Canada made the right call on the West Bank

While people protested vociferously about the killing in Gaza — a territory from which Israel withdrew all Jewish settlements nearly a quarter-century ago — few raised their voices about the abuses in the territory that Israel still occupies illegally across the West Bank. It barely registered on the world’s map.

No longer.

This month, Canada joined the United Kingdom and France in declaring that it cannot be business as usual for Jewish settlements that were created — and keep expanding — in violation of international law. And in contravention of Canadian government policy.

Specifically, Canada is joining other European nations in planning to ban commercial ties to these settlements. The logic, in law and in policy, is that these settlements have long been deemed to be an obstacle to peace.

“For more than 70 years, successive Canadian governments have held the position that a two-state solution is the way forward,” argued Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand.

Bands of armed Jewish settlers have been provoking, attacking, ransacking Palestinian land with rising impunity in recent months, attracting the ire of even the loudest apologists within the current Israeli and American governments. But these transgressions are hardly unprecedented, and the remedy is far from novel.

When I was based in the Middle East as a foreign correspondent in the late 1990s, I covered endless confrontations between Jewish settlers in outlying areas of the West Bank imposing themselves in indefensible (and undefendable) outposts. Back then, Israeli governing and security authorities did not turn a blind eye with as much abandon as they do now.

In those days, when the Oslo peace process was still alive, it was widely understood that these outlying settlements would one day be demolished (while the bedroom blocs outside Jerusalem and Tel Aviv would be bartered for other concessions). Jewish settlements were removed from Gaza in 2005, and from the Israeli-occupied Egyptian Sinai in the 1980s.

To be sure, the peace process has been on life support for two decades. But the long-term goal of a two-state solution is not dead, if for no other reason that there is no better, workable alternative — certainly not the “one-state solution” that many of Israel’s opponents call for.

The idea that the Jewish state should sign its own death warrant by merging into a Greater Palestine, soon to be outvoted by a Palestinian majority including Gaza and the West Bank, ignores the lessons of history. There’s a reason that the UN chose partition, which gave rise to Israeli independence in 1948; the breakup of Yugoslavia is another illustration that you can’t force people who hate each other to live under the same roof, deprived of self-determination.

Hence two states for two peoples, at some point.

Canada and other friends of Israel cannot be complicit in watching the current government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sabotage the possibility of that two-state solution. That is precisely why the time is right, at this very moment, to send a signal of Canada’s position.

This is not piling on, it is making a point.

Decades ago, I wrote about the incongruity of Revenue Canada (now the CRA) granting charitable deductions to registered charities that sent funds to the West Bank. I took some heat for those stories at the time, but I believed that the contradiction had to be exposed, and that we needed the kind of governmental clarity we are seeing today.

Better belatedly than never. Better also than the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement that is ambiguous at best, mischievous at worst.

BDS is an amorphous agglomeration of activists, some of whom well understand the distinction between Israel proper and the occupied West Bank; others deliberately blur the lines by treating all of Israel as an “apartheid state” that must be boycotted and decertified.

BDS cloaks hidden agendas, spreads distortions and sows divisions. A transparent, properly administered governmental rubric — restricting commerce with illegal settlements, not isolating the rest of Israel — is far preferable and fully justifiable.

The timing of British Prime Minister Andy Burnham in leading the charge is surely suspect, given his desire to appease impatient Labour MPs who supported his recent bid for the party leadership. But there is no time like the present.

Israeli electoral politics are also in play here. The Middle East’s most enduring — if embattled — democracy is going to the polls on Oct. 27.

Canada and Europe are clearly signalling to Israelis that the more they expand Jewish settlements on occupied territory, the more they are diminishing their ties with friendly countries. By delivering that message now, Canada is telling Israeli voters what they need to hear as they decide on their country’s future.