An Idea: Leave Canadian Jews Alone

This community has had to sit by as their most agonizing historical nightmares are resurrected in the present day.

Illustration by Paul Lachine

I used to think of Israel in mainly geopolitical terms, as a bulwark of American and Western power in the Middle East. I now think of it as a place my family can escape to if things get really bad. That’s the difference marrying a Jew makes. 

For more than ten months, since Hamas terrorists invaded Israel and murdered more than 1,000 people, igniting the war they knew would follow, I have watched with mounting dread as the violence spread. It has destroyed most of Gaza, killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and made northern Israel uninhabitable. Southern Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and the West Bank are conflict zones. Iran and Israel teeter on the brink of full-scale war. More than a hundred Israeli hostages remain in captivity, from the more than 200 initially kidnapped by Hamas. An unknown number have been killed, either by their captors or by friendly fire.

All this, reportedly, because Hamas’s Iranian purse masters determined a new war in Gaza would derail a looming normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. If that’s true, Iran’s leaders appear to have judged correctly.

I have watched, also, as the congregants of our little synagogue in Owen Sound, ON., became increasingly uneasy at worship for fear of being attacked; and as they grew incrementally more despairing, realizing the ancient infection of antisemitism has again burst into full virulence in Canada and worldwide. I’ve held my wife as she sobbed late into the night out of fear, sadness and inchoate horror, that this could be happening yet again.

Wednesday, synagogues and Jewish organizations across Canada received a graphic, terrorist death threat, which I will not reprint here.

It’s not enough that Canadian Jews have had to sit by helplessly as their most agonizing historical nightmares are resurrected in the present day, down to fire-bombings of synagogues, shots fired at Jewish schools and the old pattern of antisemites blaming the Jews, all Jews, for every ill. It’s not enough that Canadian Jews have had to come to grips with the fact that many critics of Israeli policy, ostensibly progressives, consider any Jew anywhere to be a legitimate proxy for the Netanyahu government. It’s not enough that Jewish families have had to watch in relative silence as the streets of Canadian cities rang with shouts of “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free!” … a slogan that implicitly calls for the destruction of the State of Israel and the expulsion or massacre of millions of Jews because they are Jews.

Now we have a person in Canada, perhaps a group, telling my wife, my stepsons, my family, and our tiny congregation, many of whose members lost family or ancestors in the Holocaust, that we deserve to die because of where and how we worship. This as authoritarian parties surge worldwide, as unabashed fascists use social media to solidify a new niche on the far right, and as war threatens to ignite the Middle East.

A last-ditch bid for a ceasefire and release of all Israeli hostages is under way. Millions of Israelis are daily filling their country’s streets, demanding an immediate end to the war. The Netanyahu government, in thrall to its own far right, has been corrupt and inept, both before and after Oct. 7. Every casualty of war, especially of civilians and most particularly of children, is an abomination. It’s a fact there will be no lasting peace in Israel or in the region until Palestinians also have a state, a country, a chance at a better future for their children. It’s a fact, also, that the radical fringes on both sides of this decades-old battle now control events, and this is no foundation for peace.

That said: Is it too much to expect that all Canadians, progressive internationalists that we like to think ourselves to be, will intuitively understand that terrorizing an entire community, a tiny minority at that, out of anger at a government in another country half a world away, is dangerous and wrong? Apparently so. We’ll have a better idea if the perpetrators are found and identified.

It seems odd now, and sad, to reflect that at the turn of the 21^st Century it appeared to many of us that the great battles over race, religion and tribe had been fought and won. Here we are in 2024, replaying a scenario that wouldn’t have seemed out of place in Leipzig or Hamburg in 1933. What a world.