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Trudeau's Israeli Status Quo Ignores Palestinians

As published in the Victoria Standard: February 1, 2016.

Apparently, Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu “digs” Justin Trudeau; who affirmed official Canada’s ongoing support for Israel at the recent Davos summit. Canadian support for Israel likely means a quiet continuation of business ties, military liaison and silence on Israel’s illegal settlement and expansion activities in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights; all in open violation of international law.

During a CNN interview about ISIL, Trudeau might well have been pleading the case of the Palestinian people; driven from their homes and farms in 1948 by triumphant Israeli military, para-military and guerilla forces unopposed by the European powers whose indifference facilitated the Holocaust.

“If there’s one thing that recent history has taught us, it’s that ultimately conflicts like this need to have their resolution on the ground with people who…want to take their country back from terrorists.” While the pre-Zionist Palestine was not a country in the formal sense of the word; the territory’s Arab inhabitants enjoyed a definite sense of nationhood no less legitimate than that of the European Jews who gradually displaced them.

To the sorrow of the Palestinians and the shame of many Israelis; Jewish terrorism has evolved from its genesis in Israel’s formative years of Irgun and Stern Gang guerilla attacks against Arabs and the British. Their terror tactics were modest compared to today’s lethal combination of high tech military assaults against Palestinians and militant settler violence targeting Arabs, Christians and Israelis. The fanatical Hamas are hardly in the same league as the IDF, with its Apache gunships, F15’s, tanks and heavy artillery.

Until the United States government imposes serious conditions to its military, economic and diplomatic cover for the expansionist Israel state; the prospects for Palestinian statehood and real peace are nil. The Palestinians turned to the United Nations to even the odds because direct negotiations with Israel actually means simultaneous bargaining with the United States. What would we do in their place?