an attempt to lure votes away from the Liberals, and it was only after considerable opposition from Arab governments, the Department of External Affairs, and advice from the Right Honourable Robert Stanfield, a highly-respected statesperson, and especially business interests, that Clark withdrew his efforts to move the embassy (Lyon 1992, 19). Furthermore, as the Canada Israel Committee did not formally request the move in the first place, this cannot be considered an example of the ineffectiveness of the lobby (19). On the issue of the settlements, Canada has only spoken against Israeli construction of illegal settlements in the West Bank once despite its written policy against the settlements, and this lack of pressure is a change from previous Canadian governments. Third, supporting the right to an independent and viable Palestinian state is not in and of itself in contradiction with being pro-Israeli, so there is no evident lobby activity on that issue. These factors make Sasley’s argument about the ineffectiveness of the pro-Israeli lobby weaker.
• In fact, in a study of Department of External Affairs (DEA) officials from 1987 who were responsible for Canada’s Middle East policies, they perceive that Canada’s position has suffered because of its pro-Israeli tilt, and that the source for that tilt is the Canada Israel Committee (6). They ranked the influence of the Canada Israel Committee as ahead of that of the Prime Minister’s and the DEA’s (6). In another question, they ranked the Canadian Jewish community as a 5.85 out of 7 as an obstacle to implementation of policy on the Middle East (Kirton & Lyon 1989, 195). The Canadian Jewish community was assigned the highest ranking as an obstacle to peace; higher than the prime minister (5.04), the Department of External Affairs (5.04), Israel itself (4.92), or Cabinet (4.68) (195). These officials show an eagerness to enhance relations with the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and oppose legislation to make the Arab economic boycott of Israel illegal (Lyon 1992, 15). Lyon mentions that this may be due to the fact that familiarity breeds sympathy, as these officials work on the Israel-Palestine policy; however, it is more likely the case that by gaining a greater understanding of the topic these officials were able to come to a more balanced position on the conflict, which is perceived by some as being “anti-Israel” due of the strength of the pro-Israeli lobby in Canada.
• While the lobby has been effective in marginalizing individuals (such as Neil Macdonald 17) (Whitaker 2004, 205) and most certainly has played a role in influencing Canadian foreign policy, there is not enough current research on the lobby to determine the extent to which they have been able to influence the current government’s direction in foreign policy. Regardless, the lobby groups can be successful if Cabinet members deliberately seek out their council or if they are predisposed to be supportive of their aims. Harper has received awards from the Canadian Jewish Congress and as well has been honoured by B’nai Brith with a Stephen Harper Human Rights Centre being built in Israel. These are both signs of how highly the lobby groups regard Harper, and are indicative of the positive relationship between these groups and Stephen Harper.

Implications

• The shift in relationship between Israel and Canada under the Harper government can be explained by a combination of factors: the prime minister’s personal beliefs, a pro-Israeli ideology in the Canadian Cabinet, an attempt to demonstrate moral leadership to the Conservative party base, the pursuit of economic conservatism, a lack of interest or understanding of foreign policy by the Canadian public, orientalism, and a pro-Israeli lobby active in the Canadian political sphere. But what effect will this change in policy have on Canada’s role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Canada’s relationships with countries in the Middle East, and on its relationship with the international community more broadly?

Implications: Canada's Role in the Israel-Palestine Conflict

• Historically, Canada’s involvement in the conflict has included mediating, engaging in high-level diplomacy, providing troops for monitoring and enforcing border settlements, security zones, ceasefires, and other official agreements (Jacoby 2000, 84). As recent as 1997, Canada initiated a track two process between small groups of Palestinian and Israeli experts, former officials, and current officials (Brynen et al. 2003, 7). Today though, Canada’s major role in the conflict has more to do with supporting Palestinian refugees than participating in mediating the peace process. Moreover, the work of the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade, and Development has changed substantially over the mandate of the Harper government, which can be seen in the Departmental Performance Reports (DPRs) in two specific ways. First, these reports document an operational change from concrete support towards symbolic support for the peace process. In this case, this has entailed a change from funding border management operations and donating humanitarian aid to Palestinians in 2006, to attending conferences, making ministerial statements, and conducting formal visits to the area in 2012 and 2013. Second, the government pledged to donate $300 million over five years in 2007-2008 to support justice and security sector reform in the Palestinian Authority (“Departmental Performance Report” 2008, 33); however, this is the only concrete measure of support for the peace process since 2009 that has been made by the Department as outlined in the DPRs. It also appears to have been haphazardly implemented as the DPRs only report supporting security/justice reform in 2008-2009 and 2012-2013, and only vaguely reference the continued delivery of the pledge in 2010-2011 (2009, 10; 2013, 22; 2011, 18). This change in type of support for the conflict and its haphazard provision illustrate that the increase in support for Israel by the government has not been matched by an interest in becoming a proactive actor in the peace process.
• This change has been matched by a decrease in the number of Canadians who believe that Canada can play a constructive role in the conflict, from 76% in 2006 to 65% in 2010 (Environics Research Group 2010, 44). However, there are former public servants who believe that Canada can still take action. Both Michael Molloy and Michael Bell believe that if Canada can establish itself as a fair-minded and serious partner in the peace process, as well as develop and express clear objectives in the conflict, it could play an important role working towards its resolution (Bell et al. 2007, 13, 15). However, the chance of Canada becoming a major player as a mediator in this conflict is low: the current Conservative government has not shown an interest or a willingness to commit the resources necessary for an active role in mediation (18). Furthermore, despite policymakers’ wishes to have an active role in the area, Canada withdrew its peacekeeping battalion in the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force between Syria and Israel in 2006 (17).
• Could Canada even play a role as a mediator if it were willing? First, despite Canada’s pro-Israel bias, Palestinian negotiators may welcome Canadian mediation efforts in the hopes that Canada’s close relationship with Israel would translate into influence, enabling more positive activity from Israel during the negotiation process and encouraging it to make more commitments towards a peaceful settlement of disputes. However, its bias may also lead a potential Canadian mediator to invalidate the demands of the Palestinians by refusing to entertain them in a negotiation process, or it may be unwilling to push Israel, if necessary, to explore new options or commitments. What leverage Canada has in trade would have negative consequences for both countries if Canada used it as collateral to force progress in the peace negotiations. Moreover, Canada may not have the political clout necessary to enforce mediation outcomes even if it did take part, as its warm relationship with Israel does not preclude Israel to following Canada’s advice. This is especially true as Israel does not fundamentally see Canada as having the same kind of international significance as the United States does (Friedson & Gradstein 2014), even though Israel does not necessarily respond to American criticism – such as on the construction of settlements – either!
• More importantly, in the short-term, the current government is not enhancing its ability to be perceived as a neutral future mediator in the conflict. The Conservative government has taken concrete steps that have damaged Canada’s relationship with the Palestinian Authority: after the symbolic Palestinian campaign to upgrade its status at the General Assembly, Canada recalled its heads of missions to Israel and Ramallah, and its permanent representatives to the United Nations in New York and Geneva back to Ottawa (Foreign Affairs Media Relations Office 2012). The Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat’s response to this was that the Canadian government was “more Israeli than the Israelis[…] they have disqualified themselves from playing any role in the Middle East peace process” (Clark 2013 “Canada temporarily recalls…”).
• In spite of this criticism, the Palestinian Authority still welcomes any support from the Harper government as they are not in a position to refuse it. After a visit to Canada in September 2013, the Palestinian Foreign Minister, Riyad al-Maliki, spoke about how surprised he was to have received a warm reception given Canada’s recent history of support for Israel. He stated that, “Either I want to stay hostage to actions that have happened […], or [I can] liberate that relationship from what happened and […] see if there is any possibility for engagement” (Berthiaume 2013 “Palestinian foreign minister…”). In fact, when Stephen Harper visited the West Bank during his visit to Israel in January 2014, President Mahmoud Abbas publicly thanked him for Canada’s financial aid and expressed his hope that relations between Canada and the Palestinians would improve. While a diplomatic nicety, this statement also underlies the wish for change that exists among Palestinians; the former Palestinian Minister of Industry and Trade expressed the hope that Canada’s visit could be a potential starting point for a change in Canada’s current policy towards Israel (Friedson & Gradstein 2014).
• While Canada’s pro-Israeli policy is damaging their relationship with the Palestinian Authority and Palestinians, Canada has not unilaterally supported Israel in every situation: Foreign Minister John Baird once called the Israel government’s decision to conduct settlement construction in the E-1 area not “[helpful] to the cause of peace”19 (Ravid 2012). However, Canada has declined to speak out at any other time against Israel’s settlement construction, even though it is official Canadian policy to condemn settlement construction in the occupied Palestinian territories (“Canadian Policy on Key Issues…” 2014). Given Harper and other Cabinet members self-professed support for Israel, it is interesting that this is the only time that they have spoken against the actions of the Israeli government. The reason for this inconsistency may be due to the timing, as Canada’s reprimand came days after Canada voted against recognizing Palestine as a state at the United Nations. A second, more likely, reason may be the seriousness of the act. Building in the E1 area, or the area between East Jerusalem and the Ma’ale Adumim settlement, would effectively complete a crescent of Israeli settlements around East Jerusalem and divide it from the rest of the West Bank and the other Palestinian population centres (Seitz 2005, 33). Not only this but it would nearly bisect the West Bank and jeopardize the prospects of a continuous Palestinian state (33). Construction of this settlement would have serious implications for the achievement of the two state solution as originally outlined in the 1993 Israel-Palestine Liberation Organization Declaration of Principles (“Canadian Policy on Key Issues…” 2014) and a staple of every peace process since the failed Oslo negotiations (Camp David Summit in 2000, Roadmap for Peace in 2002, the Geneva Accord in 2003, etc.). For Canada to have explicitly or tacitly supported this construction would have meant actively working against Canada’s commitment to the two state solution (“Canadian Policy on Key Issues…” 2014). This may have been so serious of a violation that even the pro-Israeli Cabinet ministers could not morally support it as conscientious citizens. However, considering that Baird deliberately leaked the details of the private conversation between Harper and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the media, it is more likely that this was a strategic move by the government to be seen by the Canadian public as taking action to uphold “Canadian values”. Building in the E-1 area is a serious enough offence that it would have been difficult to characterize their lack of response as a part of Canadian identity if their inaction sparked a public backlash, and conversely, the seriousness of the violation also means that only the most radical of Israeli supporters would oppose this step by the Harper government. Furthermore, this criticism evidently did not negatively impact Canada’s relationship with Israel, as the media reports that Prime Minister Netanyahu could not remember the conversation (Berthiaume 2012).
• Overall, it is not evident that the closer relationship between Israel and Canada will negatively affect the relationship between Canada and the Palestinian Authority in the long-term, nor negatively affect its ability to play a meaningful role in bringing about peace between Palestinians and Israelis. While in the short-run this policy stance is increasing tension between Canada and Palestine, Palestine is politically weaker out of Israel and Palestine, and will likely welcome any help that Canada offer. However, Canada will run into more problems with Israel if it does not recognize that supporting the social and economic development of Palestinians is necessary to the security and prosperity of Israel. Israel faces Palestinian political violence as long as the conflict goes on, and a self-sustaining and secure Palestinian state will reduce Israel’s financial and human costs resulting from the conflict.

Implications: Canada's Role in the Middle East

• In 2005, Canada’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Roderick Bell, stated that Canada has a special place in the Middle East, though it is perhaps undeserved (Momani & Antkiewicz 2007, 174). Since then, Harper’s shift in position has been characterized by non-profit organizations as moving from a genuine bridge-builder position to a stance that is aggressive (Standing Senate Committee on Human Rights 2007). The most visible response to Canada’s continuous minority position on votes concerning Israel has led to the Organization for Islamic Cooperation to “retaliate[e] by finding problems with otherwise innocuous consensus resolutions,” according to observations by non-governmental organizations (Standing Senate Committee on Human Rights 2007).
• Canada has also received of sharp criticism from Arab countries over its support for Israel, its lack of support for Palestine’s bid for statehood, and its faux-pas of meeting an Israeli minister in East Jerusalem 20 (Clark 2013 “Disgruntled Arab states…”). In the Arab world, these actions have created bitter feelings towards Canada, and have already started to materialize in concrete consequences for Canada’s foreign policy towards the Middle East (Clark 2013 “Disgruntled Arab states…”). In May 2013, Qatar made a bid to relocate the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) to the Middle East in 2016. While Qatar did withdraw its bid, the ICAO is a major UN agency and losing it would have entailed more than diplomatic embarrassment: it would also have meant losing $119 million a year in growth for Montreal’s economy and would have resulted in subsequent domestic criticism (Clark 2013 “Disgruntled Arab states…”).
• Furthermore, the Middle East receives only approximately only 1% of Canada’s imports and exports (Momani & Antkiewicz 2007, 161), so economically-speaking, the Middle East is a minor relationship for Canada. However, the region has shown strong growth in imports and exports in the previous decade, and the potential revenue from oil and gas trade make the Middle East a very profitable partner indeed (166). As stated by Momani and Antkiewicz, due to the perception of an impartial Canadian foreign policy and the friendliness of Canadians, Canadian businesses have been welcomed by Middle Easterners in the region (167). It appears that as of 2007, Canadian businesses have not been negatively impacted by Canada’s foreign policy actions in the Middle East (167). Without a survey of Canadian businesspeople working internationally, it is impossible to tell the extent to which Canada’s foreign policy has impacted its citizens’ ability to work in Israel. However, it is likely that Canada’s reputation has taken a hit since Stephen Harper came in to power in 2006.
• This is because the Israel-Palestine conflict is still important to those in the Middle East, as the Israel-Palestine conflict fills an “emotional need” (Zisser 2012, 394). The Middle East as a whole reacted sharply to Israel’s military incursion into Gaza in 2009, and to Israel’s brutal reaction against the Turkish flotilla to Gaza at the end of May 2010 (394). This group reaction to Israel’s acts of hostility, as well as the Arab sympathy for Palestinians, can likely be attributed to the fact that 79% of the Arab public believes that Arab people are one nation (with minor differences between distinct nations) (“The ACRPS Announces the Results…” 2013). With this level of solidarity with Palestinians, it is no wonder that a review conducted by Mira Sucharov in 2003 found that, in terms of absolute and relative diplomatic influence, Canada had declined from the position of a “middle power to a minor power at best” (in Zahar 2007, 65). Given the pro-Israeli ideology of the current government, it is likely that that pattern has continued (and will continue) under Stephen Harper. It is therefore not surprising that Canadian support for Israel has garnered backlash from the Middle East; if Canada would like to maintain warm relationships with Middle Eastern partners, Canada will likely need to invest in those ties both politically and economically.

Implications: Canada's Role in the International Community

• Internationally, Canada is in the minority with its pro-Israeli stance. As the Israeli diplomat, Abba Eban pointed out, “if Algeria introduced a resolution declaring that the earth was flat and that Israel had flattened it, it would pass by a vote of 164 to 13 with 26 abstentions” (Shalom 2004). While the intention of this quote is to highlight the “anti-Israel bias” at the United Nations, it illustrates the Israeli perception of the United Nations and the extent to which 64 Canada’s choice to support Israel makes Canada a black sheep internationally. The only others who support Israel are typically the United States and a few American semi-independent colonies21 . According to Heinbecker, many at the United Nations show solidarity for Palestinians because they can identify with the hardships this Arab population has faced (2011, 267). As he says, “for [the G77], the forty-plus years of Israeli occupation of the West Bank evoke memories of the colonialism they themselves endured” (267).The American (and now Canadian) support for Israel regardless of Israeli non-compliance with many United Nations resolutions is viewed by the global South as unfair (267).
• One of the signs that Canada’s international reputation has suffered from this position was when Canada lost its bid for a Security Council seat in 2010 to Portugal, with 113 votes to 78. As reported by the media, UN diplomats said anonymously that this was in reaction to Canada’s unqualified support for Israeli policies and actions (“Canada withdraws from race…” 2010). Heinbecker argues that the reasons why Canada lost the seat were clear: Canada’s “contempt” for the United Nations, Canada’s abandonment of its climate change commitments, its diversion and restructuring of aid away from African countries and towards the Americas, its unequivocal support for Israel, and its mismanaged bilateral relationships (2011, 7). He pointed out that Canada needed 132 votes to obtain a Security Council seat, and since the Organization of Islamic Cooperation makes up 57 of those votes and the African group makes up 50, this means there were a lot of countries that Canada had disappointed going in to the election process (“Panel Discussion on Canada’s Campaign…” 2009, 4) Given, as previously quoted by Williams, that Canada’s nomination for positions within international organizations has traditionally been uncontested, and given that this is the first time in Canada’s six-decade history at the United Nations that it has not won the seat for which it made a bid (Levitz 2013), this is a sign of the international community’s displeasure with Canada’s current foreign policy, including Canada’s relationship with Israel.
• In continuing along such a course without moderating its foreign policy position, Canada is likely to further disappoint its allies, especially those from the global South. This will likely have an impact when Canada will need those multilateral relationships for passing General Assembly resolutions on a given topic (especially pertaining to Israel or Palestine), or if Canada chooses to take part in the Israeli-Palestinian issue in the future. It may also contribute to a cooling of relationships between Canada and its international allies. However, in terms of broader implications, it must be kept in mind that Canada’s policy on Israel is only one aspect of its relationship with the international community and its importance should not be exaggerated. As such, it is unlikely that this will have concrete repercussions for Canada (such as economic sanctions, boycotts, or more subtle actions such as snubbing Canada at working group meetings or international forums) or have a long-term impact, unless Canada does something that is truly significant and shockingly controversial (such as funding Israeli settlement construction or jailing peaceful pro-Palestinian protestors within Canada).
• Much more important and detrimental to Canada’s external relationships is the Canadian-led cooling of its multilateral relationships and international commitments, which will undoubtedly have an impact in future years. Canada announced that it will not run again for a Security Council seat in 2014. While the government declared that this is due to the fact that Canada will not give up its “principled foreign policy” for a seat, the truth of the matter is likely more of a combination of two factors. First, Canadian decision-makers likely recognize that Canada would not, in all probability, be able to win the seat. Secondly, this is simply the consequence of continuing a foreign policy which places little to no importance on multilateralism and international organizations in general (Levitz 2013). While it remains to be seen what long-term impact will come of this, future Canadian governments will have to work hard to rebuild the relationships that the current government is so quick to dismiss. While Canada maintains its strong support for Israel, this factor is unlikely to win Canada many allies in the near future.

Conclusion

• Since Israel’s birth, Canada has played a role in supporting its existence and security. This started with Pearson and Rand who advocated for partition of British-mandated Palestine at the United Nations in 1947 and 1948, and continued through the policies of the following governments. While Canada’s support for Israel has changed over the years from being tacitly or mildly sympathetic to explicitly or strongly sympathetic towards Israel, Canada’s foreign policy towards Israel has generally reflected domestic and strategic considerations, with ideological factors playing a more minor role.
• Under the Martin government, and continued by the government of Stephen Harper, Canada has become much more supportive of Israel, in United Nations arenas as well as in its bilateral relations with Israel. The current governmental support for Israel can be attributed in part to the moral beliefs and pro-Israeli ideology of the leadership of the government, their aspirations to realize economic conservatism, and a strategic move on their part to appeal to the pro-Israeli community within their party. However, this stance also gains support from a disinterested and uninformed Canadian public, and exists within the structures of orientalism. Lastly, while it is difficult to determine the extent to which the pro-Israeli lobby has had influence in Canada today, they have praised and rewarded Harper’s stance on Israel with multiple awards and a “Stephen Harper Human Rights Centre”.
• Canada’s political support for Israel has resulted in international repercussions in the threat of relocating the International Civil Aviation Organization away from Montreal and in a diplomatic backlash from the Organization for Islamic Cooperation in the form of their pointed lack of support for Canadian resolutions. Canada’s support of Israel lends the country international legitimacy and credibility. While it is important to ensure that Israel can function as a proper member of the international community, it is also important that Israel follow the rules of international law and the norms of the international community. Lending support and credibility to a country that baldly flouts international opinion and international law is problematic as well as morally questionable, and reflects poorly on Canada’s judgement internationally.
• Furthermore, a question should be raised as to how sustainable Canada’s foreign policy on the Israel-Palestine conflict is domestically. As presented in the public opinion section, Canadian voters are becoming increasingly polarized on the topic of Canada-Israel foreign policy. While this foreign policy leads to a closer relationship between Canada and Israel and a tense relationship with Palestine, this policy will likely increase domestic tensions between certain groups of Canadians. In fact, this stance has already had domestic implications, as Canadians of Arab origin are feeling increasingly insecure about Canada’s domestic commitment to protect them: in light of increased discrimination and racial profiling following the events of September 2001, a strongly pro-Israeli government creates concern that the Canadian government will not support them as they would other Canadians, domestically and internationally (Zahar 2007, 63). For example, the government’s handling of Maher Arar22 , a Syrian-born Canadian who was arrested on a stopover in the United States and deported to Syria, has reinforced fears among Arabs and Muslims that they are not equal citizens under the law (64). Jews are feeling similarly to Arabs, as anti-Semitism is still a problem in Canada with 14% of Canadians expressing anti-Semitic beliefs (Clarke 2014). Given the increasingly interconnected spheres of domestic and foreign politics, this policy stance creates reverb among the Canadian population, especially the Arab and Palestinian population, and it will likely take years to fully realize the domestic effect of this policy.
• If there are any lessons to be learned from Harper’s support for Israel, it is that it is not so easy to disregard either the opinion of the international community, the ties and importance of multilateralism, or the relationship between domestic and international relations. The reality today is that countries are increasingly interconnected and as a result, managing one’s bi- and multilateral relationships as well as being sensitive to the diplomatic repercussions of one’s actions domestically are much more important than in the past. If Canada continues to alienate its allies, not only through its strong political support for Israel but also through its withdrawal from multilateral institutions, it may have to worry about more concrete actions of the Arab and international community’s disapproval. A reputation takes years to build, and seconds to destroy. The next federal election in 2015 will bring with it a review of the Conservative foreign policy, and it will be interesting to see whether the verdict will be that Canada took action to make, or just completely break, those relationships.

Annexes

• [Annex 1: Canadian Imports from Israel and Canadian Exports to Israel, 1994 – 2013]
• [Annex 2: Canadian Imports from Israel and Canadian Exports to Israel, Adjusted for Currency Appreciation]
• [Annex 3: Votes by Canada at the Security Council on Passed Resolutions Related to Israel]
• [Annex 4: Votes by Canada at the Commission on Human Rights & Human Rights Council on Passed Resolutions Related to Israel]
• [Annex 5: Votes by Canada at the United Nations General Assembly on Passed Resolutions Related to the Israel-Palestine Conflict]

+ The politics of accommodation: Canada, the Middle East, and the Suez Crisis, 1950–1956 (2016 - JSTOR)

Greg Donaghy, International Journal, Vol. 71, No. 2

Abstract

This paper re-examines Canada’s response to the Suez Crisis within the context of its overall approach to the Middle East in the early 1950s. It reminds contemporary readers that most Canadian policymakers, including Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent and his Secretary of State for External Affairs, Lester B. Pearson, viewed the distant and unfamiliar region with reserve, as one better left to the Great Powers to sort out. That view only changed in 1956, when the Suez Crisis, Anglo-American discord, and the possibility of nuclear war threatened Canadian strategic interests, transforming Canada into a small regional stakeholder.

• The Suez Crisis was a transformative experience for postwar Canada. It hastened the dissolution of the country’s links with a fading Great Britain, which turned toward Europe and left Canadians alone to come to terms with their new, simpler status, as North Americans. Moreover, Foreign Minister Lester B. Pearson’s triumph in creating the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) had important consequences for Canadian foreign policy. Peacekeeping gave the small northern country a distinct international role, whose impact on the way Canadians thought of their place in the world was immediate. Pearsonian diplomacy—noble, disinterested, selfless—quickly became a popular watchword. Observing its ally’s smug posturing, a skeptical US ambassador sneered that “Canada had clean hands, a pure heart, and no axe to grind.”? Suez also changed Canada’s role in the Middle East from distant observer to a small regional stakeholder. Joining the UNEF, Canadians were drawn into the Middle East vortex, which became a top Canadian security interest for almost three decades and remains one of the country’s most sensitive foreign policy portfolios.

Suez: The essential context

• It was certainly not obvious in the early 1950s that Canada would eventually embrace the Middle East as an important object of its diplomacy. Despite the active role that Canada had played at the UN over the partition of Palestine and the creation of Israel in 1947, the Liberal government of Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent remained removed from the Middle East and its intractable problems. The region was geographically distant from Western Europe and the familiar North Atlantic cocoon, where Canada’s traditional political, security, economic, and cultural interests lay. The Middle East’s post-colonial unrest created disturbing ripples at home. The inconclusive debate over the status of Jerusalem upset the Catholic hierarchy in French-speaking Quebec, whose voters regularly supplied the Liberal government with its parliamentary majority. “Keep one eye on Jerusalem,” Pearson told his officials, “and the other on Quebec.” As the 1950s advanced, Arab nationalist movements in Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria posed their own problems. They were supported by liberal French Canadian intellectuals, who opposed French policy and forced Ottawa to choose between its anti-colonial ideals and its North Atlantic ally, France.*
• Nor was Canada’s minuscule trade with the region likely to become an incentive for a more active Middle East policy. In the six years from 1949 to 1955, Canada’s exports to the area barely averaged CAD$30 million annually, falling to $12 million or .007 percent of total Canadian exports in 1955. While much of this trade was routine, the government fretted about the steady stream of requests from both Arabs and Israelis for Canadian arms and their potential impact on the regional balance of power. Frustrated by their efforts to differentiate between defensive and offensive weapons, ministers and officials crafted cautious compromises that satisfied no one, handing their critics “a good stick with which to beat the government.”
• Canada’s diplomatic presence in the Middle East was weak. Apart from an assistant trade commissioner based in Cairo, Canada had no diplomatic missions in the region in the early 1950s, an absence keenly felt by the officers most directly concerned. Canadian diplomats found themselves “handicapped” by the lack of regional representation, and argued that Canada : "should have direct contact with governments and peoples of the Middle East and base its policy on adequate information secured from independent sources rather than having to rely on analyses supplied by interested parties or by independent observers whose viewpoint is not Canadian.”
• Senior officials readily acknowledged these points. They were aware, too, of the region’s growing strategic importance, as the European imperial powers prepared to retreat, leaving behind unstable and impoverished states that were an open invitation to Soviet interference. Even so, practical considerations constrained their ability to act. The costly Cold War demands associated with the Korean War and NATO rearmament left Ottawa with little extra spending capacity. What remained was focused on Europe and the newly independent countries of Asia, which were judged a higher priority. Only in the fall of 1954, responding to mounting regional tension and the steady pressure from Arab and Israeli governments anxious to enlist its support, did Ottawa finally open its first Middle Eastern posts, in Cairo and Tel Aviv.
• This step did not presage a substantial increase in Canada’s involvement in the region. As the number of tit-for-tat Arab raids and Israeli reprisals mounted in late 1953, Canadian officials remained conscious of their analytical shortcomings and were disinclined to take sides. “Our information is not always free from bias and doubt,” they cautioned, warning Foreign Minister Pearson that “any assessment must be hedged with reservations.”
• Caution defined Canada’s regional policies the following year as well. Pressed by Washington in early 1955 to express his support for the new Baghdad Pact, which united Britain and several Arab states in an anti-Soviet alliance, Pearson reluctantly agreed. In doing so, however, he made it clear to NATO’s North Atlantic Council that “the Middle East lies outside our real defence interests and the commitments we would be willing to accept.” Ottawa later underlined this point by rejecting an invitation to join the US, France, and Britain in monitoring arms shipments under the Near East Arms Coordinating Committee. While Canada had routinely consulted these powers on its Middle East arms sales since 1950, the invitation raised alarm bells in the Department of External Affairs. Its top official, Jules Léger, reminded his minister that membership carried a “considerable risk of implying special commitments with respect to the Middle East...[and] might undoubtedly restrict our freedom of action.” Pearson agreed, leaving Mideast arms control in the hands of the Great Powers.

Suez: The politics of accommodation

• Without overriding interests in the Middle East, Pearson and his officials were more prepared than the major Western powers to embrace strategies that would isolate the region as a source of Cold War conflict. Their approach to the Middle East copied their “hands-off” approach to the Cold War in Asia. Stalin’s death in 1953, the Geneva Conference on the Korean War and Southeast Asia in the spring of 1954, and the July 1955 summit in Geneva, where Western leaders met with their Soviet counterparts for the first time since 1945, convinced Canadian policymakers that it was possible to negotiate with Moscow. Pearson himself confirmed this in October 1955, when he became the first NATO foreign minister to visit the USSR. The Canadian enjoyed his talks with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, whom he described as “blunt and volatile as only a Ukrainian peasant, turned one of the most powerful people in the world, can be.” Pearson told his colleagues that Khrushchev was “incapable of not saying what he actually believed and...was perfectly frank in his statements that the Russians did not want war.” Moscow, the foreign minister concluded, was ready to seek a peaceful modus vivendi with the West.
• Unlike many Western observers, Pearson did not interpret growing Soviet interest in the Middle East as evidence of communist aggression, but as a less threatening manifestation of a “traditional Russian drive to get into that part of the world.” Nor did Canada’s foreign minister worry that the Arab world was likely to fall easy prey to Moscow’s attractions. During a quick visit to Cairo en route home from Asia in October 1955, Pearson met the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, and was charmed. Nasser was an “impressive and attractive personality” and gave “an impression of sincerity and strength, without any trace of arrogance or self-assertion.” The Canadian minister dismissed US and British suggestions that Nasser challenged Western interests. Instead, Nasser represented a vibrant Arab nationalism, whose profound opposition to European colonialism would make it difficult for either the West or the Soviet Union to influence developments in the Middle East. As Pearson told a Princeton University audience earlier that year, “the yearning and effort of the people of the Islamic world, of India, and of South-east Asia [was]. . . exciting and full of promise for the world.” It would not be suppressed.
• Pearson’s most influential advisers in External Affairs shared these views about the Soviet Union. The dangerous instability introduced into the Middle East in November 1955, when the existing Arab-Israeli balance of power was abruptly overturned by a large Czech arms sale to Egypt, confirmed their view that the West needed to seek a broad regional settlement with Moscow. The Anglo-American effort to keep the Soviet Union out of the Middle East with sweetheart arms deals and economic aid for the Arabs had clearly failed and was likely to embroil the West in a distracting struggle with Moscow. Norman Robertson, High Commissioner in London and one of the country’s foremost diplomats, warned Pearson accordingly in March 1956: "I feel affairs in the Middle East have developed to a point at which there is little prospect of stabilizing the situation without some degree of Soviet cooperation. They have demonstrated that they have the power to upset that area, and we should try to make them take some responsibility for keeping order in it."
• Ottawa’s Soviet experts reached similar conclusions. John Holmes, an assistant under-secretary who had served as chargé d'affaires in Moscow in 1947-1948, warned Léger that the failure of Anglo-American diplomacy to either curb Arab-Israeli conflict or prevent Soviet meddling demanded “urgently desperate remedies.” The current policy of ‘“‘non-cooperation is proving bankrupt and just possibly leading to disaster.” Holmes insisted that it was time for the US, Britain, and France to invite the USSR into the Middle East as an equal partner, seeking regional stability through a quadripartite settlement.
• While a Great Power arrangement concluded outside the UN would offend Canada’s multilateral sensibilities, Holmes saw parallels between the present situation in the Middle East and earlier Cold War crises in Southeast Asia. The Great Power agreement reached at the Geneva Conference in 1954, he pointed out, had produced a successful ceasefire in Indochina. A similar arrangement would not end Moscow’s inclination to interfere irresponsibly in Mideast affairs, although it “might establish some kind of international discipline over competitive co-existence in the area.” It was even possible that the UN might monitor a Great Power arrangement, perhaps supervising regional arms transfers or channelling aid disbursements.
• Robert Ford, head of the department’s European division, echoed these views. One of the department’s consummate realists, Ford grounded his analysis in Russian history and culture, which he knew well, and became the architect of Canada’s policy of constructive engagement with Moscow following Stalin’s death. While Ford and Holmes differed on some points—Ford placed the Arab-Israeli clash in its full post-colonial context—they were united on the only realistic solution: “The Big Three have failed to solve the problems in the Middle East without Russia; it seems inconceivable that they could do so now that the Soviet Union is an active participant,” wrote Ford. “I think the only course is to invite the Russians to participate with the Western Big Three in trying to solve at any rate the major problem—Arab-Israeli relations.” Ford too was hopeful that a great power settlement would eventually involve a role for the UN.
• Pearson was intrigued by these ideas and encouraged both Britain and the US to begin talking with Moscow. British Prime Minister Anthony Eden, to whom Khrushchev paid an official visit in March, worried that the USSR was unaware of how unstable and dangerous the Middle East really was. He did not dismiss Pearson's proposal out of hand, but neither did he champion it. The reaction from the US was sharply critical: it had used American diplomat Robert Murphy and then UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskj6ld in unilateral efforts that spring to broker an Arab-Israeli peace settlement without the Soviet Union. When Pearson mentioned his ideas to Dwight Eisenhower, the American president cut him off mid-sentence, insisting that ‘Nasser was a problem” and that he was “weak and fearful.” US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was equally hostile when Pearson broached the subject a few months later at the NATO foreign ministers’ meeting in May 1956.

Suez: The crisis

• Washington’s determination to treat the unrest in the Middle East as simply part of a larger Cold War struggle frustrated Canadian policymakers in the spring and early summer of 1956. They remained attached to their view that a regional settlement depended on a UN-sanctioned great power agreement, even as Dulles pushed Pearson in a contradictory direction and pressed him to sell Israel a squadron of F-86 jet fighters.
• When Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal on 26 July, however, the initial Canadian reaction reflected the prevailing view in Ottawa that the Middle East was primarily a Great Power responsibility and that the crisis should be taken up by the UN Security Council, where Moscow would be given a chance to exert its proper influence. Told of Nasser’s actions on 27 July, High Commissioner Norman Robertson urged Lord Home, the Secretary of State for Commonwealth relations, to bring the matter promptly to the Security Council. An Oxford-educated anglophile with close connections throughout the senior levels of the British government, Robertson added the hope that Britain “would not be too quick to gather too many spears to its own bosom.”
• Pearson and St. Laurent shared Robertson’s concern. On 28 July, Eden sent St. Laurent and the other Commonwealth prime ministers a tough and uncompromising message: “We can not allow [Nasser] to get away with this act of expropriation and we must take a firm stand.” Eden’s assumption of Canadian support irked the French Canadian prime minister, while his obvious determination to bring Nasser to heel alarmed Pearson. Canada’s foreign minister was particularly worried by Eden’s implied threat of force and his unrealistic expectation of American support. Anxious to preserve its standing in London, Ottawa held its fire. Instead, St. Laurent sent a restrained reply to the British prime minister, endorsing Robertson's views as his own.
• Even this mild Canadian response angered Eden and his officials. Sir Archibald Nye, the British high commissioner in Ottawa, thought that "the Canadian reaction to the Suez situation hasn’t been very satisfactory from our aspect [sic]. I think at first they failed to grasp its importance; when they did their reaction—instinctively and perhaps subconscious [sic]—was ‘how do we keep clear of this mess’ and not ‘what can we do to help.’"
• Disbelief followed. Senior British officials refused to accept Canadian misgivings as real. When Robertson’s old friend Gladwyn Jebb, the British ambassador to France, passed on his warnings, they were dismissed by the Foreign Office as “more Robertson than Canadian Government.” Closing their eyes to Canadian fears, the British refused to explore Ottawa’s reaction further. “I have held back from making any approaches officially,” Nye reassured London, “in case we got reactions which didn’t suit us.”
• Although deeply skeptical of Britain’s aggressive posture, Ottawa was sympathetic to London’s claim that the international community had a stake in the canal’s operations and it tried to be helpful. St. Laurent agreed to meet a British request to freeze Egyptian assets in Canada, even though the government had no legal basis for doing so. Ottawa also gave public support to British efforts to convene a conference of canal users in mid-August, while privately it was less enthusiastic. Pearson considered it unlikely that Nasser would agree to British demands for genuine international control of the canal, moving the British one step closer toward the use of force. As this possibility loomed larger, the question of Canada’s reaction became a concern in London. On 15 August, Robertson met with British Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd, who asked him directly “whether, if we had to use force we could expect the support of the Canadian Government.” Robertson’s answer was simple: “No.”
• Eden erupted with anger. “I think this should be taken up with the Canadian government,” he wrote; “it is far worse than anything US Govt has ever said.” Lloyd counselled patience and dismissed Robertson as unimportant, a ‘“‘strong” UN man, whose views were not representative of Ottawa’s. With breath-taking arrogance, Lloyd suggested that Britain avoid consulting Canada to spare it the embarrassment of having rejected the use of force too quickly: “May there not be some danger of their giving us an answer which they might be sorry for later if and when some new aggression by Nasser... makes the use of force the definite and immediate issue?’ Eden agreed, adding that he saw “no advantage in asking Mr. Robertson his opinions any more.” Clearly, Ottawa was no longer, if it ever was, a factor in British calculations.
• Britain’s refusal to consult seriously with Canada reinforced Ottawa's reluctance to become too involved in a regional crisis that Canadian policymakers continued to see as a Great Power responsibility. Defence Minister Ralph Campney assured a Vancouver audience in early August that the crisis was “primarily a European matter...not a matter of particular concern to Canada. We have no oil there. We don’t use the canal for shipping.” Moreover, by the summer of 1956, Canada’s foreign minister was fully absorbed in his work as chairman of a NATO committee examining the alliance’s future. Ottawa watched from a distance as Eden’s confrontation with Nasser played out in the summer and fall of 1956. Pearson was pleased with the results of the London Conference and reassured by Nasser’s decision to meet with the five-person delegation headed by Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies. Though doubtful that Menzies would be successful, he thought this step toward talks meant that “the situation had eased a good deal,” and he told his political colleagues in late August that “he doubted if really serious trouble would occur.”
• The respite was short-lived. In a meeting with Selwyn Lloyd a few days later, Pearson was alarmed by the foreign secretary’s continued determination to bend Nasser to London’s will. This was Pearson’s first face-to-face meeting with a participant in the crisis and the encounter was not reassuring. British diplomacy was “not being very skilful,” he told St. Laurent, and was characterized by “a lack of imagination and skill.” The “perplexing” result was “a lack of direction and sureness of touch.” Pearson made sure that the Canadian position was unambiguously clear at a NATO council meeting two days later in Paris. The West, he insisted, “must. ..rule out the use of force” and submit the dispute to the UN Security Council, where it might be worked on by the Great Powers most immediately involved.
• Canadian worries mounted in the fall as Menzies played out his hand in Cairo and Dulles advanced his ill-advised plan for a Suez Canal Users’ Association (SCUA). The new organization’s birth pangs immediately revealed a yawning gulf between US and Anglo-French views over the use of force to back up its mandate. Pearson was unimpressed and further irritated at the continued refusal of the three Western powers to bring the dispute to the UN. He carefully avoided anything to do with SCUA, warning Ottawa that Canada “should be very careful in this interim period in saying or doing anything which would give the impression that Canadian association or support is something that can be taken for granted.”
• London and Paris finally asked the Security Council to rule on their dispute with Egypt in September, but Canadian misgivings persisted. “Far from seeking a solution,” observed R.A. MacKay, Canada’s permanent representative to the UN, “France and the UK ...seem bent on humiliating Nasser.” MacKay’s suspicions were soon confirmed. Soon after the Israeli attack on Egypt on 29 October, Britain and France demanded a ceasefire; when the fighting continued, they moved to seize control of the Suez Canal, catching Canada completely off guard. Deeply distressed by the British action, Robertson reported to Ottawa that he had been “given no inkling” of London’s plans and “not the slightest intimation that anything extra-ordinary was planned.” The high commissioner spent the whole day of 30 October trying to see key British officials, but met only closed doors and busy telephones.
• The reaction in the Department of External Affairs was “stunned and uncomprehending.” St. Laurent, who learned of the Anglo-French assault from the press, was outraged. Belatedly, a cable arrived from Eden explaining that France and Britain could not stand by while a war between Israel and Egypt blocked the Suez Canal. If war did break out, London and Paris would issue a call for a ceasefire; if none was forthcoming, they would take military action to make both sides retreat from the canal. This would be risky, added Eden, but “I know that we can look for your understanding and much hope for your support in our endeavours.” St. Laurent threw the telegram at Pearson, asking, “What do you think of that?”
• The British action fundamentally changed the nature of the Suez Crisis for Canada, and Pearson knew it. Apart from the danger that war might spread throughout the Middle East, three aspects of the British decision to intervene alarmed Ottawa because they struck at institutions that represented core Canadian interests in the postwar world. First, the decision to act while the Security Council was still considering Egypt’s complaint against Israel was a direct challenge to the UN’s authority. Whatever its shortcomings, the UN in 1956 was a vital forum for Canadian diplomacy. Second, the Anglo-French action would alienate India and divide the Commonwealth, the loose association of states from the former British Empire that Canada relied on to navigate the complex shoals of the post-colonial world. Third, and most important, Ottawa feared the impact of the Anglo-French gambit on relations between the US and Britain. A break between Canada’s two closest allies would obviously weaken NATO, striking at the heart of Canada’s national security interests. St. Laurent’s reply rejected completely Eden’s rationale for acting as he had.
• London was “aghast” at the tone of St. Laurent’s missive. A former secretary of state for Commonwealth relations described the telegram as “blistering.” Arnold Smith, a senior official at Canada’s high commission in London, reported that “the bitterness about the Canadian attitude on Suez was as great as that against the Americans.” But there was little time for recrimination as the UN’s deliberations moved from the Security Council, where Britain and France could hide behind their Great Power veto, to the General Assembly, where debate on a US motion calling for a ceasefire and an immediate withdrawal was slated to open on the afternoon of 1 November. Anxious to salvage the British position, restore the UN’s prestige, and heal the breach in the North Atlantic alliance, Pearson made immediate plans to go to New York.
• Before leaving Ottawa, Pearson met with his colleagues to review his plans. Given the mounting pressure on France and Britain, he thought Paris and London would welcome a proposal calling for an immediate ceasefire, a general conference to find a Middle East settlement, and a temporary UN police force along the Arab-Israeli borders to keep the peace. Pearson's interest in a UN police force was not surprising. He had championed the idea as a youthful diplomat at the Canadian Legation in Washington during the mid-1940s and in the early days of the Korean War, when he tried to turn the US-led UN corps into a permanent UN police force. After briefing cabinet, Pearson asked Robertson to seek Britain’s reaction to a plan to call upon the General Assembly to create an “‘adequate UN military force to separate the Egyptians from the Israelis.”
• When Pearson arrived at UN headquarters that afternoon, a buzz of excitement swept through the crowded building, as UN delegates stopped Canadian diplomats to ask, “What's he got? We hear Mike's got a proposal. It’s high time. Can he do it?” Pearson, who had served continuously as Canada’s foreign minister since 1948, was then at the height of his international influence. A leading architect of NATO and the postwar Commonwealth, he had shaped many of the procedures that defined the UN. By the mid-1950s, he had developed a network of friends and contacts that spanned Western Europe and encircled the newly independent countries of Africa and Asia. His affability and liberal idealism hid his keen grasp of the hard realities of international politics. Negotiation was his genius, and, in the words of one friendly reporter, he excelled in “finding out how one side felt, then playing it back to the other, and vice versa.”
• On his arrival in New York, Pearson learned that Britain was ready to “hand over” the Suez Canal “to a UN force strong enough to prevent the renewed outbreak of hostilities between Egypt and Israel.” This slight concession was enough. Pearson pressed Dulles, with whom he consulted closely, to amend the US resolution so that it included a reference to a possible peacekeeping force. Doubtful that there was sufficient time to recraft his motion and worried that any delay might provoke a harsher resolution from the Soviet Union and the Afro-Asian states, Dulles refused.” During the debate on the American motion, Pearson sat quietly until the small hours of the morning. Rising at 3a.m. to explain Canada’s abstention, he argued that the American resolution calling for a return to the status quo was not enough; what was needed was a “UN force large enough to keep these borders at peace while a political settlement is being worked out.”
• After lunch with the secretary-general, who doubted that Pearson’s idea would work, the minister returned to Ottawa to update the prime minister and cabinet. Canadian policymakers were in broad agreement on the force’s main attributes: it should report directly to the secretary-general; it should be allowed to act without the consent of the parties concerned; and it should employ modern self-contained units to create a robust force, which was “compact, mobile, [and] hard-hitting.” They differed, however, over its composition. The Canadian mission in New York, more attuned to Afro-Asian opinion, excluded the invading French and British troops; Pearson insisted that they should constitute the UN force until a “more permanent police force could be provided.”
• Although Pearson clearly intended to give London and Paris some helpful UN cover, his plan ran into trouble at home. Nervous cabinet ministers from English Ontario echoed the criticisms of the opposition Progressive Conservative Party and its allies, who denounced the government for its failure to back Britain. “The Canadian government,” declared the Toronto Globe and Mail, “added nothing to its prestige—or to Canada’s—by its conduct at this week’s emergency session of the UN General Assembly.” But St. Laurent backed Pearson strongly. “Do as you think best,” he reportedly said. “I will support you here.” At an early morning meeting on 3 November, ministers approved Pearson’s two-stage proposal, under which a largely Anglo-French force would immediately enter the region to keep the peace, while waiting for a “longer term UN police force.”
• The US was skeptical, but with no other plan in sight, encouraging. Deputy Secretary of State Herbert Hoover Jr., who temporarily replaced the ailing Dulles, urged Pearson to press on, but warned that the current plan provided too much cover to Paris and London and would be seen by the Afro-Asian bloc as an effort to “legitimize” their assault on Egypt. In response, Pearson secured his government’s approval for a second resolution that asked the UN secretary-general and a five-member committee to draw up plans for a police force drawn from “national military forces immediately available.” It would oversee the ceasefire called for in the General Assembly’s ceasefire resolution of November 2.
• This was more “promising,” although the State Department still raised two substantial objections: first, it insisted that any UN police action must have the consent of the parties involved; and second, Washington opposed the reference in the Canadian draft to “national military forces immediately available.” The reaction in London was more uncertain. On the basis of the second Canadian proposal, Lloyd told Robertson that he thought Britain could support the resolution with a few “minor” amendments. Indeed, Lloyd had even given Robertson the impression “that the resolution was welcome and that... they might even be able to vote for it.” Wanting an amendment that would effectively have the UN guarantee a settlement of the Suez problem, Eden hesitated. He was not opposed to the resolution, but he refused to support it until he had studied it in conjunction with two US motions that established peacemaking machinery for Suez and Palestine.
• Pearson was briefed on the American and British reactions to his resolution on his arrival in New York, late in the afternoon of 3 November. He immediately met with the US permanent representative, the imperious Henry Cabot Lodge. Lodge handed Pearson a draft resolution of his own, appropriately typed in the UN’s pale blue. Inspired by the Canadian draft, the US resolution was simpler, giving the secretary-general 48 hours to craft a UN emergency force that would oversee a ceasefire with the consent of the parties involved. Pearson undoubtedly realized that this was a much different text from the one shown to Eden. Despite the irritation of British ambassador Sir Pierson Dixon, who justifiably felt betrayed, Pearson agreed “in a flash” to support the US resolution when Lodge assured him that Paris and London “could” not oppose it.
• Within minutes, the new “Canadian” resolution was circulating through the UN, with the minister’s “leg-men” hustling hard to secure a large majority of votes from all quarters. It was ultimately assured passage when Pearson and Arthur Lall, the head of the Indian delegation (which had its own resolution demanding the immediate withdrawal of the invading forces), agreed to support each other’s resolutions. Even so, the pressure in the UN General Assembly was enormous and as the gathering dragged on past midnight, Pearson surprised his colleagues by lighting a cigarette. Asked if he smoked, Pearson replied, “I really don’t, but I'll be taking dope soon if we don’t soon get this show on the road.” And soon it was. The UN General Assembly adopted the Canadian resolution early in the morning of 4 November. Within 48 hours, the UNEF had begun to take shape, and London and Paris had agreed to a ceasefire. The worst phase of the crisis was over.
• The implications of the Suez Crisis for Canadian foreign policy were extensive and enduring. Canada’s role in the creation of UNEF and its subsequent participation in the force made peacekeeping, especially at the UN, a major preoccupation for Canadian foreign policy until the 1990s. It provided Canada with a distinct and useful global role that went beyond its status as a junior partner in the US-led Western alliance. Between 1956 and 1989, Canada participated in 13 UN “blue helmet” missions, boasting that it “never refused a mission.” “Peacekeeping was impossible to resist,” argues historian Norman Hillmer, “fitting the government’s international objectives and appealing to a public anxious to believe that Canada could be the world’s conscience, untainted by power politics and considerations of narrow or selfish interests.”
• The crisis also had a lasting impact on Canada’s ties with its two major Western allies, Britain and the US. Suez destroyed the close and easy familiarity that had sustained Anglo-Canadian relations since Canada began to pursue its own diplomatic course in the 1920s. “I fear,” observed Sir Saville Garner, who took up his duties as British high commissioner in Ottawa in November 1956, “that the Canadian Government will never again accept our judgment so readily as they have been prepared to do in the past.”’ He was right. More important, the crisis at last turned Britain irrevocably toward continental Europe, leaving Canada alone to work out its future as a North American nation. Inevitably, this meant closer economic, political, and cultural relations with its overwhelming neighbour, the US.
• Finally, Suez and its aftermath transformed Canada’s role in the Middle East from a distant outsider to a small regional actor. Participation in the UNEF, which lasted until Nasser ordered the force out in May 1967 and was renewed after the Yom Kipper War in 1973, gave Canada a stake in the region’s affairs and a minor say in its unending peace processes during the 1970s and 1980s. That role is mostly gone now, the victim of cutbacks in Canadian peacekeeping operations during the 1990s and the sharp changes in the international environment since 9/11. But another legacy of Suez persists. The crisis brought the Middle East into Canada, where its ‘diaspora politics” created a political minefield that limits policy options and raises questions about the likelihood of Canada ever again playing a leading role in a Middle East conflict.

