AT PENPOINT
The proposal in an Israeli office to send the Gazans to Canada is incredibly arrogant for a number of reasons. First it assumes that Canada will take so many people in. There are three million Gazans, and it is a safe assumption that Israel will leave about two and a half million to be disposed of somehow. Second, it assumes that the Israel attack on Gaza is inevitably going to result in a victory.
As regards the first assumption, it makes assumptions about the power of Canadian Jewry that may come up against resistance. While Canadians have shared in the guilt of the Holocaust, the relaxation of immigration barriers has also created a white supremacist group, which will presumably be hostile to even more Palestinians coming in, and in numbers which would change the demography of all of Canada. With a population of 38 million, adding about three million more people would be problematic. Will even Canadian Jewry want to help clean up the mess Israel has made?
One insidious problem that might make Canadian Jewry oppose such a move, or at least make it ambivalent about supporting it is that Canada’s anti-migrant forces will be strengthened. Such forces, which are not in the Canadian mainstream at the moment, are anti-Semitic and racist. They will roil up rancour against Palestinians, but also against Jews.
The dilemmas posed to Canadian Jewry will be posed also to American Jewry. A minority of any such migrants will end up in the USA. There is a small Palestinian community in the USA, and any Gazan relatives will be attracted. Once settled in Canada, migrants find the USA relatively easy to shift to. If the USA attempted to set up barriers which came in the way of free US-Canadian movement, that would be problematic.
It might be blithely seen as a solution in an Israeli government office, but Canadian Jewry is also likely to be made uncomfortable when such a large number of migrants get the vote. Migrants so far have few opinions about Jews, and can take them or leave them. However, these migrants will have a visceral dislike of Israelis, and their Zionist supporters abroad, and by extension Canadian Jewry. While the incident of the murder of a Palestinian child took place in the USA, by the Jewish landlord of the building he lived in, its implications for Canada are brought into being by this proposal.
The implications of searching for a haven, a refuge, for an entire people should have dangerous echoes in the minds of Jews. After all, for about 50 years, they had the world exercised about where the Jews should go. Jews had been content to go about their lives as followers of a minority religion, looked down upon by ‘natives’. The rise of nationalisms in the 19th century led to the ideas of Jews too being a nation, needing to find Zion, a national homeland. One of the first schemes was for Jews to be allotted part of the East Africa Protectorate, the so-called ‘Uganda Plan’ even though it falls in what is today part of Kenya. The Zionist Congress of 1903 actually considered it, because the problems faced by Jews in Europe had been shown by the Kishinev pogrom in 1903, when 49 Jews were killed. Then there was the 1905 pogrom there, part of a series of 80 pogroms that took place in the Russian Empire at the time of the abortive Revolution of that year.
Zionists should look hard at what Israel has become. Or perhaps it has not become anything, and is merely showing its true self. Now Israel is not taking revenge for October 7; it is taking revenge for the pogroms, and for the Holocaust. While not all Gazans were responsible for October 7, some were.Â
The ‘Uganda Plan’ was not the only one to try to divert Jews to Africa instead of Palestine. The Nazis themselves contemplated a scheme to send the Jews of Europe to Madagascar. In 1940, the Nazis Adolf Eichmann proposed settling a million Jews a year in Madagascar, which was a French colony due to fall into German hands with the defeat of France. However, later in the year, the ‘East African Solution’ was abandoned in favour of the ‘Final Solution.’
Fascist Italy also came up with an offer to settle Jews from both Europe and Palestine in certain areas of Ethiopia and Italian Somaliland, but nothing came of the plan. That cannot be said of Birobidzhan, a patch of land in the Soviet Far East, where a Jewish Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was set up in the Stalin Years, but which collapsed under Stalin’s anti-Semitism combined with the creation of Israel itself.
Canada was considered briefly, but quickly rejected by Ionists, because of the bad experience of the Doubokhors, or Russian ‘Spirit-Wrestlers, whose late 19th century migration en masse from Russia, may have inspired the present idea.
Another strand which is becoming confused is the non-Jewish left, which had traditionally supported Jews and Zionism. However, in the USA, Christian Zionism became strong, where Zionists gained the support of many Christian fundamentalists. Christian Zionists hold that the return of the Jews to the Levant is a precondition of the Second Coming of Christ. At the same time, the Palestinian cause was initially supported by the left, because the USSR saw Israel as a kind of American colony in the Middle East.
However, the left may support the Palestinian cause because the slaughter is awful, and supporting Israel means supporting the killing of babies and the bombing of hospitals. One consequence of supporting Gazans is it means supporting Hamas, which is an explicitly Muslim-fundamentalist organisation. While it hotly denies being terrorist, it does not deny that it believes in ‘political Islam’. As it derives from the Ikhwanul Muslimeen, the present bombing has put Western leftists at least on the same page, and perhaps in bed, with Islamists.
However, the left and the Islamists might be left to worry about ideological purity, while the Canada idea shows what the Zionists plan for the West Bank, which has so far been the focus of Israeli attention, though there have been deaths there. Israel seems to have given up on the idea of settling in Gaza, though the present conflict may have revived the idea. However, if Gazans can be forced to flee, so can West Bank residents, and that would be much more attractive for the Israelis.
The Jews have been twice uprooted from the country, but the Palestinian residents have not. They may have been Muslim for 1300 years, but were Christian before that, and probably Jewish even before that. Israel basically consists of European Jews, mostly from Russia, especially Ukraine, some directly, some via the USA. However, while the Zionists achieved some ethnic cleansing in 1948, the task has not been accomplished.
However, Israel does not seem to contemplate the results of moving out the Gazans. The Doukhobors have not shown many signs of wanting to go back, but as the recent episode of Hardeep Singh Nijjar showed, Canada has problems with the Khalistan movement because of a large number of Sikh migrants. Can it really afford another migrant community with memories of an ancestral homeland and a yearning among some for its freedom?
Zionists should look hard at what Israel has become. Or perhaps it has not become anything, and is merely showing its true self. Now Israel is not taking revenge for October 7; it is taking revenge for the pogroms, and for the Holocaust. While not all Gazans were responsible for October 7, some were. But none, particularly not the babies and toddlers now being butchered, were born at the time of the Holocaust.
