A recent op-ed by Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow reminds us that just as we must divest from companies complicit in the ongoing genocide and apartheid, we must divest ourselves from governments and nation-states that are ultimately projects of empire.
“A slaughter isn’t a slaughter if those being slaughtered are at fault, if they’ve been quietly and effectively dehumanized — in the media, through policy — for years,” writes Palestinian-American writer, professor, and psychologist Hala Alyan. “If nobody is a civilian, nobody can be a victim.”
Over the last few months, Canadian politicians have continued to normalize the ongoing genocide against Palestinians. Trudeau repeated Zionist talking points about Israel’s “right to defend itself” to justify their genocide; five MPs visited Israel to “learn about the trauma and toll of the Hamas invasion.”
Many politicians, like Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow, claim “what Hamas did on Oct. 7 was horrific and without justification.” They fail to recognize or perhaps cannot engage with the facts: that Palestinian resistance did not occur in a vacuum, but was an effort to resist the well-documented abuses, apartheid, and dehumanization enforced by Israel upon the Palestinian people.
Our politicians have made every effort to manufacture consent for Israeli war crimes, either through clear racism or more covert forms of normalizing rhetoric. Mayor Olivia Chow’s recent Toronto Star opinion article is part of this effort, which is no more than an attempt at pacifying a public increasingly frustrated with our politicians’ absolute failure at ending a modern-day genocide. I’m relatable; I’ve suffered; here is proof, she seems to say. And just like you, I don’t want bad things to happen.
But reading her article, it would seem that this genocide against Palestinians is being committed by no one, that Canadian banks are not invested in the arms that Israel is now using to murder with impunity, and that compassion and empathy alone are acceptable substitutes for material action, namely: an arms embargo and ending international support for an apartheid state.
If there’s a potential to recognize our present as a corollary moment, for Chow to call for resistance in the present just as resistance fighters did in the past, it’s smothered in this piece. Her reluctance to draw parallels between the violence of the past and present is why Chow tells the Star, “my mother was a hungry child in a war zone,” without drawing the correlation that Israel is starving children in Palestine, just as the Japanese Empire did to civilians all across the Asian continent during the Second World War, including to Chow’s family. (more...)
Moving Beyond Electoral Politics and the Sedative of Empathy
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