+ Canada and the birth of the Israel-Palestine conflict (2017 - WL)

Claire Mian, CCPA Monitor. May/Jun2017, Vol. 23 Issue 7, p. 30-37

• In the seemingly hopeless struggle that characterizes the modern Middle East, Canada played a significant role in the birth of its most intractable issue: the conflict between Arabs and Jews in Israel-Palestine.
• This year marks the 70th anniversary of the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan that was to create a Jewish state and an Arab state in the British Mandate for Palestine. It is also the 50th anniversary of the 1967 Six-Day War in which Israel took over the Arab territories of Gaza and the West Bank—the areas that were to have been the Arab state.
• Canada was more involved in these two events than is generally known. In 1947, the chair of the UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) was a Canadian judge, Ivan Rand, appointed by the founding triumvirate of Canadian foreign policy: Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, Minister of External Affairs Louis St-Laurent and Deputy Minister Lester B. Pearson. Acting as key advisor for External Affairs was the first woman to rise above clerical ranks in the civil service, Elizabeth MacCallum.
• The Canadian UN delegation played an important role in formulating the partition motion and in lobbying for its passage. Tragically, it failed to ensure the UN Security Council would monitor all of the motion’s provisions beyond the simple drawing of boundaries. These provisions, designed to give the plan a fighting chance of success, included a two-year transition period and an economic union between the two politically and economically unequal states.
• The full implications of this failure revealed themselves between Israel’s Declaration of Independence in May 1948 and the 1967 war, in which Israel took over the entire former mandate of Palestine. Canada, along with most western nations, failed to insist that Israel vacate the occupied territories. Canadian governments have been allowed to pursue a clearly contradictory foreign policy toward Israel/Palestine since then.
• On the one hand, official policy condemns Israel’s occupation of the territories, while on the other, official practice fosters a close alliance with Israel over shared commercial and military affairs, as well as democratic values. The Trudeau government has reinstated its contribution to the United Nations refugee program for Palestinian immigrants, a welcome correction that in no way threatens Canada’s relations with Israel. But perhaps 2017 will bring a just re-examination of historic decisions that have made the plight of Palestinians one of the major human rights injustices of our era.
• At the turn of the 20th century, the majority population of the Ottoman region of Palestine was Muslim, along with small Christian and Jewish minorities. Palestine, a small agricultural region, was ruled by the Ottoman governor in Damascus. Its economic status benefitted from being on a trade route from the Mediterranean world to the Far East and from being the site of the holy places of all three monotheistic religions: Christianity, Judaism and Islam. As the slow disintegration of the highly diverse Ottoman Empire was proceeding, Zionism was growing as a nationalist movement, claiming Palestine as the ancient homeland of the Jewish people to which they had an inextinguishable historic right.
• After the First World War, the League of Nations, under the philosophical sway of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s belief in the right of self-determination, set up the mandate system, ostensibly to ensure that the “great powers” would foster economic and political development in former colonies and prepare them for self-government. Among the provinces of the defeated Ottoman Empire (labelled Class A mandates because of their relative advancement), Britain was given responsibility for Palestine, Transjordan and Iraq, while France took Syria and Lebanon. The mandatory power had obligations to local governments, as well as to the Mandates Commission at the League of Nations. However, as the events of the interwar period were to show, the mandatory powers ruled with little regard for anything other than their national self-interest.
• During the course of the war, Britain had made three significant and contradictory undertakings regarding the Middle East. In 1915, a 10-letter correspondence between Sharif Hussein of Mecca, who held traditional tribal leadership over much of the Arab population of the Ottoman Empire, and Sir Henry McMahon, British High Commissioner to Egypt, concluded an Anglo-Arab agreement: in return for Arab support of the British war effort, Britain would grant the local Arab leadership an independent Arab state at war’s end.
• The boundaries of this state remained vague, however. Hussein purportedly understood them to include the entire Arabian peninsula, Palestine, Transjordan, Syria and Lebanon, and possibly Iraq. For his part, McMahon wanted to keep the boundary issue open till the end of the war. Hussein eventually relented, but he considered that McMahon’s words constituted Britain’s commitment to support the future creation of an independent Arab state.
• While it is possible Britain envisioned a viable and friendly independent Arab state, the policy priority was to limit rival French influence in the region. Thus, the British and French governments quietly entered into a separate agreement (the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916) that pre-emptively carved up the provinces of the moribund Ottoman Empire into European “spheres of influence.” The third of Britain’s self-interested diplomatic initiatives was the Balfour Declaration of November 1917, which stated (emphasis added):
  • His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.
• Lengthy diplomatic wrangling at the end of the war led to territorial resolutions in the Middle East that clearly favoured Britain and France. In the postwar regional disarray, Sharif Hussein was briefly able to establish an Arab state, with Palestine as the province of “southern Syria.” It lasted, in vague territorial and political terms, from 1919 to 1922. But with the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, the Sykes-Picot Agreement essentially became the blueprint for the League of Nations’ mandate system, with France acquiring Lebanon and Syria, and Britain taking Transjordan, Iraq and Palestine.
• Expressions of Arab outrage at British betrayal found no support. The Balfour Declaration was actually included in the preamble of the Palestine Mandate Agreement, thus enshrining in an international agreement the notion of Palestine as a “national home for Jewish people,” without mention of a home for Palestinian Arabs but only “civil and religious rights of non-Jewish communities.”
• In addition to this unique preamble, Palestine’s was the only mandatory agreement not to include the provision for the establishment of a constitution, parliamentary institutions and elections. While token attempts were subsequently made to cobble together a parliamentary system, in reality a well-supported Jewish Agency for Palestine, and a succession of artificial Arab institutions (e.g., the Sharif of Jerusalem or the Arab Higher Committee), continued to represent the Arab population. There was never any provision for elections.
• International politics shifted significantly with the end of the First World War. The United States replaced Britain and France as the leading western power. New nations, such as Austria, Hungary and Poland, emerged in Europe. Nationalist movements in colonial territories became a leading political current. The Communist Revolution, which had forced Russia out of the war in 1917, produced a new country ready to assert its pre-eminence in European and world affairs. And Canada gradually, and peacefully, forged its way to winning complete autonomy over its external relations.
• Two little-known Canadians played key roles in the historic discussions that took place from the beginning of the British mandate in 1922 to the eventual UN Partition Plan for Palestine in 1947. One of them was Elizabeth MacCallum, the first woman to become a senior foreign policy advisor.
• Long before the 1947 ban on women rising beyond clerical positions was officially lifted, MacCallum had gained the respect of senior staff in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) as a result of her books and articles, and her work for the Foreign Policy Association in Washington. Born into a family of scholars and missionaries in Turkey, MacCallum had pursued graduate studies in Canada and the United States, becoming particularly expert on the League of Nations’ mandate system.
• Unlike her colleagues, MacCallum had personal experience of the Ottoman Empire and knowledge of the aspirations of its diverse population. Her memoranda and draft position papers were the raw material of policy-making as early as the 1920s. She was among the few to point out the Balfour Declaration, as worded, cleverly avoided explicitly endorsing a Jewish state in Palestine, which was and is still recognized to have been Britain’s intention next to containing growing Arab nationalism.
• In assuming control of Palestine, Britain made some attempts to limit Jewish immigration. Nonetheless, waves of Jewish settlers from Eastern Europe, the purchase of Arab lands, and the expansion of cities and industries in the region fuelled Arab anger at both the increasing political and economic inequality between the two communities and British failure to protect Arab rights. A general strike turned into the Arab Revolt of 1936–39, which was harshly put down by the British military. Traditional tribal leaders and high-profile members of a new professional class, who were suspected of fomenting anti-British nationalist sentiment, were executed or exiled. It was a significant setback to the Palestinian Arabs’ ability to form a cohesive political force in the ensuing conflict on the future of Palestine.
• Realizing that increasing Jewish immigration had been a major cause of the revolt, Britain issued the 1939 White Paper, which placed stricter restrictions on Jewish settlement and land purchases. This, in turn, led to violent attacks on British installations by Zionist groups, as well as expressions of outrage by international Zionist organizations. While condemning the violence, Zionist leaders explained it was the result of uncontainable anger at Britain’s refusal to come to the rescue of European Jews as the evidence piled up of mass atrocities being committed against them.
• MacCallum’s analysis of the White Paper provided the clearest exposition of the tragic consequences of Britain’s contradictory policy in Palestine. She consistently pointed out that failure to address the demands of both groups in a just manner would result in protracted violence. She was also the only analyst explicitly to point out that all the great powers involved had economic and geo-strategic interests in this region.
• Britain and France had longstanding investments in the Middle East and Asia and were increasing their activities in existing oil fields and in oil exploration; it was therefore vital to maintain safe land and water routes in the area. The emerging powers—the United States and the Soviet Union—were quickly developing their own interests in the region. MacCallum’s briefing papers to her government were constant reminders that failure to address the political aspirations of the Arab populations not only contravened the accepted principle of self-determination, but would also lead to long-term economic and political costs.
• The British government was facing relentless pressure from the United States, as well as international Zionist organizations, to reverse the policy of the White Paper and allow unrestricted Jewish immigration into Palestine. The outbreak of war did nothing to decrease this pressure. Britain maintained that to do this and to encourage an autonomous Jewish state in Palestine, absent Arab consultation and agreement, was to invite violence.
• It was clear that Britain was no longer willing or able to manage its contradictory commitments in the region and was moving toward handing Palestine over to international trusteeship. But British declarations remained vague about the timing and conditions of its physical withdrawal.
• With the end of the Second World War, the future of the mandates was high on the agenda of the League of Nations’ successor, the United Nations. Iraq had managed to gain independence from Britain in 1932. Syria, Lebanon and Transjordan (renamed Jordan), having taken significant steps toward self-government between the wars, joined the United Nations as independent members between 1945 and 1946. Palestine was the only remaining Class A league mandate.
• It was on this most complex of international issues that Canada’s fledgling Department of External Affairs broke its teeth. The isolationist Mackenzie King, holding the external affairs portfolio in the PMO, wanted to maintain strict neutrality in international affairs, but especially in those areas that might place Canada in the middle of an Anglo-American conflict. In September 1946, he relinquished the department to St-Laurent, with Pearson as undersecretary.
• St-Laurent and Pearson convinced King that Canada, if asked, could not honourably turn down a role in resolving the Palestine issue. Canada was thus successfully pressured into sitting on the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP). King insisted that neither St-Laurent nor Pearson should be Canada’s representative, and that the Canadian government should not be bound by any positions eventually taken by whoever did take on the role.
• Ivan Rand, a respected jurist and member of the Supreme Court of Canada, was ultimately chosen to represent Canada on what would become the last truly international attempt to resolve the Jewish-Muslim conflict in Palestine. Rand had a long and varied legal background, but he is best known as the author of the Rand Formula—the decision that determined that once a union was accredited to an employer, union fees could be levied on all employees. Rand, however, had no previous knowledge of the Middle East, so it fell to McCallum to give him a “crash course” in the region’s history.
• With Canada’s participation in UNSCOP decided, lengthy wrangling within the UN General Assembly produced 10 other members: Australia, Czechoslovakia, Guatemala, India, Iran, the Netherlands, Peru, Sweden, Uruguay and Yugoslavia. The committee was to visit Palestine and report by September 1947. Rand, as a Canadian and a jurist, was immediately thrust into the committee chairmanship.
• The discovery, near the end of the Second World War, of Nazi concentration camps, and the plight of Jewish refugees throughout Europe, charged UNSCOP’s mission with urgency. Attempts by Britain and the Arab states to keep the future governance of Palestine separate from the issue of resettling the Jewish refugees of Europe failed repeatedly.
• President Harry Truman broke with his predecessor Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s neutrality by declaring that the Balfour Declaration was a promise to Jews of a homeland in Palestine. For Truman, this priority trumped guarantees of protection to the Arabs in Palestine and was worth the risk of continued war. Arab leaders throughout North Africa and Asia condemned the new U.S. position as great power imperialism.
• Given Britain’s stated opposition to Jewish immigration, Canada found itself exactly in the middle of an Anglo-American dispute. While the Department of External Affairs unofficially favoured the U.S. position, its declarations, with input from MacCallum, attempted to find a just compromise on Jewish immigration and a future state (or states) in Palestine. Throughout the war, Canada had been strongly lobbied by Zionist organizations to take a position on the 1939 White Paper and the Balfour Declaration. The Zionist argument was that Canada’s agreement to the mandates system and non-objection to the Balfour Declaration constituted a commitment to the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine.
• The difficulty of the task confronting UNSCOP cannot be overstated. On top of the fraught Jewish-Arab and great power confrontations, this was to be the first test of UN viability. Furthermore, Canada’s reputation as an advanced power that was friendly to both the U.S. and Britain, but also neutral and fair-minded, was at stake.
• The “interested parties” to the dispute were invited to appoint liaison officers to UNSCOP. The British government and the Jewish Agency in Palestine did so; the Arab Higher Committee in Palestine did not. The latter declared that no nation or group of nations could decide the outcome of their homeland. This left only individual Arabs or the new Arab League of independent states to speak for Arab Palestinians.
• Arab non-participation reflected, at least in part, the relative lack of resources and international support available to the Arab Higher Committee. The new Arab states of Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq were all battling internal political issues and had barely come out of the British and French stranglehold of their external affairs.
• Canada’s recommendation, championed by MacCallum, that the UN committee have independent expert advisors was rejected. However, Rand and the Canadian delegation were able to press another of MacCallum’s ideas: that the only fair and prudent option was the expeditious establishment of an enforceable UN trusteeship system. She believed that 1947 provided a small but crucial window for this option, as both communities in Palestine realized that, with Britain’s imminent withdrawal, the likelihood of bloodshed was extremely high.
• MacCallum believed a resolution of the immigration issue was paramount, arguing Canada, and any country that could afford it, should adopt a more open policy toward Jewish immigration. This would lessen pressure on Palestine to accept Jewish refugees. In this respect, she was and still is one of the few experts on the Middle East to recognize the failure of Europe and North America to open their doors to Jewish immigration, both during and immediately after the war.
• It has been argued that support for Palestine as a Jewish home spared many western countries, where anti-Semitism was prevalent, from the responsibility of taking in large numbers of Jewish refugees. We still don’t know which Canadian immigration official responded “None is too many” to the question of how many Jews should be allowed into Canada. But these words—the title of the celebrated 1983 book by Irving Abella and Harold Troper—have come to symbolize Canadian anti-Semitism.
• UNSCOP visited Palestine in June and July of 1947, receiving the concentrated attention of Jewish Agency representatives David Horowitz and Abba Eban, as well as local businesses, agricultural co-operatives, trade unions, schools and cultural agencies. Rand and his colleagues were positively impressed. They were exposed to very little in Arab Palestine; they did not visit the rural part of the region, where most Arabs lived. It is not clear whether the committee investigated the amount of land that had been sold or transferred to Jewish owners, or the methods used to do so.
• They certainly did not investigate the implementation of the 1939 White Paper. It is undeniable that the traditional Arab elites, many of them absentee landlords, had profited from selling lands to Jewish owners, with no concern for what would happen to the peasants who had worked and lived there for generations. It must not be forgotten that since the Arab Revolt the educated Arab elite had been substantially reduced, and those that remained were not willing or able to contravene the official Arab boycott of UNSCOP. This boycott allowed the Zionist case to go unanswered.
• Rand drew three main conclusions from his visit to Palestine: Britain’s record as a mandate power was reprehensible; the Jewish community in Palestine had done exemplary work and deserved to have its own state; and the Arab community needed some protection, for an indeterminate amount of time, to develop economically and be able to govern a state in Palestine. Rand devoted much more effort to planning the boundaries and ethnic composition of the Jewish state than to planning the economic and political development of the Arab state.
• As the committee deliberated, the following options emerged: partition into two independent states that would be as ethnically homogeneous as possible; a unitary state (one central government for both Arabs and Jews); a “bi-national state” (one central government with semi-autonomous Jewish and Arab regions); or a federation (one central government with several geographically determined and ethnically mixed regions). All options except for partition involved the complicated question of central versus regional powers, and the territorial and ethnic composition of each constituent part. All options depended on the formation of a credible UN trusteeship structure to implement and monitor the solution.
• Regrettably, in the distrustful atmosphere of postwar political jockeying within the UN Security Council and General Assembly, an enforceable system of international trusteeship was a very long shot. In spite of the fact it appeared in all the proposed options, the idea never materialized. Rand, whose opinion held considerable sway over the committee, pronounced himself in favour of partition, or two independent states with a monetary and customs union, as he clearly appreciated the economic inferiority of a future Arab state.
• The partition was to begin with two years of “sovereignty association” under international trusteeship and restricted Jewish immigration. Residents in each state would acquire citizenship of that state, with the option of applying for citizenship in the other state. The granting of independence would be contingent on the states adopting democratic institutions and signing a 10-year treaty of economic union. The size and ethnic composition of each state was crucial. Rand’s plan included a third state: an international State of Jerusalem, which would include the holy places of Judaism, Islam and Christianity.
• In the end this became UNSCOP’s majority recommendation to the General Assembly. Though it is almost impossible to ascertain precise population figures, the decision gave 55% of Palestine to the Jewish population and 45% to the Arab population. At the time, Jews were estimated to make up 35% of the population and owned 7% of the land. In the Jewish state the population would be 55% Jewish and 45% Arab. The Arab state would be quite ethnically homogeneous, with only 1% of the population being Jewish.
• There was a minority recommendation, put forward by India, Iran and Yugoslavia, that favoured a federal state. It was almost immediately clear that this recommendation would not receive any attention.
• The General Assembly established an ad hoc committee to frame the majority recommendation into a resolution to be voted on. The Jewish Agency and international Zionist organizations set about lobbying UN national delegations to accept the plan. As they had made clear to Rand, they would have preferred to be given the entire province of Palestine, but at least this recommendation contained the essential words: “an independent Jewish state.”
• The Arabs immediately rejected the majority report. The Arab Higher Committee from Palestine and all the Arab states continued to hang their case on what they considered to be the incontrovertible Arab right of residence in their own land. Britain reiterated it would only implement a solution to which both sides agreed and remained vague on the precise date it would withdraw its political and military presence from the region.
• UNSCOP’s job done, Pearson took over where Rand had left off, confirming Canada’s support for partition. He and Department of External Affairs officials believed a friendly Jewish state in that unstable but important region would be a long-term benefit. Pearson listened to MacCallum’s cautions, but he was not convinced. He went on to play a key role on the ad hoc committee that prepared the partition resolution for a vote. The Canadian delegation recommended establishing a management committee to oversee, with the British government, the two-year transition of the two “sovereign/associated” states into full independence, and creating a framework for continued governance of the international State of Jerusalem.
• Pearson did raise the issue of enforceability in the face of gridlock in the last days of the British mandate; the two potential states opposed each other unconditionally, and Britain reiterated that it would not supervise an arrangement to which both were not agreed. The dire implications of passing a contentious resolution in this explosive situation do not seem to have been compelling enough for Canada and most European UN member nations to resist U.S. and Zionist pressure to resolve the Jewish question in Palestine.
• The UN Trusteeship Council was barely more than a plan on paper. It would have taken the overwhelming influence of a great power to ensure a workable mechanism was put in place before a vote was taken. The only viable option to ensure the orderly implementation of the resolution would have been direct Security Council intervention, but hostility among its permanent members made this impossible. While nations such as Canada and Sweden scrambled to come up with an interim management plan, U.S. delegation and Zionist pressure remained constant. It was tragically evident that, in haste, the UN General Assembly was on the verge of voting for a catastrophically unenforceable resolution.
• On November 29, 1947, the General Assembly voted on Resolution 181: 33 nations, including Canada and the United States, voted in favour; 13 nations, including all Arab member states voted against; 10 nations, including Britain, abstained. None of its provisions were ever implemented.
• The passing of the partition resolution was a runaway train, and neither the UN, nor any other great power, could put on the brakes. Within hours of the vote, violence erupted in Palestine. Britain refused to provide access to any UN supervisory presence and did little to stop the violence. Instead, it announced its mandate would expire at midnight on May 14, 1948.
• On May 15, 1948, David Ben Gurion, on behalf of the Jewish People’s Council of Palestine, proclaimed the birth of the State of Israel (pictured). More than 750,000 Palestinian Arabs left or were forced to leave, with about 150,000 remaining within the new state. Those who left settled in towns, villages and refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. Some were able to emigrate to other Arab or non-Arab countries. The legal and humanitarian fallout from these decisions of 70 years ago continues to be at the heart of the Middle East tragedy.
• The State of Israel went on to be recognized by the UN and most member states. The State of Palestine has yet to come into existence. As many predicted, MacCallum perhaps most eloquently, the region is now entering an eighth decade of unrelenting violence. Successive wars have enlarged the area originally assigned to Israel to include virtually all of Mandate Palestine.
• The near certainty of violence was not a sufficient deterrent for those nations that had the power to defeat, or properly implement, the partition motion. Zionists seem to have believed Palestinian Arabs could be “transferred” to other Arab lands. It is difficult to conceive of how the new and floundering states of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Iraq could have been perceived as being up to this task.
• The right of Palestinian Arabs to stay in their homeland as full citizens of their own state was then, and still is today, largely overlooked. Their right to return to lands occupied in wars, chiefly in 1948 and 1967, as agreed to by the UN in the Geneva Convention is similarly a dead letter.
• It can only be hoped that the debate between the MacCallum viewpoint, which sought equality and justice for both sides in the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the Rand-Pearson viewpoint, which penned a fair solution but then settled for expeditious self-interest, can be revisited. This will require a gargantuan effort to objectively re-examine the events of 1947-48 with the benefit of archival records.
• The Trudeau government’s recent announcement that it will restore its contribution to Palestinian refugees is encouraging, but it perpetuates the convenient notion that this is just a “refugee problem.” Our government could be more effective by standing by its official position on Israel/Palestine (see sidebar) and providing leadership in the form of an international commitment to truth and reconciliation in the region.
• But here, as with so many other issues, we are presented with a great enigma in the Trump administration. For the time being, while the U.S. president’s rhetoric has been inconsistent, the U.S. policy of continued financial and military aid to Israel (and exceedingly feeble disapproval of settlements) remains on course. International voices urge Israel to acknowledge the settlements are an “existential threat” to its own freedom and democratic aspirations, but these have yet to reach the Netanyahu government.
• Meanwhile, others warn Gaza has become the largest internment camp in the world and that the humanitarian situation requires urgent attention. Ignoring both situations can only play into the hands of Islamic extremists. Despite the fraught events of the past 70 years, it would be entirely appropriate, in this 150th anniversary of Canada the nation, to remember and adopt the same realistic yet egalitarian principles that motivated MacCallum to seek what would be best for the nations of Palestine and Israel.

Canadian Policy on Israel/Palestine

• On occupied territories and settlements : “Canada does not recognize permanent Israeli control over territories occupied in 1967 (the Golan Heights, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip). The Fourth Geneva Convention applies in the occupied territories and establishes Israel’s obligations as an occupying power, in particular with respect to the humane treatment of the inhabitants of the occupied territories. As referred to in UN Security Council Resolutions 446 and 465, Israeli settlements in the occupied territories are a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. The settlements also constitute a serious obstacle to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace. Canada believes that both Israel and the Palestinian Authority must fully respect international human rights and humanitarian law which is key to ensuring the protection of civilians, and can contribute to the creation of a climate conducive to achieving a just, lasting and comprehensive peace settlement.” Global Affairs Canada website (accessed March 2017)
• On Canada-Israel relations : “Our friendship is built first and foremost on shared values. Our peoples share a passionate belief in, and willingness to defend, the principles of freedom, democracy, human rights and the rule of law. From this friendship stems an increasingly dynamic partnership—not just in diplomacy and government, but in our business and cultural ties.” Canada-Israel Joint Declaration of Solidarity and Friendship (2015)
• On aid to Palestinian refugees : “Canada’s international development assistance in the West Bank and Gaza works to aid the Palestinians in building the foundations of a viable, democratic Palestinian state that will support people to live in peace and security with Israel. As one of Canada’s foreign policy objectives, this goal supports a comprehensive, just and lasting peace negotiated directly between the parties.” Global Affairs Canada website (accessed March 2017)

+ Canada’s Israel Policy under Justin Trudeau: Rejecting or Reinforcing the Legacy of Stephen Harper? (2018 - T&F)

Steven Seligman, American Review of Canadian Studies, Volume 48, 2018 - Issue 1

Introduction

• Shortly after becoming Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau boasted to the world that “Canada is back” (Fitz-Morris Citation2015). Although spoken at the Paris climate change summit, the claim seemed designed to be interpreted more widely as an overall indictment of Canadian foreign policy under Prime Minister Stephen Harper and a pledge that Trudeau would recast Canadian foreign policy on a wide variety of issues. One particularly contested foreign policy issue that arose throughout Harper’s time in office was Canada’s policy toward Israel. As Prime Minister, Stephen Harper consistently adopted a clear pro-Israel position and sought to portray his opponents as anti-Israel. For their part, the opposition Liberal Party presented an inconsistent message on Israel that fluctuated in accordance with changes in the party’s leadership. Whereas Stéphane Dion and Michael Ignatieff each attempted to occupy a middle ground between pro-Israel and pro-Palestine views, Bob Rae and Justin Trudeau more clearly embraced a pro-Israel stance. Yet, Rae and Trudeau still faulted Harper for his tone on the matter and maintained that the Prime Minister had been exploiting the issue for partisan purposes. Hence, the election of Trudeau as Prime Minister created the opportunity for a new leader to set a new tone on Israel.
• Overall, this political dynamic demonstrated the significant role that party leaders play in shaping their party’s message toward Israel and that the Prime Minister plays in shaping Canadian foreign policy toward Israel. Research on the foreign policy-making process in parliamentary democracies generally (Kaarbo Citation1997), and Canada specifically (Michaud Citation2006; Gecelovsky Citation2015; Nossal, Roussel, and Paquin Citation2015, 183–205), has shown that the Prime Minister plays a dominant role relative to other domestic actors. Building on this work, the goal of this article is to address the following questions: To what extent can major developments in Canada’s Israel policy since 1993 be explained as a result of the preferences of each Prime Minister who served during this time? To what extent did Stephen Harper change Canada’s policy after 2006 by adopting a more pro-Israel position? And has Justin Trudeau’s Israel policy moved Canada “back” the era of Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin?
• I argue that the Prime Minister has indeed played a decisive role in shaping Canada’s Israel policy since 1993. While some parts of Canada’s Israel policy have remained relatively stable throughout this time, Canada’s policy under Harper nevertheless differed from its policy under Chrétien and Martin by a noticeable degree. Additionally, I argue that Trudeau has responded by largely reinforcing the Harper policy rather than rejecting it. While domestic debate on Israel has not disappeared under Trudeau, and some policy differences still remain between Trudeau and his critics, Trudeau’s approach bears much in common with his predecessor.
• This article proceeds in six parts. First, I review the literature on the role of the Prime Minister in directing Canadian foreign policy generally and situate the analysis of Canada’s Israel policy within this literature. Second, I provide a brief overview of Canada’s policies on key issues involving Israel and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. This section shows that certain key elements of Canada’s policy since the 1990s have remained relatively stable across different Prime Ministers, but also provides a starting point for examining how different Prime Ministers have carved out distinct approaches from this common foundation. From there, I offer separate sections analyzing Canadian foreign policy toward Israel under the leadership of four Prime Ministers: Jean Chrétien, Paul Martin, Stephen Harper, and Justin Trudeau. Collectively, these sections show the extent to which Canada’s policy depended heavily on the preferences of the Prime Minister.

The Prime Minister, foreign policy, and the domestic politics of Canada’s Israel policy

• Within British Commonwealth parliamentary democracies, the Prime Minister’s role in Cabinet is traditionally known as “primus inter pares” or the first among equals. Yet, Donald Savoie’s seminal study of Canadian politics noted that power had become increasingly centralized in the hands of the Prime Minister, such that Savoie characterized the transformed relationship as “Primus: there is no longer any inter or pares” (Savoie Citation1999, 71). As Savoie elaborated, Canadian Prime Ministers “have in their hands all the important levers of power,” a lengthy list that includes the power to:
  • Chair Cabinet meetings, establish Cabinet processes and procedures, set the Cabinet agenda, establish the consensus for Cabinet decisions; they appoint and fire ministers and deputy ministers, establish Cabinet committees, and decide on their membership; they exercise virtually all the powers of patronage and act as personnel manager for thousands of government and patronage jobs; they articulate the government’s strategic direction as outlined in the Speech from the Throne; they dictate the pace of change, and are the main salespersons promoting the achievements of the government; they have a hand in establishing the government’s fiscal framework; they represent Canada abroad; they establish the proper mandate of individual ministers and decide all machinery of government issues, and they are the final arbiter in interdepartmental conflicts (Savoie Citation1999, 72).
• Although Savoie’s focus was primarily domestic politics, scholars of Canadian foreign policy have made similar observations about the influence of the Prime Minister in this area. Paul Gecelovsky notes that the Prime Minister “is the key person in deciding both the direction and content of Canadian foreign policy, and that the prime minister, when so choosing, may override the interests of other actors and have Canada pursue a foreign policy to his or her liking” (Gecelovsky Citation2015, 213). A key power held by the Prime Minister to direct foreign policy is the ability to appoint and dismiss Cabinet ministers whose portfolio pertains to foreign policy, such as the ministers of foreign affairs, international trade, and international development, among others. The Prime Minister also holds the power to issue “mandate letters” to these ministers that carefully delineates their agenda. Further, the Prime Minister appoints and dismisses senior civil servants whose work involves foreign policy, such as deputy ministers, ambassadors, and high commissioners. For these reasons, as Nossal, Roussel, and Paquin conclude, the Prime Minister enjoys a position of “pre-eminence in foreign policy” (Citation2015, 198).
• To be sure, the Prime Minister also faces constraints. Perhaps most notable are those intrinsic to the nature of international politics, as studies of Canadian foreign policy often highlight the primacy of external forces over domestic forces in shaping policy (Hawes and Kirkey Citation2016). According to this view, Canada’s relative position within the global distribution of power and the preferences of its key allies are chiefly responsible for determining Canada’s core national interests and the policies needed to attain them, particularly in regard to defense and security policy. Individual leaders are, in turn, assumed to largely check their partisan and ideological differences because the stakes are too high to subject core national interests to domestic political gamesmanship. As the adage goes, politics tends to stop at the water’s edge.
• However, there may be reasons to believe that Canada’s Israel policy is less subject to these constraining factors. Notwithstanding the symbolic importance that some domestic actors in Canada attach to the Middle East, the reality is that relations with Israel are not vital to Canada’s national interest. Thus, Canadian Prime Ministers do have a fair bit of room to maneuver in shaping Canada’s policy toward Israel. For example, when violence erupts between Israel and other actors in the region, the Prime Minister can decide the tone and substance of Canada’s statements on the matter. Likewise, Canada’s votes at the United Nations (UN) on resolutions addressing the Middle East, and Canada’s foreign aid policies toward the region, are by no means predetermined by international factors. Variation can—and does—exist in how different Prime Ministers have shaped Canadian foreign policy toward these and other issues pertaining to Israel.

Canada’s policy on key issues involving the Israeli–Palestinian conflict

• Before discussing the ways in which Canada’s Israel policy developed under different Prime Ministers since 1993, it is important to note that there are key elements of Canada’s policy that have remained constant regardless of the leader in power. Since the mid-1990s, the website of Global Affairs Canada (and predecessor bodies) has included a web page outlining Canada’s position on “key issues” involving the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and by examining the content on this web page as it has evolved since the mid-1990s, we can see a fair degree of continuity in Canada’s position since the Chrétien era (Global Affairs Canada Citation2017b). Canada has consistently supported the right of Israel to exist in a state of security and the right of the Palestinians to self-determination. Canada has encouraged both sides to negotiate a comprehensive peace settlement in accordance with UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, as well as the 1993 Israel–Palestine Liberation Organization Declaration of Principles. Additionally, Canada has not recognized permanent Israeli control over territories occupied in 1967 and opposes all unilateral actions designed to predetermine the outcome of negotiations, such as Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem and construction of settlements. Canada has recognized the applicability of the Fourth Geneva Conventions to occupied areas under Israeli control. Finally, Canada has consistently felt that many UN resolutions addressing the Israeli–Palestinian conflict are written in language that is polemical, one-sided, and ultimately not constructive toward a peaceful solution of the conflict.

The Chrétien government and Canada’s Israel policy

• During his early years, Jean Chrétien’s Israel policy was established amid the larger context of the Middle East Peace Process that began at the 1991 Madrid Conference. As such, Chrétien saw few tensions between being a supporter of Israel and a supporter of a multilateral diplomatic process that encouraged all parties to engage in negotiations. However, as the peace process stalled by 1996 and was later superseded by the violence of the Second Intifada, domestic critics of Chrétien’s approach claimed that the new political environment warranted a new approach. Thus, by 2000, the Canadian Alliance Party criticized the Chrétien government’s policy as misguided and, in their view, insufficiently pro-Israel. Chrétien proved somewhat sensitive to this charge and sought to emphasize his support for Israel, while still trying to remain sensitive to the Palestinian side as well. As Bill Graham, Minister of Foreign Affairs, put it in November 2002, “if we are disliked by all sides, then it may mean we are doing the right thing” (Kiliç Citation2007, 15).
• When Chrétien became Prime Minister in 1993, Canada was already involved in the Middle East Peace Process. The previous year, Canada was selected as the “gavel holder” of the Refugee Working Group (RWG), one of five multilateral working groups created as a result of the 1991 Madrid Conference (Rempel Citation1999; Sucharov Citation2003; Brynen Citation2007; Robinson Citation2011; Global Affairs Canada Citation2013). The RWG met several times during the mid-1990s, but its meeting in December 1995 proved to be its last as the peace process began to deteriorate by 1996. Although Canada continued to try to work on the refugee issue for the next few years by organizing informal meetings with a smaller group of actors, Canada’s ability to impact the Middle East Peace Process was limited following the end of the multilateral working group process. Despite these challenges, Mira Sucharov views Canada’s role in the RWG as a key example of the Chrétien government’s commitment to multilateral diplomacy, noting that “the multilateral format of the working group was well suited to the Canadian style of internationalism” (Citation2003, 317).
• In addition to these diplomatic efforts, the Chrétien government also sought to strengthen Canada’s trade and aid relationships with both Israel and the Palestinian Authority. From 1993 to 2005, Canada provided roughly $330 million in aid to the Palestinian territories and neighboring Arab states, which provided budgetary support for the Palestinian Authority, refugees, and civil society, among other things (Brynen Citation2007). Regarding Israel, the Chrétien government negotiated the Canada–Israel Free Trade Agreement, which entered into force in 1997 and led to an increase in trade between the two countries from $507.3 million in 1996 to $1.4 billion in 2012 (Global Affairs Canada Citation2017a).
• Partisan debate about the Canada’s position toward Israel intensified in 2000 following the outbreak of the Second Intifada. As a member of the UN Security Council, Canada voted in support of Resolution 1322, which, inter alia, “deplore[d] the provocation carried out al Al-Haram Al-Sharif in Jerusalem on September 28, 2000” and “call[ed] upon Israel, the occupying Power, to abide scrupulously by its legal obligations” (United Nations Citation2000). Canada’s vote, which was cast just two weeks before the 2000 federal election campaign began, had two immediate consequences on the domestic politics of Canada’s Israel policy. First, it “split the Liberal caucus,” as some members criticized the resolution as one-sided while others defended it (Adams Citation2000, November 8). Second, it provided the Canadian Alliance Party an opportunity to position itself as the party that most strongly supported Israel. During the campaign, Stockwell Day, the leader of the Canadian Alliance, visited a synagogue in Thornhill and told the audience that his party’s position was “clear and unequivocal: We support Israel’s right to exist in peace and security with its neighbours.” He added that “[i]t was especially disappointing to see Jean Chrétien and the Liberal government support a one-sided UN resolution, number 1322, which singled out Israel as the sole party to blame in this outbreak of violence. It was unbalanced” (McCarthy Citation2000, November 1).
• Jean Chrétien proved sensitive to this criticism and the Prime Minister subsequently met with members of the Jewish Canadian community to assuage their concerns. A press release acknowledged the community’s opposition to the resolution and sought to reassure it that “one UN vote cannot define—or re-define—the deep and longstanding friendship that exists between Canada and Israel.” (Chrétien Citation2000, November 3). Yet, Canada’s vote on Resolution 1322 was fairly consistent with the way in which the Chrétien government had approached many other UN resolutions addressing Israel. Since the mid-1970s, the UN General Assembly has engaged in an annual practice of adopting roughly 20 resolutions addressing the Arab–Israeli conflict, most of which are framed using one-sided language that assigns blame only to Israel while absolving other parties of responsibility. As I note (Seligman Citation2016), the Chrétien government tended to support most of these resolutions because it viewed them as representative of the international community’s view of the conflict, although Canada did feel that the language used was sometimes problematic.
• The Chrétien government also faced domestic criticism for its participation in the 2001 UN World Conference against Racism, held in Durban, South Africa. The conference focused heavily on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and criticized Israel using language that Canada deemed unacceptable, including draft documents that revived the “Zionism-as-racism” charge and labeled Israel an “apartheid” state. Following the decision by the United States and Israel to walk out of the conference midway, the Canadian Alliance called on Canada to follow suit (Thompson Citation2001, September 5). Torn between its commitment to UN multilateralism and host country South Africa, and its opposition to the conference’s discussion of Israel, the Chrétien government remained at the conference and worked with like-minded states to remove the most egregious language from the draft documents. Although this effort saw considerable success, the final documents remained unacceptable to Canada, which stated that it was “not satisfied with this Conference” and that Canada declined to withdraw from the event “only because we wanted to have our voice decry the attempts at this Conference to de-legitimize the State of Israel and to dishonour the history and suffering of the Jewish people” (Government of Canada Citation2001, September 8). In March 2002, Canada abstained on UN General Assembly Resolution 56/266, which addressed the implementation and follow-up of the conference.
• Canada’s vote on Security Council Resolution 1322 and its participation in the Durban Conference highlighted the difficult balancing act that the Chrétien government sought to walk between supporting both UN multilateralism and Israel. It also revealed the central fault line on Israel policy that would define subsequent debates on the issue throughout the Harper era, during which time Harper embraced a pro-Israel policy and eschewed Chretien’s commitment to UN multilateralism toward the Middle East.

The Martin government and Canada’s Israel policy

• When Paul Martin became Prime Minister in 2003, he retained Chrétien’s commitment to the UN as a key component of Canadian foreign policy as well as his willing to recognize that both Israel and the Palestinians shared responsibility for the failure to reach a lasting peace. But compared to Chrétien, Martin appeared somewhat more sympathetic to Israel and thus more willing to criticize the UN for its perceived bias against Israel. A clear example of the Martin government’s stance can be seen in Canada’s address to the General Assembly on November 30, 2004 (United Nations Citation2004).
• As Prime Minister, Martin received support from several prominent Jewish Canadians in the business community, such as Gerald Schwartz and Heather Reisman, and selected several pro-Israel parliamentarians to serve in his Cabinet (Barry Citation2010). Under Martin, Canada began to change its voting record on a few UN resolutions addressing Israel (Seligman Citation2016). One particularly notable UN vote was Canada’s abstention on a General Assembly resolution calling on Israel to comply with the International Court of Justice’s advisory opinion on the construction of the security wall in the West Bank. In his memoir, Martin (Citation2008, 350) reflected that he “disagreed with the view of the Department of Foreign Affairs that UN resolutions regarding the region were ‘balanced.’ There was no doubt in my mind that while Israel might be subject to legitimate criticism, it had been singled out at the UN as if it were the world’s most egregious miscreant, which it clearly was not.” This view stood in contrast to Chrétien’s approach, but appealed to more overtly pro-Israel members of the Liberal Party and Canadian public at large. Yet Canada’s overall voting record under Martin on UN resolutions addressing Israel did not differ substantially from Canada’s record under Chrétien notwithstanding a few high profile changes.
• Ultimately, Martin’s time in office was short-lived, and neither of his immediate successors as Liberal leader—Stéphane Dion and Michael Ignatieff—embraced Israel with the same intensity, which provided an opportunity for Harper to portray himself as the strongest defender of Israel.

The Harper government and Canada’s Israel policy

• If Canada’s Israel policy under Chrétien and Martin was shaped by these leaders’ attempts to balance support of Israel with support of UN multilateralism, then Canada’s policy under Stephen Harper was shaped by a different set of factors. In seeking to explain the determinants of the Canada’s strong pro-Israel policy under Harper, some scholarly analysis has emphasized the Prime Minister’s personal values (Chapnick Citation2016), while others have emphasized electoral calculations and the inherently partisan nature in which Harper viewed foreign policy generally (Barry Citation2010; Nossal Citation2014). Most likely both views hold merit as they are not necessarily mutually exclusive. What is clear is that Harper adopted a distinct style in shaping Canada’s policy toward Israel that eschewed the value of UN multilateralism. Harper embraced Israel with such zeal that even Israeli officials seemed surprised, as indicated when Israel’s finance minister joked in 2012 that “Canada’s an even better friend of Israel than we are” (as quoted in Martin Citation2012, February 3). Meanwhile, during Harper’s time in office, the Liberal Party was led by four different party leaders, which resulted in the party offering an inconsistent and evolving message on Israel policy.
• Coming to power in February 2006, Harper wasted no time showcasing his pro-Israel policy. In March 2006, about a month after Hamas won the Palestinian legislative elections, Canada announced that it would suspend all direct financial assistance to the Palestinian Authority (Galloway Citation2006a, March 30). A few months later, when violence erupted between Israel and Hezbollah, Harper referred to an Israeli attack in the town of Qana, Lebanon, as “measured” despite civilian casualties (Galloway Citation2006b, July 28). In January 2008, Canada was the first country to announce that it would not attend the UN follow-up to the 2001 World Conference against Racism, citing concerns about anti-Israel and anti-Semitic rhetoric (CBC News Citation2008, January 23). In January 2010, Canada announced that it would halt general fund contributions to the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the branch of the world body that administers Palestinian refugee camps, citing concerns about its working relationship with Hamas (Zerbisias Citation2010, January 15). The following month, Junior Foreign Affairs Minister Peter Kent went so far as to say that “an attack on Israel would be considered an attack on Canada” even though the two countries have no such defense treaty indicating this position (Chase Citation2010, February 16).
• Canada’s votes at the UN General Assembly became even more pro-Israel after Harper became Prime Minister, a change that began slowly in 2006 but much more dramatically after 2011. By 2015, Canada was no longer voting in support of even a single General Assembly resolution addressing Israel, a marked departure from the Chrétien years during which time Canada supported about 75 percent of such resolutions, and the Martin years when Canada supported about half (Seligman Citation2016). Canada’s voting record at the UN Human Rights Council from 2006 to 2009 likewise reflected a pro-Israel position (Binette and De Courval Citation2014). Such votes put Canada in the company of only a few states, usually the United States, Israel, Australia, and a handful of other small states. Canada further defended Israel in strong terms when the Middle East was addressed at other multilateral venues, such as La Francophonie and the Group of Eight (G8). At the 2011 G8 meeting, Canada stood alone in opposition to a statement that encouraged Israel and the Palestinians to resume negotiations using the pre-1967 borders as a starting point (Saunders Citation2011, May 25).
• While Harper’s position tended to isolate Canada from its traditional Western allies, the Prime Minister and members of Cabinet repeatedly claimed that their policy was motivated by moral principle rather than geopolitical calculations. Oftentimes, Harper took pride in standing alone on Israel. For example, Canada’s Israel policy was undoubtedly a factor in Canada’s failure in October 2010 to win a seat on the UN Security Council, but the Prime Minister responded to this development by embracing its defeat as a moral victory. As Harper told an interparliamentary conference on anti-Semitism, he had “bruises to show” for his Israel policy and that “whether it is at the UN or any other international forum, the easy thing to do is simply to just get along and go along with this anti-Israeli rhetoric, to pretend it is just about being even-handed, and to excuse oneself with the label of honest broker … but as long as I am Prime Minister, whether it is at the UN or the Francophonie or anywhere else, Canada will take a stand whatever the cost” (CTV Staff News Citation2010, November 8).
• Following the Security Council defeat, and the subsequent 2011 federal election in which the Conservatives won a majority government, Canada’s policy became even more pro-Israel. For example, in 2012, Canada was one of only nine states to vote against a UN General Assembly (UNGA) Resolution that symbolically recognized Palestine as a sovereign state (Humphreys Citation2012, November 29). Under Harper, Canada also grew less willing over time to publicly affirm Canada’s opposition to Israeli settlement construction in the occupied Palestinian territories. When Lawrence Cannon served as foreign affairs minister from October 2008 to May 2011, it was not uncommon to hear him publicly criticize Israeli settlements and affirm their illegality under international law (Clark Citation2009; May 25; Blanchfield Citation2010; March 16). By contrast, John Baird, who served as foreign affairs minister from 2011 to 2015, refrained from making comparable statements and seemed to take personal pride in his refusal to do so, on one occasion rebuffing a journalist by saying that he did not want to “pile on” Israel by commenting on settlements (Campion-Smith Citation2014, January 17).
• On the domestic front, Harper and his government waged an intense effort to politicize Israel policy for partisan gain. These efforts were particularly noticeable during the early years of Harper’s time in office, in which the Prime Minister likely benefited from the fact that Liberal leaders Stéphane Dion and Michael Ignatieff offered mixed messages. For example, during the 2006 Lebanon War, Liberal leadership candidate Michael Ignatieff initially said that he was “not losing sleep” over Israel’s Qana attack, but later suggested that Israel had committed a “war crime” (Deveau Citation2006, October 11). Two years later, he revised his position again to say that his use of the term war crime was “the most painful experience of my short political career, and it was an error” (Diebel Citation2008, April 14). Meanwhile, Stéphane Dion explained in 2006 that the Liberal Party’s position on Israel was one in which friends sometimes criticize friends (Dion Citation2006, August 3). In this context, Harper painted the Liberals with a broad brush and dismissed the party as adopting an “anti-Israeli position” (Clark and Valpy Citation2006, October 13).
• Perhaps, the most notable partisan attack involving Middle East policy occurred in November 2009 when the Harper government distributed political flyers in selected electoral ridings that stated that the Liberal Party “willingly participated in overtly anti-Semitic Durban I.” The insinuation that the Liberal Party was itself anti-Semitic was left to the reader’s imagination, but there seemed little doubt that this was the intended subtext. The flyer also referenced Ignatieff’s comment about war crimes and falsely stated that the Liberal Party wanted to delist Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. Liberals denounced the political flyer as “shocking” and an egregious “misrepresentation of facts” (Brennan Citation2009, November 19). But such messages appeared to have their desired impact at the ballot box. An Ipsos Reid exit poll after the 2011 federal election found that 52 percent of Jewish Canadian voters supported the Conservatives under Harper’s leadership (Simpson Citation2011, September 28).
• Overall, Stephen Harper clearly adopted a distinct style in discussing Canada’s Israel policy. By firmly embracing Israel at the expense of UN multilateralism, Harper seemed content to pursue a unilateral policy that increasingly isolated Canada from most of its allies. This policy abroad was matched with a sustained effort at home to use Israel policy as a wedge issue, a tactic that benefitted from divisions within the Liberal Party on Israel, but also revealed the willingness of Harper to exploit foreign policy on Israel for electoral purposes.

The Justin Trudeau government and Canada’s Israel policy

• The Liberals’ poor showing in the 2011 federal election provided an opportunity for the party to reevaluate its position on a variety of issues, including Israel. Although Ignatieff had begun to embrace a more pro-Israel position after assuming leadership of the Liberal Party, Harper and the Conservatives never let voters forget his 2006 comments. But the selection of Bob Rae as interim leader in 2011 provided the Liberals with a chance to reset the party’s approach to Israel. Rae, whose wife was a past vice-president of the Canadian Jewish Congress, had been a more consistent supporter of Israel throughout his public life. In 2002, when Rae left the New Democratic Party, his stated reasons focused almost exclusively on the party’s criticism of Israel (Rae Citation2002, April 16). Ten years later, as interim leader of the Liberal Party, he issued a strong defense of Israel during a brief period of violence between Israel and Hamas in 2012 (Rae Citation2012, November 14).
• Justin Trudeau adopted a similar pro-Israel approach after becoming party leader in April 2013. For example, during another round of violence between Israel and Hamas in July 2014, Trudeau issued a press release saying that “Israel has the right to defend itself and its people. Hamas is a terrorist organization and must cease its rocket attacks immediately” (Trudeau Citation2014, July 15). Media commentators quickly seized on the similarities between Trudeau’s statement and those made by Harper. One newspaper editorial commented that Trudeau had “fallen in line” with Harper’s approach (Siddiqui Citation2014, July 26) while another suggested that “there is not a sliver of daylight between the Liberal and Conservative approaches” (Ibbitson Citation2014, July 23). Indeed, Trudeau himself offered a similar assessment in February 2015 when he said that “the fact is that on Israel specifically there is very little difference between the policies of the government of Canada under the Conservatives and the Liberal party” (Spivak Citation2015, February 27). Trudeau repeated this position during the 2015 campaign debate on foreign policy when he responded to Harper’s comments on Israel by saying that “the issue of Israel where we most disagree as Liberals with Mr. Harper is that he has made support for Israel a domestic political football when all three of us support Israel and any Canadian government will” (as quoted in Maclean’s Magazine Citation2015, September 28).
• Although the determinants of Trudeau’s views on Israel have yet to be explored in depth, part of the explanation is likely the same set of electoral calculations that motivated the Harper government. The Liberals saw a steep decline in their share of the vote among Jewish Canadians and understandably sought to reverse this trend. Another part of the answer may be the personal beliefs of the Prime Minister, although this is more difficult to discern as Trudeau did not appear to have publicly commented on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict prior to entering public life.
• Whatever the reasons, Trudeau has, like his Liberal predecessors, sought to support both UN multilateralism and Israel, but his policy toward Israel has also borrowed heavily from the Harper playbook. To be sure, Trudeau did indicate soon after the election that Canada’s policy toward Israel would undergo a change in “tone,” but he also emphasized that this would not result in a change in policy. As Israel’s ambassador to Canada stated following a phone conversation between Trudeau and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “Mr. Trudeau has been very consistent from the very beginning of his campaign, in expressing his support for Israel. … I’m sure maybe the style will change. … But I don’t feel there will be a change on the substance. I’m really reassured” (Blanchfield Citation2015, October 30).
• Within weeks of coming to power, Prime Minister Trudeau had his first opportunity to showcase one component of his government’s Israel policy when the UN General Assembly began its annual practice of adopting a flurry of resolutions addressing the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Notably, Canada’s voting record on Israel resolutions at the 70th regular session (2015–16) of the UNGA remained identical to that of the Harper government during the previous few years, and no changes in Canada’s votes occurred at the 71st regular session either (2016–17). Of the 20 resolutions addressing Israel adopted at each of the 70th and 71st regular sessions of the General Assembly, Canada voted against 18 and abstained on the other two.Footnote1 Notably, Canada voted against resolutions affirming the Palestinian right to self-determination, the illegality of Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories, and the applicability of the Fourth Geneva Conventions to occupied areas under Israeli control. Overall, Canada’s voting record at the UN under Trudeau government thus far is among the most pro-Israel in the world and is markedly different than Canada’s voting record under Chrétien and Martin.
• Trudeau has also taken an unwavering stance against the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign targeting Israel and the related campaign to brand Israel as an “apartheid” state. The BDS campaign, which emerged in July 2005, “call[s] upon international civil society organizations and people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era [and] to pressure your respective states to impose embargoes and sanctions against Israel” (Palestinian civil society Citation2005, July 9). Similarly, “Israel Apartheid Week”, which began at the University of Toronto in 2005 and has since spread to other campuses in Canada and abroad, states that its aim “is to educate people about the nature of Israel as an apartheid system and to build Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns as part of a growing global BDS movement” (Israel Apartheid Week Citationn.d.). Both campaigns have been firmly rejected by Trudeau. In March 2015, Trudeau posted a statement on his twitter account saying that the “BDS movement, like Israeli Apartheid Week, has no place on Canadian campuses. As a @McGillU alum, I’m disappointed. #EnoughIsEnough” (Justin Trudeau Citation2015, March 13). The following year, the Conservative Party introduced a motion in Parliament that called for the House to “reject the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement which promotes the demonization and delegitimization of the State of Israel” (Martin Citation2016, February 23). The motion was adopted by Parliament by a vote of 229 to 51, with deep support from the Liberal government, including from Justin Trudeau, who voted in support of the motion.
• Another example of Trudeau’s support for Israel can be seen in the government’s critical response to the appointment of a Canadian law professor to the position of UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967. The position is mandated to investigate Israeli violations of international law in the occupied Palestinian territories, but because it is not permitted to investigate violations of the law by actors other than Israel, critics have accused it of having an institutionalized biased against Israel. In March 2016, the UN Human Rights Council appointed Michael Lynk, a professor of international law at the University of Western Ontario, to serve a six-year mandate in the position. In response, the Canadian-based Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs issued a statement that “strongly denounce[d] the appointment of Michael Lynk to this role” and said that “Mr. Lynk has a long record of involvement with anti-Israel initiatives and has repeatedly made public statements that demonstrate hostility towards Israel” (Martin and Zilio Citation2016, March 30). The Trudeau government appeared to agree with this sentiment, although it was more guarded with its comments. A spokesperson for the Minister of Foreign Affairs said that “what is absolutely critical is that the mandate holder upholds the highest standards of probity, impartiality, equity and good faith. These are the standards set by the office and of these, the most critical trait is impartiality. On this score, we are concerned by some reports and past statements, which we reviewed independently” (Martin and Zilio Citation2016, March 30). Foreign Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion called for the UN Human Rights Council to “review” the appointment and emphasized that Lynk was not chosen by the government and did not represent Canada (Canadian Press Citation2016a, March 25).
• The Trudeau government’s positions on UNGA resolutions addressing Israel, the campaigns to promote BDS and brand Israel as an apartheid state, and the appointment of Lynk as UN Special Rapporteur all reveal that Canada under Prime Minister Trudeau has taken a clear pro-Israel position. More pertinently, on each issue, Trudeau has adopted the same position embraced by the opposition Conservative Party and former Prime Minister Harper.
• However, there remains one key issue on which Trudeau and Harper never saw eye-to-eye—Canada’s policy toward the UNRWA, the branch of the world body that is responsible for administering Palestinian refugee camps. In 2007, the Harper government allocated $32 million to the agency, reducing this amount to $19 million in 2009 before ending all funding in 2010 (Keinon Citation2016, November 18). The stated reasons for this funding cut was the Harper government’s concerns about the working relationship between UNRWA and Hamas, the latter having been declared a terrorist group by Canada in 2002. Although this decision seemed designed to signal the Harper government’s commitment to Israel and hostility toward the UN, the funding cut was ironically not supported by Israel, which privately lobbied Canada to reverse course (Berthiaume Citation2013, July 9). While Israel frequently criticizes the UNRWA for its relationship with Hamas, it nonetheless recognizes that the UN body provides needed resources to Palestinian refugees and thus helps maintain some political stability in the region. In 2016, Trudeau announced that his government would restore funding to UNRWA, a decision that one Israeli newspaper called “a significant break” from the Harper government’s policy (Keinon Citation2016, November 18). Not surprisingly, the Conservatives have criticized the Trudeau government’s position on UNRWA (Canadian Press Citation2016b, November 16).
• Although the Trudeau government’s decision to restore funding to UNRWA represents an important policy break from the Harper government, the overall record of Canada’s Israel policy under Trudeau thus far reveals that it has embraced a strong pro-Israel position that closely resembles the approach embraced by Harper, while differing in key ways from the approach generally embraced by the governments of Chrétien and Martin.

