Gaza and Canada’s refugee double standard

 

The Trudeau government’s response to Ukraine was swift and comprehensive. Its approach to Gaza has been timid and hesitant

Nearly 50,000 Palestinians live in Canada. Most arrived here as refugees. They make up a small part of a global Palestinian diaspora, numbering seven million. Witnessing the war from afar evokes helplessness and anguish for those in the diaspora.

Palestinians are a stateless people, 80 percent of them displaced, 50 percent living outside the borders of their historic homeland. The right of return is feeling more and more remote. Many in the diaspora have extended family members or friends currently trapped in Gaza.

Lima Al-Azzeh, a young Palestinian living in Vancouver, recently wrote a column for CBC’s First Person. She wrote about feeling helpless and suffering in silence while awaiting news from family members in Gaza:

And then there are the other silences to contend with. The ones that feel more personal. Noticing who spoke up and who didn’t. Noticing who reached out with a word of support or comfort and who didn’t. Noticing who, over the years, has cared to ask us genuine questions about what it means to be Palestinian. What it feels like to be homesick for your homeland and every day be confronted by the impossibility of your return.

This is the sixth conflict in the past 15 years where Palestinians in Gaza have suffered mass killings by the Israeli military. This war is certainly the most devastating, with the expressed Israeli intent of stamping out Palestinian life. Palestinians are being called “human animals” by far-right Israeli leaders while as they are merely trying to survive in the face of mass displacement, unrelenting bombing, ethnic cleansing, the destruction of their homes, the lack of medical care, a lack of sanitation, and hunger.

It is hard not to believe that what the world is witnessing in Gaza constitutes the very definition of genocide—a deliberate attempt “to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” by “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”  (more...)

Gaza and Canada’s refugee double standard