If Canada wanted reconciliation, it would stand with Palestine

 

Canada is a settler-colonial state. Decolonization of this land means ending Canadian support for Israeli colonialism as well.

The Canadian state has tried to cultivate an image and identity as an exception among settler colonial nations—a leader in both Indigenous reconciliation and multiculturalism domestically and a neutral peacemaker on the world stage.

There’s one obvious exception to this cultivated image. Canada has made an exception of Palestine in its self-proclaimed dedication to racial equity and global human rights, supporting Israel unconditionally despite its documented apartheid, arbitrary detention and torture (including of children), forced expulsions, illegal settlements, ethnic cleansing and genocide against the indigenous Palestinian people.

“Palestine is not the exception,” says legal scholar Dr. Noura Erakat. “The rule is the colonial framework.”

Canada has a longstanding failure to respond to Indigenous and racialized voices calling for the most basic humanitarian treatment of Palestinians. Dr. Rinaldo Walcott said in October that this “exposes the bankrupt situational morality of Canadian politics in a settler-colonial country that can only but support white settler politics elsewhere as the condition of its own existence.”

The moral litmus test of Palestinian solidarity reveals the hollowness of so-called progressive policies of diversity, equity and inclusion—and reconciliation. Rather than redressing injustice, these policies have become redirections that do little to disturb structural inequities and the dehumanization of Black, Indigenous and racialized people.  (more...)

If Canada wanted reconciliation, it would stand with Palestine