Conclusion

• Four individuals have served as Prime Minister of Canada since the election of Chrétien in 1993. Accordingly, Canadian foreign policy toward Israel during this time can be understood as unfolding in four stages, each corresponding to the specific Prime Minister in charge. Canada’s Israel policy under Chrétien focused largely on supporting the multilateral Middle East Peace Process and, as much as possible, sought to avoid taking strong, one-sided stances in support of either Israel or the Palestinians. When Martin became Prime Minister in 2003, he tried to distance himself somewhat from this approach and began to move Canada more firmly toward a pro-Israel position. But Martin still held that Canadian support for Israel should not come at the expense of Canadian support for UN multilateralism.
• By contrast, when Harper came to power in 2006, he quite explicitly rejected the so-called “honest broker” approach toward Israel that he claimed had been embraced by both the Chrétien and Martin governments. Instead, Harper firmly embraced a pro-Israel position and actively sought to make the Middle East a partisan issue in Canada. Accordingly, Canada’s relations with the UN suffered. Finally, since coming to power in 2015, Trudeau has sought to soften some of the rhetorical rough edges around Harper’s approach, but has nevertheless adopted a pro-Israel approach that more closely resembles the Harper approach than it does the Chrétien and Martin approach.
• Ultimately, what is clear is that each Prime Minister has attempted to carve out their own approach to Israel policy and to distinguish themselves from their predecessor to a greater or lesser degree. But what also appears notable is the extent to which Trudeau’s policy has largely resembled Harper’s policy on several key issues. If 2006 produced the beginning of a significant shift in Canada’s policy as a result of Harper’s electoral victory, then Trudeau’s policy toward Israel appears significant because of the extent to which it has not sought to reverse Harper’s approach Thus, despite Trudeau’s claim that Canada is “back” and that significant foreign policy changes were in store for Canada, this has largely not been the case with respect to Trudeau’s policy toward Israel. Rather than rejecting the legacy of Harper, Trudeau appears to have so far largely reinforced it.

+ 'When Pigs Fly': Britain, Canada and Nuclear Exports to Israel, 1958-1974 (2019 - WL)

Or Rabinowitz, Diplomacy & Statecraft, 09592296, Dec2019, Vol. 30, Issue 4

• Britain and Canada, two major nuclear Cold War actors, refrained from establishing close nuclear ties with Israel from 1958 to 1974, despite Israel's consistent interest in importing civilian nuclear technology. This was true both before and after the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty came into force in 1970, even though the treaty allowed for the export of safeguarded nuclear reactors. In comparison, the other two leading nuclear exporters of the period, France and the United States, were much more involved in the initial stages of the Israeli nuclear programme, exporting research reactors to Israel in the 1950s. How did Britain and Canada view Israel's military and civilian nuclear programme from 1958 to 1974? How did they form their nuclear export policy towards Israel and what considerations motivated them? This analysis examines these questions using archival material from British and Canadian archives.
• Israel's nuclear programme has been the focus of academic interest in the past two decades, an interest largely fuelled by the shroud of state-mandated secrecy surrounding it. The bulk of existing research has been devoted to exploring two major aspects of this phenomenon: an effort both to uncover the history of the programme and explore its impact on the development of Israeli-American relations,[ 1] with some additional attention devoted to examining Franco-Israeli nuclear dynamics.[ 2] Whilst the nuclear dimension of Israel's relationship with the United States and France has been explored in the academic literature, the parallel nuclear dimension of Israel's relations with Britain and Canada has received limited attention.[ 3] The analysis addresses this lacuna. The key questions are therefore: how did these two nuclear actors view Israel's military and civilian nuclear programme between 1958 and 1974? How did they form their nuclear export policy towards Israel and what considerations motivated them? Why did these two nuclear actors refrain from exporting civilian nuclear exports to Israel, on what grounds, and how did the emergence of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty [NPT] effect these policies?
• Why is the interaction of these three nuclear actors important? On the nuclear front, both Britain and Canada collaborated with the United States in the Manhattan project.[ 4] Whilst Britain opted to 'go nuclear', motivated by the ideas and opinions of its political and scientific elite,[ 5] Canada rejected nuclear weapons development. However both Powers were early developers of civilian nuclear technology;[ 6] and each attempted to become a major global nuclear supplier, with Canada dramatically more successful than Britain.[ 7] Significantly, Britain and Canada closely collaborated with the United States in establishing the non-proliferation regime, playing significant roles in creating the International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA] in the 1950s,[ 8] the NPT in the late 1960s,[ 9] and the Nuclear Suppliers Group [NSG] in mid-1970s.[10] During this process, reliance on safeguards was gradually adopted as a key feature of the global nuclear order.[11]
• On the Israeli side of the equation, Britain and Canada, alongside the United States, were important allies throughout the Cold War, in addition to France in Israel's early years. Significantly, Anglo-Isreali relations were markedly more complicated compared with Canada's, given British involvement in Israel's establishment and negative Israeli views of this involvement.[12] Anglo-Israel relations reached their nadir on 7 January 1949 when British and Israeli warplanes engaged in a fight on the Sinai border.[13]
• Despite Israel's consistent interest in importing civilian nuclear technology,[14] Britain and Canada refrained from establishing close nuclear ties with Israel between 1958 and 1974, primarily because of concern that they would upset their relations with Arab states. This was true both before and after the NPT came into force in 1970 – and even though the NPT allowed the export of safeguarded nuclear reactors. In comparison, the other two leading nuclear exporters, France and America, were much more involved in the initial stages of the Israeli nuclear programme. In the late 1950s, France famously sold Israel the nuclear reactor built at Dimona, whilst the United States supplied a small research reactor erected in Soreq.[15] The Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford administrations also went on to negotiate and sign contracts to supply nuclear power reactors to Israel between 1974 and 1976 – these reactors were never exported.[16]
• Anglo-Canadian reluctance to engage in nuclear commerce with Israel touches on a recent debate in nuclear studies: what motivates states to export nuclear technology? One view is that 'economic profit' does not encourage potential exporters when such trade 'undermines their own security' and occurs only if the commodity 'is consistent with underlying strategic conditions'.[17] Another posits that nuclear exporters, which are also democracies, co-operate with clients due to three motivations: consolidating existing alliances, re-enforcing ties with the 'enemy of my enemy' for strategic reasons, and bolstering ties with other democracies.[18] This analysis assesses the salience of these claims.
• A key issue is the evolution of nuclear exports regulation. These transfers were not initially regulated by the international community in the 1940s and 1950s, and it remained so until NPT's entry into force in March 1970.[19] The NPT did not ban any kind of nuclear commerce per se, rather, it obligated all treaty members to attach IAEA safeguards to certain nuclear exports.[20] In other words, members were allowed to transfer listed nuclear items under IAEA safeguards to any party accepting them, whether the client was a treaty member or not – in this case, Israel. The list of items requiring safeguards included nuclear reactors, reactor equipment, fuel reprocessing plants, and nuclear fuel.[21] An additional element of the non-proliferation regime was introduced with the establishment of the NSG in the mid-1970s. NSG's purpose centred on creating a framework that would streamline nuclear export regulations and 'catch in its net' non-NPT suppliers like Japan and France, which ratified the NPT in 1976 and 1992, respectively.
• Adopted in 1977, the first set of guidelines also included its own 'trigger list' of items requiring safeguards. Significantly, mainly due to French opposition, the guidelines did not embrace a demand for the recipient to agree to safeguards on 'all its nuclear facilities', a condition known as 'full scope safeguards'.[22] Such a request would require the recipient country to agree to place its entire nuclear facilities under international safeguards, even those unrelated to the nuclear deal at hand – say, facilities imported from a different supplier or indigenously built. In Israel's case, such a demand would mean agrement to open Dimona for inspections, a demand that Israel rejected when presented by the Jimmy Carter Administration in the late 1970s.[23]
• Whilst the NSG as a group rejected the adoption of 'full scope safeguards' in the 1970s, two important suppliers moved ahead unilaterally to adopt them. In December 1976, the Canadians adopted an official policy that insisted all recipients of nuclear exports accept 'full scope safeguards'.[24] The United States joined Canada when it adopted a similar measure contained in its Nuclear Non Proliferation Act of 1978.[25] The British expressed support for the safeguards in NSG talks in 1974–1976,[26] and the condition was adopted officially by the suppliers in 1992 when the NSG revised its official guidelines.[27]
• In Britain and Canada, the 'initial concern' phase about Dimona and Israel's nuclear intentions began in 1958 with news of Israel's intention to construct a nuclear reactor and ended in 1966 when Dimona's reactor was in operation. In this period, both Britain and Canada experienced a similar concern regarding Israel's nuclear programme. On one hand, both suspected that Israel was covertly developing weapons and attempted to gather intelligence on this effort. Each feared antagonising the Arab world should they assist Israel in civilian nuclear expansion. On the other, each had nuclear establishments interested in exporting their respective nuclear technologies to prospective clients like Israel.
• Both London and Ottawa kept a keen eye on Israeli civilian and military nuclear developments. In the late 1950s the British nuclear sector had high expectations regarding its future, expecting to become a major exporter. As a proud member of the Manhattan project and possessing nuclear weapons, Britain was 'firmly committed to a nuclear future'.[28] British scientists developed the Magnox reactor, fuelled with natural uranium, moderated by graphite, and cooled by gas; industry officials hoped to export this technology globally following initial sales to Japan and Italy in 1959.[29] Against this backdrop, reports of Israeli interest in developing nuclear power capacity received British attention. In August 1958, the Embassy at Tel Aviv reported to the British Board of Trade that Israel's finance minister, Levi Eshkol, had given a speech detailing his country's interest in such technology. According to the report, Eshkol declared that within five years, 'we shall make our first steps towards actually setting up an atomic power plant'.[30] Focusing on possible exports to Israel, the report stated that due to lack of finance, Britain's 'best chances' to sign a deal depended on its ability to show that its technology was 'better geared and more efficient' for Israel's needs.[31]
• In February 1961, London agreed to share information it had gathered on Dimona with Ottawa, including a questionnaire presented to Tel Aviv.[32] Explicitly leaving the option open for an Israeli nuclear weapons programme, the director general of Israel's Foreign Ministry, Chaim Yahil, told the British, 'The Israeli government has no intentions of producing atomic weapons. It could not be expected that any government would give firmer assurances. Circumstances may change and meanwhile Israel is surrounded by hostile neighbors' [emphasis added].[33] Yahil left the door open to a future Israeli nuclear weapons programme, but his clear message stands in contradiction to the premier's, David Ben Gurion's, almost inaudible talk with President John Kennedy in New York on 30 May 1961: Ben-Gurion spoke 'rapidly and in a low voice' in a way that 'some words were missed'.[34]
• On this international trip scheduled for May-June 1961, Ben-Gurion planned to meet, by order, Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker,[35] Kennedy, and British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. Prior to the trip, Canada and Britain shared intelligence on Israel's nuclear programme and discussed 'possible western initiatives'.[36] Ottawa and London expected to be briefed by Washington.[37] At this point, Israel was roughly half-way through the five-year construction of its French-bought Dimona nuclear reactor.[38] Following Ben-Gurion's agreement to let American visitors inspect Dimona, Margaret Meagher, the Canadian ambassador to Israel, also expected an invitation, commending the Canadian military attaché, 'whose photographs of the Beersheba reactor have been the most informative secured thus far'.[39]
• Professor Ernst David Bergmann, chair of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission [IAEC], insisted in conversations with Meagher that Dimona was not intended for weapons but for studying 'the industrial side of atomic energy' with the 'ultimate goal of producing atomic power'.[40] Despite these statements in a memorandum for Diefenbaker, Ottawa's Department of External Affairs officials reckoned that Israel might decide to 'develop a nuclear weapons capability' should the Egyptians forge ahead in conventional strength.[41] Similarly, the counsellor at the British Embassy in Israel, Henry Pakenham, told the Foreign Office that the Israelis were 'reserving their option' to decide to develop nuclear weapons 'nearer the time when the reactor goes critical'.[42]
• Washington, London, and Ottawa all briefed each other on the May-June talks with Ben Gurion.[43] The British concluded that on the nuclear front, Ben Gurion's reply to Macmillan 'was rather discouraging' as he stuck to his refusal to accept international inspections but agreed to contemplate 'inspection by neutrals'.[44] Similar to the explanation given Kennedy,[45] Ben Gurion explained to Macmillan that the Israeli goal was to train personnel 'in preparation for an atomic energy programme' expected in ten to 15 years' time to provide 'cheap power for taking salt out of sea water to irrigate the Negev'.[46] Ben Gurion's agreement to 'inspection by neutrals' translated to on-the-ground American inspection-visits at Dimona, which took place throughout the decade.[47] Israeli insistence on restricting American visits only meant that throughout the 1960s, the British, and to a lesser degree the Canadians, were scrambling to gather intelligence on Israel's programme. After Ben Gurion's trip, Canadian interest in closely following Dimona diminished, whilst British intelligence gathering persisted.
• In August 1962, after the first American visit to Dimona, the British pressed Washington to share information.[48] Two months later they were briefed that 'the installation appeared to be intended for peaceful purposes only'.[49] The Canadians were also informed of two visits,[50] yet the British were much more interested in receiving information. In September 1963, the Americans informed the British of Israeli agreement to a third inspection to take place 'before the reactor comes into operation'.[51] The British were simultaneously trying to glean information from the French, particularly on the safeguards they had applied, although the French insisted on not giving an 'entirely straight answer'.[52] The British ambassador to Israel, John Beith, recommended showing 'constant concern on the subject', erroneously believing that the Israelis would stop short at the 'ability to design a device'.[53]
• A key question in the debate surrounding Dimona involved uranium. The South Africans had infomred Ottawa of their intention to export 'Ten Metric Tons of Uranium Oxide' to Israel, which Tel Aviv promised to use 'for peaceful purposes';[54] later, American and British intelligence on alleged Israeli attempts to procure uranium in Argentina raised further concerns.[55] Any conditions attached to French supplied uranium would not be applicable for uranium bought elsewhere. The Americans appealed to British diplomats in Washington, telling them, 'we should keep our eyes open for, and exchange information on, any Israeli intentions in the nuclear field'.[56]
• British diplomats in Washington were briefed on a third visit and, this time, the Americans were only '90 percent certain that nothing suspicious was going on'.[57] To D. Arkell, an official with the Defence Intelligence Staff at the British Ministry of Defence, the American inspection report gave 'no cause for any relaxation of interest in Israeli intentions'.[58] The Canadians and the British exchanged assessments, and one analyst at the Canadian Directorate of Scientific Intelligence calculated that Israel could conduct 'one or two underground tests of low yield' with relatively 'little risk of detection' by late 1966.[59] A bilateral Anglo-Canadian intelligence discussion painted a 'far from reassuring' picture.[60]
• A second key query concerned plutonium. The question of the existence of a plutonium reprocessing plant in Dimona was acute, and Arkell correctly assumed that Israel had secretly built one, hiding it from the American inspectors.[61] Other British defence analysts stressed that the existence of a plutonium separation plant is 'the crux of the whole problem',[62] noting that even if such a plant was not yet operating, Israel could start preparations for equipping the 'laundry building' as a chemical reprocessing plant on short notice.[63] The Foreign Office instructed the Embassy in Israel to find more information on this subject, but the consul-general, Alexander Kellas, more realistic about the secrecy enshrouding Dimona, responded, 'it is not likely that this Embassy will be able, either by fair means or foul, to find out exactly what is going on in Dimona'.[64]
• The French now expressed concerns about Dimona in talks with the British. Significantly, French companies were allowed by President Charles De Gualle to complete existing contracts at Dimona in a private capacity – following Ben Gurion's request – the last reportedly in June 1965.[65] Notwithstanding France's on-going involvement, French sources told a British diplomat in Paris that 'every time an Israeli spoke to a Frenchman about military matters he always tried to get something or other which would help towards this end' of exploding a bomb.[66] French diplomats ruled out any further nuclear assistance to Israel; they stated that De Gaulle was 'anxious' to restore the French position in the Arab world and 'he would not think of helping the Israelis to realise their atomic ambitions'.[67]
• Differing views and a lack of intelligence also had a major role. Conflicting assessments in 1965 on where the Israelis were heading produced a sharp divide in British opinion between the Foreign Office, and especially Beith, on one side, and Defence officials, on the other. Beith reported that the Americans had achieved a 'reasonable degree of control' over the Israeli nuclear programme, and the Israelis were 'in the American pocket' since they needed American finance for a major desalination project.[68] Philip Joseph, an official at the Ministry of Defence, wrote Adam Goodison, at the Foreign Office, stressing that Israel was only likely to abandon the 'idea of a nuclear weapon' if offered 'guarantees of security of her borders by the major powers'.[69] Defence Ministry officials also wondered whether the Americans really had acquired 'a reasonable degree of control' over Israel's programme. The lack of information on the flow of 'safeguard free uranium' to Israel proved this notion false.[70]
• In September 1965, R.S Bishop, a diplomat stationed in the British Embassy at Washington, was informed of yet another American inspection visit to Dimona by Rodger Davies, head of the State Department's Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs.[71] Admitting that the first American inspection was 'limited in time', Davies stressed, 'there have been no limitations on the more recent visits'. He told Bishop that although the reactor was critical, and Israel was capable, 'she was not actively making a weapon' and had 'no facilities to extract plutonium'. As conveyed to Bishop, the State Department assessment was that Israel could 'obtain a nuclear bomb' in three to five years depending on how much uranium it bought from Argentina. Davies stressed that Washington was 'very anxious to stop the proliferation' and that it was 'prepared to take a very tough line with Israel to stop her developing her own bomb'.
• As Dimona began full operation, the intelligence failure regarding Israel's nuclear potential gradually became clearer. Specifically, the paucity of information about Israel's uranium imports proved to be crucial. In April 1966, the Foreign Office was informed of another inspection of Dimona, this time the source was Jim Spain, the State Department's director of the Office of Research and Analysis for the Near East and South Asia.[72] According to Spain, the Israelis proposed returning spent fuel to the French 'in the near future' and had even asked whether 'the Americans might like to witness the hand over as further evidence of Israel good faith'. As for French safeguards attached to Dimona, Spain stated that the French had repeatedly asked in vain that the Israelis 'give the first charge back'. According to Spain, the French were now both contemplating to 'demand its return' and consider witholding supplies of 'future fuel charges ... if they did not get the first fuel charge back'. Implied in the Anglo-American dialogue was the lack of clarity about how much uraniun Israel had managed to import from Argentina and elsewhere; if enough, it would not need future French fuel supplies. As with previous reports, British diplomats in Washington had to petition the Americans yet again to receive a detailed report of the inspection, which was transmitted the following month.[73]
• Parallel to efforts about gathering intelligence on Dimona, Britain and Canada also contemplated whether to export reactors and other nuclear items to Israel. In autumn 1962, following Canada's successful initiation of its first nuclear power reactor, a 'Nuclear Power Demonstration', many countries, including Israel, expressed interest in importing this natural uranium, heavy water reactor.[74] An official working for the Canadian nuclear utility, Atomic Energy of Canada, wrote to Albert Ritchie, the assistant under-secretary for External Affairs, asking for the government's green light for talks with Israel; he noted that the company 'would not wish to indicate any such willingness if political considerations would override any business assessment'.[75] Political considerations did in fact supersede the economic ones. The External Affairs' African and Middle Eastern Division stipulated that such co-operation with Israel would potentially be met with 'hostile criticism from Arab propaganda sources'.[76] Although good relations with Israel were desirable, damage to relations with Arab states 'ought to be kept to a minimum'; the sale was not vetoed, but it was stressed that no 'special credit' would be offered.[77] The Canadian ambassador to Israel, Arthur Andrew, disagreed with this approach, but was overridden.[78]
• From 1956 to 1966, Canada signed three contracts with India and one with Pakistan on the export of its CANDU model heavy water reactor capable of producing weapons grade plutonium.[79] Israel was interested in Canadian nuclear exports, and Canada's nuclear co-operation agreement with India was seen as an indication for a possible successful outcome.[80] Yet, despite the positive approach in exporting reactors to India and Pakistan, Israel's case was handled differently. In June 1964, R.E. Collins, an under-secretary in External Affairs, informed Andrew that the Canadian Atomic Energy Advisory Panel had concluded, 'it was politically undesirable for Canada to entertain negotiations for the sale of reactors in that part of the world', although this decision was not to be made public.[81]
• In addition to reactors, the Canadians had to consider how to contend with Israeli requests for nuclear equipment in general. Was Israel a legitimate client or should all Israeli requests be barred? In 1966, the Israeli Ministry of Defence contacted the Canadian Chalk River Laboratories to request the 'urgent' purchase of 'miniature warning dosimeters', devices that measure exposure to radiation. These devices were designed at Chalk River and mentioned in a scientific publication, explained by J.W. Greenwood, head of international affairs at Atomic Energy of Canada, to Don Dewar, of the Atomic Energy Control Board.[82] Considering the request, Dewar noted that although there were 'no legal limitations on exporting the dosimeters', doing so might be 'politically unwise'.[83] Dissenting views by officials in the African and Middle Eastern Division stressed that as dosimeters were health and safety items, they could only be used to measure radiation.[84] It was finally decided that there would be 'no objection' to exporting them; D.H. Kirkwood, an under-secretary at External Affairs, informed the Atomic Energy Control Board and Atomic Energy Canada of the decision.[85]
• On a parallel track, British interest in exporting nuclear technology to Israel grew in 1964 in light of Israel's intention to explore the construction of a nuclear powered desalination plant in co-operation with America's Lyndon Johnson Administration.[86] In July 1965, British Atomic Energy Agency [UKAEA] officials met with a retired general, Zvi Zur, the Israeli Defence Force's former chief of staff and head of Israel's water utility, Mekorot, to discuss the possibilities. It was clear to all participants that establishing a nuclear desalination plant was a complicated project. Zur told his interlocutors that the American company, Westinghouse, was the only United States supplier 'capable of undertaking a plant of the required capacity', even if Westinghouse 'had never constructed anything of this size before'.[87] A British company with relevant desalination experience, Weir Westgarth, peaked Israeli interest according to Zur.[88] But the feeling was not mutual. Weir Westgarth had several desalination contracts in Arab countries and showed a 'marked lack of enthusiasm for any dealings with Israel', fearing it would lose 'valuable Arab world connections'.[89] Some British diplomats, keen to create new contracts, brushed aside these concerns, seeing British participation in the Israeli project as 'decisive for our future progress in this field'.[90] They stressed that given the humanitarian and peaceful character of the project – desalinating water – it would likely proceed 'without serious damage to our Arab interests'.[91] Under pressure, Weir Westgarth reluctantly agreed to be represented in Israel by a front company.[92]
• The Israeli desalination project got traction with the local Anglo-Jewish community, and several important figures 'expressed strong interest', including Lord Edmund de Rothschild,[93] Marcus Sieff, and, in the words of Beith, 'other British Jews'.[94] Hans Kronberger, an eminent Jewish nuclear phsicist who fled Austria to Britain in 1938, was also involved with promoting the nuclear desalination plant.[95] This involvement was not always welcomed by British officials, with one Treasury official, William Armstrong, protesting to the Foreign Office that Rothschild had no 'status as principal in the affair'.[96]
• As talks on the desalination plant progressed, certain questions on the nature of the safeguards that would attach to the deal emerged. Would the Johnson Administration condition the sale on Israel's agreement to place Dimona under safeguards? M.I. Michaels of the British Ministry of Technology told the Foreign Office that based on the Israeli press, Israel was likely to reject any such linkage.[97] The general idea of demanding the attachment of safeguards to nuclear deals was not internationally popular; the Indians and Egyptians had already declared their opposition, with the Indians claiming them a 'form of economic blackmail'. The British assumption, stated by Michaels, was that the success of future safeguards would 'rest on an informal understanding between potential supplier countries of reactors and equipment'. But how should the British treat the American demand to inspect Dimona, a French supplied reactor, as a condition for future nuclear exports? Should the British accept the 'American extension of the safeguards doctrine', as termed by Michaels, legitimising the demands made by one supplier to extend safeguards over facilities supplied by another supplier? Michael's concern was that if Britain accepted this new extended doctrine, and the Israelis refused to agree, it would push them to buy French technology yet again: 'We would put the ball in French hands and I cannot see them dropping it'.
• A British diplomat stationed in Washington, C.H.D Everett, was later informed by State Department officials that the Americans were not intending to create a linkage between Dimona and the American supplied desalination plant; Washington would only require the application of safeguards to the desalting nuclear plant itself.[98] But the question lingered on the British side: 'Should we encourage them [the Americans] to get safeguards applied on all nuclear plants in Israel, or would this embarrass us elsewhere?'[99] Contact between Israeli and British officials on possible co-operation on the desalination project continued with the open support of several Israeli officials,[100] and with the Israelis demonstrating 'serious interest' according to reports by the new British ambassador at Tel Aviv, Michael Hadow.[101] He urged the Foreign Office to 'make the first formal move' to assure that Britain could participate in the project.[102] His keen support motivated him to propose a rather radical initiative: by convincing Tel Aviv to go with British over American technology, Israel would be offered 'a share of future orders for desalination plants'.[103]
• As 1966 progressed, the Israelis gradually realised 'there had really been no progress' with the Americans.[104] Indeed, further talks with American officials made it clear to the British that 'the nuclear desalination plant would never be built'.[105] One vocal critic of the initiative was the American historian, Roberta Wohlstetter, who wrote to Michael Palliser, the private secretary to Prime Minister Harold Wilson, in July 1966. Returning from a visit to Israel with her husband, the nuclear strategist, Albert Wohlstetter, she was critical of the desalination plan, telling Palliser that 'ideals about heading off the arms race in the Middle East' by supplying large nuclear reactors 'defy satire'.[106]
• The emergence of the NPT became another key development. The end of the decade brought dramatic changes to Israel's nuclear status as well as the nuclear proliferation regime as a whole. On the ground, covertly, the Israelis had crossed the nuclear threshold and assembled crude nuclear devices in the days leading to the Six Days War of June 1967.[107] As Canada's External Affairs Africa and Middle East Division explained to their minister, it was gradually becoming clear that Israel was 'one of the more advanced of the so called "near-nuclears"'.[108] The exact degree of Israel's nuclear capabilities was not yet completely known, as 'evidence has never been conclusive',[109] but the country's nuclear trajectory was apparent. The Israeli leadership's insistance on emphasising that it had 'the people with the know-how' to build nuclear weapons, in the words of Eshkol during a January 1968 visit to Canada, served to underline this impression.[110]
• The establishment of the NPT was a second landmark. The treaty opened for signature in August 1968, came into effect in March 1970, and Israel consistantly refused to sign.[111] In December 1968, R.C. Hope-Jones of the Foreign Office's Disarmament Department drafted instructions for Hadow of 'making it clear' to the Israelis that it remained 'vitally important to keep nuclear weapons out of the Middle East'.[112] Hope-Jones calculated that Israel wanted to 'keep open the option of producing nuclear weapons', noting that the Foreign Office should consider its policy in case 'the Israelis announced one day that they had achieved a nuclear capability'.[113]
• A confidential and annotated paper by General R.E. Lloyd of the Arms Control and Disarmament Research Unit, entitled 'Israel and Nuclear Weapons', underlined the change in Israel's perceived nuclear status. The paper stated that Israel is 'believed to be close to achieving – if she has not already done so – the capability for designing an effective nuclear weapon'.[114] The working assumption was that Israel could produce a 'small stock' of weapons without 'the prior necessity of a test explosion', and that the bombs could 'effectively' be delivered by the Israeli air force against targets in 'Egypt and elsewhere'. The Disarmament Department also detailed both possible ways of 'inducing' Israel to join the NPT and recommendations on how to 'minimize the consequential threat to international stability' should these efforts fail. The report asserted that the 'only really certain way' of persuading Israel to give up its nuclear weapons was by offering 'a credible and explicit politico-military guarantee' against future attacks, noting that 'no lesser assurances' would be sufficient, and that 'the principal guarantor' would have to be the United States. The report also proposed launching a 'propaganda campaign', notably focused at 'American Jewry' but also in Israel and elsewhere, 'designed to frighten' against the introduction of nuclear weapons in the Middle East. Linking the civilian aspect to the military, one of the proposed leverages to pressure Israel was the 'withdrawal of assistance to her civil nuclear programme'. Concluding in a realistic tone, the report determined that if Israel's 'predicament' led its leaders to be 'so desperate' as to develop nuclear weapons, then it is 'most unlikely that any amount of arm twisting' would convince them otherwise.
• As the decade drew to an end, plans to establish nuclear power plants for electricity production replaced Israel's nuclear desalination initiative. British and Canadian authorities now faced the question of whether they should bid to export power reactors to Israel given the evolution of Israel's nuclear status and the launch of the NPT. In Canada, the Ministry of Industry called for a 'general review of the possibility of sales of nuclear materials and equipment to various countries', with the express wish to 'test the temperature of the water in Israel'.[115] It was seconded by Charles McGaughey, the ambassador to Israel, who wondered 'is there any reason why Canada would not be prepared to sell a nuclear generating station to Israel?'[116] These initiatives were quashed. Atomic Energy of Canada 'was not prepared at that time to pursue a possible sale to Israel'.[117] Such a sale was seen as 'undesirable' given the 'unsettled political situation in the region', and Israeli approaches should be met with the reply that 'Canada does not consider itself to be a potential supplier'.[118] The Canadian diplomat in Israel conducting talks on the matter was reluctant to give such a blunt reponse to the Israelis, but the position was shortly confirmed.[119]
• London also wondered what to do about exports to Israel. The failure to export Magnox reactors had led the British to focus in the mid-1960s on 'Advanced Gas-cooled Reactors', a more sophisticated version of Magnox, but this model, too, failed to become a commercial hit.[120] In the early 1970s, the British nuclear industry was gearing towards a switch to a third model, the 'Steam Generating Heavy Water Reactor', thought to be more attractive to potential clients.[121] What should be the British government's position towards a possible bid to export a reactor and nuclear technology to Israel? Inside the Foreign Office, a debate raged. A 1967 'Standard Ministerial guideline' had stated that the Britain should under 'no circumstances' [emphasis added] supply material or equipment to either Israel or the Arab states, 'which could contribute to the development of a nuclear capability'; this re-emerged on 12 June 1970.[122] The 'Standard Ministerial guideline' was now being questioned. Some officials argued that if British companies would not supply the reactor, then the Israelis would either buy elsewhere, 'perhaps from France, with minimal safeguards', or simply 'build one themselves'.[123] By exporting the reactor, Britain could 'insist' on satisfactory safeguards in addition to having 'good access to information' on the Israeli programme. As for any regulatory change introduced by the NPT, it was argued that safeguarded nuclear power plants were 'perfectly legitimate items of peaceful international trade, just as conventional power stations'; and IAEA safeguards demanded by the NPT were adequate.[124] Those who rejected this view maintained that even if applying safeguards, it would not necessarily mean that the British 'would have any power whatsoever at the critical moment to prevent the Israelis doing what they wanted', and in the Israeli case, 'one can never carry suspicions too far'.[125]
• Throughout 1973, and more so during the Arab oil embargo that followed the October Yom Kippur War, the Israelis were 'pressing on quickly' with a plan to establish nuclear power plants, aiming to initiate the first reactor by 1982.[126] Since the British 'Steam Generating Heavy Water Reactor' was new, the Israelis suggested that British companies participate in separate tenders for 'conventional sections' of the reactor programme. But the British nuclear establishment refused to form close ties with Israel. The most UKAEA agreed to do was exchange information on desalination, and only if the exchange remained secret.[127] UKAEA was unwilling to establish a 'straight inter-organisational agreement' with its Israeli parallel, explained Barbra Maclean of the UKAEA to Nick Fenn at the Foreign Office.[128] The Foreign Office also recommended that any exchange with the IAEC remain secret.[129] Maclean noted that even the export of a safeguarded reactor to Israel, adhering with NPT obligations, 'would carry an element of risk' since it had the potential to contribute to 'the development of Israel's nuclear capability'.[130] It was argued that news of a British export would 'undoubtedly be exploited' by the Soviets and Arabs, and that Britain 'should not stimulate nuclear exports to Israel' as long as it refused to join the treaty – despite the fact that it was not a treaty condition for export.
• In February 1974, reports of Tel Aviv's serious intention to invest in its civilian nuclear programme motivated yet again a reassessment of British policy towards nuclear exports to Israel. The Foreign Office Energy Department explained to Maclean that officials were now 'trying to clear our minds' on the line Britain should take 'towards contacts of any kind in the nuclear field in the Middle East'.[131] Linkage to the Arab-Israeli dispute remained key, and the new 'rough guidelines' that were adopted maintained that whilst 'nuclear contacts' were accepted and normal around the world, there was a 'good deal of political difficulty' in the Israeli case due to the ongoing Arab- Israeli conflict and the fact that Britain did not want to be seen assisiting Israel's nuclear weapons programme. Despite the fact that it was perfectly legal under Britain's NPT obligations to export safeguarded reactors, the guidelines stated, 'the supply of complete nuclear power station and/or reactor ... would almost certainly be unnacceptable to it on political grounds'. The supply of 'ancillary equipment' and 'know-how of a specific nuclear nature' could also cause 'political problems', and only the supply of 'non-nuclear equipment' for a nuclear power plant would be acceptable. Although some officials thought a 'less restrictive line' should be adopted, reasoning that 'nuclear power is here to stay',[132] the stricter view won the day.
• America's 1974 nuclear export initiative presented a further consideration. Israeli plans to establish nuclear power plants received a boost in June 1974 when Nixon conducted his historical visit to Egypt and Israel.[133] He declared that his Administration would export nuclear power reactors to both states. The commercial counsellor at the British Embassy in Tel Aviv, E.V. Vines, assessed rather poetically – although in hindsight wrongly – that even though Israeli plans to build and operate 20 nuclear power plants by the end of the century 'may seem over ambitious', the Israelis possess the art of 'making dreams come true'.[134]
• Nixon's declaration also saved the British from taking a stand on a related front.[135] Prior to his visit, the Israeli Embassy at London had approached Urenco,[136] the European nuclear utility of which Britain was a member, and enquired about 'a supply of nuclear enrichment'.[137] In this case as well, the NPT created no legal limitations on exporting enriched fuel to Israel, as long as it was 'subject to IAEA safeguards' and Israel gave a 'peaceful uses' assurance. However, for the British, the main problem was not a legal but 'the political one', and the lack of willingness to risk 'Arab hostility'.[138] Here, the British were inclined to reject the Israeli request, but since Nixon's offer included enrichment services to Israel, the Israeli approach was now void and British officials opted to leave the original enquiry 'lying on the table'.[139]
• In looking at the key insights from this analysis, several issues beg consideration. First, there is the issue of how Israel's nuclear programme, both its military and civilian aspects, was perceived. London and Ottawa correctly viewed it with suspicion and apprehension from its inception. These misgivings informed the identical policies adopted by each Power on the question of whether to export nuclear reactors and nuclear technology to Israel after 1958. Despite the fact that the export of nuclear reactors was gradually becoming a common practice, both nuclear suppliers refused to consider seriously such exports to Israel before and after the NPT came into force in March 1970. Nuclear sales to Israel were treated before and after the NPT as a special case. The different treatment Israel received became apparent in the late 1960s after Canada signed deals to sell reactors to India and Pakistan – clients who resided in an unstable war-torn region – but refused to export to Israel. The difference for the Canadians was that Israel was clearly making progress towards being nuclear weapons capable, whilst India and Pakistan remained 'innocent' nuclear clients. The documents reveal an additional bias. British and Canadian diplomats stationed in Israel showed consistent support for nuclear exports to Israel and demonstrated generally more leniency to their host country compared with the officials stationed at the home capital, especially intelligence and defence officials.
• Second, there is the question of the creation of nuclear exports policy. Both Ottawa and London formed their course of action concerning Israel based on their strategic perception of the Arab-Israeli conflict. They maintained close co-operation in intelligence assessments of Israel's nuclear progress during the 1960s, with Britain showing more involvement than Canada due to its historic and geo-strategic involvement in the region. As for motivations, both Powers wished to maintain close ties with the Arab states, believing that civilian nuclear exports to Israel would damage those relations. London and Ottawa wanted to avoid Arab and Soviet accusations of collusion with and assistance to Israel's weapons programme, and it was assumed that civilian nuclear co-operation would expose the exporter to such allegations. A key element in this assessment was the growing understanding in the late 1960s that Israel was virtually nuclear capable. Over time, it gradually became clear that the theoretical circumstances under which Canada and Britain would agree to export nuclear technology to Israel would never materialise or, in other words, would take shape 'when pigs fly'.
• Third, the emergence of the NPT needs to be considered. The fear of damaging relations with the Arab world served as a motivation to avoid civilian nuclear co-operation both before and after Israel crossed the nuclear threshold, and before and after the NPT came into force from 1967 to 1970. Despite the fact that the NPT regulated and allowed its members to export safeguarded power reactors to non-NPT members, the calculus on the Israeli front did not change for both states. British documents reveal that the NPT was used internally to justify the denial of nuclear exports, barring civilian nuclear co-operation with Israel, in opposition to regulations created by treaty itself, and despite the fact it safeguarded such supplies.
• Corroborating the theory that 'economic profit' does not motivate potential exporters, the potential commercial benefit of exports to Israel was consistently overridden in both London and Ottawa by a perception that such ties would undermine strategic interests by damaging relations with the Arab states. However, it is also possible to make an opposing argument: that the larger Arab market and fear of losing a potential stake in it was more appealing commercially than Israel's smaller one. Significantly, no nuclear power plants were exported to the Arab world in this period. Yet, the other theory, which similarly does not stress economic considerations, is also relevant. That Israel was a democracy and an ally was not enough to tilt the balance in favour of nuclear commerce by both exporters. The importance of relations with the Arab world and the fact that this was not an 'enemy of my enemy' equation, forging closer ties with Israel and strengthening the alliance with it through nuclear commerce was not a dominant motivation.
• The reluctance of nuclear exporters to aid Israel's civilian nuclear programme, coupled with the clear acknowledgement of its nuclear weapons capabilities and the changing landscape of the nuclear proliferation regime, contributed to Israel's inability to import additional reactors during the rest of the Cold War. As one British report concluded in 1985, 'despite more than 35 years of research and professions of peaceful intent notwithstanding, Israel has yet to put a civilian nuclear power program into operation'; and this statement is true as of 2019.[140]
• A competing explanation should also be considered. Is it possible that by the time Britain and Canada were considering nuclear exports to Israel in the 1960s and the 1970s, they had already been overtaken by events? Was Israel, having developed nuclear weapons, not fundamentally interested in establishing its own nuclear power infrastructure?[141] Although 'lukewarm' in the 1960s, historical records demonstrate that by the 1970s, Israel was indeed interested in developing its own nuclear power plants for electricity production; it had initialled a formal contract with Ford's United States in August 1976 on the supply of two such reactors, and the Israel Electric Corporation was developing a massive deployment plan to this end.[142] The American nuclear power plants were never supplied due to the adoption of the Carter Administration's Nuclear Non Proliferation Act in 1978. Israel was interested in developing its own civilian nuclear infrastructure, but was more attentive in keeping Dimona unsafeguarded and, hence, refused any demands to open it for inspection. From 1958 to 1974, Israel prioritised above all other nuclear related considerations, its ability to maintain the Dimona reactor as an unsafegaurded reactor, and this prime directive has survived to this day.

+ What lies ahead? Canada’s engagement with the Middle East Peace Process and the Palestinians: an Introduction (2021 - T&F)

Jeremy Wildeman & Emma Swan, Canadian Foreign Policy Journal, Volume 27, 2021 - Issue 1

Introduction

• The year 2020 will be remembered for dramatic global events that brought to light both the precariousness of the existing world order and perils in its nature. Everywhere norms seem to be being challenged and social inequalities becoming more pronounced. The future well-being of hundreds-of-millions of people and the stability of entire regions are in question. For the first time in living memory, the Global North appears to be at the mercy to a calamitous event – a pandemic – that has wreaked havoc across the Global South. It already seems inevitable that 2020 will be remembered as a rare historical inflection point where the world changed irrevocably.
• Events contributing to that inflection point include the United Kingdom’s formal withdrawal from the European Union (Brexit), the World Health Organisation (WHO) officially declaring COVID-19 a pandemic, the polarizing United States presidential election, unprecedented curbs on civil liberties, and global protests such as ones for democracy in Hong Kong, for political change in Belarus, and against racism and police brutality in the United States. In addition, and as is often the case, many of the most important events of 2020 were centred on the Middle East. These include a Saudi-Russian oil price war that contributed to a collapse in the price of crude, a collapsing Lebanese economy and the devastating Beirut port disaster, the ongoing threat from violent Islamists, Turkey’s continuing intervention in Kurdish regions of northern Syria and Iraq, conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and ongoing, catastrophic civil wars in Libya, Syria and Yemen.
• These were all taking place parallel to larger geopolitical struggles. One pitted Turkey, Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood, against Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt. Another prominent point of contestation is between Iran and its non-state allies, like Lebanese Hizballah, Iraqi Kata'ib Hizballah and Yemeni Huthis, against the United States, Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. That struggle threatened more than once to (d)evolve into a broader regional war following the United States’ 2018 withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear accord and a policy of “maximum pressure” wielded against Iran; the United States’ high profile assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in Iraq to start 2020; the sabotage of numerous Iranian nuclear and scientific installations in the summer of 2020; and the killing of the head of Iran’s scientific nuclear program, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, during American Thanksgiving. That struggle is also indicative of the unprecedentedly open partnership between Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, Europe continued to invest billions of dollars in regional programming in search of stability in its Southern Neighbourhood and to keep refugees outside its borders, while Russia and China continued to take advantage of increasing United States retrenchment from a region it has dominated.
• In light of the events outlined above, what better time to take stock and reflect on Canada’s historical, contemporary and future engagement in the Middle East, than through one of its primary entry points to the region, the Middle East Peace Process (MEPP) and the Palestinians? This thematic special issue offers an overview of Canada’s relationships and role in this key part of the Middle East. The articles herein consider how Canada has articulated and actioned policy towards the Palestinians, the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, and the peace process, from the 1950s to the present day. It explores how Canadian policy in these areas materialized, both theoretically and in practice, and what this means for Canada in the region moving forward.
• As has been the case since the end of the Second World War, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict continued to occupy a central position in regional political dynamics in 2020. On January 28th the Trump Administration’s much anticipated Peace to Prosperity: A Vision to Improve the Lives of the Palestinian and Israeli People (White House, Citation2020) was released. This was that Administration’s stab at an Israeli-Palestinian political settlement, which has long occupied an important place in United States foreign policy. Also known as “Trump’s Peace Plan” or, with Trumpian flair, “The Deal of the Century” (Inskeep, Citation2020), this plan represented a radical departure from past United States policy. It appeared specifically to eschew foundational principles undergirding the MEPP. That included appearing to side with Israeli claims over sovereignty of the entirety of Jerusalem, annexation of large swathes of the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) and against the legal status of millions of Palestinian refugees. Under Peace to Prosperity, the Palestinians would be left with limited autonomy on a scattering of isolated bantustans whose composure is often referred to in diplomatic circles as resembling the holes in “Swiss cheese.” The details of the plan are in fact so one-sided, it has been referred to in some circles as a, “unilateral statement of the terms for Palestinian surrender” (see Viveash’s article in this issue for a broader discussion of the plan). It could reasonably be argued it is the most one-sided proposal for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since proposals began to be made under British colonial rule nearly a hundred years ago.
• Peace to Prosperity was also remarkable for its profound ignorance of the historical and contemporary issues related to the MEPP, and in particular issues fundamental to the Palestinian cause, such as: their aspirations toward national self-determination, a sense of injustice over the original partition of historical Palestine in 1948, a population half-of-which has been forced to live stateless without protection as refugees, and a feeling of abandonment by the international community. In return, the plan sought to placate Palestinians with modest economic promises in return for their giving up on their rights (Amnesty, Citation2020); a path long trodden when United States administrations try to maintain the status quo. This was proposed while the United States punished the Palestinians by withdrawing hundreds-of-millions of dollars in annual aid appropriations, intrinsic to meeting Palestinian and refugee needs (MEMO, Citation2021). The United States was wielding aid as a tool to force Palestinians to accede to the new Trump Administration “peace” model in an economy that has been made dependent on foreign aid inflows (Amr, Citation2018), following decades of well-documented “de-development” of the Palestinian economy under Israeli rule (Nakhleh, Citation2004; Roy, Citation1995, Citation1999; Tartir & Seidel, Citation2018; Tartir, Dana, & Seidel, Citation2021).
• Peace to Prosperity proved controversial among the international community and even among Israelis (Lazaroff, Citation2020a), given its one-sided nature and how it seemed to guarantee the end of a two-state solution that all internationally legitimate Israeli-Palestinian peace plans have been based upon. This should not be unexpected for a Trump Administration that was not shy to court controversy and often proved challenging to work with for perhaps the closest and most loyal ally of the United States, Canada. Just as with the North American Free Trade Agreement (now the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement) and its economic rivalry with China, the Trump Administration’s approach to Israeli-Palestinian peacebuilding was one of many important factors that further challenged Canada’s ability to cling to a rules-based order while maintaining its post-World War II-tethering to United States global leadership.

Historical ties to the Middle East that define Canada as a country

• Despite limited scholarship on Canada and the Middle East, the region is important to Canada. Since 1947, Canada has not only been an actor in the Middle East, but at times an important one (Dekar, Citation1987, p. 2). Already in the 1980s some leading scholars, like Abu-Laban, went so far to describe the Middle East as a traditional area of concern for Canada (Abu-Laban, Citation1988, p. 116), a view which seemed to be reinforced in government circles at that time (Stanfield, Citation1980). Those connections include demographic linkages that have only grown since the 1980s. Now over one million Canadians identify as Arab (Statistics Canada, Citation2017). Likewise, there are notable Kurdish, Armenian-, Turkish-, Israeli- and Iranian-Canadian communities. The majority of the professed faiths in Canada are of Abrahamic derivation, which for millions of Canadians creates a natural sense of connection to the “Holy Land.” This is relevant for Canada’s dominant Christian denominations, a sizable and established Jewish community, and a rapidly growing Muslim one. Canada has consequential foreign policy ties to the region, too. As the articles in this journal describe, that includes to the MEPP and to the Palestinians. In fact, engagement with the region has been so impactful on Canada that it has shaped Canada’s very identity as a state independent from the British Empire, just as Canadians shaped the future composure of Israel and Palestine at the partition of British Mandatory Palestine. Indeed, it would be hard to envisage Canada’s international identity without the Middle East.

Canada: the Foundation of Israel and Suez Crisis

• Canada’s early engagement with the Middle East was limited and done mostly in service of the interests of the British Empire. Arguably, and leaving religious connectedness aside, Canadians had in that time shown little concern for the region, with one exception when, as Eayrs in 1957 wrote, “Some quickening of interest may be discerned since 1945, chiefly because of Canada's role as midwife’s helper at the birth of the state of Israel” (p. 97). There, Canada and powerful Canadians played intrinsic roles in the partition of what was British Mandatory Palestine. Supreme Court of Canada Justice (1943–59), Ivan C. Rand, was central in drafting a 1947 United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) Majority Report, which proposed partitioning the land into separate Jewish and Palestinian states, with a slight majority of the land being awarded to the minority Jewish community (Khalidi, Citation1997, p. 11). This concept of partition has dominated most peace models to this day. Rand was also credited with bringing UNSCOP to adopt the Majority Report, as opposed to an UNSCOP Minority Report that called for a federal state (United Nations General Assembly, Citation1947). Another high level diplomat and future Prime Minister of Canada (1963–68), Lester B. Pearson, was chairman of the United Nations sub-committee responsible for establishing UNSCOP (Husseini, Citation2008, p. 41). He played a lead role in partition and the subsequent recognition of Israel as a state at the United Nations; while Canada recognized Israel in December 1948. As a result, “Zionists were so grateful to Canada and to Mr. Pearson for the part he played in the whole process that they called him ‘the Balfour of Canada’” (Report on Canada’s Relations with the Countries of the Middle East and North Africa, Citation1985, p. 49). Zionism represents the ideological organizing principles behind the establishment of the state of Israel. The comparison to British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour was praise of the highest magnitude, for it was Balfour who in 1917 made the “Balfour Declaration” on behalf of the British government, promising the Jewish people a national home in what was Ottoman Palestine (Balfour, Citation1917).
• Canadian interest toward the broader Middle East was aroused following the Suez Crisis in 1956, when Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal almost immediately after achieving full independence from the British Empire. The Canal was long a strategic transit point of global importance and had been dominated by British and French investors, and workers, since the era of British colonial rule (1882–1956). Britain and France thus conspired with Israel to provoke a military conflict with Egypt, to create the pretext for Britain and France to invade with the excuse of bringing order and peace “back” to the region. The true intention of the aggressor’s was to put an end to Egypt’s nationalization process and dispose of its anti-colonialist, pan-Arab nationalist President, Gamal Abdel Nasser (1956–70) (Scott, Citation1996, p. 27). The old tricks of once-Great Powers had though no place in the new world order and the operation happened to the dismay not only of the Egyptian people, but international public opinion and the world’s new Superpowers, the Soviet Union and United States.
• Most nations around the world sided with Egypt, and the Soviet Union even threatened to use nuclear weapons. The United States was furious it had not been consulted in advance, with President Eisenhower threatening to throw Britain and France out of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and to sell off Sterling Bonds. The sale could have crashed the United Kingdom economy not long after a Second World War that left Britain broke. For Canada, this confrontation was extremely concerning because it threatened to undo the special transatlantic alliance that had developed between the United States and United Kingdom in winning the war. This was also a period of transition for Canada. The Suez Crisis came at a time when it was moving away from its historical role as loyal colony of Britain, to deepening ties with a new patron in the United States (Husseini, Citation2008, p. 43). For this reason, few events as the Suez Crisis would arouse as much anxiety in Canada since the Second World War (Eayrs, Citation1957, p. 102). As a matter of national foreign policy priority, Canada sprang into action in search of devising a way to maintain harmony in the transatlantic alliance by helping Britain to abandon its intentions for Egypt, while defusing the conflict in the Middle East and the United States’ displeasure with the United Kingdom. Secretary of State for External Affairs (SSEA) (1948–57), Pearson would do this by proposing the world’s first large-scale United Nations peacekeeping force.
• Pearson, a former president of the United Nations General Assembly 7th session (1952–53), had worked tirelessly over the years to strengthen the influence of the world body. If not for Soviet vetoes, he may have become its Secretary-General. Working in 1956 with the actual Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjöld, Pearson sought to defuse the crisis by proposing a United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) to be stationed in Egypt and police the area, providing a way for Israel, France and the United Kingdom to withdraw with minimal loss of face and for Britain to preserve its close relationship with the United States. The invading countries’ troops would be replaced by UNEF forces, whose 6,000 person target strength, achieved by February 1957 (First United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF I) – Background (Full Text), Citationn.d.), was built around a core 1,100 Canadian troop deployment (Eayrs, Citation1957, p. 102).
• There had been much debate in Canada over the correct course of action. Many loyalists, notably in the Progressive Conservative Party, were adamant about supporting the United Kingdom in its time of need. Pearson himself assured the Canadian public that the solution to the Suez Crisis had been sought out by Britain and actually worked in its favor (Lester Pearson & the Suez Crisis 2, Citationn.d.). Meanwhile, there was almost unanimous acceptance in Canada of its newfound importance in world affairs, deriving from Pearson’s peacebuilding innovation. The achievement earned him a Nobel Peace Prize in 1957 and ushered in what is considered the “Golden Age” of Pearsonian diplomacy, which came to define Canada’s national identity on the world stage. There, Canada was perceived as an even-handed and fair-minded “peacemonger,” willing to leave its place in the western European camp in order to act as an interlocutor facilitating discussions that bridged the divide between communist East and capitalist West, and Global North and Global South (McKercher, Citation2014, p. 329).

