O Canada!

Canada, the true Colossus of the North, has not been very kind to Israel in the last few days. The Canadian parliament on March 18 passed a non-binding resolution proposed by the left-wing and anti-Israel New Democratic Party, calling on the government to halt arms sales to Israel. The ruling Liberal Party wanted to appease the New Democrats, whose support in Parliament it needs to pass legislation. Many of the New Democrats have a deep anti-Israel animus, and realpolitiking Liberals joined them, some more in sorrow, in passing that resolution. Non-binding that resolution may have been, but Trudeau’s government decided to go with the flow, and the foreign minister, Melanie Joly, has announced that Canada will indeed halt those weapons sales to Israel in the future. Sales already contracted for will not be affected.

Practically, this will have little effect. Israel has been buying only about $20 million worth of weapons each year from Canada. Canada in the last decade has bought more than $1 billion of weapons from Israel. But it’s a terrible decision, nonetheless, this very public distancing by Canada from Israel just as Israel is fighting the fourth war for its survival (the other three were in 1948, 1967, and 1973). How deeply unkind to a country that has done nothing to harm Canada, that suffered on October 7 the greatest attack on Jews since the Holocaust, and that is only trying to end Hamas’ ability to inflict on the people of Israel the same kind of atrocities it did on October 7, as it has promised to do, “again and again and again.”

Let the Canadians be reminded that right now, as Canada cuts off its weapons sales to Israel, Israeli weapons systems are now protecting Canadian pilots, fighters, and naval combatants around the world. They are deployed to protect Canada’s borders and NATO countries bordering Russia.

Joly and the deplorable Trudeau  have forgotten that in the last decade, the Canadian Defense Ministry purchased Israeli weapon systems worth more than a billion dollars, after examining their performance, prices, and delivery times compared to those of other Western companies. Will Heather McPherson of the New Democratic Party , a leader of the anti-Israel group within that party, demand that Canada stop buying weapons from Israel? Is her anti-Israel animus that great?

Hamas has made clear that it wants to destroy every last Israeli Jew, and replace the lone Jewish state with a twenty-third Arab state. Hamas is an enemy that always and everywhere embeds itself, and its weapons, in civilian areas and civilian buildings, hoping to increase the number of civilian casualties so as to score propaganda points against Israel. Yet Israel, by warning civilians (and, at the same time, Hamas) to leave areas and buildings about to be targeted, has managed to minimize civilian casualties. As of the beginning of November, after only a few weeks of fighting, the IDF had dropped 14 million leaflets, sent six million text messages, and made four million telephone calls, to warn Palestinians to get out of harm’s way. Think how many more leaflets, text messages, and telephone calls it has made in the almost five months since. Was there ever such an effort made by any army to warn civilians away from areas that were going to be hit  knowing that its mortal enemy was gaining that information at the same time?

Those warnings were heeded, which helps explain the ratio of civilian-to-combatant deaths in Gaza as now 1:1, an unheard-of achievement. Compare that ratio with the average ratio in all he wars since 1945, according to the UN itself, of nine civilians killed for every combatant. Or note the ration of civilian-to-combatant deaths that the Americans achieved in Afghanistan of 4:1, and in Iraq of 3:1. No wonder British Colonel Richard Kemp has called the IDF “the most moral army in the history of warfare” and John Spencer, a 25-year veteran of the American military, now a professor of urban warfare at West Point, has similarly described the IDF as “taking unprecedented steps to protect the civilians of Gaza.”

Tommy Douglas, a politician and the leader of the New Democratic Party from 1961 to 1971, best known for being the father of Canada’s universal health care system, once voted “the Greatest Canadian,” was a member of the Canadian Palestine Committee, a group of prominent non-Jewish Zionists formed in 1943. In 1944, the Canadian Palestine Committee wrote Prime Minister Mackenzie King that it “looks forward to the day when Palestine [which at the time meant all of Mandatory Palestine, from the river to the sea] shall ultimately become a Jewish commonwealth, and member of the British Commonwealth of Nations under the British Crown.”

Lester Pearson was a Canadian diplomat in 1948, who played an important role at the U.N., in getting that body to recognize, in the Partition Resolution, the need for a Jewish state in the Land of Israel. That resolution withered on the vine because the Arabs refused to accept it; it could not be revived. Pearson later became Prime Minister of Canada. In his memoirs, he wrote: “I never had a doubt that this problem [between Arabs and Jews] is unsolvable without recognizing a Jewish state in the Land of Israel. For me it was always the center of the issue. A Jewish state in the land of Israel, a national home, it is something that I felt that it was a sine qua non for every arrangement.” In 1960, Pearson received Israel’s Medallion of Valour and after he stepped down from being Prime Minister in 1968, he received the Theodore Herzl award from the Zionist Organization of America for his “commitment to Jewish freedom and Israel.” Memo to Canada: More Tommy Douglas and Lester Pearson, please, and less Justin Trudeau and Heather McPherson.

Voltaire famously dismissed Canada in 1769 as “quelques arpents de neige.” A few acres of snow. I always thought the sentiment absurd, unfair. But not nearly as unfair as the Canadian government has just been to the people and government of Israel. So this year I won’t be visiting Canada as I had been contemplating. I won’t be dropping in on a certain bookstore — Paragraphe? — near rue Prince-Arthur, in Montreal, where 18 years ago I bought a print of Hochelaga, an Iroquois village that Jacques Cartier himself came across in 1535. The original of that print was published in Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s Navigazioni e Viaggi. Does that bookstore still exist? No, I won’t be going north this year. I grew up believing that many things — not just prices for books, but also the level of public debate, the mental reach, the moral tone — were always “slightly higher in Canada.” I expected better of our northern neighbor. So my response will be a quiet boycott of one, in force until Canada comes to its senses. Care to join me?