For folks curious about today's Canuck news:
Last fall, Trudeau issued 28.5 million in new permits for military exports to Israel, for classes of material ranging from bombs to vehicle components to electronic equipment and monitoring systems. Canadian parts also get shipped to the US to complete equipment sent by them.
This was a huge uptick for related spending, and it upset Canadians who've in the past protested Trudeau for supplying Saudi Arabia against Yemen. 1/2
So Canada's decision to block new military funding to Israel isn't an empty gesture; it's responding to a discourse that has not only been going for the last few months, but also for the last few decades.
Canadians tend to be raised on the belief that our legacy is as "peacekeepers", and the bravery of one of us against Rwandan genocide also keeps that myth alive.
But the country has also been part of the world's military actions, too - so there's a longstanding fight over identity here. 2/2
@MLClark I too was unhappy we supplied military hardware to Saudi Arabia; it's a repressive dictatorial/theocratic regime w/ a catastrophically bad human rights record, a toxic state ideology (to the point one could easily argued their principles are the antithesis of ours), & a long history of covertly sponsoring terrorism.
By contrast Israel has a fairly robust democracy, a decent human rights record (certainly no worse than ours), & an ideological base fairly compatible with pluralism...
@MLClark Suffice to say it doesn't appear to me supplying military materiel to the Saudis in any way serves the interests of world peace... especially not if our goal is a pluralistic, tolerant global society.
I do think supplying military materiel to the Israelis, on the other hand, could serve world peace - their current opponent is, after all, an explicitly genocidal terrorist group...
But I'm a tad less idealistic than most in this area - & recognize sometimes victory is needed for peace.
I don't think anything that's happening in Israel under its current far-right government serves peace--and I say that as someone who reads local Israeli news every day.
I also lived through another era where people acted like mass war campaigns wouldn't just radicalize the rest and create new extremists. We saw Taliban scatter and return.
The "total victory" BS from the 2000s echoes in this war. Nobody will "win". We're just enduring atrocity until enough are tired of it again.
@MLClark Their current government's far-right bent is disturbing, I'll grant that.
It is, however, somewhat understandable; people tend to skew right (& warm to militaristic ideals/groups) when faced by hostile actors who preach the complete annihilation of their people. Especially when that kind of thing has been tried before.
I'm not entirely convinced the situations are analogous; for one, it seems the level of radicalization in the Gaza Strip has been extreme for a very long time.
Torin, I'm not talking about the government after Oct 7. I've been writing about Netanyahu's far-right coalition before that, and I've written explainers about the complex history of Israel's democracy.
Netanyahu faced three corruption trials going into 2023, and alarmed locals in December 2022, because he held on to his mandate through the most extreme right-wing coalition in Israeli history. Then he went after the Supreme Court, and sparked *months* of local protests--
@MLClark The threat existed before Oct. 7; among other things, the rocket attacks would've kept that in the public consciousness... which I believe made Israel more vulnerable to right-wing influence from the get-go.
Combine that with a growing far-right globally (no doubt driven partly by rising anxieties about the future, online echo chambers / radicalization pipelines given huge reach by social media companies, & vast amounts of dark money) & perhaps in hindsight the outcome is unsurprising.
That "belief" doesn't quite jive with regional history, where the Likud Party has played a strong role in exacerbating tensions for decades. Labor Zionism declined after its PM was assassinated by a right-wing Israeli.
But the key point I'm trying to make is that Westerners generally don't know much about the democracy they're vaguely upholding. Israel and Palestine are abstract stories in online chatter, instead of places where real humans are trying to survive amid extremists.
That's also why there's not much point to these conversations. They just become performances of allegiance that at best trade in dehumanizing certain populations, and at worst demonstrate ignorance of *all* populations involved.
Israelis are in the middle of an internal discourse about their future, while their government wages a war on multiple fronts, and while Palestinians suffer and die.
It's not a good topic for idle online chatter. It's just a cruel mess for all involved.
@MLClark You have a good point.
And I should be especially careful around such topics, as my inherently rather cold way of looking at the world is particularly apt to follow paths and yield conclusions that more sensitive individuals may find... well, without putting too fine a point on it, rather unpleasant.
Perhaps more worth discussing are the aspects of Western society's politics, ideology, behaviour, et cetera that the discourse surrounding the war has highlighted.
That's been the bread-and-butter of pretty much every article I wrote about Israel in the last year - including a four-part series called "Israel and the West".
I've written often in the last few months about wartime mentalities, too. (I think my most recent was a few weeks back in my newsletter?)
Western ignorance of Israel as an actual state is a huge bugbear in part because many support Israel solely because it fits Christian eschatology. It's "polite" anti-Semitism at best.