Support for Israel and pragmatic multilateralism

• In this Golden Age of Canadian diplomacy in the 1950s and 1960s, Canadian leadership considered international bodies like the United Nations, NATO and British Commonwealth to be intrinsic to Canada’s security and national interests. That connection to those multilateral bodies became embedded in what we know as the Pearsonian approach to foreign policy. Through them, Canada felt it could play a more significant and independent role in world affairs, allowing it to “punch above its weight,” and this drove Canada to constructively contribute to the well-being of those bodies. Canadian leaders like Pearson and Progressive Conservative Prime Minister John Diefenbaker (1957–63) also understood they were living in a rapidly changing world (McKercher, Citation2014). With decolonization under way, global politics was becoming rapidly less European in character, and this would have a significant impact on international institutions like the United Nations and Commonwealth. By 1961, African, Asian, and Latin American members constituted two-thirds of the United Nations General Assembly. Decolonization in Africa and Asia transformed power relations in these organizations and placed racial discrimination at the top of their agendas. This was an important shift for Palestinians because decolonization was the prism through which the Global South perceived the Palestinian cause.
• Diefenbaker was concerned about holding together a majority non-white Commonwealth, which he considered to be a force for good in the world. He felt Canada could not afford to sit back when crises arose in the international community over racial and postcolonial injustice. Worried that newly independent countries embittered against their former Imperial sovereigns in the capitalist West were susceptible to influence from a Soviet bloc that presented itself as a champion of decolonization, he, as well as Pearson, positioned Canada to become sensitive to the aspirations of the non-European peoples of the Global South. They went so far as to vote with the Global South at the United Nations even on positions Canada found unpalatable (McKercher, Citation2014, p. 336); while championing the universality of human rights (ibid, p. 330); something anathematic to the racist logic colonialism was built upon. This approach was evident when Canadian leaders stepped in during the Suez Crisis, concerned that, in addition to disrupting the transatlantic alliance, it could undermine the Commonwealth by pitting the white former dominions against the rest of its non-European membership.
• By the mid-1960s the Middle East had become an important space for the formation of a Canadian national identity and “Pearsonianism” (Labelle, Citation2019, pp. 172–173). At the same time, Ottawa made “Israel’s right to exist and prosper” a key tenet of Canadian diplomacy, even if this led many to declare Canada, “3/4 impartial on the Israeli side” (ibid, p. 173). Though that contributed to Canada being a notable supporter of Israel, this support was not unflinching. Canada had opposed Israel’s acquisition of territory from Egypt – including the Gaza Strip – during the Suez Crisis in 1956 and also opposed Israel’s acquisition of the OPT – the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza Strip – by force in the 1967 Six-Day War. For this reason, Canada backed United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 (S/RES/242), which called for Israeli withdrawal from occupied territories and a negotiated settlement among the warring parties. Canada was also one of the earliest and largest providers of Palestinian aid. From 1950 to 1969, Canada was the third largest contributor to the United Nations Refugee and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) (Forsythe, Citation1971, p. 39). UNRWA’s first Commissioner General in 1949 was also a Canadian, Major General Howard Kennedy (External Affairs and International Trade Canada, Citation1993b, p. 11).
• Still, Arabs were growing frustrated with Canada during this period, and criticized Pearson’s self-proclaimed “even-handedness” because it seemed to favor Israeli actions at the expense of Arab human dignity (Labelle, Citation2019, p. 171). Even though Canada still saw itself as able to play the peacekeeper role, which requires a sense of neutrality, there was a,
  • [C]ertain resistance from Arab states to what they perceived to be the lack of balance in Canada’s approach – on the one hand, a deep commitment to the state of Israel with no parallel commitment to the rights of Palestinians to a homeland, and on the other, its minimal relations and trade with the Arab states of the area. (Report on Canada’s Relations with the Countries of the Middle East and North Africa, Citation1985, p. 50)
• As Palestinians pursued their claims for self-determination, this still did not figure as a major element in either S/RES/242 or Canadian policy, other than as, “amorphous ‘refugees’ in need of a ‘just settlement’ to their plight” (Brynen, Citation2007, p. 74). By 1967 and 1973, Egypt was at odds with Canada over UNEF and especially Canada’s presence in it. As a result, in 1973 during the Arab oil embargo of nations perceived to be pro-Israel, shipments to Canada were cut by 22 percent as it was classified as a “neutral” country that was generally pro-Israel in its policies (Report on Canada’s Relations with the Countries of the Middle East and North Africa, Citation1985, p. 51). This was at a time when Arab oil accounted for 25 percent of Canadian imports (Report on Canada’s Relations with the Countries of the Middle East and North Africa, Citation1985, p. 51).
• Canada’s image took a particular turn for the worse when in 1979 a short-lived Joe Clark Progressive Conservative government came to power with a campaign pledge to move Canada’s embassy to Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which would effectively recognize Israeli conquest of 1967 OPT territory by force. Such a one-sided move provoked a Saudi-led a regional backlash from the Arab world. That in turn led to the appointment of former Progressive Conservative Party leader (1967–76), Robert L Stanfield, as “Special Representative of the Government of Canada Respecting the Middle East and North Africa,” who almost immediately recommended Canada return to a more fair-minded and constructive Middle East policy (Stanfield, Citation1980).

Canada and the Middle East Peace Process

• The Jerusalem Embassy crisis exposed a fault line in Canadian politics, as well as amongst those who took an interest in the Middle East. However, Stanfield’s recommendations and follow-up by the Clark government, and then successive PE Trudeau Liberal (1980–84), Brian Mulroney Progressive Conservative (1984–93) and Jean Chrétien Liberal (1993–2003) governments, would represent what many considered a return to a more traditional Pearsonian approach to global affairs. The process of making this return, described by Robinson in this collection, would position Canada to become an important and potentially constructive actor in the Middle East, this time through the United States-led Oslo Peace Process at the center of the MEPP. Thus, Canada was one of only twelve countries invited at the foreign ministerial level to the White House in 1993 for the signing ceremony of the Oslo I accord, which External Affairs said (at the time) reflected Canada’s credentials earned over forty-five years from its commitment to the Middle East and its having, “consistently kept the door open to all parties in the region” (External Affairs and International Trade Canada, Citation1993a, p. 2). This approach allowed Canada to take on important leadership roles in some of the most sensitive political aspects of the peace process, such as acting as the Gavel holder (chair) of the Refugee Working Group (1992–96) and becoming the sponsor of the Ottawa Track II Process (1997–2000).
• By 1993, the Government of Canada would state, “Canada has strongly supported the State of Israel since its foundation in 1948 and is firmly committed to that country’s well-being as an independent state in the Middle East, within secure and recognised boundaries” (External Affairs and International Trade Canada, Citation1993b, p. 18). Yet, that did not mean Canada supported Israel’s claim over parts of the OPT, including East Jerusalem. Canada’s position in November 1993 was, and save for the last sentence, largely remains,
  • Canada does not recognise permanent Israeli control over the territories occupied in 1967 (the Golan Heights, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip) and opposes all unilateral actions intended to predetermine the outcome of negotiations, including the establishment of settlements in the territories and unilateral moves to annex East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. Canada considers such actions to be contrary to international law and unproductive to the peace process. (External Affairs and International Trade Canada, Citation1993b, p. 22)
• Though no longer in the top-three of donors to UNRWA, by 1993, the Government of Canada estimated it had provided a total of $202 million to the United Nations organization (External Affairs and International Trade Canada, Citation1993b, p. 16).
• Even after Conversative Prime Minister Stephen Harper (2006–15) embraced a partisan pro-Israel approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict, Canada remained quite engaged with the Palestinians as one of the international community’s top sources of Palestinian development aid (Wildeman, Citation2018, p. 154; 2020). In fact, of the over $CAD 1 billion in aid Canada spent on the Palestinians between the 1996/97 and 2018/19 financial years (Wildeman, Citation2020), the Harper government still accounts more than half of that spending. Under the Harper government, Canada also continued – though perhaps reluctantly and below the proverbial “radar” of Cabinet – to support the Jerusalem Old City Initiative (JOCI), a research project aimed, “at providing practical and fair solutions to the Old City of Jerusalem, one of the most contentious and significant issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” (University of Windsor, Citationn.d.).
• The JOCI was a sort of spiritual successor, on a smaller scale, to the political work Canada had supported under the Mulroney and Chrétien governments. It was an unofficial, but government funded “Track II” project designed to provide ideas for the resolution of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians over Jerusalem’s Walled Old City and the overlapping holy sites it contains. Established by three recently retired Canadian diplomats – Michael James Molloy, Michael Dougall Bell and John Bell – near the end of the Chrétien government – in October 2003 – JOCI employed a combination of workshops, commissioned studies and intensive consultations involving Israeli, Palestinian and international peace negotiators and subject matter experts, to develop ideas for a “special regime” to manage the most sensitive aspects of the Old City. Between 2003 and 2012, JOCI working groups worked out in-depth proposals for the governance and security of the Old City and its Holy Sites under a neutral (third party) administrator overseen by a governance board (Molloy, Citation2021). The design work included suggestions for an international police force, access to the holy sites, coordination of religious events, archaeology, property transfer, dispute resolution, planning and zoning, utilities and an economic framework (ibid.). The JOCI’s proposals were widely disseminated to policy communities in Israel, the Palestinian Authority/ Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), the Middle East, the European Union and United States. According to Michael James Molloy, its documentation supported Secretary John Kerry’s final efforts to revive the peace process in the second term of the Obama Administration (Molloy, Citation2021).Footnote1
• By the early 2010s, the Harper government’s policy towards Israel and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict had become, “the ‘center of gravity’ of Canadian policy towards the broader Middle East, influencing Ottawa’s approach to the entire region” (Musu, Citation2012, p. 72). There the “Harper Doctrine” operated, in part, on a belief that previous governments had wrongly “gone along to get along” with Israel’s critics on the world stage (Chapnick, Citation2016, p. 106). From another point of view, his Conservative government was specifically eschewing the approach taken by previous Liberal and Progressive Conservative governments of empathizing with Global Southern viewpoints in Middle East affairs. It also reflected what Chapnick (Citation2016) refer to as Harper’s “visceral feeling that dogmatically supporting” Israeli interests was simply the right thing to do, regardless of its political cost, irrespective of the number of Conservative members of Parliament seated in the House of Commons and even sometimes without consideration for the expressed concerns of Israelis themselves (Ibid). As described by several articles in this collection, this contributed to a shift in Canadian voting patterns at the United Nations from somewhat sympathetic for the Palestinians – a prevalent viewpoint in the international community – to an overtly pro-Israel stance. This has left Canada voting ever since with a tiny group of states on issues related to Israel and Palestine, that could be counted on two hands, such as Australia, Israel, the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, Nauru and the United States (United Nations, Citation2020).

The Middle East Peace Process today

• Nearly three decades since Canada’s involvement in the MEPP began and nearly a year since the release of the flagrantly biased Peace to Prosperity, today many have proclaimed the MEPP to be either moribund or, at best, on life support (see Viveash commentary in this collection). In addition to a collapse of the peace process, Palestinians are facing a crisis in leadership with generally low confidence in the Palestinian Authority (Survey Research Unit, Citation2018, Citation2020). Adding to the breakdown in the MEPP and domestic politics, 2020 ushered in a new wrecking ball: COVID-19. At the time of writing this introduction, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have handled the COVID-19 virus remarkably well compared to states that enjoy more freedom and have many more resources to draw from. This is despite early fears that the virus would wreak devastation on a population rendered generally quite vulnerable by an occupation that deprives them of the resources they need to deal with any crisis (Tartir & Hawari, Citation2020). From a more cynical point of view, Palestinians are also a population that has for generations become accustomed to strict lockdowns (Ayyash, Citation2020). So, they were arguably more prepared for what fighting COVID-19 would entail.
• Success at containing the virus did earn Palestinian Prime Minister Shtayyeh and the Palestinian Authority some early domestic accolades after they acted quickly and early, declaring a state of emergency on March 5th (Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, Citation2020). In fact, their approach was effective enough internally that the early primary source for COVID-19 transmissions ended up being Palestinian workers returning from Israeli construction areas (Tartir & Hawari, Citation2020). Still, the full impact of how COVID-19 will play out is to be seen and the expectation Western countries will be struggling with their own domestic economic situation suggests aid assistance to the OPT could diminish in the years to come. This could carry significant unforeseen political implications on an often aid-reliant economy.
• The status of Peace to Prosperity is meanwhile uncertain. Trump lost the November 2020 United States election, won by a Biden Administration that is likely to re-embrace many of the underlying tenets of the MEPP, such as support for Palestinian refugees and the two-state solution (Magid & Boxerman, Citation2021). At the same time, it is unlikely to expend significant political capital on Israel-Palestine peacebuilding owing to other significant domestic priorities. Pushback from Europe and international public opinion (Lovatt, Citation2020), did however lead the Netanyahu government in Israel to put de jure annexation of 30 percent of the OPT on hold (Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, Citation2020). In return and as a public reward, the United Arab Emirates offered to normalize relations with Israel through the Abraham Accords.
• This would be a breakthrough for Israel, which had only normalized relations in the region with Jordan (1994) and Egypt (1978). This was also an opportunity for Israel and the Emirates to become public with their unofficial working relationship, which it had been difficult to be open about in the past given how strong sympathies were, and remain, in the Arab world for the Palestinians cause (El-Kurd, Citation2020). For example, Egypt was once suspended from the Arab League (1979–89) for first making peace with Israel, and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was assassinated in 1981 over his role in normalizing relations. Meanwhile, the 1994 agreement with Jordan remains unpopular in a country where the status of the OPT and Palestinian statehood are treated as “high” national security issues (Badarin, Citation2020).
• Bahrain would soon follow the Emirates at normalization, almost certainly at the behest of their Saudi patrons (Najjar, Citation2020), and on 15th September 2020 they participated in an Abraham Accords signing ceremony on the White House Lawn, alongside the Emirates, United States and Israel. Sudan and Morocco have since joined the Accords, and all actors did this in return for goods provided by the United States. For the Emirates, this included being allowed to purchase the most modern F-35 fighter jets (Wrigley, Citation2020); for Sudan, being removed from the American state sponsor of terrorism listing; and the United States recognized Morocco’s occupation and annexation of the Western Sahara, at the expense of the native Sahrawi people (Goldberg, Citation2020; Jakes, Citation2020).
• Polling indicates Palestinians overwhelmingly rejected a process of normalization which they perceive as occurring at their expense, with a majority describing it as a betrayal (Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, Citation2020). The Accords indeed represent a break from the 2002 Saudi-led Arab Peace Initiative that, like the MEPP and S/RES/242, put forth a land-for-peace formula proposing Palestinian statehood in the West Bank and Gaza Strip (with East Jerusalem as its capital) in exchange for Arab normalization of relations with Israel. By contrast, the Abraham Accords appear to trade away Palestinian land and rights, in exchange for limited Arab-Israeli détente.
• For its part, the Netanyahu government has not backed away from its annexation plans. For one, it has continued to approve the construction of thousands of new settlement homes in the OPT (Staff & AFP, Citation2020). Second, it suggested on numerous occasions that annexation is only temporarily on hold. For instance, Israel’s Ambassador to both the United Nations and the United States, Gilad Erdan, explicitly stated that annexation may still happen (T.O.I. Staff, Citation2020), while Netanyahu himself suggested annexation is still on the proverbial table (Lazaroff, Citation2020b). Even United States Ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, was quoted as saying annexation had not been canceled (Abu Toameh, Citation2020).
• While Palestinians may perceive the Abraham Accords as a betrayal, the Trudeau government celebrated the agreement (Global Affairs Canada, Citation2020b), describing it as a historic and positive step toward peace and security (Global Affairs Canada, Citation2020a). As with the Netanyahu government, the Accords were a welcome opportunity for Canada to escape from a tricky political situation. Despite Canada’s muted public response to annexation (Dyer, Citation2020), it posed a threat to international law and the rules-based international order the Trudeau government has promised to reinforce (Sands & Carment, Citation2019). Formal annexation may have forced Canada to take a stronger stance against it or risk consequences for its international image by remaining silent. As such, Minister of Foreign Affairs Champagne would state the Government of Canada was pleased Israel had announced its decision to suspend annexation of parts of the West Bank and that,
  • As a friend and ally of Israel and a friend to the Palestinian people, Canada remains strongly committed to a two-state solution, including the creation of a Palestinian state living side-by-side in peace and security with Israel, and a comprehensive, just and lasting peace. (Global Affairs Canada, Citation2020a)
• The threat annexation posed for Canada’s foreign policy is not light speculation. As happened in 1979 and is described by Wildeman in this collection, Canada’s Israel-Palestine policies impact on how Canada does business in the Middle East and on its foreign affairs more broadly, for example, in fora such as the United Nations.
• In 2020, Canada was competing for two open seats on the United Nations Security Council against two smaller competitors, Ireland and Norway, which are known for their constructive engagement in world affairs and robust development aid budgets. Since Canada last competed unsuccessfully for a seat in 2010, Ireland and Norway have consistently had a foreign policy record that is more in line with international law and support for human rights for Israel-Palestine, as compared to Canada, which had one of the worst. That matters in a United Nations General Assembly that is dominated by nations of the Global South, which often identify with and advocate for Palestinians. Once seemingly a lock for election to the body because of its past commitment to multilateralism, the unthinkable happened when Canada lost to Portugal and Germany in its 2010 bid for a seat, ending a streak of sitting on the council once per decade (“CBC”, Citation2010). That loss was blamed in part on the Harper Conservative government’s shift in Middle East policy from one perceived as being fair-minded toward all actors in the region, to being partisan pro-Israel (“CBC”, Citation2010).
• Despite a rhetorical shift by the Trudeau government promising a return to a traditional Pearsonian approach, which the Harper government had specifically rejected, the gap between image and reality has been so gaping that questions abounded among Canadians themselves if Canada was even worthy of its bid for the seat (Kimber & Kirk, Citation2020). There was even an energetic campaign led by Canadian civil society groups against their own country’s bid. That campaign attracted supporters that included over one hundred organizations and international personalities, such as Noam Chomsky and former Pink Floyd guitarist Roger Waters (also see Spitka’s commentary in this collection). One of the campaign’s key arguments was,
  • Since 2000 Canada has voted against 166 UN General Assembly resolutions critical of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Ireland and Norway haven’t voted against a single one of these resolutions. Additionally, Ireland and Norway have voted yes 251 and 249 times respectively on resolutions related to Palestinian rights during this period. Canada has managed 87 yes votes, but only two since 2010. (Just Peace Advocates, Citation2020)
• The campaign raised so much concern that Canada’s Ambassador to the United Nations felt compelled to write a letter to his fellow Ambassadors addressing it (Blanchard, Citation2020). Whatever impact the campaign and issue of Palestine had, it was a remarkable affair and Canada lost its 2020 bid even more handily than in 2010.

Articles in this special edition

• This special issue fills a gap in the academic literature on Canada’s relationship to the Palestinians, while adding to the limited scholarship on Canada’s approach to the MEPP and Middle East generally. Moreover, this issue is unique in that it brings together scholarly articles from the academy, as well as pieces by Canadian diplomats and other civil servants deeply involved in representing Canada and its approach to the MEPP. These past and present foreign policy officials offer first-hand accounts of the “front lines” of Canadian diplomacy in the region.
• By bringing together the intellectual reflections of these diverse contributors, who altogether have extensive firsthand experience with the topic being explored, this collection provides a holistic look that will be useful to Canadian officials considering new ways of engaging in the region. Much has been written about the divide in scholar-practitioner interactions. This critique rests on grievances from both sides: with scholars accusing policymakers of falling short in applying context specific decision-making, failing to universally uphold the Government’s commitments, and lacking in-depth theoretical rigor; while policy makers and practitioners accuse scholars of failing to provide policy relevant recommendations from their often-hypercritical theorizing and ivory tower navel-gazing. As Bertucci, Borges-Herrero & Fuentes-Julio (Citation2014) argue, “scholars and practitioners in this field tend to talk past each other, with little impact in either direction” (p. 56). This thematic special issue, however, offers a different approach. By bringing together the practitioner’s emphasis on experience and the scholar’s emphasis on theory and research, the fruits of their interaction paints a more informed, well-rounded picture of Canadian engagement. While each tackles a unique and important facet of Canadian foreign policy, these research articles and policy commentaries work together to argue for a more consistent articulation and application of Canadian foreign policy vis-à-vis the Palestinians, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the MEPP.
• Former Canadian diplomats, Michael Molloy, Andrew Robinson, and David Viveash offer readers a chance to “peak behind the curtain” of Canadian foreign policy through three key historical moments, respectively: the admittance of Palestinian refugees in 1955–1956, Canada’s policy toward the PLO and recognition of Palestinian self-determination in 1989, and Canada’s involvement in the Madrid Peace Process in 1991 and subsequent role in the MEPP.
• Michael Molloy served as the Canadian Coordinator of the Middle East Peace Process (2000–2003), was the Ambassador of Canada to Jordan from 1996 to 2000, a founding member of the Multilateral Refugee Working Group, and Co-Director of the Jerusalem Old City Initiative. In his policy commentary, “False Start: Canada’s Resettlement of Palestinian Refugees, 1955–1956,” Molloy sheds new light and offers new analysis on the details of an unusual 1956 Palestinian refugee movement to Canada, describing important historical processes and events around Palestinian refugees that are relevant to this day. This includes the centrality refugees will play in the success of any peace process, and Canada’s early experiences and former emphasis on that issue. His article also provides context for the way in which race and identity have helped shape Canadians’ views of immigration and foreign policy.
• During his time as a 36-year career diplomat, Andrew Robinson served as Chairperson to the Refugee Working Group, and Director General and Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process (1995–2000). He also served at the Canadian diplomatic mission in Beirut during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Speaking with first-hand experience and intimate familiarity, in his policy commentary, “Talking with the PLO: Overcoming Political Challenges,” Robinson outlines the Canadian domestic and international events surrounding SSEA Joe Clark’s announcement that Canada would, in 1989, recognize the Palestinian right to self-determination. Likewise, Canada chose to lift remaining restrictions on dialogue with the PLO, which would allow Canada to open formal dialogue with them and thus be able to contribute to international peacebuilding efforts. These were controversial moves, but were vital in setting the stage for Canada to play an active and constructive role in the multilateral track of the Madrid Peace Process, and were in Canada’s national interests.
• Robinson’s piece segues into David Viveash’s policy commentary where he raises the important question, “Has President Trump Killed the Middle East Peace Process?” There Viveash, the Deputy Head of Mission at the Canadian Embassy to Israel (1995–1998) and the Canadian Representative to the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah from (2006–2008), reviews the evolution of the Madrid Peace Process since 1991 through subsequent decades of the MEPP, placing particular emphasis on lessons learned from Canada’s role in the multilateral negotiations. After reviewing Canada’s initial response to Peace to Prosperity, Viveash considers ways in which Canada might influence the debate going forward and ponders if the Trump Administration’s proposal may finally have marked the end of the MEPP.
• In “Assessing Canada’s foreign policy approach to the Palestinians and Israeli-Palestinian Peacebuilding, 1979–2019,” Dr Jeremy Wildeman, a research fellow at the Human Rights Resource and Education Centre, University of Ottawa, and a Middle East research analyst with nearly a decade of experience as a development practitioner in the West Bank, describes how Canada has two different approaches it may adopt at different times in its Middle East foreign policy towards the Israel-Palestine conflict. One is considered a more traditional and fair-minded “Pearsonian” approach, which is centred on multilateralism, and where Canada seeks to build bridges and peace by acting as an interlocutor between its Western allies and countries in the Global South/ Middle East. The other is a more partisan, “Harperian” approach, which is centered on bilateral relationships built on a foundation of (perceived) shared values with “like-minded” Western democracies. That approach is taken at the expense of states or non-state groups like the Palestinians, usually from the Global South, who are not considered like-minded.
• In his article, “The International Community’s Role and Impact on the Middle East Peace Process,” pracademic Dr Michael Atallah, a Senior Middle East Analyst at the Privy Council Office of the Government of Canada argues – in a personal capacity – that foreign donors to the Palestinians, including Canada, have played a lead role in shaping and maintaining a turbulent status quo in Israel-Palestine, while propping up global consensus for a near moribund two-state solution. This is tied to their failure to challenge their own assumptions and to adapt to changing realities as the conditions necessary for peace deteriorated around them. This led to a gaping chasm between theoretical aims for peace-building and what was actually happening. This, he maintains, resulted in a process that ultimately undermines peace while permanently damaging the credibility of the international community. He further argues this pushed Palestinians further away from the prospect of self-determination, while allowing Israel to maintain a status quo that endangers its own long-term security.
• In their article, “Canada, the United Nations, and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” University of Ottawa Professor Costanza Musu and Cornell doctoral candidate Amelia Arsenault describe how Canada has articulated and pushed its views of Israel-Palestine at the United Nations, balancing between sometimes contradictory priorities. In offering this description, the authors note that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has long occupied a central place in Canada’s Middle East policy, and how Ottawa has seen itself as an “honest broker” in it. In the process, Musu and Arsenault offer a useful historical account of the lineage of Canada’s United Nations voting and foreign policy.
• In her article, “The Personal is Political!: Exploring the Limits of Canada’s Feminist International Assistance Policy Under Occupation and Blockade,” University of Ottawa doctoral candidate Emma Swan draws on her recent field research in the OPT and enters into a detailed discussion of Justin Trudeau’s Feminist International Assistance Policy, arguing that the technocratic and apolitical approach Canada adopts in its development and humanitarian interventions in the Gaza Strip is at odds with the Liberal government’s commitment to feminist-informed international assistance. This calls into question the extent to which the Trudeau government’s quixotic policy espouses fundamental feminist principles related to the political drivers of insecurity faced by women. Swan argues that for Gaza, this renders Canada’s assistance inadequate in addressing the most pressing political-structural factors driving aspects of women’s insecurity, such as Israeli occupation and blockade.
• As a former officer on the Middle East Desk for the now shuttered Canadian International Development Agency, University of Ottawa Professor Ruby Dagher fills an important void related to Canada’s role in the economic de-development of the OPT in her article, “Canada’s Economic Assistance to the OPT: Ideology, Politics, and Flawed Responses.” While providing a historical assessment of the economic challenges Palestinians have faced, Dagher argues that Canada’s actions, like that of other donors, have allowed and even contributed to Israel being able to undertake actions that come at a significant economic cost to the Palestinians. Those actions include undermining the possibility of Palestinian economic development and the emergence of a self-sustaining Palestinian economy. Dagher argues this stems from Canada’s unwillingness to engage with the real problems affecting Palestinians and a lack of political will to do something about them, perhaps owing to Canada’s close alignment with Israel.
• Finally, Dr Timea Spitka, is a senior fellow at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs and a research specialist of human security and of children in conflict, who has extensive practitioner’s experience, including in Israel-Palestine. She offers a policy commentary interrogating Canada’s image as a normative leader in human rights, human security and gender, versus its tendency to waver on those principles when applied to Israel. Spitka argues that taking sides has not helped to promote peace or reduce conflict, that the best route to security for Israel itself is peace and universal human security, and that Canada could re-engage as a constructive peacebuilder – if it so chose.
• Indeed, despite a pessimistic forecast about Canadian Middle East policy and regional peacebuilding among the contributions in this collection, the belief that Canada can, should and has done better is a unifying ideal interwoven among them.

Conclusion

• The Middle East has, and remains, important to Canada. Likewise, as many of the contributors to this special edition lay out, Canada has at times been able to play a constructive role in the region, and specifically in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There have been periods where Canada has either not been a constructive party or even been a part of the problem. This is not a simple foreign policy relationship.
• We need to note that the contributions in this special edition do not focus on the domestic politics of Israel-Palestine in Canada or Canada’s relationship with Israel. While some of the contributors touch upon those factors in their analysis, we make this caveat while recognizing that those issues have become deeply politicized and at times, strongly contested among Canadians. We also recognize the challenge of credibly addressing any aspect of Palestine, the MEPP or the Middle East in Canadian policy, given the career pressure academics face to avoid discussion of it (Bahdi, Citation2020; Selley, Citation2021; Zine, Bird, & Matthews, Citation2020). For that same reason, Canada’s Palestine, MEPP and Middle East policies are automatically rendered important topics for scholarly exploration.
• As the authors of this collection demonstrate, since the creation of the State of Israel and the genesis of the contemporary Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Canada has played an important role in seeking solutions to the issues most germane to the question of peace. It is clear from this thematic special issue that as a country, throughout the decades, Canada has often traversed a simplistic “pro-Israel”/“pro-Palestinian” divide, versus a more nuanced, people-centric approach. With many examples of inconsistencies in Canadian foreign policy addressing the Palestinians and the MEPP, and fewer examples of Canada providing laudable leadership in these areas, what remains stable is its sustained involvement in the region.
• Given its historical track record of involvement, it is safe to assume Palestine and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will continue to elicit attention and involvement on the part of the Canadian Government. The extraordinary events of 2020, including the release of Peace to Prosperity, may be a catalyst for Canada to redefine its policy towards the Palestinians and Israeli-Palestinian peacebuilding; there may even be signs of this taking place.

+ Talking with the PLO: Overcoming political challenges (2021 - T&F)

Andrew N. Robinson, Canadian Foreign Policy Journal, Volume 27, 2021 - Issue 1

Introduction

• Canada’s support for the principle of self-determination for the Palestinian people was reiterated in a vote at the UNGA in 2019 (and again in 2020), in what was characterized in the Canadian media in 2019 as a “significant” change of vote (Csillag Citation2019) – even though Canada had voted for a similar resolution between 1989 and 2006. So it was really just a reversion to form. But the first time Canada voted in favour of that resolution in 1989 was a real change, one which reflected a significant development of Canadian policy towards the PLO and the Israel-Palestine issue.
• Although the subject of Canada’s attitude towards the Palestinians and the domestic political influences on it has by no means been ignored in the literature on Canadian Middle East policy (Goldberg and Taras Citation1989, Lyon Citation1993), this policy commentary fills in details about two significant elements of the process: firstly, the beginning of a working-level dialogue with the PLO in 1980 and secondly, Canada’s acceptance of self-determination and the subsequent lifting of all restrictions on contact with the PLO in 1989. The author draws on his personal experience as an officer in External Affairs (now Global Affairs) directly involved in the development of Canada’s policy towards the PLO over the period 1980–1992. During this period Canadian policy moved from timid and limited contact, considered politically sensitive within Canada because of the PLO’s terrorist links, to one of recognition of the Palestinian right of self-determination. The role of the PLO in the civil war in Lebanon justified the posting of an officer to the Canadian Embassy in Beirut in 1980 to open up a dialogue on political and Embassy security issues, a dialogue which proved useful to Canada.
• During the 1970s the world had begun to move towards seeing the PLO as the relevant representative of the Palestinians, but Canada moved on this file more slowly than most, mainly because of partisan electoral considerations and also fear that recognition of a “right of self-determination” for the Palestinian people might be seen as reinforcing the arguments for Quebec independence. However, as the decade moved on, Canada’s reluctance to move further on the question of Palestinian national rights left it more and more isolated, until the 1988 statement by the Palestine National Council recognizing UN Security Council resolution 242 – which includes recognition of Israel’s right to exist in peace in the region – gave Canada an excuse to catch up to its usual international partners, including the United States. As a result of this change, Canada re-established its credentials with the Arab side as a fair-minded party on the Arab-Israeli issue, to the extent that at the Moscow Multilateral Conference in 1992, the PLO and Israel both accepted that Canada should assume leadership of the highly contentious Refugee Working Group in the Multilateral component of the Middle East Peace Process.

Growing recognition of the Palestinian cause

• In the 1960s and into the 1970s, for the most part, Canada did not have any substantive official dialogue with the PLO. There was a PLO representative attached to the Arab League Information Office in Ottawa from 1972, but the representative (Abdullah Abdullah) did not have any official contact with the Department of External Affairs. Canada’s reluctance was mainly due to the fact that the PLO was still seen primarily as a terrorist organization, and indeed in the 1970s and even into the 1980s the PLO did not accept Israel’s existence and continued to support a policy of “armed struggle” in various forms. This included high profile aircraft high-jackings and terrorist attacks by Palestinian organizations affiliated with the PLO, such as the attack on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972. However, the international community increasingly saw the PLO as an organization with a legitimate political role, and indeed the only Palestinian organization with the power and credibility to be the Palestinian party in an eventual peace process. In 1974, the PLO was accepted as a full member of the Arab league, and that same year the UNGA voted in favour of recognizing the PLO as an observer. Gradually, western European and like-minded states moved in the same direction. Indeed by June, 1980 the EU, traditionally somewhat ahead of Canada on these issues, was already calling in its Venice Declaration for recognition of the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people, including its right to self-determination, and for the association of the PLO in eventual negotiations (Venice Declaration, Citation1980).
• In Canada during the 1970’s there was increasing recognition at the political level of the necessity to take into account the issue of Palestinian national rights as a group, not just individual human rights. However, the whole issue of Canada’s policy stance respecting Palestine remained highly contentious (Bones, Citation1985; Noble, Citation1985). This was demonstrated, inter alia, by the decision (following a significant public outcry in Canada) to request postponement of a UN Conference scheduled to be held in Toronto in 1975, rather than to allow a PLO representative to attend (Bones, Citation1985), and by the 1979 promise of Joe Clark, leader of the Progressive Conservative party, to move the Canadian Embassy to Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a promise whose timing was largely motivated by electoral considerations (Flicker, Citation2002). (See also Wildeman’s contribution to this special edition of the CFPJ).
• Meanwhile, after being driven out of Jordan in 1971, the PLO leadership and armed forces transferred mainly to southern Lebanon. This upset the rather fine power balance which had existed in Lebanon between the various religious communities and contributed to the outbreak of civil war in 1975. Meanwhile, Canada was serving on the UN Security Council in 1977–78, and thus was very involved in the international response to Israel’s 1978 invasion of southern Lebanon which amongst other things led to the creation of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL).
• Ironically, although the Progressive Conservatives were able to form a minority government after the May 1979 election, Mr. Clark’s electoral promise respecting Jerusalem was to result in much more public attention to the actual situation in the Middle East. There was a significant outcry by Arab states and by Canadian business sectors, which led to Prime Minister Clark commissioning the Hon. Robert Stanfield to find a face-saving response to criticism of his Jerusalem embassy promise.Footnote1 Mr. Stanfield was asked to address not just the Jerusalem embassy issue but the whole question of Canada’s relations with the Middle East and North Africa. He and his team travelled extensively in the Middle East and also listened to presentations in Canada. In his report Mr. Stanfield noted that the recognition of the rights of the Palestinian people was a sine qua non for a negotiated solution, and that internationally the PLO was increasingly perceived as the only spokesman for the Palestinian people which enjoyed the support of a large and significant body of Palestinian opinion. He recommended therefore that despite the PLO’s ambiguous attitude towards Israel and terrorism, Canada should broaden contacts with it on issues affecting negotiations and the peace process, with a view to encouraging that organization towards greater moderation (Stanfield, Citation1980).
• Mr. Stanfield’s final report was presented just two days after the February 1980 election. Its recommendations included:
  • Canada should support the Palestinians’ right to a homeland as well as their rights to be heard and participate in the determination of their own future;
  • Canada should broaden contacts with the PLO on issues affecting negotiations and the peace process; and
  • To encourage moderation and conciliation we must be regarded as fair minded by the parties. (Stanfield, Citation1980, pp. 7, 10, 14).
• On March 3rd Prime Minister Clark resigned and Pierre Trudeau was appointed Prime Minister. The new government did not see a need or political advantage to comment upon the report. Nevertheless, Mr. Stanfield’s realistic appraisal of the situation in the region would help influence the tone and content of Canadian policy towards the Middle East region, including towards the PLO in the coming years.

The value of dialogue

• Encouraged by Mr. Stanfield’s recommendation on broadening contacts, the Department of External Affairs decided to assign an officer (this author) to the Canadian Embassy in Beirut whose responsibilities would include liaising with the PLO. This meant that Canada could now speak directly and officially to the PLO, and Canadian policy respecting the Middle East could be informed by first-hand input from the Embassy in Beirut on the implications of PLO policy and developments, in addition to what was available from other sources.
• The dialogue was valuable in broadening the sources of information provided to Canada. The Embassy obtained information directly about PLO views and so was better able to analyze and comment upon developments in Lebanon, including on what was going on in PLO-controlled southern Lebanon, and indeed in the broader Middle East region. It also provided the PLO with an opportunity to express its views directly to Canada. For example, in July 1981, during a Canadian Parliamentary delegation’s call on PLO Chairman Arafat in southern Lebanon, the PLO Chairman expressed directly to the Embassy representative at some length his dissatisfaction with Prime Minister Trudeau’s political summary at the 1981 G7 Summit in Ottawa issued just a few days earlier (UofT, G7 Information Centre, Citation1981). Arafat was especially (and justifiably) displeased with the statement’s failure to condemn Israel for its air raids against Palestinian locations in west Beirut and south Lebanon the previous month, which had killed over 100 people and injured hundreds more. Such direct lines of communication did not exist previously, hampering Canada’s ability to assess reports of Palestinian statements.
• The assignment of an officer to Beirut to talk to the PLO had been approved on the grounds that it was desirable not just for political reasons but for reasons of embassy security. At that time Canada’s embassy was located in west Beirut, as were the residence of the Canadian ambassador (T.J. Arcand) and the living quarters of the 14 or so Canadian staff. Although the worst period of fighting in the Lebanese civil war was over, the government of Lebanon, such as it was, had basically no control over west Beirut, and instead different sections of the city were controlled by a variety of militia groups. The militias did not necessarily have good relations with each other, but of one thing people could be sure – no Lebanese militia wanted to mess with the PLO, which controlled the southern part of the city and much of southern Lebanon. So, quite apart from any broader political benefits, on the very practical issue of security for the Embassy and its personnel, talking with the PLO was not only desirable but necessary, as two examples will show.
• On one occasion, it was learned that an individual convicted in connection with the murder in 1976 of the United States ambassador to Lebanon carried out by agents of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) had just been released after serving a very short sentence. Canada had played a role in getting this individual returned to Lebanon so he could be tried, and while in custody he had issued threats to “get even” with Canada. So his release, especially after serving such a short sentence, immediately raised questions at the Canadian Embassy as to the implications for security of the Embassy and its staff. Would this individual carry out his threats to retaliate against Canada? Accordingly, when he was released, the Canadian Embassy immediately contacted the PLO to express concern about this individual’s threats. A few days later, the responsible Embassy officer was called back to the PLO headquarters to get the reply. It was somewhat (but only somewhat) reassuring, “The individual concerned was acting on the instructions of a PLO member organisation. He will not take any action against Canada unless he is instructed to do so.”Footnote2 Not the best of reassurances, but at least the Embassy had registered its concern, and no doubt the individual or his masters had been spoken to.
• There was always a degree of crime in Beirut, including car theft, but over a period of just a few weeks in 1981 a number of vehicles belonging to the Embassy were stolen. The thefts had not occurred in the area of Beirut the PLO controlled, but knowing the PLO’s influence with Lebanese militias the responsible Embassy officer went to see the PLO and explained the problem, asking for help in getting the vehicles returned. “Let us see what we can do” was the answer. A week later the Embassy got a request to come back in. The answer: “We know where the vehicles are, but they will not be returned.” (They were probably by that time in the Bekaa valley, controlled by the Syrian army.) “However, we know who stole them, and we can assure you that no more cars of the Embassy will be stolen.” And none were. This showed how the PLO could lay down the law for the other militias in West Beirut, even in areas not directly controlled by the PLO, and how a good relationship with the PLO contributed to the security of the Embassy and its personnel generally.
• Perhaps the greatest value politically for Canada of this dialogue came during the Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982, when the Canadian Embassy was virtually the only Western embassy still functioning in west Beirut. In those days, the PLO official who was the Embassy’s principal interlocutor (and constantly on the move to avoid having his location pinpointed by Israeli intelligence) began the practice of calling at the Canadian Embassy at night, under cover of darkness, to update the Embassy on the latest developments and to convey the PLO’s views. The Embassy’s reports to Ottawa were copied to Canadian missions in other capitals, such as London, Paris, Bonn and Washington, and as usual Canadian diplomats in turn shared their contents (as deemed appropriate) with counterparts in the governments in the countries to which they were accredited, giving those allied foreign ministries access to additional perspectives on the PLO’s actions.
• Keeping the Embassy open in west Beirut during the invasion was not without its hazards, and these were not just relating to physical and personnel safety. There were political hazards as well. The government of Prime Minister Trudeau was on the receiving end of complaints by Israel not just about keeping open the Embassy but also because of the detailed information which the Embassy was providing about the civilian deaths and destruction being wrought by the Israeli bombing of Beirut. This pressure to close the Embassy however was counterbalanced by a degree of public admiration for an ambassador who stayed at his post to serve Canada and Canadians, even though his residence was seriously damaged by the bombing. On July 28th, there was even a unanimous resolution in the House of Commons, commending Ambassador [Théodore] Arcand and his staff for their devotion to duty and recommending them for some form of recognition (a recommendation never acted upon). One of the speakers in the debate, Marcel Prud’homme (Liberal, Saint-Denis), the Chairman of the House Standing Committee on External Affairs and National Defence used the occasion to argue for recognition of the PLO as the principal representative of the Palestinian people (Canadian Parliamentary Historical Resources, Citation1982, pp. 19771–19772). The scattered applause which this suggestion received showed that even in 1982 there was a degree of support among MPs for a warmer attitude towards the PLO.
• As the Canadian Embassy was the last remaining Western embassy functioning in west Beirut, and as a PLO official kept coming to the Embassy at night to relay information, it was felt necessary to raise pre-emptively with Ottawa the question about what should be done in the event that Arafat sought political asylum at the Embassy. Ottawa did not say no, but there was a very clear instruction, “Don’t do or say anything to encourage any such request.” In any event, the Ambassador and Canadian staff were withdrawn by the middle of August, by which time it was evident that the PLO apparatus and most of their fighters would be departing Beirut under an agreement negotiated by the American special representative Philip Habib. At the end of August, Arafat left Beirut on a Greek cruise ship accompanied by French warships.
• After the departure of the PLO leadership from Lebanon in August 1982, principal Canadian responsibility for dialogue with the PLO was transferred to the Canadian Embassy in Tunis, the new home of the PLO leadership. After leaving Beirut however the PLO became a more dispersed and heterogeneous organization. While the official headquarters were in Tunis, Canadian embassies in some other capitals in the region also met with PLO representatives, always at a level below the Ambassador. Likewise, during occasional liaison visits to the region mid-level officers from External Affairs would sometimes call on the PLO contacts of the Canadian embassies involved (mostly Tunis, Cairo, and, after 1985, Damascus). This was encouraged by Ottawa but the Department of External Affairs remained very sensitive to any suggestion that the dialogue was going to higher levels, as one example demonstrates. Following the Israeli air attack on the PLO headquarters in the southern suburbs of Tunis in October 1985, which killed over 60 people, the Counsellor at the Canadian Embassy in Cairo wrote to his PLO contact expressing his personal condolences and attaching a copy of Mr. Clark’s statement deploring the raid. Normal diplomatic practice, one would think. The Palestinian counterpart faxed the letter to Tunis, and three days later the Embassy officer in Cairo was surprised to receive by fax a letter of thanks addressed to him and signed by Arafat. Informed about this, Ottawa replied to the Embassy reminding it of the Canadian policy on level of contact and warning against any reply to Arafat – a warning which was not necessary but which Ottawa felt obliged to put on the record for political reasons.
• Meanwhile, in Ottawa, for domestic political reasons there was little appetite at the political level for raising the official level of dialogue. This was mostly because of the continued involvement of Palestinian groups in terrorist acts, such as the high-jacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro in 1985, even though there was increasing acceptance in political circles of the PLO’s centrality to any solution to the Palestinian question. The Senate Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, in a June 1985 report specifically recommended “that Canadian government contacts with the PLO continue at their present level and frequency” (Senate Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs; Report on Canada’s Relations with the Countries of the Middle East and North Africa, Citation1985, p. 68).
• While the information gathered through this dialogue helped External Affairs to have a more complete understanding of developments within the PLO and of the situation in the region more generally, it was of course just one element of many inputs into the overall analysis put together in Ottawa. But the next significant change in Canadian policy respecting the PLO was driven not by anything learned through the reports of Canadian diplomats on their dialogue with PLO counterparts, but rather by events in the occupied territories and in the international arena, and their impact on Canadian public opinion.
• During the Palestinian uprising (the first intifada), beginning in December, 1987, actions by Israeli forces received significant negative media coverage in Canada. By 1988, there was growing criticism in Canada of Israeli actions against the Palestinians, which included reports of beatings and the cutting off of food supplies to Palestinian refugee camps. In March, Secretary of State for External Affairs (SSEA), Joe Clark gave a hard-hitting speech to the Canada–Israel Committee criticizing human rights violations under international law, which significantly set back his relationship with the Canadian Jewish community (Secretary of State for External Affairs, Citation1988, p. 3). The reaction was so strong and immediate on the part of the leadership of the Canadian Jewish community that the next day Mr. Clark felt it necessary to backtrack, sending a letter reconfirming Canada’s “unwavering support” for Israel (Goldberg & Taras, Citation1989). This episode also underlined the potential domestic political costs of any forward movement in Canada’s relationship with the PLO.Footnote3
• While Canadian attitudes were slowly evolving, the winds of change were blowing with more force elsewhere, leaving the Canadian position more and more isolated. Responding in part to the intifada, in November 1988, the Palestine National Council (PNC) meeting in Algiers issued a declaration of independence of the state of Palestine. The accompanying PNC political statement essentially accepted the notion of two states proceeding from negotiations based on United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolutions 242 and 338 and Israeli withdrawal from territories occupied in 1967. This then set the stage for Arafat to make further announcements in December in Geneva, and in particular a statement, on which the Americans had been insisting, clearly renouncing terrorism, “We totally and absolutely renounce all forms of terrorism, including individual, group and state terrorism” (Journal of Palestine Studies, Citation1989). In return, the United States announced that it was lifting its restrictions on dialogue with the PLO. The following day, the United States Ambassador in Tunis met with a senior PLO representative.

Recognizing Palestinian self-determination … but not the PLO

• This left Canada as the only G7 government without senior level (Ministerial or Ambassadorial) dialogue with the PLO, clearly not something which reflected Canada’s interests, particularly as it embarked on a two-year term (1989–90) on the United Nations Security Council. But what was regarded by officials in External Affairs as a no-brainer still took more than three months to work out.
• Although SSEA Clark was ready to move ahead, he first had to persuade strongly pro-Israel Prime Minister Mulroney, which proved no easy task and led to disagreements between the two men (Nemeth, Citation1989). Meanwhile, on the SSEA’s instructions, work was proceeding within External Affairs on drafting language for a possible statement to get Canada out of its lonely position. Arafat’s statement in Geneva and the subsequent move by the United States had certainly warmed the waters. Within the External Affairs bureaucracy there was a degree of impatience to update the Canadian posture, but one official in Minister Clark’s office cautioned, “Be patient. We have to make sure the Minister and Prime Minister are tied down inseparably to this raft before we send it down the rapids.” This was acknowledgment of the potential for political challenges ahead.
• There were in fact, two issues that needed to be resolved. First, if Canada were to lift restrictions on high level contacts with the PLO, would that mean Canada was “recognizing” it, and was Canada thereby accepting its claim to be the “sole legitimate representative” of the Palestinian people? And secondly, was Canada recognizing the recently declared state of Palestine and/or the principle of self-determination?
• The stumbling block regarding self-determination was that it seemed to prejudge the outcome as a state, whereas Canada maintained that whether or not there was to be a Palestinian state should be decided by negotiations with Israel. A further problematic aspect was the strong concern that any suggestion that self-determination and an independent state were two sides of the same coin be avoided, so as not to introduce any complicating implications regarding the question of Quebec separatism. This would have to be addressed in any eventual statement.
• On a foreign policy issue with high domestic interest, it was typical for the approval of the Prime Minister to be sought, and sometimes for the matter to be referred to the appropriate Cabinet committee. However, in this unusual case, given the likelihood that such a decision would be controversial, Prime Minister Mulroney referred the issue to full Cabinet. There was also no doubt that it would be Mr. Clark as foreign minister who would make the eventual announcement and carry the proverbial “can of responsibility” for any political fallout.
• Thus it was that on 30 March 1989 (the day the Palestinians celebrate as Land Day, an entirely unintended co-incidence) Mr. Clark was able to make the long awaited announcement (Department of External Affairs, Citation1989a), accepting the principle of self-determination for the Palestinian people and lifting restrictions on high level dialogue with the PLO. The statement was hedged with reservations, particularly with regard to the question of an independent Palestinian state,
  • I want to take this occasion to reiterate that Canada does not recognize the Palestinian state proclaimed last November. However, the proclamation of a state does cast a different light on the question of Palestinian self-determination. Canada has long accepted the right and need for Palestinians to play a full part in negotiations to determine their future. We had been concerned that the phrase “self-determination” was being used as a code-word for an independent state, and that Canadian endorsement of the principle would be interpreted as Canadian advocacy of an independent state. That interpretation is no longer possible, because an independent state has been declared, and not recognized by Canada. That allows Canada to endorse the principle that the Palestinians have the right to self-determination in accordance with the International Human Rights Covenants. That must be exercised through peace negotiations in which the Palestinians play a full part. (Department of External Affairs, Citation1989b)
• Although delayed, this statement, as well as a subsequent change in voting pattern at the UN, finally allowed Canada to be seen as a “fair-minded” interlocutor, as called for almost a decade earlier in the Stanfield report. As a result, Canada left behind the image of one-sidedness that its past UN voting record had suggested. And so, Canada was ready to be actively involved in a period of rapid change in Middle East politics, which within a short space of time saw the beginning of a structured bilateral and multilateral peace process between Israel and its Arab neighbours: in 1991 in Madrid, in 1993 the Oslo I Accord between Israel and the Palestinians, and in 1994 the Israel-Jordan peace treaty. Thanks to its move back to a mainstream position, by 1992 Canada had the credibility with both Israel and the PLO to be invited to assume leadership of the most politically sensitive element of the Multilateral Peace Process, the Refugee Working Group (Robinson, Citation2011). Thus, the fair-minded approach recommended by the Stanfield Report (1980) allowed Canada to contribute to Middle East peace-building and to garner international prestige for its efforts. It is a past example of a diplomatic approach that Canada can and should take towards the region and indeed in foreign policy more generally.

+ Has President Trump killed the Middle East Peace Process? (2021 - T&F)

David Viveash, Canadian Foreign Policy Journal, Volume 27, 2021 - Issue 1

Introduction

• President Trump's long-awaited Middle East peace plan was released on 28 January 2020 (White House, Citation2020). Some observers have suggested the Trump vision is less a plan for peace than a unilateral statement of the terms for Palestinian surrender: Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel, no refugee return and Israel's annexation of the Jordan valley and all West Bank settlements in exchange for what one observer has referred to as a “discontinuous Palestinian archipelago state surrounded by a sea of Israeli territory” (Thrall, Citation2020). Writing in Politico, two former high-level United States “peace processors” observe that the Trump plan, “gives Israel everything it wants, concedes to Palestinians everything Israel does not care for, tries to buy off the Palestinians with the promise of $50 billion in assistance that will never see the light of day, and then calls it peace” (Malley & Miller, Citation2020).
• Has President Trump killed the Middle East Peace Process (MEPP) with his plan, or is he just finishing off an initiative that has been dead – or on life support – for almost 20 years? This policy commentary assesses what the Trump plan means for the peace process, Canada's long-standing policy in support of the MEPP and ways Canada could influence the debate going forward.

The Madrid Conference

• From 30 October to 1 November 1991, Spain hosted the Madrid Peace Conference, co-sponsored by the United States and the Soviet Union. It followed a March 1991 President George H.W. Bush speech stating, “The time has come to put an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict” (Bush, Citation1991) and months of “shuttle diplomacy” by Secretary of State James Baker.
• According to the Madrid Letter of Invitation (Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Citation1991), the process would have separate “bilateral” and “multilateral” tracks. The bilateral track would include negotiations between Israel and its Arab neighbours, as well as the Palestinians as part of a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation. The Palestinian dimension of the bilateral track effectively represented the next step in the implementation of the historic “Framework for Peace in the Middle East” (United Nations, Citation1978) concluded at Camp David in September 1978. This Framework outlined a process for achieving Palestinian self-government in the West Bank and Gaza and established principles for peace treaties between Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. The Framework's overall goal was to achieve “a just, comprehensive, and durable settlement of the Middle East conflict through the conclusion of peace treaties based on Security Council resolutions 242 and 338 in all their parts” (ibid). In other words, to achieve peace with its Arab neighbours, Israel needed to return lands captured in the 1967 and 1973 wars. As a first step in this direction, the Egypt-Israel peace treaty signed in March 1979 provided for the full return of Egyptian land captured by Israel in 1967.
• Consistent with the 1978 Framework, the Madrid process negotiations regarding the Palestinians would be, “conducted in phases, beginning with talks on interim self-government arrangements … with the objective of reaching an agreement within one year” (Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Citation1991). Once agreed, the interim arrangements would last for five years, with negotiations on “permanent status” beginning in the third year (ibid). The multilateral track added an international dimension with a “focus on region-wide issues of water, refugee issues, environment, economic development, and other subjects of mutual interest” (Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Citation1991). An Israeli foreign ministry website notes a distinction that, “The purpose of the bilateral track is to solve the conflicts of the past. The purpose of the multilateral track is to build the Middle East of the future” (Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Citation1999).

