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EDITORIAL February 19, 2003 * 27 Shevat, 5764 Living on the Wrong Side of the Tracks By Frank Dimant http://www.bnaibrith.ca/tribune/jt-edit.html It is worth revisiting Canada’s decision to bar its Ambassador from visiting the bereaved family of a Canadian-Israeli victim of terrorism. This is not simply because Canada prides itself on doing the right thing and could have avoided criticism by simply choosing compassion over politics, but because a closer look at this decision reveals a policy that is, in itself, contradictory. Canadian policy on the Middle East is based on the principle that it will not prejudge the solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, and that final status issues must be resolved bilaterally, by the parties in question, through negotiation. However, the decision not to visit the Goldbergs rested solely on another foreign policy principle that terms all Jewish communities east of the so-called Green Line as “illegal”. This contradiction is all the more apparent when one considers that the issues driving the current conflict and, by extension, Canadian foreign policy did not begin and end in 1967 as one might logically assume from the government’s response to this tragic case. There was a prior history that impacts on current events, reaching back not just to the invasion of the fledgling State of Israel by its Arab neighbours in 1948, but way beyond. Many of the Jewish communities that have flourished in areas under Israeli control since 1967 replace those that were destroyed both before and during the 1948–49 war. The Jews who lived in these earlier communities were either killed or driven off their land. For example, the remnants of the ancient community in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City were expelled when Jordan occupied the area, while ancient synagogues were destroyed or converted into stables or latrines. Jews were subsequently forbidden to visit the area let alone live in it even to pray at their holiest site, the Western Wall. Now Jewish residents who have returned to the area are classed as “settlers” by Canadian Government policy. Going back further into history, following the 1929 massacre in which the ancient Jewish community of Hebron was decimated, the few survivors fled for their lives to areas where the Jews were better able to defend themselves. Those who have returned to live in Hebron since 1967 have reclaimed the right for Jews to live near, and pray at, their second holiest site, a right denied them under Jordanian rule. These Jewish residents of Hebron are also branded as “settlers” and their communities as “illegal” under current Canadian policy. I use the word communities, rather settlements, purposely. The term settlement is, in the lexicon of Middle East diplomacy, a derogatory pseudonym suggesting an alien presence, thus denying the indissoluble religious and historical Jewish ties to these areas that span millennia. The most basic point of contention is simply the fact that the residents of these communities are Jewish, that Jews have returned to live in areas from which they were expelled. There is an air of unreality to the way Canada and the West relates to these communities and their inhabitants. We like to pretend that they do not exist that they are, in essence, non-communities populated by non-people. By using the label “settlers”, even “settler children”, we have created a lesser class of human being with the implicit message that they are not eligible for the protections of international law, nor the niceties of humanitarian treatment. I suspect the reason for this stratagem is that it makes it easier for us to ignore the unpleasant truth that, by deeming these communities “illegal” and calling for their evacuation, what is really being advocated is a policy of ethnic cleansing of Jews from the area, much as has been the case in so many Arab countries that once had a long tradition of Jewish “settlement”. The family members left behind by Yechezkel Goldberg are not “settlers”. They are human beings, a mother and her children, widowed and orphaned by a cold blooded killer in a brutal terrorist attack in a part of Jerusalem not even regarded as “occupied” by Canada or by the international community. Canada did not want to send a “message” by allowing its diplomats to visit a bereaved family because they live on the wrong side of the Green Line. What about the “red line” of Canada’s policy towards terrorism? After all, the Goldbergs live on the side of the Green Line from which terrorist operations against all Jews in the area are planned, implemented and encouraged. The visit would not have merely been an opportunity to showcase that Canada was doing the “right thing” in diplomatic and humanitarian terms. It would have sent a resounding message to terrorists, their enablers and sponsors, that Canada is unequivocally opposed to terrorism. Now that would have been a message worth sending.