Assessing the multilaterals

• The multilateral track was launched in Moscow in January 1992. “Working Groups” on arms control and regional security (ACRS), environment, refugees, regional economic development, and water resources were established and held organisational meetings on site. Canada played an important part agreeing to serve as “gavel-holder” of the Refugee Working Group (RWG) and was part of the Multilateral Steering Group which met after each round of working group meetings. Each group met roughly twice per year from 1992 to 1995. Early rounds of the multilaterals were tentative at best. In part, this was due to a lack of progress on the bilateral track. By December 1992, ten rounds of bilateral negotiations in Washington had failed to produce a single formal agreement (Miller, Citation2008, p. 195). The working groups also struggled with the past versus future distinction between the tracks. This was particularly evident in the RWG as perhaps the most “human” of the groups. Israel boycotted the first meeting in Ottawa in May 1992. The second Ottawa meeting in November 1992 was delayed due to Israeli concerns that one of the Palestinian delegates was an active member of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The RWG's family reunification theme inevitably touched on “the right of return”, an issue which Israel argued was reserved for the bilateral track. Similar issues played out in the Environment and Water Resources working groups where it often proved difficult to avoid “rights” issues.
• In September 1993, the entire Madrid process was energized by the “Oslo Channel” – successful secret negotiations between Israel and the PLO brokered by Norway. The “Oslo I Accord” was signed in Washington and witnessed by President Clinton, Prime Minister Rabin, and Yasser Arafat. It provided for mutual recognition between Israel and the PLO, and a five-year transition to Palestinian self-government with permanent status negotiations beginning no later than the third year (United Nations, Citation1993). In essence, the Oslo Channel replicated the 1978 Camp David framework and timetable for Palestinian self-government but established the PLO rather than Egypt and Jordan as the negotiating partner. After almost two years, the Madrid process had a plan and committed leadership.

Canada and the peace process

• As Robinson describes in his policy commentary in this volume, Canada struggled to position itself domestically as a player in Middle East peace. Ultimately, however, it would become a strong supporter of the Madrid process. Having played an important part in the 1947 United Nations “partition plan”, sent peacekeepers to the Sinai (1956) and the Golan Heights (1973), and provided long-term assistance to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) (1950), Canada seemed like a natural choice to lead the RWG. This significant role was part of a wider, “whole of government” approach to the peace process that included the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, the Canadian International Development Agency, the International Development Research Centre, the Department of National Defence and experts from other government departments.
• From the Oslo I breakthrough in September 1993, the RWG moved forward on several fronts (Robinson, Citation2011). Meeting in Tunis in October 1993, the RWG was the first multilateral group to convene in the region. It identified Palestinian refugee needs and mobilized the resources required to address them (Brynen & Tansley, Citation1995). A series of Canadian-led missions to refugee camps enabled direct dialogue with the refugees themselves. Some progress was made on the delicate family reunification issue, with more Palestinian refugees allowed to join their families in Israel and the West Bank and the relocation of almost 500 refugee households from “Canada Camp” in Egypt to Gaza. A life-changing scholarship program enabled over 200 Palestinian refugee women to attend universities in Lebanon. Canada participated actively in the other multilateral working groups and hosted an “intersessional meeting” of the Multilateral Steering Group. In short, Canada was all in supporting the multilateral track of the Madrid/Oslo peace process.
• Further progress on the bilateral track, including the “Gaza/Jericho Agreement” (Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Citation1994) and a 1994 Israel-Jordan peace treaty provided additional momentum to the multilaterals. Productive meetings of each working group were held in 1994, several in the Middle East. In October, Rabin, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, and Arafat won the Nobel Peace Prize. In September 1995, Rabin and Arafat signed the “Oslo II Accord” in Washington. Formally known as the “Interim Agreement on the West Bank and Gaza”, (Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Citation1995), it divided the West Bank into three areas, established a schedule for withdrawing Israeli forces from some and provided for the transfer of specified governance responsibilities to the new Palestinian National Authority (PNA).

Oslo unravels

• The peace process suffered a body blow when Rabin was assassinated on 4 November 1995. In the spring of 1996, a series of suicide bombings shook Israel and an Oslo II target for Israeli withdrawal from parts of Hebron was missed. In May, Benjamin Netanyahu narrowly defeated Acting Prime Minister Peres to become Israel's 9th Prime Minister. Following the announcement of a major new Israeli settlement near Jerusalem in February 1997, the Arab League called for the suspension of all forms of normalization with Israel, including the multilateral negotiations. As progress towards resolving the conflicts of the past faltered, so too did efforts towards building the Middle East of the future.
• By mid-1997, the Oslo Accords were unravelling. The 1997 deadline for launching permanent status negotiations was missed, as was the 1999 deadline for ending them. With a commitment to get the peace process back on track, Ehud Barak became Prime Minister in June 1999. Following a failed summit meeting at Camp David in July 2000 and a provocative Jerusalem walkabout by then Likud party leader Ariel Sharon, the Palestinian Second Intifada broke out in late September. Last minute efforts at an agreement based on President Clinton's final status vision failed and George W. Bush became the 43rd President of the United States.
• Following the 9/11 attacks, Arafat was deemed to be on the wrong side of President Bush's “War on Terror”. Until Arafat's death in 2004, the peace process was effectively on hold. With a different foreign policy direction taken by the Harper Conservative government in the mid-2000s, Canada disengaged from an active political role (Robinson, Citation2011) while moving closer to Israel at a political level. Towards the end of his second term, President Bush showed more interest in the peace process, convening an international conference in Annapolis in November 2007. Subsequent intensive talks between Abbas and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert came closer to a mutually acceptable final status agreement than any previous effort. Facing legal issues, Olmert was forced to resign in September 2008 and Netanyahu returned as Prime Minister in March 2009.
• Reviving the peace process was an early priority for President Obama. In a landmark speech in Cairo in June 2009, he called for the establishment of a Palestinian state and a freeze on Israeli settlements (White House, Citation2009). Speaking at Bar Ilan University the following week, Netanyahu endorsed a two-state solution for the first time. This endorsement was, however, subject to several conditions which the Palestinians would find deeply objectionable, including recognition of Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people with Jerusalem as its undivided capital, demilitarization of the Palestinian state and defensible borders for Israel, and no right of return for Palestinian refugees (Netanyahu, Citation2009).
• Obama would have an acrimonious relationship with Netanyahu, particularly over the latter's aggressive expansion of settlements. During Obama's time in office, the settler population in the West Bank and East Jerusalem increased by over 100,000. (Baker, Citation2016). Reflecting Obama's frustration with Netanyahu's intransigence on this issue and the peace process generally, the United States abstained on a December 2016 Security Council resolution calling for an end to Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Adopted by a 14–0 vote, Resolution 2334 called on Israel to, “immediately and completely cease all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem”, adding that the establishment of settlements has, “no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation of international law” (United Nations Security Council, Citation2016).

Deal of the century?

• Since Donald Trump became President in January 2017, the peace process has clearly gone into reverse. Prime Minister Netanyahu's positions on a two-state solution have evolved little from his first term (1996–1999) and his 2009 Bar Ilan University speech. What is different now is that, in President Trump, Netanyahu found a partner for his version of that solution. Together, the longest serving Prime Minister of Israel and the norm-busting United States President have been chipping away at the foundations of the established framework for achieving Arab-Israeli peace.
• Development of the Trump plan began in November 2017, directed by his son-in-law Jared Kushner. Almost immediately, Trump started making game-changing down payments on the eventual plan. In December, the President recognized Jerusalem as Israel's undivided capital (White House, Citation2017), effectively taking one of the most delicate issues of the MEPP off the table. In response, the Palestinians suspended contacts with the Kushner team and had no further involvement in the development of the plan. In March 2019, Trump recognized Israel's annexation of the Golan Heights (White House, Citation2019), unilaterally ruling on the central issue in an eventual peace treaty with Syria. In November 2019, the State Department reversed course on a longstanding legal position, concluding that West Bank settlements do not violate international law (Jakes & Halbfinger, Citation2019). Where previous peace efforts tried to open doors, Trump was closing them even before the political part of his plan was unveiled.
• The full “Peace to Prosperity” plan was released 28 January 2020 (White House, Citation2020). Flying in the face of land for peace, the plan focused more on what Israel was planning to take than what it was prepared to give. Where previous negotiations envisaged Israel surrendering 90% or more of the West Bank, the Trump plan provided for the annexation of the Jordan Valley and all existing settlements, reducing the Palestinian land area to roughly 70%. The Jordan Valley annexation would effectively establish Israel's eastern border, giving Israel full control over the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Israel would retain full sovereignty over Jerusalem and any capital of an eventual Palestinian state would be outside Jerusalem in the area beyond the existing barrier. No Palestinian refugees would be allowed to return to Israel and any returns to the Palestinian area would be subject to Israel's approval.
• In effect, the Trump plan decides all the permanent status issues in Israel's favour and makes the rest of Israel's offer subject to a long list of conditions. They include all the objectionable requirements set out in Netanyahu’s Citation2009 speech as well as a range of measures to enhance governance, the rule of law and internal security in the Palestinian area. The Palestinians would have up to four years to satisfy the plan's conditions during which there would be a freeze on new West Bank settlements. As and when Israel and the United States are satisfied that the conditions have been met, the United States would recognize what Trump refers to as a state and Netanyahu calls a “state-minus” or “conditional limited sovereignty”. The $50 billion in assistance is effectively a signing bonus which would only come into effect once all the conditions had been satisfied. The funding would come mostly from Arab states and private investment with slightly less than half being directed to projects in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon. In sum, the Trump plan is more about Israel's security than Palestinian self-determination. The Economist labelled the plan the “steal of the century” (Economist, Citation2020). Abbas called it the “slap of the century” and delivered the Palestinian response – “We say 1,000 ‘no's’ to this deal” (Abu Tomeh, Citation2020).

The Abraham Accords

• Within days of the Trump plan's release, Netanyahu pledged to move forward on annexation of the Jordan Valley and West Bank settlements. Fearing precipitous steps on annexation could scuttle the overall plan, the Trump Administration encouraged Netanyahu to hold off until after Israel's March 2 election. As the election results produced no clear winner, Netanyahu and his closest rival, Blue and White party leader Benny Gantz, entered into coalition negotiations. On April 20, a unity government was established with Netanyahu as Prime Minister for the first two years of an anticipated four-year term. The coalition agreement precluded any vote on annexation until July 1, when the mapping of relevant areas was expected to be completed. In the interim, there were mounting calls on Israel and the United States to eschew such a provocative move. Several EU states condemned the proposed annexation as a violation of international law; some threatened sanctions against Israel or recognition of a Palestinian state (Emmott, Baker, Irish, & Lubell, Citation2020).
• Arab states also opposed the proposed annexation. Jordan's King Abdullah cautioned that moving ahead with annexation would provoke a “massive conflict” with his country (Al Jazeera, Citation2020). In a prophetic mid-June op-ed “It's Either Annexation or Normalization”, the United Arab Emirates Ambassador to the United States, Yousef Al-Otaiba, warned that “Annexation will definitely, and immediately, reverse all of the Israeli aspirations for improved security, economic and cultural ties with the Arab world and the United Arab Emirates” (Halbfinger & Hubbard, Citation2020). As it turned out, Israel, the Emirates and the United States were already engaged in indirect contacts brokered by Jared Kushner. On 13 August, the White House announced that Israel and the United Arab Emirates had agreed to a “full normalization of relations”. Sealed in a phone call between President Trump, Prime Minister Netanyahu and Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Zayed of the Emirates, the agreement provided for follow-up talks on the establishment of embassies and expanded cooperation in a range of areas including investment, tourism, security, healthcare and the environment. In return, Israel agreed to “suspend declaring sovereignty over areas outlined in the President's Vision for Peace and focus its efforts now on expanding ties with other countries in the Arab and Muslim world” (White House, Citation2020, August 13).
• In a scene that evoked memories of the 1993 Oslo Accord, President Trump, Prime Minister Netanyahu and the foreign ministers of the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain gathered on the White House lawn on 15 September 2020 to sign the “The Abraham Accords Declaration”. Named after the patriarch of the three monotheistic religions, the Accords included a common declaration of principles (White House, Citation2020a, September 15), texts of a “Peace Agreement” between Israel and the United Arab Emirates (White House, Citation2020b, September 15) and a “Declaration of Peace, Cooperation and Constructive Diplomatic and Friendly Relations” between Israel and the Kingdom of Bahrain (White House, Citation2020c, September 15). President Trump heralded the Accords as “the dawn of a new Middle East” and suggested that other countries would be joining in “very, very soon” (Crowley, Citation2020). Others were less generous in their praise of the normalization moves. Mahmoud Abbas referred to the initial Israeli/Emirati agreement as a “betrayal” of Jerusalem and the Palestinian cause and recalled his ambassador from Abu Dhabi (Boxerman, Citation2020).
• For the four states directly involved, the Abraham Accords appeared to represent a win-win solution. Bahrain and the Emirates formalized their anti-Iran alliance with Israel and the United States, under cover of halting Israel's annexation in the West Bank. For the Emirates, enhanced access to advanced American weaponry (possibly including F-35 jets) may have been a consideration (Kirshner, Citation2020). At the minimal cost of putting annexation “on hold”, Israel gained two new peace partners with the potential of more Arab and Muslim states to come, opened new trade and investment opportunities in the region and hedged its bets on the outcome of the United States election. Heading into that election, the Trump administration catered to its Christian evangelical base by supporting Israel and the effort to exert “maximum pressure” on Iran. For Trump and Netanyahu, the Accords provided a much-needed foreign policy win and a welcome diversion from mounting criticism of their management of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the specific context of this paper, the Accords represent a further erosion of the principles which have guided Arab-Israeli peace efforts since 1967. Forget about “land for peace”. For Trump and Netanyahu, the new mantra is “peace for peace”.

What can Canada do?

• The Abraham Accords did not formally halt the Trump plan or reverse recent measures which undermine underlying principles of the Madrid/Oslo process. While de jure annexation in the West Bank may be on hold, de facto annexation continues with thousands of new settlement homes approved since the Accords were signed (TOI Staff, Citation2020). Although Canada welcomed the Abraham Accords (Global Affairs Canada, Citation2020a), the government's response to the overall Trump plan was more qualified. In a statement by Foreign Minister Champagne issued on the day the Trump plan was released, Canada “recognized the urgent need to renew efforts towards a negotiated solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict”, and committed, “to carefully examine the details of the United States initiative for the Middle East peace process” (Global Affairs Canada, Citation2020b). Recalling key elements of longstanding Canadian policy, the statement:

1. Reaffirmed Canada's commitment to “achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East” including the “creation of a Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security with Israel and ensuring Israel's security within its own borders”.
2. Maintained that “peace can only be achieved through direct negotiations between the parties” and urged those parties to “create the conditions for such negotiations to take place”.
3. Reaffirmed Canada's “readiness to support meaningful dialogue between the parties toward a negotiated and viable two-state solution”.

• Minister Champagne's statement effectively outlined the criteria against which Canada would judge the Trump plan. In this context, it is difficult to imagine a positive evaluation. On the first point, the Trump plan is neither comprehensive nor just and there is no “side by side” Palestinian state. In the West Bank, the Palestinian state would be a collection of what some commentators have referred to as “Bantustans” connected by roads, tunnels and bridges around Israel settlements (Liel, Citation2020). On the second point, one columnist notes the Trump plan “dismantles 60 years of bipartisan support for a negotiated process between Israeli and Palestinians, in which both make concessions and land swaps that would define the lines of a new map” (Sanger, Citation2020). There have been no negotiations between the parties for over six years and the Trump administration has made no effort to resume direct negotiations based on the Madrid framework. On the third point, the Trump administration has done nothing to support meaningful dialogue between the parties. If anything, the United States has poisoned the atmosphere for such dialogue by moving its embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing Israel's annexation of the Golan Heights, and reassessing the illegality of settlements. As International Crisis Group President Robert Malley remarked, “ … the message to the Palestinians, boiled down to its essence is ‘You’ve lost, get over it’” (Holland, Williams, & Mohammed, Citation2020).
• What can Canada do? Following an open letter, (Larson, Citation2020) from three former cabinet ministers and over 50 former diplomats (including this author), Prime Minister Trudeau stated “Canada has deep concerns and disagreement” with the Israel's annexation plans and reaffirmed Canada's commitment to a two-state solution (Global News, Citation2020). Though Trudeau's statement came comparatively late and was considered less forceful than some other international reactions (Star Editorial Board, Citation2020, June 6), Canada has not followed Trump's unilateral moves on the status of Jerusalem, the Golan Heights or legality of settlements. Nor would Canada be obliged to accept any of the measures proposed in the Trump plan.
• Going forward, Canada could work with partners in Europe and, potentially, a new United States administration to revitalize the peace process framework. We can continue to use our development cooperation and other programs to strengthen Palestinian institutions and promote self-sustaining economic growth. The Canadian government has long supported “Track II” research on issues related to the peace process. The Jerusalem element of Ehud Olmert's 2008 offer to Abbas built on the ground-breaking research of the Jerusalem Old City Initiative (JOCI), which was partially funded by Global Affairs Canada. The government also supported an initiative related to the development of President George W. Bush's “Roadmap to Peace” (M. Molloy, personal communication, March 15, Citation2020) as well as extensive research on the Palestinian refugee issue (El-Rifai, Citation2019). If Canada and the international community genuinely want a democratic Palestinian state, there is a pressing need for creative thinking on Fatah-Hamas reconciliation. Other timely Track II topics could include more broadly-based approaches to managing the overall peace process and alternatives to the two-state solution.

Conclusion

• While the efforts of Presidents Carter, Bush 41, Clinton, Bush 43, and Obama met with varying degrees of success, they were all based on one common objective – securing a just, comprehensive, and durable Middle East peace based on United Nations Security Council resolutions 242 and 338. This objective, particularly the notion of land for peace, was the foundation of the Framework for Middle East Peace and the Madrid/Oslo process. As this commentary has argued, the Trump plan abandons these basic principles, seriously undermining the prospects for a sustainable solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
• Has President Trump killed the Middle East Peace Process? At the time of writing (two weeks before the United States election), the answer has to be “It depends”. Former Vice-President Joe Biden is well ahead of Trump in the polls, some of which predict the Democrats winning control of the White House, Senate and House of Representatives. Biden has referred to the Trump plan as “a political stunt that could spark unilateral moves to annex territory and set back peace even more” (Kampeas, Citation2020). He opposed Israel's plans to annex areas of the West Bank and further expansion of settlements. While pledging to leave the American embassy in Jerusalem, Biden called the 2018 move “short-sighted and frivolous” and is committed to re-opening the United States Consulate in East Jerusalem (Barrow, Citation2020). In a statement on the Abraham Accords, he and his running mate Senator Kamala Harris welcomed the normalization of relations between Israel, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates and committed to “work to leverage these growing ties into progress towards a two-state solution and a more stable, peaceful region” (Biden-Harris campaign, Citation2020). A Biden administration might also be expected to take a less confrontational approach towards Iran, including rejoining the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on nuclear non-proliferation, which was concluded in 2015 while Biden was Vice President. The Trump administration withdrew from the JCPOA and reimposed sanctions on Iran in 2018. On balance, a Biden victory in the November 3 election would seem to portend a return to a more traditional approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict, including greater engagement with the Palestinians. For the Trudeau government, such an approach would probably be a better fit.
• If President Trump is re-elected all bets are off. The Trump plan, including annexation in the West Bank and efforts to cajole more Arab and Muslim states into the Abraham Accords, would likely be renewed with vigour. As this commentary has outlined, the peace process was in trouble well before Trump entered the White House. What he and Netanyahu are doing, however, is reinventing the process to the point that its fundamental elements become unrecognizable. In a letter published in The Guardian, fifty former European Union prime ministers, foreign ministers and senior officials stated, “Peace to Prosperity is not a roadmap to a viable two-state solution, nor to any other legitimate solution to the conflict” (Holland et al., Citation2020). If Trump is returned to the White House, a stronger response to the “Deal of the Century” will be required. Canada will face a much more challenging policy path going forward and may need to work with other, more like-minded partners to build a legitimate peace.

+ Assessing Canada’s foreign policy approach to the Palestinians and Israeli-Palestinian peacebuilding, 1979–2019 (2021 - T&F)

Jeremy Wildeman, Canadian Foreign Policy Journal, Volume 27, 2021 - Issue 1

Introduction: A crisis in 1979

• "Good Evening. The two day old government of Joe Clark appears headed for its first diplomatic crisis, a serious confrontation with the Arab World, and it’s all because Prime Minister Clark seems determined to go ahead with his promise to move the Canadian Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem." (CBC News Footage, Citation1979)
• Thus, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) anchor Knowlton Nash opened the National News 6 June 1979. He was describing one of the more important crises in Canadian foreign policy history. It began with an electoral pledge in Clark’s 1979 Progressive Conservative Party campaign platform to relocate the Canadian embassy in Israel, leading to a backlash by Arab states that threw his government into disarray.
• Following Israel’s victory in the 1973 Yom Kippur war, Arab states used a 1973 oil embargo to inflict significant economic pressure on the United States and other Western countries, including Canada, for supporting Israel. B. Abu-Laban describes it as an action used against countries deemed “unfriendly”, as in pro-Israeli (Abu-Laban, Citation1988, p. 118). This caused oil prices to soar and contributed to a major economic downturn across the West. It exposed the vulnerability of industrialized regions that depend on oil imports, like Eastern Canada, and represented a bonanza of new wealth for energy rich regions like Clark’s home province of Alberta. At the centre of the embargo lay Arab displeasure with Israel’s acquisition of territory by force, its success at winning wars against its neighbours, its treatment of the Palestinian people, and support it relied on from Western powers to maintain its regional upper hand. The economic shock and successful weaponization of oil caused a significant realignment in international power structures, as the West was forced to become more mindful of Arab aspirations (Brynen, Citation2007, p. 75). The United States became particularly cognizant of the need to balance the contradictory demands of unflinching support for Israel and preservation of close ties to the oil rich Gulf monarchies (Oil Embargo, Citation1973–Citation1974, n.d.). This sparked United States-led bilateral negotiations with Israel and Arab states culminating in the 1978 Camp David peace accords between Egypt and Israel.
• By pledging to make Canada the first country to relocate its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, only 12 years after Israel seized it in the 1967 Six-Day War, Clark ran head on into the realignment in Middle East politics. He did that against the advice of his own Ministers and the Department of External Affairs (Hilliker, Citation2018, pp. 307–308). The relocation would have amounted to de facto recognition of Israel’s acquisition of territory by force and inflame the very point Arab states had protested with their embargo. Though the Clark government would only stay in power for 9 months, in no small measure due to this crisis, its actions and response would have a long-term impact on Canada’s Middle East foreign policy. The Clark experience would also illustrate two ways Canada approaches the region: either as a partisan advocate of its closest bilateral friends and allies, namely (since 1979) Israel and the United States; or as an advocate of a multilateral and internationalist approach, trying to bridge the divide between allies and non-allies.

Introduction: Approaches in Canada’s Middle East foreign policy

• This paper assesses Canada’s foreign policy approach toward the Palestinians and Israeli-Palestinian peacebuilding, which is often done through the Middle East Peace Process (MEPP). The paper argues there are two ways Canada has approached these matters, roughly corresponding to two time periods: one comprising Pierre Elliott (PE) Trudeau’s Liberal, Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservative and Jean Chrétien’s Liberal governments (1980–2003); the other comprising Stephen Harper’s Conservative and Justin Trudeau’s Liberal governments (2006–2019). Martin’s Liberal government (2003–6) was a time of transition in-between. This paper explores the two approaches by describing the first period as Pearsonian in nature, corresponding to the jumble of liberal internationalist ideas – such as a commitment to international institutions, multilateralism, human rights, diplomacy ahead of conflict, mediation and peacebuilding – often associated with Pearsonianism. Bothwell describes Pearsonianism as the Canadian approach to foreign affairs from around the early Twentieth to early Twenty-First Centuries (Citation2017, pp. 27–28). It is named after Canada’s Nobel Prize winning Secretary of State for External Affairs (SSEA) (1948–57) and Prime Minister of Canada (1963–68), Lester B. Pearson, who also played a key role in the creation of Israel in 1948 (Newport, Citation2014; Tauber, Citation1998). The second period’s approach is centred on bilateral relationships built on a foundation of (perceived) shared values with “like-minded” Western democracies. The approach is named after a lead proponent, Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
• To understand Canada’s foreign policy toward the Palestinians and MEPP, this paper also takes into consideration Canada’s relationship with the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) more broadly. The limited scholarly literature that exists on Canada and MENA typically addresses only a few important events, like Canada’s role in the establishment of Israel (1947–48), the Suez Crisis and Canadian peacekeeping in 1956, and the Clark embassy crisis. The literature also tends to focus on Canada’s bilateral relationship with Israel, at the neglect of analysis of relations with other MENA states and societies (Labelle, Citation2018, p. 170).
• In what literature does exist on Canada and the Palestinians, the MEPP and MENA, there is a striking difference in analysis offered by scholars who apply a positivist lens to foreign policy research and those who take a critical, postcolonial perspective. From the positivist side, a traditional line of thinking has been to describe Canada’s role in the region through a liberal idealist lens. There Canada is considered a mostly neutral and fair-minded actor striving for a just and lasting regional peace. Thus, Canada is framed as a quintessential peacemaker acting as an interlocutor between its friends and allies, Israel and the United States, with non-allies among the Arab and Islamic states. A case for this approach is made in a 2007 volume edited by Heinbecker and Momani, Canada and the Middle East in Theory and Practice.
• The liberal-idealist approach is tempered by a realist analysis of Canada’s foreign policy. Scholars like Gotlieb (Citation2005) and Nossal (Citation2003) suggested Canada is less a “do-gooder” state than one pursuing its national interest, regardless of official rhetoric and any outward embrace of international accords. Nossal (Citation2003) has been particularly critical of scholarship that takes Canada’s liberal rhetoric at face value, of Canadian intervention in other states’ affairs, and a Canadian propensity to lecture and moralize onto others about Canada’s superior way of life. He describes this as hypocritical given Canada’s own treatment of Indigenous peoples (Nossal, Citation2003, p. 1), and how Canada will act swiftly in a zero-sum manner to protect its national interests. Other recent research by Foster (Citation2018) considers Canadian foreign policy through its competition for energy markets. There, Canada operates in tandem with fellow shale oil mega-producer, the United States, competing against lower-cost producers like those found in MENA. In this new era, higher prices and embargoes against Western buyers could be a potential boon for cost-intensive regions like Alberta, who can easily be outcompeted by MENA energy providers.
• Critical, postcolonial scholars take particular consideration of race, identity and shared values. This perspective posits that identity draws Canada to naturally empathize with Israel as a fellow Western democracy, like the United Kingdom and United States. This tilt favouring Israel includes racist perceptions toward the “Other” people in MENA, where Arabs have all-too-often been characterized as less civilized, irrational by nature and extremist in their religious fanaticism. Y. Abu-Laban and Bakan (Citation2008) assert that race constitutes a basis of partisan support for Israel in Canada. Scholars like Bahdi (Citation2019), Labelle (Citation2019), and Monaghan and Santos (Citation2020) link this to a general anti-Arab racism permeating Canadian society, which is tied to a shared value of settler colonial dispossession of Indigenous peoples (Bahdi & Kassis, Citation2016; Labelle, Citation2019; Monaghan & Santos, Citation2020, p. 5).
• Labelle (Citation2019) notes many Arab Canadians have long perceived racist logic behind Canada’s unequal treatment favouring the Israeli-Jewish discourse over the Palestinian (p. 166). In arguing why, Husseini (Citation2008) observes while more mainstream scholars stress the positivist liberal and realist viewpoints to understand Canada’s MENA foreign policy, factors like religion and shared values are intrinsic to understanding Western support for Israel (p. 53). While a pro-Israel tilt may be longstanding, Brynen (Citation2007) says Canadians began showing increasing sympathy to Palestinians in the 1980s (p. 75), even if it did not translate to elite levels.
• Meanwhile, Nossal (Citation2014), Barry (Citation2012), Sasley (Citation2011), and Sasley and Jacoby (Citation2007), describe how electoral politics have shaped Canada’s MENA and Israel-Palestine foreign policy. This was intrinsic to the Clark embassy story, and electoral calculi seem to have morphed over time into a Canadian government propensity to back Israel unquestioningly, regardless of party in power. Though Canada’s dominant ally the United States bears great influence on Canada’s MENA foreign policy (Juneau, Citation2017, p. 406; McKercher, Citation2014, p. 329; Stein, Citation1989, pp. 375–376), Canadian support for Israel has a logic of its own, and occasionally leads to friction with United States regional efforts. In all instances, Canada remains a very close ally of the United States and friend of Israel.

Canada and the early years of the Middle East peace process: The Clark campaign pledge

• From 1967 November to 1979 June, Canadian policy on Jerusalem was based on full support of United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSC) S/RES/242, opposing Israel’s acquisition of the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) – the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem – in the 1967 Six-Day War. It called for Israeli withdrawal and a negotiated settlement among the warring states (Flicker, Citation2002, p. 117). While S/RES/242 was adopted 1967 November, in July that year Canada voted in favour of United Nations General Assembly Resolution (UNGA) A/RES/2253 condemning any unilateral alteration to Jerusalem’s status by Israel (External Affairs and International Trade Canada, Citation1993, p. 12). Clark’s 1979 campaign pledge contradicted both resolutions.
• Clark had made the pledge to the Jewish community as leader of the opposition, at the Canada–Israel Committee (CIC) 2 April 1979 in Toronto. He iterated support for relocating the embassy by saying, “‘next year in Jerusalem’, a Jewish prayer which we intend to make a Canadian reality” (Giniger, Citation1979). He reiterated the pledge at his first news conference after his election (Hilliker, Citation2018, p. 308). Commentators have speculated why he made the pledge and whether an electoral calculus was involved. In a tight election, Clark may have sought to sway Jewish voters in key urban Ontario ridings from a traditional allegiance to the Liberals (Ripsman & Blanchard, Citation2002, p. 163). Some speculate Clark believed this was the right, principled move (Flicker, Citation2002, pp. 118–123). Clark’s predecessor and successor, PE Trudeau (1968–89, 1980–84), describes Clark as unwise and “getting into a lot of difficulty” for taking up a cause of Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, which Trudeau says he himself resisted despite electoral threats from Begin (Trudeau, Citation1993, pp. 215–216).
• External Affairs feared Canada could be cut off from Middle East oil imports, valuable to Eastern Canada, and that Arab investments would be withdrawn at a time Canada needed to borrow regularly for large deficits (Ripsman & Blanchard, Citation2002, pp. 159–161). Ever conscious of Canada’s close relationship with the United States, officials were worried relocating the embassy would create unnecessary tension (Hilliker, Citation2018, p. 307). The United States had just overseen a tenuous 1978 Camp David peace agreement and the Carter Administration had an eye on a larger Middle East peace process (Flicker, Citation2002, p. 124). Canadian officials were also concerned a decade of trying to present Canada as neutral in the region was crumbling rapidly, and its image as a peacekeeper ruined (CBC News Footage, Citation1979).
• The Clark government was hammered by economic and diplomatic threats. The Arab League said any action to move the embassy would be considered an act of aggression against Arab sovereignty. The Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and Arab League said they would stop at nothing to block Canada’s move. Egyptian Ambassador to Canada, Hassan Fahmy, warned the PLO response could escalate to terrorist attacks (CBC News Footage, Citation1979). In the diplomatic corps, questions were asked as-to-why Clark was risking so much in a move not vital to Israel’s security. Israel’s Ambassador to Canada, Mordechai Shalev, said while appreciated, the move was unnecessary and Israel had no doubt about the depth of Canada’s friendship (CBC News Footage, Citation1979).
• By late June, Clark announced he would appoint former Progressive Conservative Party leader (1967–76), Robert L Stanfield, as “Special Representative of the Government of Canada Respecting the Middle East and North Africa”. Stanfield was tasked with studying the embassy move before any action was taken. This was also meant to give the Clark government breathing room to think. Stanfield’s terms of reference were to: find ways to enhance Canada’s relationship with the MENA countries, determine how Canada could contribute to a just and lasting regional peace, and see if there was a way to compatibly implement the Clark government policy on Jerusalem (Taras & Goldberg, Citation1989, pp. 158–159).
• Stanfield quickly issued a 1979 October interim report urging the government to refrain from moving the embassy. As the 1978 Camp David accords between Egypt and Israel had not yet led to broader regional peace, Stanfield cautioned moving the embassy could derail the larger United States effort (Taras & Goldberg, Citation1989, p. 159). President Carter impressed this point upon Clark in person, too (Taras & Goldberg, Citation1989, p. 161). By 29 October 1979, the Clark government had abandoned its plans. Opposition leaders accused his government of damaging Canada's credibility (Giniger, Citation1979). Clark’s minority government fell 13 December 1979. The embassy affair no doubt contributed to its fall (Flicker, Citation2002, p. 137). The events would also help orient Canada’s MENA foreign policy for the following two decades.

Canada and the early years of the Middle East peace process: The Stanfield report

• Stanfield’s tour took him across the Middle East and his final report would bear the liberal internationalist spirit of Pearsonian foreign policy. While it acknowledged Canada’s Western European roots and closest ties were with the United States, United Kingdom and Israel, the report suggested those ties should not preclude good relations with the broader Arab world. Stanfield felt Canada could and should aspire toward positive relations with everyone, and Canada would be well received if sincere when doing so (Stanfield, Citation1980, pp. 2–3).
• Everywhere Stanfield went, the central message conveyed to him was improving Canada’s standing in the region was tied to its foreign policy on Israel and the Palestinians. Meanwhile, it seemed clear that Israel-Palestine drove conflict in the Middle East. In Stanfield’s view, this endangered world peace while misdirecting scarce resources toward defence that could be better used elsewhere (Stanfield, Citation1980, p. 2). Ultimately, Stanfield concluded Canada’s contribution to a just and lasting peace was more important than economic interests. So, he felt the most useful role Canada could play in MENA was to become a mediator addressing the conflict between opposing sides. To do that, Canada would need the respect of the governments and peoples of the region, which would require Canada be viewed as fair-minded. That would mean avoiding total identification with one opposing party over another (Stanfield, Citation1980, p. 14).
• Stanfield said Canada was right to have supported S/RES/242 because it offered the best foundation for a comprehensive peace (Stanfield, Citation1980, p. 6), by providing land for a future Palestinian state. He also said it was questionable how far Israel's concern for security could justify territorial claims in the OPT, if those negated the possibility for a Palestinian homeland (Stanfield, Citation1980, p. 6). Meanwhile, Stanfield emphasized the Arab governments he met were categorical in asserting there cannot be regional peace until Palestinian’s rights are recognized (Stanfield, Citation1980, p. 7).

Canada and the early years of the Middle East peace process: A Pearsonian approach

• When Clark made Stanfield’s report public 29 February 1980, Solomon (Citation1980) described it as “pro-Palestinian” in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, noting its support for the Palestinian people’s right to a homeland and self-determination (p. 4). This was one of the Clark government’s final acts before handing power to PE Trudeau 4 March 1980. The report would influence successive Canadian governments. After Trudeau returned to power, Canada established relations with the PLO (see Robinson in this publication). Flicker suggests Canada’s United Nations voting record became more balanced, and notes Canada strongly criticizing Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon (2002, p. 137). In a 1982 press release about the situation in the West Bank and Gaza, the Government of Canada (GOC) called for a negotiated resolution to the “dispute”, Israeli withdrawal from territories occupied in 1967, peace and secure borders for all states in the region, and recognition of the Palestinian people’s legitimate rights (Department of External Affairs, Citation1982).
• In Canada, views related to Israel and the Palestinians were also changing. Among Liberal party back-benchers, there were growing popular doubts about the legitimacy of Israel’s actions during its invasion of Lebanon (Hilliker, Citation2018, p. 390). At the public level, Canadians became increasingly concerned with the lot of the Palestinians (Stanfield, Citation1980, p. 3). Notwithstanding generally low interest in MENA affairs, by late 1982 there was evidence of growing support for the Palestinian cause (Arab Studies Quarterly, Citation1983, p. 292). This included majority Canadian public support for a Palestinian state, and a fairly even 19 to 15 percent split in support for the respective Israeli and Palestinian narratives (Arab Studies Quarterly, Citation1983, pp. 292–293). Suleiman argued those opinions were affected by Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and the Sabra and Shatila massacres (Suleiman, Citation1984, p. 105). Yet, when Canadian sympathies appeared to realign in favour of Israel in an unpublished 1984 Gallup poll, with 28 percent expressing sympathy for Israel to 12 percent for Palestinians; by a margin of 38 to 22 percent, Canadians supported a statement that there would be no peace until Palestinians have self-determination (Gallup,Citation1984; as quoted in Abu-Laban, Citation1988, p. 121). A 1985 Senate Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs report on Canada’s Relations with MENA would reinforce Stanfield’s conclusion that Canada had a deep interest in the Middle East’s stability, which was most threatened by the Arab-Israeli conflict (Senate Standing Committee, Citation1985, p. v.).
• PE Trudeau was briefly succeeded by Liberal Prime Minister John Turner (1984), whose successor, Progressive Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney (1984–93), was himself sympathetic to Israel. At the 1987 Francophonie Summit, Canada refused to endorse a resolution affirming the principle of Palestinian self-determination. Now Canada’s SSEA (1984–91), Joe Clark explained that Canada could not abandon its long-standing objection to the phrase, even if Canada accepted the notion of there being an eventual homeland for Palestinians (Rose, Citation1987). Mulroney describes then Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres thanking him for stopping the “anti-Israeli” motion, and says he assured Peres he would do-so again (Mulroney, Citation2011, 1986: 5. Tough Decisions). Mulroney also says during “disturbances” in the West Bank and Gaza in 1987, the December beginning of the First Intifada, Canada was the first major industrialized country to offer Israel support at a “critical moment” when even President Ronald Reagan expressed displeasure with Israel (2011, Personal Journal: 1 January 1988). He says his position was Jews alone must make value judgements respecting their national security (2011, Personal Journal: 1 January 1988).
• Still, the Mulroney government largely went along with the Stanfield approach. In its 1987/88 Annual Report, External Affairs wrote of special concern were, “human rights abuses arising from the Israeli authorities’ efforts to restore order through their ‘iron fist policy’” (Department of External Affairs, Citation1988, p. 55). Canada was also ready to support United States regional peace-efforts. Meanwhile, in External Affairs’ 1985/86 Annual Report, it described how Canada would strive for a peace settlement that guaranteed Israel’s security and well-being, but provided, “the opportunity for Palestinians to realize their right to participate in negotiations to determine their future, and to have a homeland in the West Bank and Gaza Strip” (Department of External Affairs, Citation1987, p. 43).
• Clark became something of a champion of Stanfield’s recommendations (see Robinson in this volume). Speaking with measured bluntness to the CIC in 1988, a year into the First Intifada (1987–1991), Clark said, “Human rights violations, such as we have witnessed in the West Bank and Gaza in these past agonizing weeks, are totally unacceptable, and in many cases are illegal under international law” (Barrett, Citation1988). This could not sound more different in tone from his 1979 pledge and was poorly received by the CIC audience. Despite being one of Israel’s staunchest supporters, the Canadian government was also losing patience with Israel and Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s Likud-led government (1983–84, 1986–1992) for not cooperating with United States regional peacebuilding efforts. Meanwhile, the Palestinians were drawing broad global sympathy for their uprising (Intifada) against Israeli rule. By 1988 February, Gallup found 17.5 percent of Canadians sympathizing with Palestinians versus 15.7 percent with Israelis (Canada, Citation2019).
• In 1989, Clark announced Canada would support Palestinian self-determination (External Affairs Canada, Citation1989). This opened a new era in Canada’s relations with Israel, the Palestinians and the MENA region, and this approach would largely be sustained by the Chrétien Liberal government. With United States leadership of the MEPP through the 1993 Oslo Accord, 1994 Paris Protocol and 1995 Oslo II Accord, Canada had clear signalling from its powerful ally how to approach the peace process. The GOC would itself start, for three decades, to characterize its commitment to Israel and the Palestinians as pursuing the, “goal of a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East, including the creation of a Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security with Israel” (Government of Canada, Citationn.d.).
• During its time, the Chrétien government condemned Israeli settlement building in the OPT for violating international law, (Brynen, Citation2007, p. 77) as well as Palestinian terrorism and excessive Israeli retaliation. The GOC specifically supported what it called “fair-minded” peace initiatives (External Affairs and International Trade Canada, Citation1993, p. 23). Canada would support Palestinian self-determination, autonomy and even the possibility of a state, based on a negotiated settlement with Israel; along with Israel’s right to exist within secure borders (External Affairs and International Trade Canada, Citation1993, pp. 18, 22–23). At the United Nations, Canada parted company with the United States and Australia, joining the overwhelming majority of world states by either supporting or abstaining from resolutions sponsored by Arab states criticizing Israel’s: occupation of the OPT, attacks against civilians and nuclear weapons programme (Barry, Citation2012, p. 196). From 1992 to 2000, Canada was intensively involved in the multilateral part of the MEPP, notably as chair of the Refugee Working Group (RWG) and sponsor of the Track II Ottawa Process of negotiations. Robinson (Citation2011) writes this mostly happened “below the radar in terms of public perception”, but these efforts became a positive element for Canada’s relations with MENA countries (p. 695). Canada’s leadership role in the RWG was well received and appreciated in Washington and the Western alliance system, too.
• The liberal, multilateralist approach became so dominant under Chrétien that many scholars considered it to define Canada’s MENA foreign policy (Heinbecker & Momani, Citation2007; Jacoby, Citation2000; Stein, Citation1989). It reflected a Pearsonian Canada invested in a rules-based international system built on respect for international law and participation in multilateral institutions. At one point on a state visit to Israel, the OPT and Jordan in April 2000, Prime Minister Chrétien was reported saying Palestinians had a right to declare independence unilaterally (Sallot, Citation2000). Chrétien writes in his memoirs he was only engaging in speculation, but that he was stating the obvious, which was Palestinians would eventually have a state (Chrétien, Citation2008, p. 348–349).

A new Canadian approach to the MEPP: The Martin Liberal government

• Global politics and the Middle East changed following the 11 September 2001 (9/11) terrorist attacks. By then the MEPP was in deep crisis, having the previous year descended into a violent Second Intifada (2000–6). This time the Palestinians were armed and frequently carried out terrorist attacks in Israel, including suicide bombings. Israel had an overwhelming preponderance in might, however, and the occupied Palestinians suffered overwhelming losses (Second Intifada – Summary of Data, Citation2010). The impact of 9/11 was to transform how Western states like Canada viewed their own security, MENA politics and Israel-Palestine.
• Canada and key Western allies like the United States were already inclined to feel more in common with Israel, as compared to Muslims, Arabs and Middle Easterners. An already close political identification between Israel and Canada became tied to a post-9/11 “war on terror” security framework, which positions the interests of Western states as identical to Israel’s (Y. Abu-Laban & Bakan, Citation2010). As Musu and Arsenault point out in this volume, Palestinian terrorist attacks had a marked impact on Western opinion against Palestinians. Meanwhile, Israel was able to use its experience suppressing Palestinians to market itself as a global expert and ally combating Arab and Islamic terrorism (Y. Abu-Laban & Bakan, Citation2012, p. 329). Separately, but in this context, change began to take place in Canada’s approach to the MEPP, particularly once Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin (2003–6) came to power. Under Martin, Canada began to align its foreign policy more closely with Israel.
• Canada drew attention at the United Nations as it shifted to a more pro-Israel voting pattern (C. Clark, Citation2004). Leech-Ngo and Swan (Citation2019, p. 34) analysed Canada’s voting patterns on sixteen resolutions that took place every year, 2000–2016, at the UNGA pertaining to issues on Palestine, which may be considered sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. They found a notable shift take place from almost exclusively in favour of all sixteen under Chrétien, to less enthusiastic support under Martin (Leech-Ngo & Swan, Citation2019, p. 34). That included several Martin-era “no” votes (Leech-Ngo & Swan, Citation2019, p. 35). Perhaps more remarkable was a change in tone, as the Martin government expressed a desire Israel not be singled out on the international stage. It also stressed the importance of shared identities and values. Then Minister of Human Resources Joe Volpe said,
  • I think that we've attempted in the past and we continue to try to get a position that's balanced, but clearly we want to reinforce the fact that we support countries that are democratic, that support the same values that we support, i.e. the rule of law, freedom, human rights. And we try to reflect that in all of our actions at the UN. (C. Clark, Citation2004)
• At one point Canada’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Allan Rock, levelled a scathing denunciation of UNGA resolutions on Israel (Clark, Citation2004). This was echoed by several Liberal MPs who felt Canada cannot support unbalanced resolutions attacking Israel without pointing out similar violations by the Palestinian Authority (Clark, Citation2004). Martin himself says on entering office he disagreed with the Department of Foreign Affairs that United Nations resolutions on the region had been balanced, saying no doubt in his mind Israel was being singled out (Martin, Citation2009, p. 350). This included his view the Human Rights Council, which he felt included some of the world’s greatest human rights abusers, had been “egregiously politicized with a deep hostility toward Israel”, and needed to be replaced (Martin, Citation2009, p. 338). Despite all this, Seligman writes (Citation2018, p. 91) the Martin government did not feel support for Israel should come at the expense of Canadian support for United Nations multilateralism (and Pearsonianism). Martin’s successor would seem not to agree.

A new Canadian approach to the MEPP: A Harperian Middle East foreign policy

• On 6 February 2006, Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party came to power. The Harper government brought with it the views of a strand of Canadian conservativism that had not traditionally occupied the upper rings of power in Canada’s conservative movement. The base of that movement prioritized traditional alliances with countries it perceived Canada sharing values with, like the United States and United Kingdom. Many of its members were pro-Israel evangelicals who considered Israel an oasis of democracy and civilization surrounded by dangerous dictatorships and brutality (Barry, Citation2012, p. 193; JTA, Citation2014). The movement was sceptical about international institutions and forms of governance, and exhibited hostility toward the myths and ideas associated with Pearsonianism (Bothwell, Citation2017, p. 30).
• Like Clark, one of Harper’s immediate foreign policy tests was in the Middle East. Hamas, a group the GOC listed as a terrorist organization 27 November 2002 (Public Safety Canada, Citation2019), won the 25 January 2006 Palestinian legislative election. Harper immediately sided with Israel in 2006 March by making Canada the first country, after Israel, to cut off aid and diplomatic ties with the Palestinian Authority (Galloway, Citation2006). Many followed, led by the United States, in an effort to bring down the new Palestinian government. This marked the beginning of a new Canadian approach to MENA and MEPP foreign policy, which clearly favoured the Israeli narrative over the Palestinian (Bloomfield & Nossal, Citation2007, p. 301). It marked a turn to a type of MENA foreign policy that prioritized partisan bilateral support for a like-minded Western state, over Pearsonian internationalism and Stanfield’s fair-mindedness.
• While in power (2006–15), the Harper government departed sharply from previous policy. Like Clark decades earlier, it saw a path to electoral victory that included wooing the support of Jewish voters by taking an even stauncher public stance than the Liberals in support of Israel (Nossal, Citation2014, pp. 16–17). There is evidence to suggest this was successful at winning votes in key urban ridings (Sasley, Citation2011). Further, since his party’s core of Anglo-Protestant supporters was not large enough to achieve power, Harper appealed to non-traditional Conservatives, including Jews, on the basis of shared social values (Barry, Citation2012, p. 191).
• While Martin had shifted Canada’s United Nations voting patterns closer to Israel, the Harper government would take a harder line (Leech-Ngo & Swan, Citation2019, pp. 32–33; Nossal, Citation2014). By 2008 January, Canada distinguished itself as the only country to vote against a Human Rights Council (Citation2008) resolution calling for Israel to immediately lift its siege on Gaza and for the protection of the Palestinian civilians, in compliance with human rights law and international humanitarian law. Of the sixteen resolutions Leech-Ngo and Swan analysed, from 2006 to 2010 they found Canada’s votes split fairly even between yes and no, with some abstentions. From 2011 to 2014, they found a near inverse of the Chrétien years, with Canada voting against fourteen of sixteen resolutions (Citation2019, p. 35).
• During the 2006 Lebanon War, Harper diverged from Western condemnation of Israel by insisting Israel was defending itself appropriately against terrorism. During the 2008/09 Gaza War his Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon blamed Hamas solely for the violence (Sasley, Citation2011). In each case, Israel was portrayed as the victim and voice of reason. By 2010 February, without any treaty obligations Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Peter Kent claimed, “an attack on Israel would be considered an attack on Canada” (Chase, Citation2010). At the 2011 G8 Summit at Deauville, France, Canada refused to offer United States President Obama unanimity on a proposal for Middle East negotiations (Baker & Ljunggren, Citation2011). Musu observed Canada’s approach shift from one of a positive-sum game, seeing no contradiction in supporting both Israeli and Palestinian aspirations; to a zero-sum approach where criticism of Israeli policies was seen as incompatible with Canada’s friendship with Israel (Citation2012, p. 72).
• In 2012 November, Canada sought to block a United Nations vote recognizing Palestine as a Permanent Observer State and threatened to retaliate by cutting off tens-of-millions of dollars in aid from the Palestinians. On several occasions, Harper’s government refused to criticize the construction of new Israeli settlements in the OPT. While visiting Israel in 2014 he rebuffed questions about settlements saying he would not stand in the Middle East and criticize Israel (C. Clark, Citation2014). In a speech to Israel’s Knesset, he reinforced the idea of mutual security when reflecting on a Jewish prayer promising, “through fire and water, Canada will stand with you” (Payton, Citation2014). In 2015, a “Canada–Israel Joint Declaration of Solidarity and Friendship”, stated their friendship was built, “first and foremost on shared values” around a shared “passionate belief in, and willingness to defend, the principles of freedom, democracy, human rights and the rule of law” (Global Affairs Canada, Citation2015).
• When acting without hesitation in support of Israel, the Harper government argued it was taking a principled position, because Canada and Israel share common democratic values including transparent elections, an independent judiciary, a free press, and human rights (Wiseman, Citation2012). The Canadian Prime Minister was unequivocally siding with one party over the other. Joe Clark himself wrote in 2014 that Canadian Ministers became, “more categorical in their commitment to Israel than any other international issue”, and that Canada’s support had become more adamant than Israel’s close friend the United States (p. 84). Clark also wrote that beyond the Middle East, a fierce commitment to Israel framed Canada’s approach to international issues, including the United Nations (Wiseman, Citation2012). Some scholars and diplomats ranked this foreign policy shift the most dramatic in post-1945 Canadian history (JTA, Citation2014). Lynk (Citation2015) referred to the Harper years as a supine embrace of an Israel deeply at odds with international law and opinion. Clark said Harper’s outspoken and one-sided positions limited, or eliminated, Canada’s capacity to act as a mediator or calming influence on the “increasingly volatile” Middle East (J. Clark, Citation2014, p. 84). Robinson wrote Canada lost the credibility necessary to contribute to Middle East peacebuilding (Citation2011, p. 718). The foreign policy approach may have helped cost Canada its 2010 bid for an UNSC seat (CBC News, Citation2010), too. However, unlike 1979 there was not a broad MENA backlash against Canada for any one event or reverse of course by the Harper government.

A new Canadian approach to the MEPP: The Justin Trudeau Liberal government

• From 2003 to 2015, Canada’s MENA foreign policy shifted from one of careful balance to one overwhelmingly favouring Israel (Barry, Citation2012, p. 191). Technically, Canada’s official policies toward the MEPP had not really changed since the 1990s. Rather, there had been a change in style and actions. After PE Trudeau’s son, Justin Trudeau, led the Liberals to power in a 2015 campaign that staked his party’s reputation on reinvigorating the institutional liberal order (Sands & Carment, Citation2019, p. 285), he immediately proclaimed, “Canada is back” to Canadians and the international community (Browne, Citation2019). The campaign elicited a sense of optimism Canada would return to a more fair-minded approach to Israel and the Palestinians, too (Seligman, Citation2018, p. 80).
• Differences between Justin Trudeau and Harper are discernible. After gaining power, the Trudeau Liberals began funding the United Nations Refugee and Works Agency (UNRWA) for Palestinian refugees with a $25 million 2016/17 fiscal year commitment (Global Affairs Canada, Citationn.d.), followed by $35 million in 2017/18 (Global Affairs Canada, Citation2019, p. 21) and $30 million in 2018/19 (Global Affairs Canada, Citation2020, p. 21). This was after Harper cut funding to UNRWA in the 2011/12, 2013/14, 2014/15 and 2015/16 fiscal years in retaliation for the 2008/9 Gaza War. The Trudeau government’s decision came as the United States Trump Administration decided, in 2018, to defund UNRWA as part of a process to: put pressure on Palestinians to acquiesce to a new political deal with Israel (Amr, Citation2018), redefine and eliminate the right of return for millions of Palestinian refugees (Ahren, Citation2019), and ultimately eliminate UNRWA (T. O. I. staff & Agencies, Citation2018). Trudeau’s decision to fund UNRWA not only ran contrary to President Trump’s regional strategy, but sometimes vociferous opposition by Canadian Jewish groups (Csillag, Citation2019a). It also marked a return to a Stanfield recommendation that Canada fund UNRWA, as part of the international community’s obligation to Palestinian refugees from 1948 and 1967 (Stanfield, Citation1980, p. 13).
• When in 2017 the Trump Administration announced it would recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and move the United States embassy there, Trudeau’s government explicitly rejected following suit (Zilio, Citation2017). In a declassified email, Foreign Affairs Minister Freeland was advised Canada’s long-standing position was the status of Jerusalem can only be resolved as part of a general Israeli-Palestinian settlement (Webster, Citation2017, p. 3). Canada even risked President Trump’s ire by abstaining on a 2017 UNGA resolution declaring his recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital null and void (Blanchfield, Citation2017). There an abstention may be effectively understood as an endorsement. Meanwhile, Canada’s Conservative opposition party pledged to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in their 2019 election campaign platform (Conservative Party of Canada, Citation2018). In 2019 December, two months after being re-elected with a minority government, Trudeau’s Liberals backed an UNGA resolution supporting Palestinian self-determination (Csillag, Citation2019b).
• Similarities between Harper and Justin Trudeau abound. During nine years in power, Harper’s embrace of Israel extended into the domestic sphere. He carried out a crackdown on civil society organizations, government funded bodies and individuals speaking out in favour of Palestinian rights (Y. Abu-Laban & Bakan, Citation2012; Wildeman, Citation2017). While there was an opening up after Harper left office, the Trudeau government has publicly disparaged Palestine rights advocates. When in 2016 Western Law Professor Michael Lynk was appointed United Nations “Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967”, Trudeau’s Foreign Affairs Minister Stephane Dion immediately joined Israel to severely condemn the appointment (JTA & The CJN, Citation2016). Trudeau has also gone out of his way to condemn student and community advocates of Palestine rights, including over Twitter (Arnold, Citation2016) and on campaign (Times of Israel staff, Citation2019).
• Though Trudeau’s government caught the attention of many observers by backing the 2019 December UNGA resolution on Palestinian self-determination, this owed much to its first term (2015–19) voting record. Leech-Ngo and Swan had found, “despite the mild rhetorical shift around moving towards a more balanced’ approach, there has been absolutely no deviation in voting between the previous Harper government and the Trudeau Liberals” (Citation2019, pp. 34–35). The Trudeau government has also been adamant in arguing Israel is singled out unfairly at the United Nations (CIJA, Citation2017). Those views reflect continuity with the Harper-era “Canada–Israel Joint Declaration of Solidarity and Friendship”, which expressed anxiety over efforts to isolate and demonize the State of Israel (Global Affairs Canada, Citation2015).
• Other investigative work suggests Trudeau’s government has actively helped Israel at the multilateral level in various United Nations agencies (Larson, Citation2018). Like the Harper government, on 14 February 2020 Canada submitted a letter to the International Criminal Court (ICC) reiterating Canada’s position that Canada does not recognize a Palestinian state, so Palestine does not qualify for jurisdiction in an ICC investigation into Israeli war-crimes in the OPT. The Canadian Jewish News was told this is the same official position Canada submitted in 2018 and 2015 (Csillag & Reporter, Citation2020). The Trudeau government further supported the expansion of the Canadian Israel Free Trade Agreement (CIFTA) to permit goods and services produced in Israeli West Bank settlements, to enter Canada on the same tariff-free terms as goods and services from Israel (Lynk & Neve, Citation2019). This would economically advantage Israeli settlement growth and directly contradict Canada’s longstanding position on settlements and international law. When in 2019 a Canadian court ruled against Israeli settlement wines being labelled “Product of Israel” for being “false, misleading or deceptive”, in CitationDavid Kattenburg v the Attorney General of Canada, the Attorney General of Canada chose to appeal.
• Today the Middle East and Israeli-Palestinian conflict are much more familiar to Canadians than in the 1980s. Recent polling suggests broad sympathy for the Palestinians. In 2017, an EKOS poll found far more Canadians have a negative view of the Israeli government than a positive one, and most Canadians consider the Canadian government biased in favour of Israel (CJPME & EKOS and Associates, Citation2017). In 2018, Liberal MP Anthony Housefather told Jewish Canadians his government’s voting record at the United Nations was better than all previous ones (Housefather, Citation2018). Similarly, in 2018 Seligman argued Trudeau’s policy toward the MEPP had much more in common with Harper than Chrétien (p. 91). A 2020 EKOS poll found three-quarters of Canadians thought Canada should oppose Israeli annexation of Palestinian territory (CJPME & EKOS Research Associates, Citation2020). It also found 84 percent of Canadians think the ICC should investigate alleged war crimes committed by Israeli officials, with 71 percent saying Canada should not consider stepping in if it is opposed to the investigation (CJPME & EKOS Research Associates, Citation2020). As Sands and Carment wrote in 2019, “Despite all the rhetoric, Justin Trudeau’s Liberals are as hawkish as the previous Conservative government” (p. 285). This would appear true toward the Palestinians and MEPP.

Conclusion – two Canadian approaches

• Canada has adopted two foreign policy approaches toward the Palestinians and Israeli-Palestinian peacebuilding. This paper has labelled those Pearsonian and Harperian. The Pearsonian approach emphasizes liberal internationalism, multilateralism and peacebuilding. Though it recognizes Canada’s place in the Western camp, it seeks for Canada to build broader MENA relationships. To accomplish these aims, Canada strives to have the appearance of a fair-minded actor to all parties in the region. That is particularly important towards Israel and the Palestinians, whose conflict is considered sensitive to Arab states and of great threat to regional stability. That approach was particularly prominent from 1980 up to 2003. The Harperian approach is premised first-and-foremost on bilateral alliances with nations the GOC perceives to share Canada’s Western liberal and democratic values. Shared identity is important. Proponents of this view consider Israel a lone outpost of civilization in an otherwise dark region. Not concerned with fair-mindedness, it is a partisan approach where Canada clearly sides with Israel. Canada takes the approach regardless of cost to its regional image and relationships, or broader multilateral linkages. The approach became dominant from 2006 onward.
• Electoral politics appear to influence Canadian policy, particularly in a contest over some key urban Canadian ridings. Interestingly, as Canadians became more aware of MENA affairs and supportive of the Palestinians, the Harper and Trudeau governments adopted the most partisan foreign policy approach. Though successive governments deferred to the United States’ regional interests, Canada’s Palestinian and MEPP policy has a logic of its own, structured around its close relationship with Israel and electoral politics. Canadian policy even at times contradicted United States aims. Though unclear how it factors into Canada’s Palestinian and MEPP policymaking, Canada’s most zealous embrace of Israel came in a period where MENA oil suppliers were clear competitors to North American energy suppliers. Each approach makes frequent reference to perceived Canadian values, whose definitions are different for different Canadian actors. Further research could be done on what Canadian values may mean in the context of MENA, as well as the factors behind adopting the two approaches now laid out in this paper.
• Irrespective of approach, Canada remained a close friend of Israel and close ally of the United States. Pearson had himself been no pacifist, but an advocate of a fairer internationalism and a champion of the Western camp. Likewise, even with the Pearsonian approach to the Palestinians and MEPP, and especially the Harperian approach, Canada never valued the Arab voice over its Western friends and allies, including Israel.

+ The International Community’s Role and Impact on the Middle East Peace Process (2021 - T&F)

Michael Atallah, Canadian Foreign Policy Journal, 27(1), 81–97

Introduction

• The Israeli-Palestinian issue remains one of the most intractable conflicts of the last century. The successive failure of the Middle East Peace Process (MEPP) warrants a reappraisal of the international community’s role in moving the parties towards conflict resolution. Like few other issues, this dispute triggers unconscious assumptions, biases, and preconceptions even among those tasked with making peace. A clear and dispassionate analytical view of the problem is thus central towards finding policies that sustainably address Israeli and Palestinian grievances.
• For the past three decades, the international community has invested in the idea that establishing a viable Palestinian state alongside Israel is the only option to resolve the conflict. The creation of a Palestinian state roughly along Israel’s pre-1967 boundaries in the territories that Israel captured during the six-day war in June of that year (including East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank) has become known as the international two-state consensus (Moughrabi, Citation1987; Tilley, Citation2015). Towards achieving this goal, the international community has provided over US $35 billion to Palestinian areas between 1993 and 2018, with the European Union being the largest donor (Hemmer, Citation2010; World Bank, Citation2018).
• While the parties themselves bear a fair measure of responsibility for failing to bridge the gaps in their positions (Lintl, Citation2018), some accountability also falls on the international community due to its extensive involvement in the MEPP over the past three decades. The MEPP’s failure, as shown later, has been partly due to certain structural-cognitive weaknesses underlying Western efforts to resolve the conflict.
• This study examines the core assumptions embedded in the international community’s approach to the MEPP and assesses whether these assumptions advance or undermine the goal of peace in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. By exploring the underlying mental constructs that shape and influence international policy-making, specifically in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this study expands the literature on conflict resolution. It also explores the core challenges facing the international community in a post-Oslo (or post-MEPP) world and the implications for the future of peacemaking in the Israeli-Palestinian arena.
• The paper starts with a definition of the term “international community” and moves on to examine the MEPP’s achievements and shortcomings. To provide a more balanced view of the peace process and to situate its importance for future peacemaking, the second section, “MEPP Accomplishments”, outlines how it has positively contributed to the overall Israeli-Palestinian dynamic. The third section, “The Peace Model and its Failures”, provides a short review of the existing arguments on the MEPP’s failure and where this essay fits into that. The following three sections outline the main structural weaknesses and faulty assumptions in the MEPP and how these undermined Palestinian self-determination, as well as Israel’s long-term security. The main structural weakness argument is dealt with in section four “Policy Group Think in the Donor Community”. Section five, “Restraining Palestinian Self-Determination” examines how donor assistance has restrained Palestinian political room for maneuver while increasing their dependency on donor aid. This is followed in section six by a consideration of how the MEPP’s failure poses a threat to Israel in “Undermining Israel.” The final component of the paper is the forward-looking part in section seven, “A Post-Oslo World—Opportunities and Challenges”, which explores the Trump plan, and examines other potential developments in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and how these might affect conflict resolution in the future.

What is meant by “international community”?

• In this article the term “international community” is used to describe the majority of – mostly Western – donor countries that uphold the two-state solution as their main policy prescription. These countries support the establishment of a viable Palestinian state in the 1967 boundaries affirmed by the “land for peace formula” adopted in the UN Security Council Resolution 242 (1967) and 338 (1973). These countries are also the main financial backers of the Palestinian state building effort and they maintain robust diplomatic relations with Israel. They include Canada, Japan as well as European Union member states such as France, Germany, the UK, Spain, The Netherlands, and the Nordic states Sweden, Denmark, Iceland and Finland. The United States was the main guarantor of the Oslo peace process and, until recently, has been instrumental in keeping the peace process alive (Elgindy, Citation2019b). The MEPP was built on an international consensus envisioning the establishment of a territorially contiguous Palestinian state in twenty-two percent of historical Palestine – also largely referred to as the Green line or pre-1967 boundaries – in the West Bank, Gaza Strip with a capital in East Jerusalem (Huber & Kamel, Citation2015; US Department of State, Citation2016). The actions of the Trump administration, especially the “Peace to Prosperity” vision unveiled in January 2020, represent a marked departure from the international consensus on two-state solution. The American plan unilaterally carves out new boundaries well beyond the 1967 borders incorporating as much as 30 percent of the West Bank into Israel, there would be no shared sovereignty in Jerusalem, and Palestinian statehood would be conditional on Palestinians meeting security and governance requirements set by Israel and the United States (“Peace to Prosperity”, Citation2020). Even if the plan is quietly set aside by a new American administration, its introduction has irreparably damaged years of MEPP work and highlighted the importance of maintaining a collective international vision of peacemaking in this arena.

MEPP accomplishments

• Since the 1993 Oslo Accords, the MEPP has spawned an industry of experts, desk officers, political analysts, peace practitioners, peace envoys, Track II professionals and special coordinators. There have been hundreds of backchannel initiatives, thousands of official government condemnations, countless diplomatic demarches, and ritualistic UN General Assembly votes and Security Council resolutions. Even though the Oslo Accords faced incredible criticism for its failings nearly 30 years on, the peace process yielded some accomplishments as well. For instance, donor funding and technical expertise helped prepare Palestinians for statehood by building a range of institutions from the ground up. In 2011, based on reports prepared by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations said that Palestinian “governmental functions are now sufficient for a functioning government of a state” (UN, Citation2011, p. 1). According to the UN, the Palestinians were prepared to function as a state in the following areas: ensuring the rule of law and human rights; livelihoods; education and culture; health; social protection; infrastructure and water (Assadi, Citation2011). Without the international community, building and readying Palestinian institutions for statehood would not have occurred.
• In addition to helping Palestinians prepare for self-governance, donor countries have made modest contributions to conflict resolution. These include hosting closed discussion where the parties could engage directly with one another. Although some issues were considered too contentious to broach, some Western countries tackled it head-on, bringing the parties together for talks behind the scenes and eventually building roadmaps for resolving core issues. An example is the work that Canada undertook as “gavel holder” of the Refugee Working Group launched following the 1991 Madrid Conference to address Palestinian refugee needs. Canada later worked behind the scenes in what became known as the “Ottawa Process”, a series of Track II initiatives from 1997 to 2001 between Israelis and Palestinians (Brynen, Alma, Peters, El-Rifai, & Tansley, Citation2003; Robinson, Citation2011). With the support of the Canadian government, the work continued with International Development Research Centre (IDRC) taking a lead in bringing Israelis and Palestinians together, generating joint options to address the Palestinian refugee issue that included compensation, resettlement, and repatriation (Brynen & El-Rifai, Citation2007). Another contribution from Canada was the Jerusalem Old City Initiative which laid out a proposal for the shared management of the contested city without prejudicing the sovereignty claims of either party (Jerusalem Old City Initiative, Citation2010).
• In addition to preparing Palestinians for statehood and laying the foundation for implementing a negotiated peace, another MEPP achievement of the international community was to uphold public attention needed for conflict-resolution. In line with these efforts, European states took steps to set labelling standards for goods made in Jewish settlements versus those made in Israel (Weinzuerl, Citation2020). Although European measures to set criteria and raise such business awareness are not formally part of the MEPP, these actions nonetheless contributed to the overarching principle that settlements are illegitimate and that their non-recognition remains central to the international consensus on the conflict. While not changing the reality on the ground, these steps played a symbolic role in preserving the idea of a Palestinian state.

The peace model and its failures

• Criticism of the MEPP comes from numerous quarters and those critiques at least partially explain the international community’s inability to significantly move the parties closer to conflict resolution (Amr, Lustick, Kahwaji, & Freeman, Citation2017; Lustick, Citation2013; Qumsiyeh, Citation2009; White, Citation2017). The numerous failed peace initiatives that came on the heels of Canada’s last Track II discussions include Bill Clinton’s 2000 Camp David summit, the 2001 Taba talks, the 2002 Arab Peace initiative, the 2003 Geneva Initiative, the Middle East Quartet’s (Russia, USA, UN, EU) 2003 Roadmap initiative, the 2007 Annapolis discussion, and the 2014 Kerry process (Lintl, Citation2018).
• Some analysts highlight that donor funding has allowed Israel to maintain a low-cost occupation for years and that this diminishes any incentive for it to vie for a formal political settlement (Dajani & Lovatt, Citation2017). Mandy Turner points out that Western peacebuilding strategies of governance, security coordination, and neoliberal economics in Palestinian areas assisted Israel’s “methods of population control to ensure acquiescence to the process of colonisation” (Turner, Citation2015, p. 97). The MEPP’s failure has also been linked to the inability of the “process” to address the power asymmetry between the parties or alter the terms of engagement that would allow Israelis and Palestinians to meet as equals (Ben-Porat, Citation2008; Turner, Citation2011). The process was flawed from the outset because the “practical meaning of mutual recognition as understood by the parties was too far apart to be bridged in a manner amenable to practical implementation” (Ben-Porat, Citation2008, p. 260).
• In terms of the European Union’s role specifically, some highlight that Europe went along with the process at the expense of conflict resolution. Esra Bulut Aymat notes that the "admirable objective of pulling the parties towards crucial concessions by going along with their plans in good faith, when not met with the capacity to unleash pulling power, has left the EU in a position of participating in polarising processes that appear to weaken prospects of a negotiated settlement." (Aymat, Citation2010, p. 23)
• Hugh Lovatt notes that while affirming its commitment to the two-state solution, European Union states “shy away from deploying the tools necessary to help make this a reality” and “in continuing to promote a broken model, the EU and its member states are punching below their collective weight … .Instead of taking the initiative, they continue to act solely as a placeholder in between successive rounds of United States-led diplomacy” (Lovatt, Citation2016, p. 2). Meanwhile, despite all the institutions and organizations in place that constitute the MEPP – from the office of the Quartet to the myriad “special envoys” to the regionFootnote1–these have been unable to “construct an institutional framework as well as relational space for mitigated antagonism to develop” (Aggestam, Cristiano, & Strömbom, Citation2015, p. 1742). In equal measure, the role of the United States cannot be ignored when examining the MEPP’s failure. Khaled Elgindy proposes that a leading factor in the failure of the peace process is a historic American domestic “blind spot” that overlooks the great power asymmetry between the parties and Palestinian political realities (Elgindy, Citation2019a). Perhaps more relevant to the current discussion is the potential unconscious biases of Western MEPP officials themselves. Brown & Nerenberg note that the MEPP has become a “façade” that “persuades only the mediators of its viability” and that benign neglect and denial on the part of world leaders of the local realities – especially Palestinian institutional decay and Israeli rejection of the two-state solution – accurately describes where we are currently at in the history of the conflict (Brown & Nerenberg, Citation2016, p. 25).
• The above arguments allude to the faulty cognitive frame in which the international community operated throughout the MEPP. These flawed assumptions are best reflected in the collective donor belief that eventually the conditions for peace would be right on both sides, and they should in the meantime keep reinforcing the MEPP. This assumption failed to account for changing realities on the ground that made establishing a Palestinian state in the West Bank increasingly unviable. For instance, according to Peace Now (Citation2019), an Israeli NGO, at the start of the peace process in 1993, there were 116,300 Israeli settlers living in the West Bank. The Jewish settler population in the West Bank – not including those in East Jerusalem – has reportedly reached 463,535 as of January 2020, according to information compiled by an Israeli statistical firm using population figures from Ministry of Interior (AP & TOI, Citation2020). This does not include the estimated 218,000 Israelis living in East Jerusalem that most of the international community views as illegal (Seidemann, Citation2019). Long before the spectre of annexation, growing settlement infrastructure in the West Bank was the key obstacle to a viable Palestinian state. Some Western policymakers intentionally set aside this inconvenient reality while others did so unconsciously; nevertheless, almost all MEPP officials operated under the same cognitive frame and accepted similar overarching assumptions.

Policy groupthink in the donor community

• To fully unpack how the international community has approached the MEPP it is important to explore the assumptions that policymakers used to formulate policy and programming towards the region. In response to criticism that there is closing window for a two-state settlement, a common refrain among MEPP officials has been that “it doesn’t matter how much things change on the ground because everybody knows what the final settlement will look like”, i.e. a two-state solution largely along the 1967 boundary. This “everybody knows” argument absolved MEPP professionals from constructing policies that imposed costs on the parties for taking unilateral steps that changed realities on the ground (Friedman & Seideman, Citation2010). Yet, the international community now finds itself in a three decade state-building project that was only supposed to last five years as envisioned under the Oslo paradigm. The above assumption reflects one of the problematic cognitive frames of international peacemakers and it constitutes a key structural weakness of the MEPP.
• A process well understood in psychology is that human perception “constructs” rather than “records” reality and that we “tend to perceive what we expect to perceive” (Heuer, Citation1999, p. 8). The process of inference-building where people construct their own version of reality is very much grounded in a person’s own assumptions and preconceptions (Heuer, Citation1999). Nowhere was this more at play than in the collective thinking in MEPP policy circles over the past thirty years. Western countries who sought to uphold the two-state solution convinced themselves that their efforts would eventually pay off, even if the realities on the ground were moving along a different trajectory. The collective impression that emerged was founded on a range of problematic assumptions that is best characterized by the “groupthink” phenomena.
• Groupthink is the phenomenon whereby unchallenged analysis is adopted and circulated within a closed setting. As originally outlined by psychologist Irving Janis, groupthink is a syndrome where pressure to reach a consensus – or concurrence-seeking – supersedes differences within the group (Hart, Citation1991). In this case the policy prescription is reinforced by other like-minded policymakers adopting the same conclusions. Policymakers in Western countries have fallen into this trap when dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
• They assume, for example, that if the international community keeps the two-state formula alive, both rhetorically and through programming, then it will remain a viable conflict resolution model despite contradictory realities on the ground.Footnote2 This view is closely linked to the “everybody knows” argument where MEPP professionals internalized the belief that the contours of a final settlement were well understood and the only missing ingredient was political will that would eventually materialize. The second subsumed assumption is that there is simply no other alternative that could be palatable to both sides, and therefore, no other conflict resolution option should be explored (Hussein, Citation2015). Policymakers accepted the idea that Israelis would never agree to a bi-national state since this would efface the Jewish-majority in Israel, while downplaying the importance of Palestinian civil rights (Farsakh, Citation2017). The third and most problematic assumption is that both parties must negotiate amongst themselves for there to be a lasting agreement. This last point overlooks the great power asymmetry between the parties, which undermines the very principle of making any negotiation viable or any deal implementable (Thiessen, Citation2017, pp. 7–8).
• In addition, the assumptions above overlook not only the changing realities on the ground, but also the transforming attitudes of the Israelis and Palestinians. For instance, support for a two state-solution among Israelis fell from 69 percent in 2012 to 55 percent in 2017 (Shear, Citation2018). A 2019 poll found that only 34 percent of Israelis support the two-state solution, with 42 percent backing West Bank annexation (Kraft, Citation2019). Similarly, among Palestinians, 65 percent supported the two-state solution in 2006 and only 43 percent by 2018 (Shikaki & Scheindlin, Citation2018). Such inconvenient facts have either been dismissed or not given sufficient weight in the international peace process machinery.
• Groupthink may be an unavoidable feature for large bureaucracies where critical thinking is hampered and public servants are forced to operate within narrow guidelines that discourage dissent (Hirst, Van Knippenberg, Chen, & Sacramento, Citation2011; Macias, Citation2020). The collective assumptions within the MEPP community obscured critical thinking and allowed “process” to develop into a life of its own. Over time, this led to bureaucratic policy drift that sustained the Western-led peace process status quo.

Restraining Palestinian self-determination

• As the MEPP got underway after the Oslo Accords, Western – including American, Canadian, and European – programming in the region steadily increased. Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip have increasingly become dependent on external funding and donor aid is now the main driver of the Palestinian economy (Taghdisi-Rad, Citation2010). This support has ebbed and flowed over the years, even though the overall trajectory is one of decline (World Bank, Citation2020). The rationale for financially supporting the Palestinians rests on the premise that donors are building and training Palestinian institutions to ready them to run a state of their own (Persson, Citation2018). Various arguments attempt to situate why this international aid exists and persists; however, at its core it endures primarily to induce Palestinians to “buy into a peace agreement with Israel” (Wildeman & Tartir, Citation2014). Some argue that international donor assistance, while aimed at state-building, contributed to the fracturing of Palestinian politics and undermined democracy and economic development in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (Farsakh, Citation2016; Turner, Citation2014). A particularly relevant critique of the international community in the Palestinian arena is that they internalized Israeli security concerns when engaging Palestinian interlocutors. One could not be a “partner for peace” in the MEPP if Palestinian entities were not approved by Israel (Turner, Citation2011). By using such discourse, Turner argues that donors promoted the “right” type of elite that MEPP institutions could deal with, which undermined Palestinian society, promoted elite fragmentation and confrontation, and diminished the legitimacy of the PA (Turner, Citation2011).
• Two decades of donor assistance has also constrained the political space for Palestinian leaders to pursue self-determination. Palestinian rule is limited only to enclaved urban municipal areas (area A) of the West Bank. Area A is administered by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, whose mandate expired in 2010. Abbas has governed by decree since and the international community continues to underwrite his rule. In some way, the donors are complicit in preserving an undemocratic and increasingly authoritarian regime in West Bank cities. According to June 2019 polling, some 57 percent of Palestinians want President Abbas to resign and 80 percent believe there is corruption in the Palestinian Authority, which most (67 percent) believe is deep-rooted (Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, Citation2019). With external funding continuing to flow to Palestinian Authority areas despite the suspension of electoral democracy, Palestinian governance essentially relies on the international donor community. This donor funding imposes constraints on Palestinian governance. For instance, any move to step back from the Oslo Accords (Oslo I in 1993 and Oslo II in 1995), abandon the Palestinian Authority or turn over control of “Area A” to Israel would jeopardize donor funding and threaten the livelihood of thousands of people employed by the Palestinian Authority.
• There seems to be a growing recognition that donors cannot continue financially supporting the Palestinians indefinitely. Funding to Palestinians has been in decline since 2009 (Goldenberg, Shamni, Novik, & Bauman, Citation2016; World Bank, Citation2018). This donor fatigue is likely brought on by other crises that compete for assistance but also by the lack of progress towards resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The arrival of COVID-19 and the global economic fallout will almost certainly increase pressure on donor countries to redirect their resources internally to deal with the pandemic. One argument for restructuring aid posits that donors should shift away from short-term support and towards making Palestinian institutions “more resilient over the medium and long-term” with the aim of keeping “their institutions viable, both at a grassroots level and as a national community in a manner that would make it possible for future leaders to negotiate on their behalf” (Brown, Citation2018, p. 2). This argument, however, leads to the same predicament/impasse that has currently confronted the donors, as it reinforces their unwillingness to accept the reality that the two-state solution is no longer viable and that the ongoing donor programming is not serving its intended aim.

Undermining Israel

• Many supporters of Israel are critical of the perceived singling out of the Jewish state at the UN and in other international fora. They simultaneously question the “disproportionate amount of attention and condemnation” that Israel receives from international institutions, which they argue serves to “reinforce the victim narrative adopted by the Palestinians” (Menenberg, Citation2011, p. 27; Muravchik, Citation2013). As the only self-declared “Jewish and democratic state”, Israel is bound to attract greater scrutiny due to its close association with Western countries that express support for human rights, universal values, and international law (Mertes, Citation2015).
• Israel’s failure to meet some of these obligations in its dealings with the Palestinians is not the fault of Western countries, but they should be accountable for their inability to translate their rhetorical support for Israel into concrete actions in the MEPP. Donors failed to accelerate the creation of a viable Palestinian state alongside Israel. Establishing such a state would have been a key factor in safeguarding Israel from impending demographic and security burdens while preserving its “democratic and Jewish” character. In addition, by consciously or unconsciously avoiding the growing possibility that the collapse of the two-state solution will lead to a struggle for Palestinian civil and human rights, the international community is contributing to a dynamic where Israel will be further isolated and vilified on the global stage.
• Currently, the overall Arab Palestinian population is nearing or equal to the number of Israeli Jews living in the lands from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. In 2018, an officer in Israel’s military Coordinating Organization of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) estimated that the Palestinian population living in the West Bank is between 2.5 and 2.7 million while a Palestinian Census put that number at 3 million (Heller, Citation2018). Avi Dichter, former Chairman of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee, said that with the addition of the 2 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, Israel controls the lives of approximately five million people (Heller, Citation2018). According to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics there are some 1.84 million Palestinian citizens of Israel, and adding that number to those in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, yields a total of 6.8 million Palestinians between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean, roughly the same number of Jewish citizens of Israel (Heller, Citation2018). From this demographic reality emerges an unpalatable choice for Israel: remain a democracy or deny Palestinians the ability to vote.
• In a scenario where Israel grants citizenship to all residents of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, it would lose its “Jewish character.” Numerous Israeli leaders and experts have warned against this move. For instance, Israel’s founding father, David Ben-Guiron, believed that preserving Israel as a Jewish and democratic state was a national priority and this should remain paramount if Israel wants to avoid becoming a bi-national Jewish-Arab state (Markovsky & Ross, Citation2019). While this threat to Israel is generally less understood and incorporated in the MEPP, there were warnings in at least one Western foreign policy unit as early as the 1940s. Elisabeth MacCallum, Canada’s leading expert on the Middle East serving in the Department of External Affairs advised that equally protecting the rights of both Jews and Arabs was the only road to diminishing the threat posed to a Jewish national home in Palestine. She argued at the time that pushing a pro-Zionist solution to the British mandate of Palestine not only did not serve Jewish interests, it “jeopardized Jewish presence in Palestine by alienating the Arabs” and engendering hostility (Newport, Citation2014, p. 148).
• In this conflict, time is not on Israel’s side. MEPP professionals treated time as an inexhaustible resource. They invested in the belief that Palestinian self-determination was synonymous with establishing a “state” and not with ending the occupation, which is what most Palestinians want.Footnote3 Western countries overlooked the probability that the Israeli-Palestinian issue will increasingly be viewed internationally through a human rights prism and not a dispute over territory. Willingness to censure Israel is on the rise after decades of failed negotiations, creeping annexation, and the Trump plan. For instance, France reportedly pushed European Union member states to impose economic sanctions on Israel if it annexes territory (Emmott & Guarascio, Citation2020). In 2007, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert foreshadowed the danger to Israel: “if the day comes when the two-state solution collapses and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished” (BBC, Citation2007).
• The failure of Western leaders and policymakers to anticipate the transformation of the Palestinian struggle into a human rights issue is best demonstrated by the case of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Once a fringe group, now BDS is forming alliances with trade unions, Hollywood actors and activist counterparts globally, including the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States (Bueckert, Citation2020; Erakat, Citation2020; Horowitz & Weiss, Citation2010). While global activism on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict continues to be dismissed as fringe by Western governments, the growing awareness could accelerate unpredictably and further isolate Israel on the global stage.

A post-Oslo world – opportunities and challenges

• Members of the international community, Canada included, are now in a holding pattern on the MEPP. There are no immediate signs that they will shift their policies on the two-state solution or aid to the Palestinians. This, however, could change as the COVID-19 pandemic forces all countries to look inward and address health and economic priorities. It may not be long before small policy changes, like the ongoing decline in donor funding, become a larger trend. On the other hand, the United States “Peace to Prosperity” vision could create avenues for members of the international community to rethink Middle East peacemaking. Already, the Trump plan has gone a long way towards ending any prospect for peace envisioned by the two-state consensus (Levy, Citation2020), as examined in Viveash’s policy commentary in this collection.
• In January 2020, the United States released its long awaited vision. As noted earlier, the 181 page “Peace to Prosperity” document is a departure from previous proposals on the Israeli-Palestinian issue (“Peace to Prosperity”, Citation2020). The plan allows Israel to exercise sovereignty over all of Jerusalem, there would be no Palestinian refugee right of return, and Israel would extend its sovereignty to approximately 30 percent of the West Bank including the Jordan Valley. Within this vision, Israel would maintain control over all ports and borders, with a disjointed patchwork of isolated territorial islands linked together by tunnels and bypass roads. A future demilitarized Palestinian state could theoretically be created in the remaining 70 percent of the West Bank (Robinson, Citation2020). A former Israeli and Canadian diplomat reflected on how the Trump plan could undermine Israel’s global standing and partnership with Western states in the coming years:
  • The international community’s relative willingness to tolerate, until now, the current reality in the occupied territories, has been based on the pretense that it is only temporary … The Trump plan declares plainly that the ‘temporary’ occupation is to be replaced by a permanent military regime, which does not come with full rights for those living under its control … This will never be tolerable in the eyes of the community of liberal democratic countries to which Israel seeks to belong. (Barkan & Allen, Citation2020)
• Palestinians resoundingly rejected the Trump plan, while reactions elsewhere were muted, likely reflecting sensitivities around relations with Washington more than the content of the approach proposed. Many donor countries echoed the EU response saying that they “will study and assess Trump’s plans on the basis of its commitment to a negotiated and viable two-state solution that takes into account the legitimate aspirations of both the Palestinians and the Israelis” (Deutsche Welle [DW], Citation2020). Germany’s Foreign Minister Heiko Maas went further while remaining cautious saying “Trump’s proposal raised questions about the involvement of the conflicting parties in a negotiation process and their relationship to recognize international parameters and legal positions” (Deutsche Welle [DW], Citation2020). While many European and like-minded countries reiterated that only a negotiated approach would succeed in resolving the conflict, none were willing to explicitly say that the Trump plan represents a death blow to the two-state model (Tharoor, Citation2020). Even before the prospect of Israeli annexation, an increasing number of Palestinians believed that the two-state solution was dead (Rasgon, Citation2018; TOI, Citation2020). Similarly, there is a growing awareness that a one-state reality already exists and that we are entering an era of permanent Israeli control of Palestinians (Lustick, Citation2019).
• Despite its past failures, the international community remains vital for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The parties, on their own, are extremely unlikely to forge a political settlement given the great power asymmetry between them. With all the time and resources already spent on the MEPP, many donor countries want a return on their investment in the form of a viable resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Accepting that the Oslo paradigm is dead presents a unique opportunity for Western countries to re-imagine conflict resolution and articulate a new vision. On 30 April 2020 EU Foreign Policy Chief Josep Borrell said “that the annexation of the Jordan Valley would mean the end of the two-state solution” (Borell, Citation2020). Even if Israel does not formally annex parts of the West Bank, settlement infrastructure and Palestinians communities have become sufficiently intertwined to make a two-state solution impractical. It is becoming increasingly difficult to cognitively dismiss the new Israeli-Palestinian dynamic and the fact that the two-state solution is over.Footnote4 Moreover, the incoming Joe Biden administration in the United States is extremely unlikely to reverse the steps taken by the previous one, even if the Trump plan is quietly set aside. Given the damage already done, it is very unlikely the MEPP could sufficiently be resurrected beyond maintaining the illusion of progress. All of these factors will likely accelerate the shift in some Western foreign policy circles toward new conflict resolution models.

Conclusion

• The future of international peacemaking on the Israeli-Palestinian issue will eventually involve a reassessment of the assumptions that underpinned the failed MEPP for the past three decades. Such a transformation will almost certainly be gradual as international bureaucracies adjust to the demise of the two-state solution and to a new global order brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. There will also be many other competing priorities for the West’s attention both domestically as well as in the Middle East, including the ongoing conflicts in Yemen, Syria and Libya, instability in Iraq, economic malaise in Lebanon, and ongoing tensions with Iran.
• In hindsight, the MEPP’s failure reveals structural weaknesses within the peace process. Cognitive dissonance and groupthink led policymakers to continuously dismiss the changing facts on the ground such as settlement activity in the West Bank. Meanwhile, faulty assumptions led to MEPP policy drift. These included the belief that the two-state solution would remain viable and the faith in the idea that political will among the parties would eventually materialize. Another flawed assumption was the belief that only direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, despite their power imbalance, could achieve success. Meanwhile, the international community undermined Palestinian self-determination by propping up an increasingly illegitimate Palestinian Authority. It treated time as an inexhaustible resource and lost sight that, with the status quo, the Palestinians had become dependent on donor aid. External aid to the region enabled Israel’s continued control of millions of Palestinians at a relatively low cost. Western policy professionals failed to take into account that Israel’s ongoing control over a majority Palestinian population is an equation that jeopardizes Israel in the long-term. By sub-consciously avoiding how the demise of the two-state solution is transforming the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a territorial dispute into a struggle for Palestinian civil and human rights, the international community is contributing to Israel’s isolation on the global stage.
• Recent developments, particularly the Trump plan and the drive towards annexation are creating unique challenges and new opportunities for the international community to re-evaluate its core assumptions on the Israeli-Palestinian situation. Will the MEPP policy community accept the one-state reality as it exists today or, will Western countries cling to the old vision of the two-state solution as the only possible hope for peace? What is certain is that the international community has an essential role to play in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in large measure because the parties themselves are unable to do so on their own. However, before the international policy community can meaningfully re-engage on conflict resolution, it must reassess its founding assumptions about the region, incorporate lessons learnt during the MEPP, and continuously push back against the cognitive barriers that prevent creative thinking necessary to sustainably resolve this conflict.

+ Canada, the United Nations, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (2021 - T&F)

Amelia C. Arsenault & Costanza Musu, Canadian Foreign Policy Journal, 27(1), 98–116

Introduction

• As a founding member of the United Nations (UN), Canada’s history of global engagement has long included a commitment to addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Since Canada’s participation in the drafting of the 1947 Partition Plan to divide the British Mandate of Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state, Canada has continued to use the United Nations as a forum to ensure meaningful participation in the Arab-Israeli peace process.Footnote1 In the years following the 1947 partition plan, Canada’s official policy has remained fairly consistent, continuously expressing Canadian support for both the existence and security of the Israeli state, whilst supporting the right of self-determination for the Palestinian people. Thus, Canada’s official foreign policy regarding the “two-state solution” to the Middle East conflict has persisted in light of geopolitical changes in the region, international developments, and domestic electoral shifts. However, Canada’s voting patterns at the United Nations on issues related to the conflict have, at times, experienced significant fluctuations. This paper will analyze how concerns about international reputation, domestic considerations, and strategic alliances with both the United States (U.S.) and European allies, have impacted Canada’s votes as Ottawa attempted to balance different, and at times contradictory, interests. Despite continued rhetorical support for certain official policies, we find that Canadian foreign policy on issues relating to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been marked by ad-hocism, as competing interests and pressures created significant variation in Canada’s votes at the UN.

Canada’s strategy at the United Nations

• Canada’s membership in international institutions did not begin with the advent of the United Nations. Throughout the interwar era, Canada expressed support for the values of internationalism and multilateralism through participation in various international organizations, such as the International Labour Organization, the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, and the League of Nations (MacKenzie, Citation2017, pp. 24–25). Following the First World War, Canadian participation in international institutions reflected a desire for global recognition of Canada’s status as a distinct, sovereign nation with considerable resources, influence, and unique perspective. Following Canada’s contributions to the Allied efforts during the Second World War, Canadian officials felt that Canada deserved stronger representation and influence internationally (Nossal, Roussel, & Paquin, Citation2011, p. 52). Canada had demonstrated its resilience, commitment, and strength throughout two global wars; therefore, Canadian foreign policy sought a more active, engaged internationalism that both recognized Canada’s distinct capacity and influence, and allowed Canada to contribute to the pursuit of peace. Consequently, Canada became an ardent supporter of the creation of a multilateral institution tasked with protecting international peace and security and became a founding member of the United Nations in 1945.
• In the years following the advent of the United Nations, Canada’s participation and role in the UN voting bodies of the General Assembly (UNGA) and Security Council (UNSC) can be best understood through an examination of its status as a “middle-power” state. Canada’s status as a “middle-power” state has long been a subject of academic debate. While a detailed discussion of the “middle-power” question is beyond the scope of this paper, we adopt this designation as we consider how Canada’s material capabilities, interests, and international position influence its behaviour at the UN. Canadian foreign policy has long recognized that Canada has limited, or “average” economic and military capabilities compared to the “great power states” that played a more prominent role in the creation and maintenance of the international order (Musu, Citation2012, p. 66). However, Canadian representatives have also argued that the country’s abundance of natural resources, material capacity, and sphere of influence were more significant and effective than those of the world’s smaller powers.
• In addition to material capabilities, the concept of “middle-power” status also considers interactions with other states in the international sphere (Nossal et al., Citation2011, p. 55). Given their limited ability to obtain decisive results through unilateral action, “middle-power” states such as Canada have an interest in supporting multilateralism and the pursuit of stability within a rules-based international order. Consequently, “middle-power” states tend to adopt tactics that prioritize “compromising, building coalitions, participation in international organizations, forging consensus, and maintaining international order” (Welsh, 2004, p. 587). Through participation in international organizations and multilateral negotiations, “middle-power” states such as Canada are therefore provided with an opportunity to exert influence internationally, express their national interests, and contribute to international diplomacy.
• Canada’s status as a “middle-power” state has been a hallmark of its foreign policy at the United Nations, where its participation allowed the Canadian voice to be projected internationally, and gave credibility to the promotion of Canadian interests and foreign policy goals to a wider, global audience (Hynek, Citation2004, p. 40; Nossal et al., Citation2011, p. 55; Paris, Citation2014, p. 277). As a “middle-power”, Canadian strategy at the United Nations has also reflected a desire to build, sustain, and strengthen strategic global alliances. Through official declarations and public votes at the UN, Canada has used this international platform to express support for like-minded states, or actors for which Canada has a regional interest. Canada has largely articulated a UN strategy that is similar to those of key European allies, often voting in unity with their western European partners of France, the United Kingdom, and Germany, as well as Australia (Vucetic & Ramadnovic, Citation2019, p. 92).
• While Canada must consider its alliances with a variety of regional actors and blocs, its strategic relationship with the United States, with whom it shares economic, security, and political interests, remains a key foreign policy priority. As Canada’s largest trading partner, Canadian prosperity and economic stability rely upon an open trading partnership with the U.S., and the threat of punitive or retaliatory economic sanctions remains a leading foreign policy consideration. Given Canada’s dependency on trade with the U.S., “decisions tend to be based on a calculation of the degree to which the issue-and the options being discussed will impinge on their relationship with the United States” (Nossal et al., Citation2011, p. 35). The extensive common border between the two states means that Canada also shares national security concerns with the U.S., and remaining a dependable American ally ensures the continued allocation of resources towards those shared security concerns. Maintaining a close relationship with the U.S. has also traditionally allowed Canada to further its interests globally. By aligning with a hegemonic state with expansive influence and capacity, Canada’s international role and sphere of influence has been bolstered and given a further sense of legitimacy. While in the Trump era Canada has relied significantly less on its relationship with the U.S. in order to strengthen its international position, the close geographical, economic, and security relationship with the U.S. does continue to influence Canada’s foreign policy. In other words, Canada’s relationship with the U.S. remains a critical aspect of Canadian strategy at the United Nations.
• Lastly, Canada’s early participation in the United Nations also aimed at promoting key liberal values, in the belief that the promotion of “liberal” values was both good for the world and supported the Canadian national interest. The values and goals articulated in the UN Charter, and later within the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, lent international credibility to what were perceived to be distinctly Canadian interests, including the protection of security, sovereignty, and human rights within a rules-based international system. As for the Middle-East specifically, Canada, like most countries, stands to benefit from regional stability (Abella & Sigler, Citation1989, p. 227), for which the resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict is seen as a necessary pre-condition.
• Canada’s reputation as a contributor to the United Nations was bolstered by Canada’s commitment to peacekeeping, beginning with former Canadian Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson’s critical role in mediating the 1956 Suez Crisis. Pearson, then Secretary of State for External Affairs, approached the United Nations to propose a solution to the conflict that would both ensure the continuity of Canada’s key strategic partnerships and decrease international tensions, thereby playing a seminal role in the creation of the first UN peacekeeping mission (Dorn, Citation2005, p. 9; Mondal, Citation2018, p. 39). As Canada continued to support UN missions, it gained a reputation as an active contributor to international peace and security, and peacekeeping became a hallmark of Canadian national identity both domestically and internationallyFootnote2 (Spooner, Citation2017, p. 208; Dorn, Citation2005, p. 7). Canada, however, became more selective in its peacekeeping deployments throughout the 1990s, generating questions about the relevance of Canada’s role as a “liberal mediator” in the contemporary era (Dorn, Citation2005, p. 23).
• Contributions to missions remained relatively low throughout the tenure of Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper (Carroll, Citation2016, p. 168). The new Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau elected in 2015 expressed the desire to restore Canada’s commitment to internationalism with an increase of peacekeeping contributions (von Hlatky, Citation2016, p. 4), but in fact Canada’s contributions to peacekeeping missions remained substantially smaller than those of previous decades.
• To conclude, Canada’s strategy at the United Nations has required a balance between the pursuit of pragmatic Canadian interests, including economic and strategic factors, and more idealistic considerations, such as those reflected in the UN values of peace, freedom, and human rights (Nossal, Citation2017). As a middle-power state, Canada’s voting behavior at the United Nations traditionally emphasized a desire to be perceived as an impartial, neutral mediator, a “honest broker” with a commitment to the ideals of multilateralism.

Canada’s UN voting behavior on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (1947-1993)

• As a member of the United Nations, Canada played a prominent role in the establishment of the state of Israel. Upon the creation of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) in 1947, Canada was selected as one of eleven “neutral” states to participate in the negotiations regarding Arab-Israeli land claims and aspirations (Husseini, Citation2008, p. 44; Bercuson, Citation1985, p. 60). Canadian Supreme Court Justice Ivan Rand was selected as Canada’s representative to the UNSCOP, and consistently expressed support for the creation of an independent Jewish state alongside an Arab state (Brynen, Citation2007, p. 74). Importantly, Canada’s endorsement of an independent Jewish state was backed by strong domestic support. Many Canadians supported Jewish aspirations to self-determination in response to centuries of antisemitic discrimination, violence, and persecution in both Europe and North America (Brynen, Citation2007, p. 74). Canada’s early advocacy for the creation of an Israeli state was also endorsed by some of Canada’s most prominent religious communities: many Christian and Jewish Canadians strongly encouraged the creation of an Israeli state, partly as a response to rampant antisemitism and the atrocities of the Holocaust, but also because of the religious association of the “Holy Land” with Judaism, Christianity, and Biblical prophecy (Brynen, Citation2007, p. 74; Mondal, Citation2018, p. 38; Husseini, Citation2008, p. 52). Thus, Canadian representatives at the UN enjoyed significant domestic approval for the establishment of a state called “Israel” that would allow for Jewish political self-determination. In November of 1947 Canada voted in favour of UNGA Resolution 181, which recommended the partition of the former British Mandate of Palestine into an Arab state and a Jewish state. Subsequently, as a member of the Security Council, Canada voted in favour of UNSC Resolution 69, which approved Israel’s membership of the United Nations in 1949 (Abu-Laban & Bakan, Citation2008, p. 648, 653).
• In addition to early support for Jewish claims to political self-determination and territorial independence, Canada also sought to use the platform of the United Nations to express support for Palestinian self-determination, for example voting in favour of UNGA Resolution 194 in 1948, which outlined the principles that would allow Palestinian refugees, displaced by the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, to return to their homes and “live at peace with their neighbors” (Bell, Molloy, Sultan, & Shaker, Citation2007, p. 20). In 1967, following the Six Day War, Canada voted in favour of UNSC Resolution 237, which emphasized the Israeli responsibility to respect the rights and safety of the people living within the recently occupied territory, and reaffirmed the “right of return” for those displaced by the war. Canada also voted in favour of UNSC Resolution 242, which called upon Israeli forces to withdraw from territories occupied throughout the war, and sought to reaffirm the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all states in the region. By voting in favour of UNSC Resolutions 237 and 242, Canada refused to recognize permanent Israeli control over the territories acquired through the conflict, including the Golan Heights, West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. Canada’s policy during this period drew from the humanitarian principles of the 4th Geneva Convention, which would require Israel to ensure the protection of the inhabitants of occupied territories and facilitate the return of those Palestinians who had been displaced by the hostilities of the 1967 war.
• In 1978 Canada strongly opposed Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, and consistently used the platform of the United Nations to reaffirm the importance of respecting Lebanon’s sovereignty and territorial autonomy. Canada voted in favour of several UNSC resolutions throughout 1978 that called upon Israel to respect the sovereignty of Lebanon, and cease military hostilities in the region, and supported the creation of a UN Interim Force task group in Lebanon to monitor the conflict, as outlined in UNSC Resolutions 425, 426, 427, 434 (1978), and 630 (1989). These votes, which were met with general approval from the international community, emphasized Canada’s commitment to the principles and values of international law, including humanitarian law. Importantly, support for Resolutions 237, 242, and 181 has remained at the forefront of Canada’s official foreign policy regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since they were first adopted.
• In 1988 Canada abstained, alongside the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Australia, from voting on UNGA Resolution 43/177, which called for the recognition of the state of Palestine and Palestinian sovereignty over the territories occupied since the 1967 war (Eden, Citation2013, p. 227). It is important to note that the United States, alongside Israel, were the only two states to vote against Resolution 43/177; therefore, Canada’s decision to abstain from the vote, alongside a number of Western allies, was likely due to strategic considerations regarding Canada’s relationship with the United States. Abstaining from Resolution 43/177 allowed Canada to express support for the interests and considerations of their closest strategic ally, maintain their status as impartial mediator, and avoid isolating themselves from the international community and other strategic allies. The abstention reflected an attempt to balance Canada’s bilateral relationship with the U.S. with its global reputation, its respect for international law, and its relationship with other states.
• The ongoing violence in Lebanon, as well as the beginning of the first Palestinian Intifada in 1987, resulted in an increased sense of sympathy amongst Canadian citizens towards Palestinian suffering (Brynen, Citation2007, p. 75). In keeping with its attempts to act as a mediator, Canada voted in favour of UNSC Resolution 636 in 1989, condemning Israel’s unwillingness to abide by previous UN resolutions, denouncing the forceful deportation of Palestinians living within the occupied territories, and reaffirming the importance of the Geneva Conventions (United Nations Security Council, Citation1989, Res. 636). Thus, Canadian foreign diplomacy continued to recognize, and express support for, Palestinian rights at the UN while still supporting the security and existence of the state of Israel.
• In 1992, Canada was granted a more prominent and critical role within the Israeli-Palestinian peace process as chair, or “gavel holder” of the Refugee Working Group (RWG) created at the 1991 Madrid Peace talks (Bell et al., Citation2007, p. 8). Canada’s reputation as an impartial “honest broker” that recognized both the Israeli right to exist in peace and security, as well as Palestinian rights, lent credibility to the notion that Canada would apply a non-partisan, fair lens to the contentious issue of refugee resettlement and aid (Goldberg & Shames, Citation2004, p. 208). Furthermore, Canada’s history of contributing to peacekeeping missions both in the Middle East and internationally, coupled with its reputation as an “immigrant-receiving country” further solidified their assignment as chair of the RWG (Robinson, Citation2011, p. 699; Goldberg & Shames, Citation2004, p. 208).
• It is important to note that all decisions taken by the RWG had to be taken by consensus, requiring explicit agreement from all participants. While Palestinian representatives focused on the “right of return,” i.e. the right of all Palestinian refugees from 1948 and their descendants to return to their original homes in the former British Mandate of Palestine, and called for the implementation of policies to improve the living conditions of Palestinian refugees, Israel opposed this interpretation of the “right of return” and sought to ensure that the negotiations emphasized “humanitarian, rather than political issues” (Brynen, Citation1997, p. 284). Canada’s ability to affect positive change regarding the issues of refugees, settlements, and border disputes between Israel and Palestine was therefore highly susceptible to changes in the peace process (Brynen, Citation2008, p. 2; Robinson, Citation2011, p. 701). While the Arab-Israeli peace process saw positive developments throughout the years 1992–1995, including the Oslo Accords, the 1994 peace treaty between Jordan and Israel, and the 1994 Paris Protocol, any progress was subsequently diminished by the assassination of former Labor Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the election of Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996, violence between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, terrorist attacks against Israel, and the continued construction of West Bank settlements (Robinson, Citation2011, pg. 696, 701). Despite these challenges, Canada’s participation in a contentious but critical aspect of the peace process like the refugee question contributed to its reputation as an impartial actor, committed to cooperation, multilateralism, and diplomacy (Goldberg & Shames, Citation2004, p. 215).

The Chrétien years: November 4, 1993-December 12, 2003

• Despite the optimism of the Oslo era, the peace process began to falter and then unravel with the advent of the Second Palestinian Intifada in 2000, following the failure of the Camp David peace conference and Ariel Sharon’s provocative visit to the Temple Mount as leader of the right-wing Likud Party. Unlike the Intifada uprising of 1987, when Palestinian violence was largely restricted to rock-throwing and unsophisticated bombs, the Second Intifada saw devastating terrorist attacks and escalating violence, including suicide bombings and the deployment of rockets (Brym & Maoz-Shai, Citation2009, p. 615; Araj & Brym, Citation2010, p. 850). Israeli forces responded with significant force, prompting concerns of indiscriminate killings and targeted assassinations (Brym & Maoz-Shai, Citation2009, p. 621). Despite the ongoing violence and the collapse of the peace process, Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, elected in 1993, largely continued to support both Israeli security considerations, as well as Palestinian rights through Canada’s votes at the UNGA. In 2000, Canada backed UNSC Resolution 1322 which condemned the “excessive use of force” against Palestinian demonstrators and reiterated that the construction of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories represented a significant breach of international law (Seligman, Citation2018, p. 84). Furthermore, this resolution reaffirmed the importance of peaceful negotiation, based in Resolutions 242 and 338, that emphasizes respect for the holy places of Jerusalem.
• However, as terrorist attacks and suicide bombings targeting civilians intensified, Canada’s voting at the UN began to reflect an increased concern regarding violence against Israel. The Israeli government acted decisively in response to the surge of violence against civilians, resulting in a substantial number of Palestinian casualties (Araj, Citation2008, p. 290). The intensifying violence stemming from the onset of the Second Palestinian Intifada led to new concerns that UN resolutions were biased in their failure to address Palestinian wrongdoing and their exclusive references to Israeli violence. The United States and Israel began condemning the UN for what was perceived to be an inability, or unwillingness, to properly address rights abuses and violence committed by Palestinian authorities, including Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades. Canada, in an effort to express its commitment to Israeli security, began abstaining from voting on resolutions that were perceived as singularly placing blame on Israel for ongoing hostilities in the region (Seligman, Citation2016, pp. 283–284). Abstentions, as opposed to “against” votes on resolutions sponsored by Arab states, were meant to acknowledge Palestinian grievances, and were largely based on a recognition that the resolutions proposed by Arab states represented the voice of the Palestinian people, who did not themselves have membership at the UN (Barry, Citation2010, p. 196). Furthermore, whilst not outright votes “against”, abstentions allowed Canada to express continued support for the Israeli right to security and recognized Israeli concerns regarding intensifying violence against civilians. Canada’s UN votes throughout the Chrétien era were often aligned with those of many of Canada’s closest allies, including the United Kingdom, France, and Australia (Seligman, Citation2016, p. 309). Thus, by abstaining from votes that the United States voted against, and voting in favour of votes that the United States abstained on, Ottawa continued to vote in step with a number of its European allies, whilst ensuring to never strayed too far from the positions of its closest economic and strategic ally.
• In 2001, the United Nations held the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in Durban, South Africa. The conference, often referred to as “Durban 1”, drew significant criticism from both the United States and Israel, who eventually withdrew their participation in the conference in response to a draft resolution that equated Zionism with racism (Seligman, Citation2014, p. 4). While Canada did not withdraw from the 2001 conference, Canadian officials issued an explanatory statement condemning any statement that equated Zionism with apartheid or racism. Furthermore, Canadian officials explained the decision to remain at the conference as an attempt to “exert positive influence” on the conference, and to “condemn attempts to delegitimize the State of Israel and to dishonor the history and suffering of Jewish people” (Seligman, Citation2016, p. 308). Canadian representatives argued that statements equating Zionism with racism would not serve the pursuit of lasting peace and would intensify hostilities and tensions between Israel and Arab states (Seligman, Citation2014, p. 238). In 2009, Canada chose not to participate in the follow-up Durban II, under Stephen Harper’s leadership (Thorne, Citation2008; Smith, Citation2012, p. 25). Jason Kenney, then Secretary of State for Multiculturalism and Canadian Identity, later explained the decision, stating that “Canada will not participate in this charade any longer. The Government of Canada will not lend Canada’s good name to the organized exercise in scapegoating that is the Durban process” (Government of Canada, Citation2011a; Thorne, 2008).
• Canada’s UN votes on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict need to also be understood in the context of the geopolitical environment that followed the 9/11 attacks on the United States. In the years following 9/11 Canada joined the U.S.-led “War on Terror”, as Ottawa sought to support its ally in its quest to identify and destroy terrorist organizations that posed a threat to Western security. Suicide bombings against Israelis soon became associated with jihadist terrorism more generally, leading to the belief that Israel and the West were similarly facing an existential threat posed by terrorism, which necessitated a coordinated response (Handley, Citation2010, p. 455). Given Israel’s long history with terrorism, its robust intelligence and military capabilities, and reputation as the only democracy in the Middle-East, Israel was perceived by many as an important ally in the “War on Terror” (Handley, Citation2010, p. 448). Canadian officials became increasingly reluctant to support any UN resolution that did not outwardly condemn terrorist activity perpetrated by Palestinian groups, and explicitly expressed concern that United Nations resolutions did not sufficiently address the threat posed to Israeli security. While Canada continued to express commitment to the so-called “War on Terror”, it is important to note that the decision not to join the 2003 U.S.-led war in Iraq created tensions between Canada and its closest strategic ally. In this context, Canada’s support for Israel in the post-9/11 era arguably aimed at demonstrating its enduring commitment to confronting terrorism and avoiding further tensions with the U.S. and other key allies.
• In sum, throughout the Chrétien era, Canada continued to express support for Palestinian concerns, particularly through the provision of essential financial aid to Palestinians, and support for UNSC Resolution 1322, which condemned Israel’s excessive use of force in response to the Second Intifada. However, in light of increasing suicide bombings that directly threatened Israeli security, strong domestic support for Israel, and the desire to maintain a strong relationship with the United States in the context of the “War on Terror”, Canada’s UN strategy began calling for more comprehensive resolutions that did not singularly target Israel for ongoing tensions and violence. Canada’s UN votes under the Chrétien government therefore reflected, in part, an interest in expressing support for Palestinians concerns given the continued construction of Israeli settlements and use of force against Palestinian demonstrators. At the same time, however, they reveal a desire to prioritize the bilateral relationship with the U.S. in the context of the so-called “War on Terror” and, later, Canada’s decision not to join the Iraq war.

Prime Minister Paul Martin: December 12, 2003-February 6, 2006

• Canada’s voting at the United Nations began to reflect a stronger alignment with Israel and the United States following the election of Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin, in 2003. Due to the sheer volume of UNGA and UNSC resolutions that criticized Israeli mistreatment of Palestinians, condemned the construction of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories, and called for Palestinian self-determination, Ottawa strengthened their opposition to resolutions that were perceived to disproportionately target Israel without consideration for Israeli security concerns. Importantly, the Martin era saw both the continuation of terrorism against Israelis as well as Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005. While a surprising move from Prime Minister Sharon, who was known for his “hawkish”, aggressive stance towards Palestinians, the withdrawal fostered optimism for the future of the peace process (Kesgin, Citation2019 p. 77). The unilateral withdrawal, coupled with the continuation of attacks against Israeli civilians, help explain Canada’s increased hostility towards UN resolutions that were seen as disproportionately targeting Israel throughout the Martin era. Canada’s representatives strengthened their criticisms of the UN’s perceived emphasis on anti-Israel rhetoric over the genuine pursuit of peace and regional stability. Excessive criticism of Israel was viewed as undermining the UN’s ability to provide an effective forum for the mitigation of threats to international peace and security, and resolutions were criticized for being “one-sided”, and ignoring Israel’s right to security vis-a-vis threats of terrorism. The Martin government argued that the majority of resolutions emphasized Israeli responsibility for peace, as opposed to supporting a comprehensive peace plan that placed obligations and responsibilities on both the Palestinian Authority and Israel (Seligman, Citation2016, p. 309).
• As a result, former abstentions on resolutions criticizing Israel shifted to votes against such resolutions and were publicly justified by statements arguing that excessive criticism of Israel would stall peace initiatives. Consequently, Canada’s UN votes began deviating from the votes of some traditional allies, namely those of the United Kingdom and France, aligning more closely with those of the United States and Israel (Seligman, Citation2016, p. 309). For example, Canada abstained from voting on the 2004 UNGA Emergency Resolution ES-10/15, which called upon Israel to abide by an International Court of Justice (ICJ) report that claimed that Israel’s construction of a separation barrier between the West Bank and Israel was illegal under international law (Brynen, Citation2007, p. 78). In justifying the abstention, then Canadian Ambassador to the UN, Allan Rock, expressed concern that the ICJ’s international condemnation of the Israeli barrier may impede the pursuit of peace, and reiterated that “the issue of the barrier cannot be viewed in isolation from Israel’s security concerns … Israel has the right to take necessary measures to protect the security of its citizens and its borders from attacks by Palestinian terrorist groups, including by restricting access to its territory” (United Nations General Assembly 10th Emergency Special Session, Citation2004). It is important to underline, however, that while the Martin era saw a Canadian UN strategy that was more supportive of Israel, official Canadian policy maintained its support for a two-state solution based in UNSC Resolutions 242, 338, and UNGA Resolution 194.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper: February 6, 2006-November 4, 2015

• While Canada’s foreign policy regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had already begun to shift towards a stronger pro-Israel stance under Martin, this trend was greatly intensified when Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper came to power in 2006. Under Harper, Canada’s voting record at the United Nations became increasingly aligned with those of the United States and Israel (Vucetic & Ramadanovic, 2019, p. 93).
• The Harper era of Canadian foreign policy represented a more general departure from Canada’s historical prioritization of liberal institutionalism, instead expressing skepticism about the efficacy and impartiality of the UN (Paris, Citation2014, p. 278). Canada’s UN strategy under the Harper government is perhaps best represented by Canada’s Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2011 to 2015 John Baird’s 2011 statement to the UNGA that, “Canada does not just ‘go along’ in order to ‘get along’” (Government of Canada, Citation2011b; Smith, Citation2012, p. 25). Baird also suggested that the UN had lost sight of its foundational purposes, accusing the institution of having become inefficient and hypocritical (Nossal, Citation2017, p. 174). Similarly, Harper’s first address to the UNGA in 2006 reflected a general skepticism of international organizations, including the UN, and criticized the international body for its lack of reform and failure to produce a comprehensive agenda (Smith, Citation2012, p. 23-24).
• Within the context of the government’s general distrust of the UN, the Harper years were marked by a considerable intensification of criticism regarding the international organization’s approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Much of Canada’s official UN discourse throughout the Harper era expressed discontent and concern that the organization had become overly politicized, ineffective, and redundant, particularly in its resolutions condemning Israel. Canada’s Ambassador to the United Nations from 2006 to 2011, John McNee, referred to UN resolutions pertaining to the Middle East as “rarely helpful”, and criticized the international institution for using “inflammatory and divisive language” that was disproportionately critical of Israel and ignored the bilateral injustices, responsibilities, and requirements incumbent upon Palestinian representatives to respect the existence and security of Israel (Seligman, Citation2016, p. 310). Addressing the UNGA in 2011, Baird pledged that Canada would no longer support the UN in condemning the abuses of some whilst conveniently ignoring infringements of the rights of others, explicitly reaffirmed Israel’s right to exist, and reiterated Israel’s “fundamental right … to defend innocent civilians against acts of terrorism” (United Nations General Assembly, Citation2011).
• Under Harper, Canada voted in lockstep with Israel and the United States on almost all issues pertaining to the Middle East, regardless of the voting positions of other strategic allies who largely continued to advocate for a more balanced approach to the conflict (Vucetic & Ramadanovic, 2019, p. 85, 87). Where under Martin and Chrétien Canada had voted in support of resolutions which addressed Palestinian claims for self-determination, Palestinian sovereignty over the Occupied Territories, and Palestinian displacement, under Harper Canada voted against several similar resolutions (Seligman, Citation2016, p. 310). For example, Canada voted against UNGA Resolution 67/19 in 2012, which granted the Palestinian Authority “non-member observer status” at the United Nations. On this vote, Canada isolated itself as one of only 9 states who rejected the resolution, including Israel, the United States, and a number of small island states (Eden, Citation2013, p. 238). Canada’s vote stood in clear contrast to those of its other strategic allies, including Australia, Germany and the UK who abstained on the vote, and France, Italy, and Japan who supported the resolution (United Nations Meetings Coverage, Citation2012). For this vote the close relationship with the U.S., in addition to the Harper government’s desire to prioritize the relationship with Israel, seems to have been the primary consideration influencing Canadian foreign policy, dominating other strategic relationships and international pressures. In 2008, Canada was the only state to vote against a United Nations Human Rights Council resolution that condemned Israeli rights violations in the Gaza Strip, citing concerns that the resolution was inherently unbalanced, and did not address Israel’s right to security, and its right to protect its civilians (Canada, Citation2008, p. 12). Canadian allies such as France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the UK abstained on the resolution. It should be highlighted that, in general, Canada has consistently argued that the UN Human Rights Council focuses disproportionately and unfairly on Israel, while ignoring the Palestinians.
• The Harper government’s steadfast support for Israel also reflected the belief that Israel was a critical ally in the “War on Terror”. Harper defended Israel’s actions against Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006, and drew similarities between Israel’s own history of dealing with terrorism and the larger “War on Terror” when addressing the Israeli Knesset in 2014, referring to “those forces, which have threatened the state of Israel every single day of its existence, and which, today, as 9/11 graphically showed us, threaten us all” (CBC News, Citation2014; Narine, Citation2017, p. 322; Smith, Citation2012, p. 24). Further, Canada’s Conservative government was the first to withdraw financial aid to the Palestinian Authority after Hamas’ electoral victory in 2006 (Galloway, Citation2006). While this decision, which suspended $7.3 million in aid and “restructured” $23.9 million in other projects, was criticized by Arab groups internationally, Canada continued to provide aid through UNRWA and other organizations that support Palestinian refugees in the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan (Brynen, Citation2007, p. 82). UNRWA funding was, however, cut by the Harper government in 2010 (Mondal, Citation2018, p. 42).Footnote3 The decision to withdraw funding to the Palestinian Authority must also be read within the larger context of the ongoing “War on Terror”. Concerned that Canadian aid funds could be used to bolster Hamas, a designated terrorist group with an explicit mandate to destroy the state of Israel, Canada sought to avoid channeling any funds through Hamas which could then be used to finance terrorist attacks. Canadian officials predicted that the United States, alongside the European Union, would also suspend funding following Hamas' electoral victory (Clark, Citation2007, p. 91). Thus, by being the first state to withdraw funds, Canada could distinguish itself as a leader, committed to the eradication of terrorism, without isolating itself from allies for whom the decision would be largely uncontroversial and replicated (Barry, Citation2010, p. 198).
• Harper’s distinctly pro-Israel policy can be partly explained through an examination of the Conservative parties’ electoral concerns. In an attempt to widen the gap between Canada’s Liberal Party and the Conservatives, Harper aimed to present the Liberals as having only limited support for Israel, thereby allowing the Conservatives to differentiate themselves as the party that most clearly supported Israel and recognized Israeli security concerns. Harper’s anti-UN rhetoric aimed to associate internationalism, and the UN more generally, with the Liberal party. By framing internationalism as a Liberal value and arguing that the UN had become overly politicized and corrupt, Harper carved out a foreign policy that was perceived as distinctly Conservative and associated with conservative values, including absolute support for Israel. Furthermore, the Conservatives had received electoral support from many Jewish and Evangelical Christian communities, for whom the status of Israel remained an important issue (Seligman, Citation2016, p. 280). Arab groups lobbied as well, but these groups suffered from insufficient organization and mobilization, due to fragmentation and division within Arab communities regarding the importance of the Israel-Palestine issue, while a significant portion of Canada’s Jewish and Evangelical communities perceived Israel’s existence and security as a high-priority issue (Musu, Citation2012, p. 71).
• Canada’s UN strategy throughout the Harper era presented support for Israel as indicative of morality and justice, suggesting that support of Israel was the “moral” or “right” response to the ongoing conflict (Narine, Citation2017, p. 325). It has been argued that Canada’s failed bid for a seat on the UNSC in 2010 was largely due to Canada’s refusal to endorse any UN resolutions that criticized Israel, thereby resulting in a loss of credibility as a fair mediator in the Middle East. (Merkley, Citation2011, p. 54; Heinbecker, Citation2010; Carroll, Citation2016, p. 175). Addressing an inter-parliamentary meeting on antisemitism in 2010, Harper referred to the failure to win a seat as a “bruise” that demonstrates Canada’s staunch commitment to support its Israeli ally, promising that Canada would “take a stand whatever the cost” (Seligman, Citation2018, p. 87). By suggesting that Canada’s inability to secure a seat on the UNSC was due to a refusal to idly undermine what is “right” for what is politically “useful,” Harper further widened the gap between the foreign policy initiatives of the Liberals, and those of the Conservative party.
• It is important to note that while Harper’s government prioritized loyalty to Israel in both UN voting and official statements, Canada’s official policy regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict continued to support the two-state solution and recognized that Israeli settlements in occupied territories represented breaches of the 4th Geneva Convention. To summarize, Canada’s shift towards a strong support of Israel throughout the Harper years reflects the government’s skepticism towards international organizations, the perception of Israel as an important strategic ally, and domestic electoral considerations.

The first J. Trudeau government: April 13, 2013-October 21, 2019

• When Justin Trudeau led the Liberal Party to a majority victory in 2015, many assumed that the new, progressive government would mark Canada’s return to an internationalist foreign policy that prioritized multilateralism (Robertson, Citation2017). Trudeau’s foreign policy vowed to target gender inequality internationally, emphasize multilateralism, address climate change, and welcome refugees fleeing political violence; indeed, the new government seemed to want to signal a significant shift from the foreign policy of the previous nine years of Conservative government. Consequently, many presumed that Trudeau would change Canada’s position on peace process-related resolutions at the United Nations. However, Canada’s votes at the UNGA remained consistent with those of the previous Harper government and have by and large continued to prioritize support for Israel.
• Prime Minister Trudeau’s policy regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict cannot be examined without an understanding of contemporary American foreign policy in the Middle East. The election of American President Donald Trump in 2016, and the implementation of his protectionist, “America First” agenda promised to include a staunchly pro-Israel foreign policy mandate. In December 2017, the Trump administration announced the unilateral decision to move the United States embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a decision that promised to inflame tensions and spark violence between Israelis and Arabs. International law has consistently reiterated that the status of Jerusalem can only be determined by a comprehensive peace plan (Cattan, Citation1981, p. 7). According to UNGA Resolution 181, the City of Jerusalem is recognized as a corpus separatum under international law, denoting that the ancient city does not officially or exclusively belong to either the Israeli or Palestinian authority (Cattan, Citation1981, p. 7). The Trump government’s unilateral decision to move the American embassy to Jerusalem was a significant symbolic move that recognized Israeli sovereignty in the contested city.
• In the wake of Trump’s unilateral decision to move the embassy, the UNGA held an emergency session to vote on Resolution ES-10/L. 22, which declared the action “null and void”, in recognition that international law forbids Israel from having legal authority over the whole city of Jerusalem. This vote was met with overwhelming international support, with 128 states voting in favour (United Nations General Assembly Resolution, Citation2017). Canada, however, was one of 35 states who abstained. Explaining its decision, the Canadian government expressed its commitment to a comprehensive peace agreement, recognizing the importance of maintaining the “integrity” of Jerusalem as a holy city for members of the Jewish, Muslim, and Christian faiths (Global Affairs Canada, Citation2017). Canada’s Ambassador to the UN, Marc-André Blanchard, claimed that the resolution was “one-sided”, and therefore would not advance peace in the Middle East, while Prime Minister Trudeau reiterated that “the idea of using votes in the UN to isolate or condemn Israel … is not productive in international relations … we are less interested in grousing and playing politics” (Marquis, Citation2018).
• As predicted, the U.S.’ decision sparked violence and conflict along the Gaza Strip, as hundreds of Palestinians protested the embassy move (Holmes, Citation2018). Israeli forces responded to the protests with violence that killed 58 Palestinians, and wounded over 1,200 (Holmes, Citation2018). Amongst the scores of injured protestors was Tarek Loubani, a Canadian doctor who had travelled to the Gaza Strip to provide aid to injured protestors and was shot by Israeli forces. Responding to news of the violence and the injury of a Canadian citizen, Trudeau referred to the clashes as “inexcusable … an excessive use of force” and called for an “immediate independent investigation” into the use of indiscriminate violence (Fife, Citation2018). However, Canada later criticized Resolution S-28/1 that was passed 29–2 by the Human Rights Council of the UNGA, which condemned the violence, reiterated Israel’s obligations under international law, and established an independent investigation into the violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law in Gaza (United Nations General Assembly Human Rights Council, Citation2018). Despite Trudeau’s initial support for such an investigation, Canada’s representative to the UN in Geneva, Rosemary McCarney, stated that the investigation would be, “one-sided, and does not advance the prospects for a peaceful, negotiated settlement” (Reuters, Citation2018). Furthermore, former Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland clarified that Canada would only support a “neutral inquiry” that would also consider Hamas’ role in instigating violence (Fife, Citation2018). The UNGA passed Resolution ES-10/L.23 in June 2018, with 120 states voting in favour, condemning the IDF’s use of violence against civilians, expressing concern for the deteriorating humanitarian crisis, and reaffirming Israel’s international obligation to respect the Geneva Conventions. Canada chose to abstain, but PM Trudeau reiterated that Canada would not follow the Americans in moving the Canadian embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.Footnote4
• Canada’s decision to abstain was at least partly motivated by economic interests, particularly those pertaining to trade with the United States. When outlining the decision regarding Jerusalem, President Trump stated: “for all of these nations that take our money and then they vote against us at the Security Council, or they vote against us potentially at the Assembly … well we’re watching these votes” (Rampton & Nichols, Citation2017). A vote against the U.S., therefore, put Canada potentially at risk of punitive economic retaliation by the U.S. The risk was particularly acute in the context of the re-negotiations of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). NAFTA was a key component of the American presidential campaign, and Donald Trump threatened to terminate the deal if it could not be “fixed” to protect American businesses. As President Trump’s “America First” policy seemed to embrace the idea of economic protectionism, the re-negotiation of the NAFTA deal became Canada’s key foreign policy priority. Canada’s decision to neither explicitly denounce, nor actively support the embassy move is therefore reflective of a strategic desire not to aggravate Canada’s closest ally and trading partner, whilst attempting to avoid isolating itself from other strategic allies, who largely voted in favour of the Resolution.

Conclusion

• On November 1, 2019, Canada voted in favour of a UNGA resolution affirming the Palestinian right to self-determination (United Nations General Assembly, Citation2019, Res. A/C.3/74/L.58). Canada's vote was echoed by its European allies, but Israel, the U.S., and a number of smaller island states voted against the resolution (Dyer, Citation2019). Some observers accused the Trudeau government of abandoning its commitments to Israel and criticized the vote as a significant shift in Canadian foreign policy. In response, Trudeau defended the vote, stating that, “The government felt that it was important to reiterate its commitment to a two-states-for-two-peoples solution at a time when its prospects appear increasingly under threat” (Thomson, Citation2019).
• Prime Minister Trudeau also reaffirmed Canada’s continued commitment to Israel’s security, promising that, “our enduring friendship with Israel remains. We will continue to stand strongly against the singling out of Israel at the UN. Canada remains a steadfast supporter of Israel and Canada will always defend Israel’s right to live in security” (National Post, Citation2019). Adam Austen, Deputy Director of Communications to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, reiterated that support for a two-state solution has always been Canada’s official policy in the region: “In keeping with Canada’s long-standing position, it is important at this time to reiterate our commitment to a two-state solution and the equal rights and self-determination of all peoples” (Snyder, Citation2019).
• Canada’s decision to support the resolution affirming the Palestinian right to self-determination must therefore be read within the wider context of competing foreign policy concerns. Importantly, the resolution came amidst increased attention and apprehension leading up to the release of President Trump’s proposed Middle-East peace plan. Further, the vote followed controversial statements from U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who justified the construction of Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory as “not, per se, inconsistent with international law”, drawing international criticism (Dyer, Citation2019). By supporting the UNGA resolution, Canada was therefore able to signal to the international community that Canada will retain its long-standing official policy that recognizes the illegality of settlement construction in Palestinian territory under international law, and affirms that the pursuit of enduring, viable Israeli security necessitates the creation of a Palestinian state. At a time in which American rhetoric questioned the long-standing conviction that the construction of Israeli settlements represented a breach of international law, the UNGA vote allowed Canada to demonstrate to the international community that it had not changed its official policy regarding Palestinian self-determination.
• This vote must also be examined within the context of Canada’s bid for a 2021 seat at the UNSC (Chapnick, Citation2020). When the Harper government failed to secure a UNSC seat in 2010, many speculated that Canada’s dwindling development aid and unwavering support for Israel had alienated a number of African and Arab states (Ibbitson & Slater, Citation2010). By voting in favour of Palestinian self-determination, Canada sought to signal a commitment to multilateralism, renew its traditional reputation as an unbiased mediator, and increase support for its bid for the coveted Security Council seat, a critical foreign policy goal for a government that had long promised to renew Canadian internationalism. Canada eventually lost its bid for the UNSC seat in June of 2020, but in November of the same year voted again in favour of a UN resolution in support of Palestinian self-determination which passed with 163 votes and only Israel, the United States, Marshall Islands, Micronesia and Nauru voting against. The vote underlined the decision of the part of the Trudeau government to continue emphazising their support of Palestinian rights as an essential element of the road towards a possible peace agreement.
• It’s worth remembering that following the 2019 vote in favour of Palestinian self-determination, Canada joined Israel and the U.S. in voting against UNGA resolutions pertaining to the Syrian Golan Heights, the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, the Division for Palestinian Rights of the Secretariat (United Nations General Assembly, 2019). These votes clearly indicated that the Trudeau government did not intend to undertake a radically different policy on Israel and Palestine, but rather continued the balancing act between competing priorities and pressures.
• In sum, Canada’s voting at the United Nations on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict cannot be analyzed in isolation from the many considerations that colour Canadian foreign policy. Canada’s votes have reflected the need to balance support for Israeli security and Palestinian rights with domestic pressures, preoccupation with international reputation, and strategic partnerships with both the United States and European allies. While Canada’s bilateral relationship with the U.S. has often been the dominant concern, on several occasions Canada prioritized other considerations, such as relationship with other strategic allies and support for international law. Essentially Canadian policy has been characterized by ad-hocism: at the core Canada has formally continued to support the centrality of international law and UN resolutions on final status issues, as well as the importance of an agreed solution negotiated between the parties, but many voting decisions over the years have been taken on the basis of interest and priorities that were, in fact, not exclusively related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict itself.

+ Normative Canadian foreign policy towards consensus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (2021 - T&F)

Timea Spitka, Canadian Foreign Policy Journal, Volume 27, 2021 - Issue 1

Introduction

• The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the most divisive conflicts that not only shatters and partitions people within the violent conflict but also drives a wedge between interveners. Divisions on how to intervene have paralyzed international and regional institutions, including the United Nations, the Arab League and the European Union. External divisions have exhausted and exasperated policy makers, making intervention effectively futile. Although Canada played a pivotal role in the creation of a consensus on global Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and is considered a normative leader in human rights, human security and gender, when it comes to Israel, its norms and principles appear to have wavered. Despite international condemnation surrounding the policies of ongoing military occupation, the actions of the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau have not ventured far from policies under former Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Canadian foreign policy has tended to emulate the United States’ unconditional support of Israel. Trudeau’s approach has, thus far, failed to draw clear lines on blatant infringements of international law, sustaining international paralysis (Wildeman, Citation2021). What should Canadian policy be for Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Is international consensus possible and what would it look like? This commentary suggests a need for a more constructive role for Canada as an unbiased and a consensus building intervener. I will briefly outline key ongoing issues in the Israeli and Palestinian conflict, discuss international divisions and suggest a roadmap towards a more effective Canadian foreign policy towards the conflict.

Current realities

• The Israeli/Palestinian conflict is one of the longest, most discussed and written about violent conflicts. Here, I will briefly mention a few of the most pertinent issues namely: human security, Jerusalem, and annexation of the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Although Israeli national security is commonly discussed and emphasized, human security or rather its absence, is one of the most pressing realities of the conflict. Civilians, especially the Palestinian population living under Israeli military occupation in Gaza and the West Bank, are subject to continuous cycles of violence and collective punishment which the Office for the High Commissioner for Human Rights has noted as an affront to justice and the rule of law (United Nations Human Rights, Citation2020). Civilians living in Gaza not only endure indiscriminate bombardment campaigns and ongoing human rights abuses by both Hamas and Israel, but also live without basic needs, including fuel and water. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian Territories noted that with the economy in free fall, 70 per cent youth unemployment, widely contaminated drinking water and a collapsed health care system, Gaza has become “unliveable”, “insisting that all parties – particularly Israel – bring an end to ‘this disaster’” (UN Special Rapporteur, Citation2018).
• Lack of human security is also evident in East Jerusalem and Area C of the West Bank (under full Israeli military control), where no authority is willing or able to provide protection to civilians. Particularly vulnerable are Palestinian children and teens who are subject to severe military crackdowns including targeted shooting and maiming. Palestinian children who live under Israeli military rule, where the age of legal responsibility is 12, are also subject to arrests and incarceration without adequate representation or trial in a military tribunal (Spitka, Citation2018). House demolitions, evictions and violent crackdowns on non-violent activists resulting in injuries and death are other routine occurrences that do not get much coverage in the Canadian media (Mastracci, Citation2020). Although official Israeli annexation of the occupied territory has formally been put on hold, it continues through the systematic displacement and military control of Palestinian land and its population (Berda, Citation2017).

International division

• Foreign policy and international intervention does not take place in a vacuum. Effective multilateral intervention is related to the degree of consensus among key interveners on a type of international intervention (Spitka, Citation2017). Consensus on foreign policy and intervention in a conflict can be constructed along various spheres including international norms, a peace process, an agreement on a solution to the conflict, national security or human security. Although international norms have been at the forefront of a framework for United Nations and European Union efforts, norms and conventions have been readily disputed and ignored by Israeli and United States administrations, in particular under President Donald Trump (Panke & Petersohn, Citation2017). Divisions among states and within international and regional bodies towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have made interventions minimal and largely ineffective. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has generated the highest number of vetoes at the United Nations Security Council. Since 2000, the United States has vetoed more than 18 United Nations Security Council resolutions including: sending un-armed monitors to the West Bank and Gaza (2001), condemning all acts of violence including extrajudicial executions and terror (2001), immediate cessation of Israeli settlement activities (2011), and condemning Israel for its violations of international law in Gaza and the West Bank (2015).
• Canada has held a similar record in the United Nations General Assembly and other United Nations bodies, consistently voting against resolutions that were critical of Israel and its practices impacting human rights of Palestinians. Canada’s voting record at the United Nations under the Trudeau government remains among the most pro-Israel in the world, closely resembling that of former Prime Minister Harper (Seligman, Citation2018). Despite Trudeau’s commitment to a feminist international assistance policy, his government also vetoed the 2018 Status of Women Resolution on the Situation of and Assistance to Palestinian Women. As noted by Swan, “given Canada’s recent efforts to champion the rights of women and girls and brand itself as ‘feminist’, it is difficult to understand why Canada would vote against a resolution supporting the human rights of women” (Swan, Citation2020). Michael Lynk, United Nations special rapporteur for the situation of human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, noted that on the Palestinian issue, “Canada has had a bad case of diplomatic laryngitis” (Gazdo, Citation2020). Still, the Trudeau government has expressed concerns over Israeli annexation and has taken some steps in line with the international consensus (Blanchard, Citation2020). Trudeau rejected Trump’s controversial lead to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, noting that “Canada's long-standing position is that the status of Jerusalem can be resolved only as part of a general settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli dispute” (Zilio, Citation2017). Then Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland hinted that Canada changed its historic voting pattern as a statement about human rights and the rise of Israeli populism (Lazaroff, Citation2020).
• Divisions on how to intervene have frozen the functioning of not only United Nations’ bodies but also regional organizations. Divisions can be witnessed in all European institutions, including the European Parliament, the European Council and the European Commission, linked primarily to new populist regimes which have strayed from European Union norms. The rise of populism in Hungary and Poland has been linked to support for Israel and blocking the European Union consensus (Kingsley, Citation2019). Divisions can also be witnessed within the Middle East Quartet (made up of the United States, European Union, Russia and United Nations). Created to coordinate a peace process, the Quartet has in recent years been incapable of accomplishing more than producing statements that are ignored and solutions that are humanitarian band-aids. Over the past decades, various official peace agreements and peace processes have failed, leaving a sense of disillusionment with international efforts. The 2003 Quartet’s Road Map was a failed attempt at a performance-based peace process. Camp David II’s official mediation in 2000 toward a two-state solution failed and contributed to serious disillusionment and violence. The Oslo peace process, initiated by Norway, was the only process that had initial results and engaged the public. With the exception of Oslo (the first Oslo Accord was signed in 1993), most peace processes were United States led and none were inclusive in terms of engaging civil society, opposition or women’s groups. Trump’s latest Middle East peace process did not include Palestinians in the talks. There is a fundamental need for international consensus, working within and not hypocritically against international norms and a need for non-biased interventions.
• A roadmap towards an effective foreign policy and international consensus Canada could play a constructive and effective role if it: (1) took a non-partisan principled stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; (2) worked to bridge international divisions; (3) emphasized international norms, human security and the protection of civilians; and (4) promoted inclusive discussion and mediation. Taking sides in a conflict is problematic on many fronts and has been an ineffective foreign policy choice for Ottawa. Supporting a side in a violent conflict, regardless of behaviour, undermines pressure for behavioural change. A partisan stance also weakens legitimacy in the eyes of other conflicting groups, as well as regional states and international institutions. As a non-partisan state, Canada could be well placed to influence Israel as well as Palestinian leadership. Crucially, taking sides in a violent conflict, when a regime ignores international norms and laws, is not conducive towards reaching an international consensus. As a non-threatening, middle-sized state and a close ally of the United States and Israel, Canada is in a good place to play a role in bridging the gaps in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Under the Biden administration in Washington, many of the widest gaps across the Transatlantic may be narrowed. For example, the European Union is taking steps to attempt to curb the flames of the rise of undemocratic and racist populism, which have seen allies in President Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Trofimov & Hinshaw, Citation2020). The ideal place to bridge divisions among international interveners is through a policy firmly grounded in international norms with a focus on the protection of civilians. Prioritizing human security for Israeli and Palestinian civilians can bridge national and international gaps. A consensus can best be achieved with inclusive discussion and engagement of civil society.
• Canadian partisan support of Israel has not only been a slap against ethics and international norms, it has also contributed to a lack of international consensus on the conflict and most likely cost Ottawa a seat on the United Nations Security Council. In June 2020, more than 100 organisations and dozens of prominent figures delivered an open letter to all United Nations ambassadors, urging countries not to vote in favour of a Canadian seat on the Security Council due to Canada’s policies on Israel (Just Peace Advocates, Citation2020). Although there has been a recent shift both in statements and voting patterns, such as the Canadian vote in favour of a United Nations resolution in support of Palestinian self-determination, it is not evident whether this signals a permanent shift towards support for human rights. Ottawa appears to be out of touch with a significant portion of Canadian Jews, too, who have distanced themselves from the current Israeli leadership, that not only represses Palestinians but also Israeli civil society, women’s groups, human rights organizations and other critics who have been deemed enemies of the state (Allen, Citation2020). Criticism of Israel, including even from prominent Jews, has been connected to antisemitism, labelling human rights concerns and non-violent activism as illegitimate.

Conclusion

• As we have seen in recent years, distancing itself from international norms and ethics is a slippery slope in state-craft and has undermined Canada’s own ambitions and reputation as a bridge-builder and peacemaker. Further, taking sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has not helped to promote peace or reduce the conflict, where the best route to security for Israel is peace and human security for everyone. Given international divisions, there is space for a middle power like Canada to contribute to better outcomes by advancing a policy grounded in the very norms and inclusive policies to which Canada claims to adhere. Canada, however, has to have the courage to do so.

+ 75 years later: When will Canada stand up for Palestinian rights? (2022 - WL)

Clare Mian, CCPA Monitor, Nov/Dec2022, Vol. 29 Issue 4, p32-33. 2p.

• In November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a partition plan for the British mandate of Palestine, drafted under the leadership of Canadian Judge Ivan C. Rand. Then Prime Minister Mackenzie King had vigorously resisted pressure on Canada to assume a leadership role in this issue, as he feared the risks of antagonizing one of his two chief allies, Britain or the United States which held opposing views. Britain opposed partition as it was a de facto betrayal of its responsibility to shepherd the Palestinian people to self-rule and to limit Jewish immigration. The U.S. favoured it as a solution to the pressure to accept a large number of Jewish refugees from post-Holocaust Europe.
• When he finally relented, King made it clear that, in acquiescing to Judge Rand’s role as chair of the UN Special Commission on Palestine (UNSCOP), his government was in no way committed to adopting the committee’s recommendations as Canadian foreign policy. Canada did vote in favour of partition in the end. Over the intervening 75 years, with the decline of Britain as a world power and the ascendance of the U.S. as “superpower” and major supporter of Israel, Canada has inhabited this hornet’s nest of international relations. Canada’s current relationship with Israel is one of “steadfast friendship and strong, growing bilateral relations in many areas based on shared values, including democracy,” according to Global Affairs Canada. At the same time, Canada is on record as supporting the Fourth Geneva Convention, which condemns the ongoing occupation of territories taken in war and imposes on Israel the responsibility to treat humanely the residents of the occupied territories. Regarding the Palestinian people, Canada recognizes their right to self-determination and to a sovereign state and has supported peace and a two-state solution in the context of the need to “support and respond to the humanitarian and development needs of the Palestinian people,” according to Global Affairs Canada. Canada’s current quandary is reminiscent of that of Britain in the mandate years. Britain had an international commitment to protect the people of Palestine and prepare them for self-government. At the same time, it made a commitment, albeit ambiguous, to “view with favour” (wording of the 1917 Balfour Declaration) the settling of Jewish refugees in the same territory. Unlike Britain in 1947, Canada does not garner world attention, but as a credible Western democracy it needs to decide whether it will continue to close its eyes to well-founded accusations of Israeli abuses of Palestinian human rights or whether it will speak up as a defender of international humanitarian law.
• This summer, two important developments provided the Canadian government with opportunities to do just that: one was a particularly egregious attack by the Israeli government on Palestinian Civil Society Organizations (CSOs), the other was a highly revealing report on Canada’s voting record on Palestine-Israel issues at the UN.
• In 2016, the Israeli Parliament passed a new Domestic Counter-Terrorism Act, which expanded both the definition of terrorist organization and the powers of the Israeli government to break those organizations so designated. In August, the Israeli government authorized a series of raids on the following Palestinian CSOs: Al-Haq, Addameer, the Bisan Center for Research & Development, Defence for Children International-Palestine, the Union of Agricultural Workers Committees (UAWC), and the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees (UPWC). Their files were confiscated, staff were detained or threatened with detention, and their offices were sealed shut. Al Haq promotes human rights and the rule of law in the West Bank. Addameer supports the rights of political prisoners who are held in both Palestinian and Israeli prisons. The Bisan Centre for Research and Development provides education to increase awareness of civil and democratic rights. Defense for Children International (Palestine) is the only organization to focus on investigating cases brought against children. The Union of Agricultural Workers’ Committees focuses on the longest-standing sector of the Palestinian economy. The Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees works to achieve gender equality. Both Michael Lynk, a Canadian law professor at Western University and UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967 and Mary Lawlor, UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders since 2020 have condemned the attacks, stating, “These organi[z] ations speak the language of universal human rights… the misuse of counter-terrorism measures in this way by the government of Israel undermines the security of all.” Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have linked the recent attacks on these Palestinian CSOs to the progress that these groups were making in reporting their human rights abuse findings to the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
• Even though neither Israel nor the U.S. recognizes the authority of the ICJ, the court does enjoy international credibility. Bringing Israel before it would be a significant stain on its reputation as a democracy. Mélanie Joly, Canada’s minister of foreign affairs, expressed “concern” over the raids and said her government was “in touch with Israel to seek information.” Despite calls to condemn these raids—by the UN human rights rapporteurs, organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, the European Union, and Canadian civil society groups (Canadians for Justice and peace in the Middle East, independent Jewish Voices Canada), Minister Joly and the Government of Canada continue to be silent. NDP leader Jagmeet Singh has issued 13 demands to the Trudeau government, urging it to bring its policy and practice on Palestine and Israel into alignment.
• In September, Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) published a report that shines a light on Canada’s contradictory position on human rights in the Middle East. According to documents released by Access to Information and Privacy (ATIP), the report says “Canada’s pro-Israel voting record at the UN contradicts its own values and interests and harms its international reputation.” The report examines the content of the yearly group of Israel-related resolutions and the correspondence between foreign policy officials and politicians on deciding Canada’s vote. It shows that, despite assertions by Minister Joly and Global Affairs Canada (GAC) that Canada judges each resolution on its own merits, the voting record demonstrates that is not the case. Canada takes a pro-Israel position to the block of resolutions, based on the rationale that Israel is unfairly singled out for criticism. This practice, begun under the Harper government, has, with one exception, extended to the Trudeau government. CJPME’s conclusion is that Canada demonstrably votes against its own values and interests and jeopardizes its reputation as a credible Western democracy as it is perceived to vote with Israel and the United States without assessing each resolution through the lens of international humanitarian law.
• In 2019, Canada attracted attention when, for the first time in eight years, and in a last-minute decision, it voted in favour of a resolution on Palestinian self-determination. Foreign policy officials had recommended two alternatives to the predictable no vote: one was to examine the current practice of block voting, the second was to vote yes on this resolution and postpone a full discussion of the practice to a later date. It was this yes vote that surprised the UN community. The review of Canada’s voting practices, which has been advocated by officials, has had no follow-up. What the CJPME report, on the heels of Israeli attacks on Palestinian CSOs, made abundantly clear is that successive Canadian governments are paying lip service to their commitment to international humanitarian standards. The votes they cast are evidence of their commitment to maintaining unshakeable ties with Israel and the United States on a whole range of economic, military and political issues. The issue of Palestinian rights can be ignored because, sadly, the Palestinian people do not constitute a powerful lobby. Stories, such as the raids on Palestinian CSOs or the recent murder of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, gain no more than a day or two of press attention. They are generally followed by Israeli denials, American support and Canadian silence. Many Canadians are counting on the Trudeau government to turn the page and put human rights at the top of the agenda.

+ Canada’s failure to adequately address the Israel/Palestine crisis (2024 - WL)

Clare Mian, CCPA Monitor. Summer 2024, p. 39-41. 3p.

• Not since the movements against South African apartheid and the Vietnam war has the Canadian public been so engaged in a foreign policy debate. At university campuses, students and faculty members are defending their right to free speech and calling for Canadian divestment from collaboration in the Israeli war in Gaza. With an election looming, political parties in the House of Commons are positioning themselves to alienate neither the Jewish nor the Muslim vote. Among the Canadian public, citizens who think of their country as a just society struggle to understand and take a stand on this issue.

Background to Canada’s involvement in the Israel-Palestine Conflict

• The creation of a Jewish state in Palestine dates from the 1917 Balfour Declaration, arguably the most important document in the history of the ongoing conflict: “Britain…view(s) with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people… it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” The first part of this declaration is indelibly imprinted in the minds of all who have followed the birth of the State of Israel (“view with favour” interpreted as “supports”). The second has been largely forgotten, except by the “non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” Balfour wrote that supporting the Zionist project was simply of “profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.” That is, Britain needed a “European” ally to protect its geopolitical interests in a part of the world considered volatile. European antisemitism and the growth of nationalism in Europe fuelled the growth of Zionism. Zionist organizations lobbied Jewish communities throughout Europe and North America to fund land purchases and infrastructure building to accommodate Jewish immigrants to Palestine. The Palestinian Arab community saw its land holdings and political influence decline, such that a fullblown revolt occurred from 1936 to 1939. It was so brutally suppressed by British authorities that Palestine lost its political, military and economic leadership as it faced its struggle for survival. In Canada, a sizable Jewish community contributed funds and material to accommodate Jewish immigration to Palestine, thus establishing an early connection between Canada and the Zionist project.

From Partition to the Six-Day War (1947-67)

• Canada emerged from the Second World War with enhanced prestige due to its military performance and emancipation from Britain. The newly formed United Nations asked Canada to assume leadership in the resolution of the “Palestine problem.” Britain had signalled its intention to withdraw as mandatory power on May 15, 1948. In 1947, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) accepted a plan that was profoundly unequal. Two Canadians—Judge Ivan Rand and future Prime Minister Lester Pearson—had largely designed it and lobbied for its acceptance with justifications reminiscent of the Balfour Declaration. The Jewish minority, 35 per cent of the population, received 56 per cent of the land, including some of its more fertile regions. The Arab majority, 65 per cent of the population, received 42 per cent of the land. Jerusalem and its immediate surroundings were designated an international area to be shared among all religious groups. There were alternatives to this plan. Independent Arab states suggested that a federal option be brought to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), but the UN’s urgency to solve the problem, the lobbying efforts of the World Zionist Organization, and American support for the Rand/Pearson plan scuttled this. Ironically, Canada, a federal state, failed to advocate for what was—and might still be—the most just solution to the Palestine/Israel conflict. Zionists in Palestine saw the plan as a step towards realizing their goal of a Jewish home in Palestine. On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion, head of the Jewish Agency, declared the establishment of the State of Israel.
• The Arab community rejected the plan. The advisability of this decision has been the subject of much analysis, but Mahmoud Abbas, the current leader of the Palestinian Authority, has called it “an Arab mistake.” Ongoing hostilities between the two communities became the first Arab Israeli war. By war’s end in 1949, the superior Israeli forces had considerably expanded the borders of the partition plan. An estimated 750,000 Palestinian Arabs were expelled or fled in fear in what Palestinians call the Naqba (catastrophe). Arab Palestinians who remained within the borders of Israel were subjected to restrictions regarding citizenship, employment, mobility, housing and access to water and electricity. Canada posed no objection to this border expansion, nor did it advocate for the implementation of 1948 UNGA resolution that called for the right of “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live in peace with their neighbours (to) be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date.” The right to an Arab state became an uphill fight to reclaim what had been theirs. In 1949, the United Nations Refugee and Welfare Agency (UNRWA) was established to care for Palestinian refugees, the longest-standing and one of the largest refugee populations in the world. Canada has always supported UNRWA. One can infer that this humanitarian aid was meant to assuage the culpability of abandoning Palestinian Arabs. In May 1949, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) admitted Israel with the understanding that “…Israel is a peace-loving State which accepts the obligations contained in the (UN) Charter and is able and willing to carry out those obligations.” Those obligations included adherence to previous resolutions recognizing the right of return of Palestinians and the protection of populations acquired through war. In 1967, Israel prepared for what was seen as a massive attack by its Arab neighbours. Given the monumental superiority of the Israeli defense forces, the United States knew the Arab attack constituted no threat to Israel. The war ended swiftly and disastrously for the Palestinian people as Israel occupied the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. UNSC Resolution 242 called for the immediate withdrawal of Israel from territories taken in war, the protection of citizens in these territories, in keeping with the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, and the right of return for the thousands of new Palestinian refugees. According to Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi, UNSC 242 was flawed in that it, henceforward, linked Israeli withdrawal to a two-party negotiated peace settlement. This sanctioned the myth of “equivalence”, that is, that two symmetrical powers were and are fighting over Palestine. Palestinians were only mentioned as a “refugee problem” so that, even by the standards of this highly criticized and ambiguous resolution, it is not clear who the “two parties” in this negotiation would be. This has inevitably played into the hands of Israel and its allies, namely Canada and the United States.

From 1967 to attempts at peace accords

• The years following the Six-Day War saw three major developments: Palestinian militancy, UN concern with Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories, and Canada’s explicit support of Israel and its chief ally, the United States. The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), born in the early 1960s, launched attacks into the occupied West Bank from its Jordanian headquarters until Jordan evicted it due to its militancy. PLO operations then moved largely to Beirut and Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon until it was brutally attacked by Israel, notably in the 1982 attacks on the Sabra and Shatila camps. The PLO, in an ironically beneficial development, relocated its operational headquarters to the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza. During these years, repeated UNGA resolutions “condemned” and “deplored” the continued mistreatment of the Arab population within Israeli borders. In 1974, a little-known UNGA Resolution (3246) affirmed the legality of “armed resistance by oppressed people.” In 1974, the UNGA reaffirmed the right of the Palestinian people to “self-determination”, “national independence”, and “sovereignty”, and granted the PLO non-member observer status in the UN. During these years, Canada voted to support the human and political rights of Palestinians, remained silent on a future Arab State, and built strong diplomatic and economic ties with Israel. A shift occurred in the 1970s when Canada’s UNGA votes turned from support of the Palestinian cause to abstention or opposition on resolutions condemning Israel, arguing that blame had to be shared between both sides in the conflict.
• By the 1990s, under Brian Mulroney, Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin, this pattern became stronger, and Canada failed to register opposition to such practices as building of settlements in the occupied territories and setting up checkpoints and separation walls. It is under Stephen Harper (2006-15) that Canada’s support of Israel became unambiguous. Then Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird asserted that Canada has no “better friend” than Israel. This was not so much a change of substance as of degree and was due to the flourishing of Canadian Israeli diplomatic and commercial relations, the violence of the Palestinian Intifadas to protest Israeli practices, the influence of Jewish Israeli lobbies in Canada, and the belief of the Conservative party that Canada was better served by strong bilateral relations rather than by a network of multilateral relations. Canada’s official dual commitment to defending Israel’s rights to be secure within its borders (which borders are never clarified) and championing Palestinian human rights became an untenable position. Clear defence of Israeli positions has probably denied Canada two requests for a non-permanent seat on the UNSC, as Middle Eastern, Asian, African and Latin American nations no longer believe in Canada’s neutrality. UN attention turned to the urgency of finding a peace settlement. The Oslo Accords (1993-95), still considered a qualified success, were based on the belief that the conflict could be solved only when both sides could be led to some form of two-state. What we are witnessing today is, in fact, the failure of the accords and the structures they established. A true resolution is not possible without acknowledgement of the fundamental injustice of the situation and the continued fallacious belief in equivalence between Israel and Palestine is addressed in a principled way.

2023-24

• Since October 7, 2023, Justin Trudeau’s government’s reaction has been opaque and hesitant. It rightly and unconditionally condemned the Hamas attacks. When Israeli retaliation on Gaza began, it voted against UN ceasefire resolutions until it finally supported a humanitarian ceasefire in December 2023. It withdrew UNRWA funding based on Israeli allegations that some agency employees were supporters of Hamas. Following an investigation, the UN’s Office of Internal Oversight (UNOIO) lauded the transparency of UNRWA operations and, in the absence of Israeli evidence, closed most of the cases. Canada has ostensibly restored funds, but it is not clear to what level. The Trudeau majority supported the NDP’s non-binding resolution of March 24, 2024, which it had drastically amended to include a stronger condemnation of Hamas, a call for the immediate release of the Israeli hostages, and a repetition of the Canadian mantra that Israel has the right to defend itself. In response to public protests concerning government military support to Israel, the government admitted to having approved $28.5 in “military goods” after Israel began its attacks. However, in a new height of official disinformation, it claimed these were “non-lethal weapons.”
• NDP pressure saw the government agree to an embargo on military exports to Israel, with the escape hatch that those already approved were excluded. Conservative pressure is growing as leader Pierre Polièvre made well-received speeches at two important synagogues in Montreal ridings with significant Jewish populations (Mount Royal and Côte St-Luc). Outflanking the Liberals in their support of Israel, Poilièvre stands a good chance of stealing Jewish votes from Trudeau. The NDP is said to be attracting Muslim voters who are angry at Trudeau’s lack of support for the suffering Gazans. In another aspect of government ineffectiveness, Canadian immigration officials have no idea how many, if any, Palestinians have managed to enter Canada. The Trudeau government continues to pay lip service to the two-state solution, but always with the proviso that it be part of a two-party negotiated settlement. The latest wrinkle is that the recognition of the second state in this plan—the state of Palestine—could be the start, rather than the end, of this process; an incomprehensible development, even by the standards of this government. Just prior to the October 7 attacks, Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) published an Ekos poll that showed 27 per cent of Canadians view Israel as a state with significant similarities to apartheid, 22 per cent see it as a “flawed democracy” and 14 per cent see it as a state with “restricted minority rights.” In the 18-34 age range, 48 per cent saw it as a state like apartheid. As the student protests in Canadian and American universities unfolded in the spring, the reported majority seemed to oppose these. American-Jewish journalist Peter Beinart sees in them a beacon of hope of young people who are putting aside self-interest to literally stand up for an ending to the suffering of a people who have been victimized for over 70 years. On May 11, 2024, the UNGA voted on a resolution to upgrade Palestine’s status in the UN, and to accelerate recognition of a Palestinian state. This would appear to be a constructive step towards the two-state solution that Canada upholds;143 of 193 members voted in favour. The United States and Israel voted against. Canada abstained.

+ Ireland–Canada: contrasting positions on Gaza in an evolving world (2024 - T&F)

Gerry McAlister, Canadian Foreign Policy Journal, Volume 30, 2024 - Issue 3

• Ireland’s decision to join with South Africa in the case against Israel under the Genocide Convention at the International Court of Justice at the Hague contrasts strongly with Canada’s decision to supply “logistical support” to Israel in Gaza.
• Ireland has had a long and somewhat different experience of colonization compared to most colonized countries. Ireland, a colony for 800 years, became in turn a colonizer, as evidenced by the strong Irish influence in Canada. Irish settlers occupied native lands in Canada just as their own lands were occupied for hundreds of years at home. And indeed, by means of the British Empire and the Roman Catholic church, Irish colonization was worldwide – in Asia, Africa and North America. For example, half of the British army in India in the nineteenth century was Irish. And, in the twentieth century, thousands of Irish missionaries spread out around the globe.
• However, this colonial experience did not turn Ireland into a proponent of colonialism or an outright supporter of the “West.” On the contrary. From the very beginning, when the country achieved partial independence in 1922, Ireland has taken a strong anti-colonial position, both at the League of Nations in the 1930s and subsequently at the United Nations. It was Ireland, for example, through its Foreign Affairs minister, Frank Aiken, who proposed the admission of China into the United Nations in 1958 – this despite opposition from the US and from the Catholic church at home.
• Ireland’s decision to join with South Africa in the case against Israel is not without its complications, both legally and politically. It is only the fourth time since 1948 one country has joined and supported another country's case at the International Court of Justice, with all the attendant complex legal issues.
• In addition to Ireland joining South Africa’s case under the Genocide Convention, Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Simon Harris and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, in a joint statement on 6 May 2024,
  • reaffirmed the wish for both Spain and Ireland to recognise Palestine, agreeing that formal recognition is an important part of acknowledging that a two state solution is the only way to bring about peace and stability in the region with a state of Palestine and the state of Israel living side by side in peace and security … Ireland fully supports Palestinian membership of the United Nations. (Government of Ireland, Citation2024a)
• And, in a further development, on 8 May 2024, Trinity College Dublin, after ongoing student protests and occupation, agreed to divest from its investments in Israel. This was an economic necessity. The college was losing hundreds of thousands of euros in tourist revenue as the students had blocked access to the Book of Kells, a thousand-year-old illuminated manuscript of the Christian gospels. The alternative, getting the police to clear the campus, would have been impossible in the present political climate in Ireland.
• A principled foreign policy can founder on political and economic priorities. Ireland is a member of the European Community but not of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Ireland has a long-standing policy of political neutrality. As well, Ireland has an extremely open economy and a strong corporate relationship with the United States. Balancing political neutrality and a close economic and cultural relationship with the US with a strong anti-colonial position globally is a tricky balancing act.
• Ireland has managed it and still has, despite its small size, some clout in the Global South. This was evidenced by Ireland defeating Canada for the seat on the Security Council of the United Nations at the last election for that body – this despite an extremely strong personal campaign by Prime Minister Trudeau who made a whistlestop global tour in search of votes. Canada was never in the running here, and one wonders if there is a certain blindness on the part of Canadian officialdom as to their standing in the world, particularly in the Global South. Canada is increasingly seen there as the tail of the US dog, whereas Ireland can point to its long anticolonial record and its political neutrality.
• The genocide in Gaza is an opportunity for Canada to change that. A majority of Canadians may want to see a ceasefire in Gaza, but are they or their political representatives prepared to condemn the genocide? In Ontario, representative Sarah Jama called for a ceasefire and an end to all occupation of Palestinian land but did not condemn the genocide, and aside from wearing the keffiyeh at Queen’s Park, the silence is both stunning and shameful. In a real democracy there would be more elected representatives dissenting. And of course, the contrast between Canada’s condemnation of Russia and its support of Israel is glaring.
• In contrast, Irish politicians both at the national and at the European level have been expressing their revulsion at Israel’s actions. In the Irish Dáil (Parliament), Sinn Féin representative Kathleen Funchion condemned the “horrific, disgusting acts of genocide” (Houses of the Oireachtas, Citation2024) by Israel, and Sinn Féin representative Chris Andrews called for an EU-wide ban on athletes and teams “representing the apartheid state of Israel. Sports cannot simply continue as if this genocide is not happening.” Labor representative Aodhán Ó Ríordáin said: “Let us call it what it is: it is a genocide. It is an absolute annihilation of a people,” and there are many others across the political spectrum using similar language. Claire Daly, an Irish member of the European parliament, has condemned “the active complicity of the European Union” in the Gaza “genocide” (European Parliament, Citation2024). Micheál Martin, the Irish minister for Foreign Affairs, commenting on Ireland's decision to join with South Africa’s case at The Hague, declared: “What we saw on 7 October in Israel, and what we are seeing in Gaza now, represents the blatant violation of international humanitarian law on a mass scale” (Government of Ireland, Citation2024b).
• Genocide and famine are of course very familiar to Irish people – there was a long history of both in Ireland. Both are now occurring in Gaza. Before the outbreak of famine in Ireland in 1845 the population was eight and a half million. A million died. A million fled the country, many of them to Canada. Two million more left within a generation. It took Ireland over a century to get over that. How long will it take the Palestinians to recover from mass displacement, mass murder and loss of territory? It is already 75 years since they were first evicted from their homeland.
• Hence the outrage in Ireland, both on the part of the political establishment and on the street. There have been large demonstrations in Dublin and around the country. The Palestinian flag flies over Dublin City Hall. Ireland had always lobbied forcefully for a “rules-based international order.” It is becoming clearer than ever that this “order” as we know it is based on Western rules and, even then, more frequently broken than observed. Canada's decision not to join with the American invasion of Iraq contrasts strongly with the decision to support the US in Gaza. There are obvious domestic as well as foreign political considerations here. Canada often “talks the talk” when it comes to human rights and international order. The sale of military use vehicles to Saudi Arabia in its war of attrition against Yemen and the “logistical support” to Israel say otherwise.
• In the new geo-political order taking shape, Canada is clearly aligned with the past of NATO and the Anglosphere and not with the evolving multi-polar world which is the future. Ireland shares many of its values with the West. But the West is essentially a colonial entity. The US, Britain, France, Spain, Germany, Holland, Portugal, Italy, etc. may be democracies now but most were, until relatively recently, colonial powers – and very violent colonial powers at that. The mass murders in Abyssinia–Ethiopia, Namibia, Belgian Congo, Kenya, etc. are somewhere in the Irish psyche as well – hence Ireland’s sympathy with emerging countries even when they are not democracies. And of course, democracies are no strangers to atrocities. Gaza is another example of imperial slaughter.

Canadian Orientalism: Israel, Palestine, and the Middle East in the ‘Golden Age’ of Canadian Foreign Policy (2024 - T&F)

Asa McKercher, The International History Review, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/07075332.2024.2416149

Introduction

• Recalling his role during negotiations at the United Nations over the partition of Britain’s Palestinian mandate in 1947, Lester B. Pearson, the long-time Canadian diplomat wrote: ‘I must admit that I became emotionally involved in a very special way because we were dealing with the Holy Land – the land of my Sunday School lessons’. The son of a Methodist minister, Pearson grew up in a world steeped in Biblical stories. In his youth, he reflected, ‘I knew more about the geography of Palestine than I did about the geography of Canada. I could tell you all the towns from Dan to Beer-sheba but certainly not all from Victoria to Halifax’. As UN delegates debated Palestine’s fate, he admitted ‘that in the back of my mind I felt I was concerning myself with something close to my early life and religious background. Although this was only an ancillary factor, it made the dispute much more real in my mind than, for instance, Korea. I do not recall ever getting very worked up about Korea when I went to Sunday School’.Footnote1 Throughout his long diplomatic and political career, which spanned from the 1930s to the late 1960s, Pearson travelled much of the globe, but he only visited the Middle East once in an official capacity, making a brief visit to Cairo in 1955 – a Jewish holiday precluded a concurrent stop in Tel Aviv. He had visited Egypt once before, in 1915, while on deployment during the First World War. Pearson’s unit had stopped in Alexandria, a city he described as ‘one of the worst places in the world’, full of a ‘multitude of beggars’ and the ‘never ending wail of baksheesh’. ‘I have appreciated Canada since I left it’, he concluded of this brush with the Arab world, ‘and I think we are easily the best as well as the most civilized’.Footnote2 Despite little firsthand experience with the Middle East, Pearson had a profound impact on the region, midwifing Israel’s birth and spearheading the creation of a peacekeeping force that helped end the 1956 Suez crisis.
• In examining Canadian foreign policy toward Palestine and the wider Middle East in the late 1940s and 1950s, it is worth emphasizing Pearson’s brief wartime encounter with the Arab world and his religious knowledge of the Levant. Not only was his limited understanding of the region shared by other Canadian diplomats, but their views of the Arab world were grounded in Orientalism, that is, in deeply ingrained cultural assumptions about Palestinian and Arab people that defined and reinforced a divide between a purported civilized, modern West and a backwards East, or Orient, that had ‘remained fixed in time’ – viewpoints evident in Pearson’s reflections above. Reducing Arabs and the Arab world to a suite of essentialist stereotypes – sensual, despotic, anti-modern – Orientalism has filled the gaps of Western officials’ ignorance and provided the justification for a ‘Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient’.Footnote3 Examining how Canadian foreign policy elites viewed Israel, Palestine, the wider Arab world, and the people of these regions during the 1940s and 1950s, below, I trace Orientalism’s influence on Canada’s relations with the Middle East and stance toward the Arab-Israeli conflict.
• Beyond the issues of Palestine’s partition and the Suez crisis, this region has received little attention within the history of Canadian international relations.Footnote4 The focus on these two events to the exclusion of much else is not a surprise given that in 1947 and in 1956, Canadian officials undertook fateful actions that shaped Middle Eastern politics. In turn, both events became central to the twin mythologies of the ‘middle power’ and the ‘golden age’ of Canadian foreign policy in the late 1940s and 1950s, during which Canada expanded its international horizons in pursuit of an engaged liberal internationalism. As part of this development, Canadians began devoting attention to Middle Eastern affairs, with partition and the Suez crisis seemingly cementing Canada’s international reputation as an active, moderate, and moderately influential force seeking to broker agreement and find consensus. In his history of this golden age, John Holmes, a diplomat during this period, pointed to the Canadian performance over Palestine in 1947 ‘as the beginning of “Canada’s role as middle power”’.Footnote5 Both the middle power and the golden age are concepts central to how many Canadians have viewed their place in the world.Footnote6 Recently, historians have critiqued these self-serving myths, and as attention has turned to Canadian foreign policy toward the Third World, the record shows that Canada’s dealings with non-Western states and peoples have been far less magnanimous than middle power proponents would have it, in part because policymakers have been influenced by cultural factors, including race and religion.Footnote7 The Middle East proves no exception.
• While anti-Semitism had been prevalent in Ottawa in the 1930s and 1940s – having an important impact, for instance, in limiting Jewish refugees’ entry to CanadaFootnote8 – during the golden age a shift occurred as Canadian officials came to identify with and support Israel, viewing it favourably as a fellow Western state that stood out from its Oriental neighbours. By the same token, as they became increasingly invested in Middle East diplomacy, Canadian officials developed or reinforced unfavourable views of Arabs. While proponents of the middle power role – past and present – point to Canadian impartiality on issues in the Middle East, an examination of Canadian diplomatic discourse reveals that Canadian officials harboured stereotyped views of Arabs and Arab states but came to imagine Israel as a beacon of civilization.Footnote9 In part, Canadian identification with Israel was grounded in a shared settler colonial experience.Footnote10 Admittedly, Orientalist attitudes were not the sole driver of Canadian policy; important, too, were the positions taken by Canada’s British and American allies, as well as Canadian officials’ support for the nascent United Nations. Nonetheless, Canadian policymakers’ decisions were taken against an Orientalist backdrop, affording little sympathy for Arabs.

Partitioning Palestine

• Apart from missionaries and trade commissioners, there was little Canadian presence in the Middle East prior to the Second World War. Indeed, until the Balfour Declaration of 1926 and the Statute of Westminster five years later, there was little Canadian foreign policy to speak of, a situation that changed slowly during the war years. The Department of External Affairs (DEA) had a single expert on Middle Eastern affairs, Elizabeth MacCallum, whose influence was limited, in part, no doubt, by her gender, but also because of the low priority accorded to her region. In Ottawa, there was little interest in Palestine, at the time a British mandate and thus a British problem. One senior DEA official, writing in 1944, explained that he was ‘loath to see any strong advocacy by the Canadian Government of a particular solution to the Palestinian problem … Palestine will remain, for a long time, a troubled area … in which it is most unlikely that Canada will have any very direct human interest’.Footnote11 William Lyon Mackenzie King, the long-time prime minister cautious of international intervention, agreed. In 1947, when Canada opened an embassy in Ankara, its first diplomatic post in the broader region, the move had far more to do with the emerging Cold War than with any interest in the Middle East. Yet that same year, as Palestine descended into violence and the British moved to end the mandate, some Canadian officials, mindful of the international ramifications of this situation, urged involvement.
• The question of participation in UN efforts to decide the fate of the British mandate in Palestine provoked a clash between King and more internationalist minded officials such as Louis St. Laurent, the secretary of state for external affairs, and Pearson, his deputy. St. Laurent saw the issue as a test for the UN, remarking that Britain’s turn to the newly created organization was: ‘the first time in history [that] a great modern state, confronted with a difficult international problem, has turned voluntarily to an assembly representative of the nations of the world and asked for guidance and assistance towards settlement’.Footnote12 For Canadians invested in promoting the institutions of postwar multilateralism, Palestine suddenly took on grave importance. ‘Not only does the situation in Palestine demand’ a solution, Lester Pearson stated, ‘but the prestige and the reputation of the United Nations itself demand it’.Footnote13 Serving as chair of the UN’s First Committee during its deliberations over the mandate, Pearson angled a compromise agreement forming a special committee to study the issue. Under pressure from the Americans and British to have a Canadian sit on this UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), King appointed Supreme Court Justice Ivan Rand to the committee, but made it clear that Rand did not represent Canada’s government. King soon regretted even this decision and opposed further Canadian involvement in matters to do with Palestine. ‘I did not think we had any business to be interfering with the Middle East’, he told St. Laurent in December 1947, ‘Canada’s role was not that of Sir Galahad’, trying to ‘save the whole world’.Footnote14
• By that point, events had proceeded apace: in June and July 1947, Rand had toured Palestine with UNSCOP. Though the local Arab populace had refused to meet with them, seven of UNSCOP’s eleven members felt confident enough in releasing a report recommending Palestine’s partition into Jewish and Arab states, with an economic union and freedom of travel; the minority of four recommended a federal state. Rand endorsed and indeed authored much of the majority report, but it took Pearson to bring the plan to fruition. In September 1947, Pearson served on an ad-hoc committee on Palestine – King had vetoed Pearson serving as its chair – whose members considered the UNSCOP’s majority and minority reports and a proposal by Iraq and Saudi Arabia for recognition of a single Palestinian state. By the end of its deliberations, the ad-hoc committee, through manoeuvring by Pearson, had produced a compromise that became Resolution 181, passed by a majority in the General Assembly on 29 November 1947. As St. Laurent readily admitted, due to these efforts ‘Canada was looked upon as having taken up the Jewish cause’.Footnote15 And for good reason, Canadian Zionists referred approvingly to Canada’s soon-to-be foreign minister as ‘“Rabbi” Pearson’ and ‘the Balfour of Canada’. Arab diplomats agreed, labelling him ‘the most able and fervent advocate of Zionism’.Footnote16 Although some commentators would later blame Canadian Zionists’ influence on Pearson’s and Ottawa’s decision-making, Canada’s actions favouring partition were driven by a desire to preserve ‘British-American harmony’: London was sympathetic to Arab views, Washington favoured the Jewish cause. Keeping Anglo-American relations in good repair was important to Ottawa especially amid ‘the new reality of the Cold War’.Footnote17
• Orientalist attitudes were important, too, and while Pearson was a key figure, so was Rand. As Canada’s appointee to the UNSCOP, he supported the majority report favouring the territory’s division into Jewish and Arab states. In prefacing a report recommending partition, Rand observed with regard to the territory that, ‘because of the religious conceptions and social sentiments to which its culture has given rise through nearly three thousand years, the hundreds of millions of adherents to the three great monotheistic religions whose spiritual interests are localized in its scenes and historical events, and the centuries of contests over its possession’, Palestine was ‘set irrevocably apart from the rest of the world’. The international community had before it a chance to recognize this fact, he continued, and in doing so, it would then be apparent that ‘the uniqueness of the land as well as that of the Jewish people and their relation to it, that in large measure justifies’ the creation of a Jewish state.Footnote18 Making clear the importance of religion to Canadian understandings of the Middle East, especially Palestine, Rand’s ruminations highlight the sense of there being a unique connection between Palestine and the Jewish people, a foundation point of Zionism. In prioritizing the Jewish connection, Rand failed to mention the Palestinian Arabs and their own unique ties to the land that they occupied. Given Rand’s prominence as a member of UNSCOP his view was important, but it was not unique among Canadian authorities. Calling, in late 1948, for international recognition of the Jewish state, Pearson emphasized that Israel had now been established and so while Arabs could see in this fact ‘an evil consequence of injustices which took place thirty years ago … even if this is the case, they cannot expect the United Nations to right ancient alleged wrongs in the face of recent history’.Footnote19 In short, Jewish self-determination trumped that of the Arab Palestinian population, whose objections to the Balfour Declaration of 1917 – whereby Britain guaranteed the creation of a Jewish homeland – were dismissed as an ancient grievance.

The civilizing mission

• Pearson’s support for the creation of Israel is simple enough to explain. Beyond emphasizing the subtle religious influence on his thinking, in his memoirs, he listed his reasons for backing partition, most significantly the slaughter of Europe’s Jews in the Holocaust. Nor did he come to regret this decision, even with the internecine violence wrought by partition and the creation of a long-term source of geopolitical tension in the Middle East. ‘I have never wavered in my view’, he affirmed, ‘that a solution to the problem was impossible without the recognition of a Jewish state in some form in Palestine. To me this was always the core of the matter’.Footnote20 A year after the partition resolution passed the UN General Assembly, and after the region saw terrible violence with the first Arab-Israel war and the Nakba – the displacement of roughly seven hundred thousand indigenous Palestinians from their homes – Pearson defended his course of action. ‘Let those who charge that this decision was the cause of all the bloodshed and destruction that have degraded the Holy Land in the last twelve months ask themselves whether there would have been peace and order’ via the other options presented to the UN in the autumn of 1947. Urging international recognition of Israel and its admission to the UN, he stated, ‘I do not deny for a moment that this is a difficult circumstance for the Arab states to accept but it is nevertheless the case and it does not seem to me that the United Nations would be doing those states any service if it encouraged them, or even permitted them, to continue their efforts to destroy by force of arms the Jewish state’.Footnote21 During the 1930s and early 1940s, anti-Semitism had shaped Canadian government attitudes toward issues such as the admittance of Jewish refugees, but among a new generation of policymakers who took power from the late-1940s onwards, philo-Semitism was predominant. Canada extended recognition to Israel in December 1948. Thereafter, as one diplomat later put it, Canadian policy became simple: ‘Israel had a right to exist and Canada would deal with Israel and the Arabs in an even-handed manner’.Footnote22
• This even-handed position – reflecting the idea of Canada as a middle power, positioned between two conflicting parties – was problematic given that the very act of supporting partition and the creation of Israel, however well-meaning a solution to the situation in Palestine, was in itself a one-sided action, legalizing the seizure and settlement of indigenous territory while ignoring Arab Palestinian self-determination. Elizabeth MacCallum, the DEA’s lone Middle East expert, was a lonely voice urging respect for Arab self-determination and warning that ‘to insist upon the partition of Palestine against the wishes of practically the whole Arab population and of at least a substantial minority of the Jews’ was unjust.Footnote23 Yet this insistent view prevailed among Canada’s policymakers. Having assisted Pearson at the UN in manoeuvring Resolution 181 to fruition, George Ignatieff recalled that he had not been ‘unsympathetic to the claims of the Palestinian Arabs or unaware of the contradictory promises that had been made to them and to the Jews before and during the war’. Still, the decisive factor in his view was ‘the humanitarian aspect of the problem – the horrors of the holocaust and the plight of the Jewish refugees who had nowhere else to go’. This aspect – and note that Palestinian Arabs were separate from ‘humanitarian’ concerns – ‘seemed to me to outweigh all other considerations’, namely the rights of Arabs.Footnote24 The Canadian government’s support for partition and the resulting formation of the Jewish state limited the place of Arab Palestinians in Canadian officials’ thinking. Orientalist attitudes were also at play. Léon Mayrand, a diplomat who served as Rand’s alternate on UNSCOP, supported pushing ahead with partition, for while the Arabs were ‘bound to shout’, there was no need ‘to take them seriously’ as they were ‘incited by the menaces of a few feudal chiefs’ rather than a people with a right to self-determination.Footnote25
• Beyond MacCallum, whose influence on Canada’s foreign policy in the Middle East was limited, one Canadian who was quite sympathetic to Arab views was General E.L.M. Burns, who commanded two peacekeeping forces in the Middle East: the UN Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO), formed after the armistice between Israel and its neighbours in 1948; and then the UN Emergency Force (UNEF), set up amid the Suez Crisis. Burns pointed to various factors that drove both popular and official Canadian support for Jewish claims to Palestine, including the assumption that ‘the Jews should go back to their homeland, promised to Abraham by God’. Further, he speculated that the ‘picture of Israel as a small nation gallantly struggling to rebuild existence in its ancient home’ resonated in Canada.Footnote26 Guilt over the failure to react to Nazi persecution, religious support for Zionism, and ideas about Israel as a David fighting off the Arab Goliath, all had an important impact on Canadian views of Israel, just as these factors also influenced opinion in the United States.Footnote27
• For many Canadians who travelled to Israel following its creation, Biblical prophecy seemed to be fulfilled. Nell Martin, who accompanied her husband Paul Martin Sr. – health and welfare minister – on a tour of the Middle East in 1958, praised Jews’ ‘initiative and dedication’ in building ‘a land of their own’. To friends, she added, ‘now you see crops, fruit trees, cotton, olive groves, citrus fruit, where before it was just abandoned hills’. For his part, Paul Martin characterized Israel as a ‘progressive, dynamic little country’, with a mix of ‘Orthodoxy and modernism, and the all-pervading influence of the Old Testament’.Footnote28 Although he never visited Israel, Pearson evidently had read enough about the country to offer considerable praise of its achievements. ‘Inevitably’, he had told attendees at a Jewish charity event in Toronto in 1952, ‘during the centuries while Palestine’s impoverished soil was being washed down unchecked from the denuded hills by the winter rains and whole sand dunes, blown by the wind, were encroaching on the plains, the once teeming population declined’, creating an empty wasteland. But this situation was being reversed through Jewish immigration and Jewish settlers’ pioneering efforts.Footnote29 Speaking on the first anniversary of the Jewish state’s creation, Rand gushed how, ‘with galvanized energy’, Jews in Israel were ‘draining and cleansing and transforming poisonous swamps into fertile fields, with irrigation they are making what was thought desert to be fruitful, they are terracing and reclaiming the stony hills, they have multiplied the abundance of the coastal plain where the Philistines once lived’. Tel Aviv and Jerusalem were set to become ‘hives of new industry’. Israel, he concluded, ‘is a land already beginning to blossom like a rose’. And here Rand went beyond praising the achievements of Jewish pioneers and commended to Israelis the task of ‘showing the way to rehabilitation of the life of the Middle East. The mass of humanity of that region today is sunk in squalor and degradation; no other people on earth can bring to it the intelligence, energy and effective work that the Jews can’.Footnote30
• This sense of a civilizing mission and the idea that Israel was an oasis of progress were influential elements undergirding Ottawa’s support for the Jewish state and Canadian conceptions of the region. Central to these concepts was the notion that Israel was Western, similar to Canada, and dissimilar from its underdeveloped, backwards neighbours. This attitude had direct, real world consequences. In 1954, as Canada’s government approved the sale of artillery pieces to Israel, one Cabinet minister explained his vote in favour of this move by emphasizing that ‘it was desirable to support a nation setting such a good example in improving the productivity of an impoverished section of the world’.Footnote31 Views of Israel as a Western state would later be reflected in a more contemporary Orientalist ‘dichotomy of freedom-loving, democratic Israel and evil, totalitarian, and terroristic Arabs’, a framework that continues to influence official Canadian attitudes toward the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.Footnote32

Terra nullius

• Importantly, this thinking about Jewish immigrants’ transformation of the empty or undeveloped territory of Palestine gels with narratives that underlay Canada’s own process of settler colonial development. In this telling, French and English settlers had fanned out into territory supposedly empty of people and ripe for development. As writer Stephen Leacock had once put it – in language mimicking that used, above, to describe Palestine – prior to contact North America ‘was, in truth, one vast silence, broken only by the roar of the waterfall or the cry of the beasts and the birds of the forest’.Footnote33 Of course, neither territory was empty and so settler colonial narratives also emphasized the extent to which Indigenous North Americans had failed to properly develop their land and resources. Whether in Palestine or in Canada what was required to ensure development was the removal of the indigenous population to make way for productive settlement.Footnote34 Thus, in Israel, Canadians found a self-affirming example of their own experience.
• For Canadian diplomats during the golden age, it was not such a stretch to find and celebrate parallels in a common Israeli-Canadian experience of settler colonialism. Margaret Meagher, who served as Canada’s ambassador to Israel from 1958–1961, made the connection in public comments shortly before leaving her post in Tel Aviv. While casual observers might see great contrasts between Israel and Canada, she emphasized that ‘we are both countries of immigration’. Canada, she observed, had been ‘endowed’ by a ‘beneficent providence’ with ‘great natural wealth, but the opening up of Canada, its settlement and development, and the maintenance of its security in two world wars, have been the fruit of the vision and the united efforts and sacrifices of people whose forbears came from many lands to weld the Canadian nation’. A similar process was afoot in Israel. ‘You have the Negev’, she added, ‘we have our northern reaches extending to the North Pole, an area sparsely inhabited, where nature is hostile but where with government encouragement, Canadians with a sense of adventure and with a mid-twentieth century pioneer spirit, are wresting the minerals from the Earth and opening up the north’.Footnote35 Positive Canadian understandings of Israeli settler colonialism manifested in other ways. In explaining why the creation of Israel was legal even though the UN Security Council’s authority to legislate a new state into being was dubious, in October 1948 Escott Reid stressed that what mattered was that Palestine was ‘terra nullius’.Footnote36 A month later, during debate over passage of Resolution 181, Pearson had told the UN’s First Committee that the facts to be accounted for were that while a Jewish state had emerged, there was ‘no indigenous Arab authority’ in Palestine that had ‘yet demonstrated its ability to take over authority’ in other areas of the territory. Thus, for Canada’s government – like the European settlers who had arrived in North America beginning with John Cabot’s landing in Newfoundland in 1497 and the subsequent generations of colonial administrators – Arabs’ inability to establish their political sovereignty along European lines limited their territorial sovereignty.Footnote37
• Canadian identification with Israelis and the classification of Israel as Western were important elements behind Canada’s backing of the Jewish state. ‘The plan of partition gives to the Western powers the opportunity to establish an independent, progressive Jewish state in the Eastern Mediterranean’, wrote Gerry Riddell, an advisor to Pearson during UN deliberations over partition, one ‘with close economic and cultural ties with the West generally and in particular with the United States’.Footnote38 Writing on the strategic situation in the Middle East in early 1956, diplomat Robert Ford referred to Canada’s ‘moral obligation’ to Israel, a state that it had helped create. While noting that Ottawa should not offer the Israelis ‘blind support … against the Arabs’ he doubted whether Canadian interests benefitted ‘by sacrificing some of the basic security of the State of Israel in order to gain a rather dubious Arab support’. The Jewish state, he stressed, remained not only the region’s only democracy, but ‘the only Western-oriented, and the only well-organized state in the Middle East, and one on which we can rely’.Footnote39 If, as Pearson stated, Israel was ‘a democratic state – an outpost, if you will of the West in the Middle East’, then Arab states were the opposite, and just as Israeli Jews were thought of as Westernized, Arabs were viewed in an Orientalist light. The Toronto Globe and Mail’s editors evoked the ‘strong contrast between the industrious Jew and the not so industrious Arabs with their ingrained contempt for Western ideas of efficiency and progress’. ‘Because Israel placed such importance on the value of individual freedom’, Rand once declared, ‘the new state was proving a “beacon light” in an otherwise darkened section of humanity’. A decade after Israel’s creation, he praised it as ‘an anchorage of all the best qualities of our Western civilization’.Footnote40 This contrast was an important one, putting Palestinian Arabs, and the larger Arab world, in a camp opposite from Canada and Israel.

Encountering the orient

• While offering positive appreciations of the productive and pioneering efforts of Israeli settlers, Canadian officials saw little to commend the activities of Palestinian refugees. While sympathetic to the former Arab inhabitants of what was now Israel, ‘who had been settled on its land for well over a thousand years, as crusaders and Turks came and went’, based on his travels into United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) camps, Lionel Roy judged that the economic future of ‘these basically peasant people’ was bleak.Footnote41 Jordan was full of refugees, reported Kenneth Kirkwood, who toured the Arab world in 1954, living ‘in primitive encampments’, that were ‘not self-sustaining’. While not giving much thought as to why the refugees found themselves in such destitution – an oversight typical in Canadian reports on the Palestinian refugees – Kirkwood likened the Palestinians to ‘pensioners on international relief’.Footnote42 After visiting an UNRWA camp near Amman, what he called ‘Refugee-land’, T.W.L. MacDermot wrote that what he saw ‘resembled in parts some of the native locations in South Africa’, where he had previously served as Canada’s representative as apartheid was being implemented. In entering the camp, MacDermot had passed by ‘scattered little shops selling fruit and vegetables, and odds and ends’, a meagre economic output that brought home to him the ‘crushing magnitude’ of the situation confronting the refugees.Footnote43 At a camp near Jericho, H.O. Moran – who later became head of Canada’s External Aid Office – sniffed at the ‘over-crowded tents without adequate sanitation’ and he cast a cynical eye on how his guides ensured that he witnessed ‘the squalor of these camps where swarms of under-clothed children played in the mud outside the tents’. He was pleased to travel next to Damascus to ‘the comforts of an ultra-modern hotel, good shops, a less troubled atmosphere’ and something approaching ‘a normal way of life’. It was only the ‘squalid refugee camps [that] served as reminders of the problems which bedevil these people’.Footnote44 For diplomats accustomed to postings in Western Europe or in South America’s modernizing oligarchies, the conditions facing refugees were a stark contrast to their own daily lives.
• Witnessing firsthand the squalor in which the Palestinian refugees lived was important in framing this issue for Canadian officials, even though it often reinforced negative stereotypes. As ambassador in Cairo – a Canadian embassy was opened in 1954 – in 1961 Robert Ford went to Gaza and he reflected that despite ‘all I had read on the subject, it was a shock actually to see the refugees on the spot’. Gaza, he thought, was where the refugees were worst off because while the living conditions were not so bad, ‘there is a very great psychological problem involved in the small area in which they are confined’, which created ‘a feeling of claustrophobia’. Yet his sympathy with the ‘magnitude’ of this ‘human problem’ was tempered by his appreciation that the refugees suffered from ‘apathy’ and a ‘lack of initiative’.Footnote45 Although Canadian diplomats recognized the dire situation confronting Arab refugees, there was a pervading sense that these were primitive peoples in some ways responsible for their ongoing plight. ‘The problem of Arab refugees persists’, Paul Martin wrote after visiting Gaza in 1958: ‘It is a human problem and the world has a moral obligation toward it’. The Palestinians themselves, meanwhile, were an ‘unfortunate people’, deserving of ‘a real measure of human dignity’. But yet, he complained, they were full of ‘hatred and bitterness’.Footnote46 Pearson also felt a measure of sympathy for the refugees, remarking in a speech to the UN on the prospects for Middle East peace, that in the small territory of Gaza, ‘are crowded over two hundred thousand refugees and a much smaller native population’. Like Martin, though, his outlook was tempered by his sense that Palestinians were a violent people, ‘bitter and frustrated, administered by strangers; rebellious, riven by frictions, and in a mood, I have no doubt, to erupt in bloodshed once firm control is removed’.Footnote47 This was tempered sympathy, with little real attention given as to why the refugees may have felt embittered or whether they were justified in harbouring such resentment. Instead, their attitude was dismissed as being part of a typical Arab outlook.
• Canadian officials were not ignorant of the plight of Palestinians, and Canada made annual contributions to UNRWA, whose first director, from 1950–1951, was Canadian Major-General Howard Kennedy. Moreover, General Burns spent five years with the UN in the region, part of multilateral peace efforts. In reflecting on Canadian government attitudes toward the regional situation, Burns offered the insightful observation that Pearson’s generally unsympathetic view of the Palestinians came from seeing them at a distance and in the abstract. ‘One feels that if he’, Burns wrote, ‘one of the most humane and compassionate of men, had had closer acquaintance with the conditions of the refugees, this blind spot would not have existed’.Footnote48 Where ignorance existed, Orientalist attitudes filled the void. For Burns’s part, likening Gaza to a ‘vast concentration camp’ bounded by the Egyptian and Israeli borders and the Mediterranean, he noted that the refugees there could ‘look to the east and see wide fields, once Arab land, cultivated extensively by a few Israelis, with a chain of kibbutzim guarding the heights or the areas beyond. It is not surprising that they look with hatred on those who have dispossessed them’.Footnote49 Here, at least, was a recognition that the Palestinians had been displaced and that Israeli settlement was a cause of their destitution.
• Given the poor assessment of the Palestinians, it became easy for Canadian authorities to view them in threatening and dehumanizing terms, akin to savages threatening Israeli civilization. Although highlighting the ‘humanitarian aspect’ of the Palestinian situation, one senior DEA official, in language that both stripped Palestinians of their agency while placing the onus of blame upon them, labelled the refugees as ‘the kind of political tinder upon which political opportunists of all shades in the Middle East thrive. They are a constant threat to the maintenance of peace’.Footnote50 Similarly, after touring the Middle East in 1957, Blair Fraser, a leading journalist and Ottawa insider, described for Canadian readers the fact that ‘three hundred thousand rootless people sit on a beachhead five miles wide, nine out of ten of them fed by international charity, with nothing to do but brood upon their wrongs’.Footnote51 As part of various efforts to remedy the situation, Canada resettled several dozen Palestinians in 1955–56, and Pearson considered convening an international refugee conference that would have, as a major focal point, dispersing Palestinians across the globe.Footnote52 Central to this thinking was the notion that Palestinian refugees were portable, with shallow roots in Palestine, and could be moved at will, just as they had been moved out of the way of Israeli settlement. Such an attitude toward indigenous populations is a central element in settler colonialism, whether in North America or the Middle East. Amid the Six-Day War, Pearson, now prime minister, returned to this idea: ‘A real opportunity has never been given to these refugees to decide whether they could or would be willing to locate in other countries’.Footnote53
• As for the Arab world, just as the Palestinian refugees were viewed as bitter and violent, Canadian briefing papers, diplomatic reports, and strategic analyses were replete with characterizations of this region as ‘uneasy and unstable’, as ‘an area of perpetual unrest’, and as ‘unsettled’.Footnote54 And no wonder, for as Canada’s diplomats were quick to note, Arabs were ‘ill-mannered… volatile and often emotionally unstable’. Cairo, for Kenneth Kirkwood, was ‘generally dirty and disorderly’, its people ‘generally ill-mannered’ and guilty of ‘much dishonesty’. Posted to the Egyptian capital with her husband Robert, Thereza Ford found the local populace ‘on the whole oily and suspicious’ and a ‘simple people’, though she did like Jordanians, who appeared more ‘healthy, well-built, and much cleaner, with no signs of trachoma so ubiquitous in Egypt’.Footnote55 Such negative, essentialist views of Arabs were commonplace in Canadian circles. Pearson labelled the spokesperson for the Canadian-Arab Friendship League ‘emotional and Arab in his approach’. And Canadian diplomats complained about Arabs’ ‘emotional antipathy toward “imperialism” and foreign control’. Such attitudes, they agreed, were putting Middle Eastern states on a collision course with Western countries, which sought only to pursue ‘their legitimate interests in the area’, as if the peoples of this region had no cause for complaint against the imperial powers who had divided up territories on a whim.Footnote56

Arab nationalism and inferiority

• The golden age of Canadian foreign policy coincided with an explosion of Arab nationalism, much of it directed against either the departing colonial powers of Britain and France or the rising influence of the United States. Like much of the post-Second World War anti-colonial sentiment, this phenomenon was dismissed by Canadian official observers, who blamed it largely on psychological factors among Arabs such as ‘jealousy’, ‘resentment’, ‘sensitivity’, and, above all, an ‘inferiority complex’.Footnote57 While Arab nationalism, a mix of ‘pride in Arab culture, history and military and political prowess’, was on the rise, Robert Ford stressed the importance of Arabs’ ‘deep-seated feeling of inferiority because of the centuries of foreign – Turkish and European – subjection’, a sound conclusion to draw, even if he felt that such an attitude was somewhat irrational.Footnote58 Arthur Kilgour, who served in Canada’s Cairo embassy, likened Arabs to a ‘difficult and maladjusted teenager’, with whom a ‘little genuine love and affection might be quite effective’. Arab nationalism would be fleeting, he predicted, and so, while Egyptian strongman Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser ‘may think that he is the reincarnation of Saladin …it might be more appropriate if he thought of himself as Aladdin who rubbed the magic lamp and produced a genie’. Nasser, in Thereza Ford’s judgment, was a ‘midget Mohammad’.Footnote59
• Overall, the Arab world was lumped in with the rest of the Third World that is, as an underdeveloped region and site of contest in the Cold War struggle between East and West. Reflecting on the Middle East after a two week sojourn to the region, Paul Martin saw it as ‘an intriguing world that is now awakening from a long slumber during a period of long colonial rule’, full of ‘peasants and the little people who represent those millions whose futures and welfare are so deeply involved in the events that confront us all’.Footnote60 With only a quick reference to ‘divisions imposed on the Arabs from without’, but with no other mention of European colonialism’s impact on the region, briefing notes for Canada’s UN delegation in 1950 emphasized that Arabs suffered ‘visibly from the long blight of Ottoman oppression’. As a result, the report continued, Arabs lacked ‘the leaders, the education and the experience in public-administration and social organization’ and so they suffered in areas such as ‘public health, education, economic development and social reform’. This situation was a far cry from their ‘position of leadership in the world of science and letters’ that ended centuries earlier with the Mongol invasions.Footnote61 Following his only official visit to the Arab world, a 1955 daytrip to Cairo to meet Nasser on the tail end of a month-long tour across Asia, Pearson concluded that ‘the problems of dirt, poverty and ignorance’ that he encountered throughout his journey were also present in the Middle East. Regretting that he did not have time to see ‘the conditions under which the average people, particularly in certain over-populated Arab communities have to live’, Pearson recorded that he ‘saw enough in Cairo and during our brief stop-over in Basra, to make me realize that the struggle for adequate living conditions in this region is as tough as it is in the Far East, and that the ideological rivalry will be just as keen’.Footnote62 Certainly, squalor did exist and it did set Arab states apart from Israel, but Canadian officials seldom gave much thought to how European imperialism had helped engender such conditions.
• Canadians did find some bright spots in the Arab world. Although some officials disliked the city, Paul Martin found Cairo ‘active, beautiful and truly impressive’, with ‘solid and substantial buildings, hotels, and apartments that flank the Nile’. Yet these signs of modernity clashed with ‘the several villages near Cairo that I visited, where poverty and squalor predominated, not unlike villages I had seen in the Far East two years before’.Footnote63 Similarly Kenneth Kirkwood labelled Damascus as ‘agreeable and European, in contrast to most of the other cities of the Arab Middle East’. What appealed to him was that while much of the region was mired in ‘instability’, in the Syrian capital ‘the feasting, dancing and amusement went on’. Moreover, Damascus stood in contrast to Aleppo, a ‘squalid half-old and formless half-new city’, where he had toured ‘strange Aladdin-like’ bazaars and soaked in the mixture ‘of ancient relics and architectures, of races and religions and even tongues’. Just as he had been impressed with Damascus, Kirkwood enjoyed Beirut for its European and modern charms. Even so, he found the Lebanese subject to ‘economic backwardness, helplessness and destitution’ and he doubted the viability of a Canadian diplomatic post in the country (a legation was opened in Beirut shortly after Kirkwood’s visit).Footnote64 In Jordan, H.O. Moran was charmed by the ‘native costumes, the absence of agricultural machinery in the fields, the shepherds herding their grazing flocks across the slopes, the soft colours on the rock-strewn hills, the gnarled olive trees in the valleys’. The resulting picture, in his mind, was less of 1953 than of ‘the biblical landscapes to which one was introduced by coloured lantern slides in Sunday schools’.Footnote65 The divide between modernity and tradition, between development and squalor, between West and East, and between Israel and much of the rest of the Middle East was palpable in Canadian Orientalist thinking.

A middle power?

• What then of the much-vaunted middle power role? In the diplomatic record of Canadian dealings with the Middle East, a comment that occurs with considerable frequency is the idea of Canada as the honest broker. It is common to see references to Canada’s ‘reputation for impartiality’, to the Canadian ‘policy of impartiality in the Arab-Israeli dispute’, and to ‘our impartiality and good will at the United Nations and as participants in United Nations activities in the Middle East’.Footnote66 This self-aggrandizing understanding of the Canadian role in the world was reinforced by Canada’s dealings in the Middle East, a tendency present not just during the Liberal government of Louis St. Laurent. In 1962, Howard Green, the Progressive Conservative foreign minister under Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, instructed Canada’s ambassador to Israel that a major objective of his mission was the maintenance of impartiality. The task would be difficult, Green warned, especially since Arabs, ‘although they do not expect explicit Canadian support, define impartiality as the avoidance of any sort of support for Israel. In Arab eyes, those who are not against Israel are pro-Israeli’.Footnote67 Certainly Canada’s position in the Middle East was not hostile to any side, but even discounting Green’s sense of the Arab standard for judging impartiality, in their views and sympathies Canada’s golden age diplomats were hardly impartial, and sentiments favouring Israel over Arabs translated into policy.
• Although their delivery was delayed by the Suez crisis, in July 1956, Canada sold 24 fighter jets to Israel. The move came after more than a year of debate about whether Canada should sell advanced weaponry to countries in the region. In September 1955, citing the ‘uneasy situation in the area’ Pearson had objected to the sale of 40 jets to Egypt, a decision backed by Cabinet, though Canada did permit the sale of obsolete training aircraft.Footnote68 What had changed within less than a year was not the tension in the region, which, if anything, worsened, but an Egyptian arms deal with communist Czechoslovakia. Pearson’s response was to push for arms sales to Israel, doing so even as he told US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles that Canada ‘was not any more anxious than the United States to become identified with one side or the other in this quarrel’.Footnote69 Canada’s embargo of military sales to the region, he told Cabinet in early 1956, was, in effect, ‘an embargo against Israel only’ because the Arab states were getting arms elsewhere. Cabinet agreed to end the embargo, and Pearson then pushed for approval of a series of Israeli orders for small arms on the grounds that ‘the greatest immediate danger in the Middle East could be a feeling of despair and frustration in Israel’, which might strike its neighbours before its position grew weaker. ‘The situation in the Middle East was becoming crucial for Israel’, he told his fellow ministers soon after, in an appeal for them to greenlight the fighter jet sale.Footnote70 Pearson’s officials backed his stance, though citing the need for impartiality, Jules Léger, his deputy, pointed out that ‘one of our problems is to prevent the engulfment of Israel without giving the impression that the West is pro-Israel and anti-Arab’.Footnote71 Cabinet eventually came around, too, with ministers noting both that among Canadians there was ‘strong sympathy’ for the Israelis and since Arab countries’ ‘most probable objective … was to eliminate Israel’ there was a need to reassure the Jewish state. As Pearson had stated in the House of Commons that January, while Canada’s government could ‘understand the feelings of Arab peoples at the alienation of land which was occupied by Arabs for centuries’ it sympathized with ‘the fear felt in Israel when they hear across their borders threats of destruction; and, of course, the United Nations did not establish the State of Israel in order to see its obliteration’.Footnote72
• At the same time as Canadian ministers approved the sale of arms to Israel, they witnessed growing tension between Egypt and the British and French, a result of Nasser’s decision to nationalize the Suez canal in July 1956, itself a response to a Western decision to deny economic assistance to his government. While Canada earned considerable credit for not backing the Israeli-British-French invasion of Egypt that autumn – Abdul Hassouna, the Arab League’s Secretary-General, praised Ottawa’s ‘prominent part’ in resolving the Suez crisis – Canadian officials acted less in defence of Egypt than to protect Canada’s interests by extracting their allies from a mess that risked tearing apart the Commonwealth and the NATO and Anglo-American alliances. As Pearson had predicted privately in July, Britain’s use of force against Egypt would lead Cairo to appeal to the United Nations, which ‘would be bringing the UN into the matter with a vengeance, and by the wrong party’, that is, by the Egyptians.Footnote73 While Canada’s creation of the UN Emergency Force as a means of helping to resolve the resulting crisis was certainly a worthy development, often overlooked in Canadian analyses of Suez is the Israeli invasion of Egypt and seizure of Gaza – citing attacks from guerrillas – that preceded the Anglo-Franco intervention. There was no Canadian condemnation of this attack. Rather, Prime Minister St. Laurent, expressed regret that Israel had attacked Egypt, but added, ‘we recognize that Israel have [sic] been subjected to grave threats and provocations during the last few years’.Footnote74
• In the months after the crisis abated, Canada’s UN delegation was involved in intense wrangling over UNEF that involved Canadian efforts both to expand the peacekeeping force’s scope to incorporate the Israeli-Egyptian border and to cover Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza. While telling a colleague that ‘we cannot appear to be less insistent on the Israeli than on the Anglo-French withdrawal’, Pearson admitted that in Gaza and along the Egyptian border, ‘some of the Israeli objectives seem to be legitimate’ and he wanted a means to boost Israeli security.Footnote75 UNEF’s expanded scope provided a buffer between Israel and its neighbours, lowering tension in the region.

Conclusions

• The capstone of the golden age, the creation of the peacekeeping force in 1956, for which Pearson won the 1957 Nobel peace prize, was preferable to continuing warfare between Israel and Egypt. However, it encapsulated Canada’s impartial position, which since 1947 had favoured Israel against Palestinian interests – ‘3/4 impartial on the Israeli side’ a diplomatic report from 1965 put it.Footnote76 This weighting was obvious to observers of the golden age. Heath MacQuarrie, a long time Progressive Conservative MP, lamented that while Canadians voiced considerable sympathy for Israel there were ‘few litanies of complaint about the treatment of the Palestinian people’, which was ‘a blot upon a decent world’.Footnote77 In the view of Peyton Lyon, a former diplomat and a friend of Pearson, Rand and Pearson bore ‘an important responsibility for the creation of Israel and the consequent denial of justice to the Palestinians’.Footnote78 Policymakers’ myopic focus on Jewish and Israeli interests, and the resulting policy decisions, sprang from a number of factors, among them an Orientalist outlook that coloured attitudes about a region of which Canadians knew little. ‘I have never been in the area’, admitted the newly appointed head of the DEA’s Middle Eastern Division in 1960, ‘and I feel that some direct visual impressions and some immediate contacts with officials in these countries would add a good deal of substance to the relatively academic knowledge of the area’. ‘My ignorance of the Middle East makes it difficult for me to gauge Arab reactions’, Charles Ritchie, then serving as Canada’s UN representative, confided to his diary amid the crisis over Lebanon in 1958.Footnote79 And in tracing the roots of the ‘weaknesses’ in Pearson’s ‘thinking on Palestine’, Iraq’s representative to the UN pointed out to a Canadian journalist that the Canadian foreign minister ‘has never been to the Middle East nor has he had, as far as I know, any serious discussions with Middle Eastern statesmen … his knowledge is only on the side of Zionist propaganda’.Footnote80 Orientalist attitudes often filled the void of ignorance, reinforcing the East-West/savagery-civilization divides in Canadian thinking.
• In thought and deed, from South Africa to Indochina, golden age Canadian diplomats charted a middle course that tended to prioritize Western interests. Within the context of the Middle East, Canadian officials saw Israel as being very much a part of the West. This attitude was reinforced by a shared sense of settler colonialism, that bound Canada and Israel together in the experience of developing barren land. The flip side of viewing the Jewish state as a Western country, was the view of Israel’s neighbours as residing firmly within the Orient. In their encounters with Arabs and the Arab world, Canada’s diplomats and other officials drew upon, and defined their own, Orientalist attitudes. When it came to Palestine specifically, like many Westerners, Canadian policymakers saw Arab Palestinians as embodying ‘the alien spirit of Oriental despotism, sensuality, ignorance, and similar forms of backwardness’.Footnote81 As a result, Palestinians were ‘not worth considering and therefore nonexistent’, making it all the easier to deny their territorial rights and right to self-determination.Footnote82 This silence is evident in the way in which golden age Canadian diplomats approached Israel, Palestine and it influenced Canadian policy towards the Middle East, a reminder that present day concerns about Canada’s role in this region have echoes in the past.

Nouvelles

This 94-year-old Holocaust survivor recommended arrest warrants for Israeli and Hamas leaders (The Forward, 23-05-24)

(À propos de Theodor Meron)

Former envoy to Israel tells MPs Canada should recognize Palestinian state now (CBC, 29-10-24)

(À propos de Jon Allen)

Autre

Ambassade israélienne

• Israel and Canada have long stood side-by-side as partners on the world stage. Economic, cultural, political, and security ties reflect our mutual interests in peace and prosperity, and are represented in a multitude of bilateral agreements signed by both countries through 75 years of bilateral relations.
• Israel and Canada’s friendship is rooted in the shared values of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law. As our bilateral relations continue to develop in areas such as science and innovation, the close people-to-people ties that exist on all levels and in all sectors remain constant.
• In 2023, trade between Canada and Israel was valued at 1.8 billion USD. The Canada-Israel Free Trade Agreement (CIFTA), in force since January 1997, has undergone several updates since that time.  The modernized CIFTA will help to further ensure that the benefits and opportunities arising from trade and investment are widely shared.
• Canada is also the home to a vast Jewish community of some 350,000 people, maintaining a warm and constant connection with the State of Israel.
• Canada is represented in Israel by the Embassy of Canada in Tel Aviv. The State of Israel is represented in Canada by its Embassy in Ottawa and Consulates in Toronto and Montreal.Some Highlights:

May 11, 1949​	Canada grants full recognition to the State of Israel. A week later, Israel’s first Consul General to Canada, Avraham Harman, is appointed. He served in Montreal.
September 1953​	​Canada opens its Embassy in Tel Aviv, and Michael Comay becomes Israeli Ambassador to Canada.
May 1961​	Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion is the first Israeli Prime Minister to make an official visit to Canada. Since that time, many high-level officials from both countries have visited.
1967	President Zalman Shazar makes the first visit to Canada by an Israeli president during Canada’s centennial at the World Expo in Montreal
1978	Prime Minister Menachem Begin visits Canada
1989	President Chaim Herzog visits Canada and addresses the Canadian Parliament
1993, 1994	Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin makes official visits to Canada
​1997​	​Canada-Israel Free Trade Agreement (CIFTA) comes into effect.
2000	Prime Minister Jean Chétien visits Israel
2001	Foreign Affairs Minister John Manley visits Israel
2002	President Moshe Katzav visits Canada Foreign Affairs Minister Bill Graham visits Israel
2005	Foreign Affairs Minister Pierre Pettigrew visits Israel
2007	Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay visits Israel Foreign Affairs Minister Tzipi Livini visits Canada
2008	Foreign Affairs Minister Maxim Bernier visits Israel
2009	Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon visits Israel
2011	Minister of Defence Peter MacKay visits Israel, signs MOU on Defence Relations with Minister of Defence Ehud Barak
2012	Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visits Canada President Shimon Peres visits Canada
2019	President Reuven Rivlin visits Canada Modernized CIFTA takes effect
2021	Foreign Affairs Minister Marc Garneau visits Israel
2023, 2024	Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly visits Israel during the Swords of Iron war