KEITH LANDY

Edmonton

At the outset, let me say what a pleasure it is to be with you in Edmonton tonight for your Annual General Meeting. Western hospitality is alive and well and I am always impressed with the vitality and ruach in smaller Jewish communities across Canada. I can also tell you with much appreciation that Canadian Jewish Congress national has always been well served by the Edmonton community, with people like Alvin Goldsman, a national officer who currently chairs CJC’s Security Committee, as well as Len Dolgoy, Gerry Gall, Ron Sorokin and Bruce Ellman who sat on our leadership boards or chaired important committees. We also recall the outstanding efforts of Edmonton counsel Rob Abells and Lyle Kanee who spearheaded our legal intervention on the Vriend case, an important development in Canadian human rights history and the battle against minority discrimination. I was CJC’s Honorary Counsel at the time of Lyle’s presentation to the Supreme Court of Canada and I assure you he did us all very proud.

And now, of course, I have moved up the ladder to become CJC President, a position I have held for just over a year. And what a year it has been. Expecting some kind of easy transition over last summer, I instead found myself in late August in Durban, South Africa at the United Nations World Conference Against Racism. You know, of course, what a misnomer that turned out to be. The gathering of international NGOs at this conference turned it upside down, with the Palestinian propaganda machine in high gear accusing Israel of the most heinous human rights violations and marginalizing the Holocaust and the historical experience of the Jewish people.

What I observed there made my blood curdle. I witnessed first hand how the Palestinian representatives, together with the support of other Arabs and Muslims and a variety of other delegates, resorted to virulent antisemitism reminiscent of Nazi-era propaganda. There were cartoons in the style of the Nazi newspaper Der Sturmer, and banners, flyers and T-shirts accusing Israel of racism, Nazism, and apartheid. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the famous Czarist antisemitic forgery, was available for sale at an exhibition booth. In the end, these forces hijacked the conference to delegitimize the state of Israel and the history of the Jewish people.

And, of course, barely a week after the conference ended, radical Islamists wrote a new and horrific chapter in the chilling book of international terrorism on September 11th, revealing for all who were willing to look with open eyes that evil deeds follow from evil words.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are facing a real problem, for the campaign to delegitimize Israel did not end at Durban. In fact, it has accelerated after 9/11, as Israel’s enemies have repeatedly tried to politicize and manipulate multilateral gatherings and to abuse international human rights agreements all to isolate Israel among the community of nations.

The United Nations Commission on Human Rights, for example, spent 40 hours dealing with Israel at its annual meeting in Geneva this past spring. This compares with the 40 minutes each, on average, the Commission spent on those other countries it chose to discuss. It passed eight resolutions condemning Israel, one of which actually served to justify Palestinian terrorism.

From the perspective of the Jewish community of Canada, there is good news and there is bad news. The good news is that the response of the federal Government to these issues has increasingly been positive. In the face of the evil travesty of Durban, Canada played a very honourable role based on its firm opposition to any language that was anti-Israel. Although our preference had been for Canada to join the United States and Israel in leaving Durban, the Canadian delegation stayed to the end. Here is why, according to the Canadian delegation’s eloquent and moving explanation: “only because we wanted to have our voice decry the attempts at this Conference to de-legitimize the State of Israel, and to dishonour the history and suffering of the Jewish people.”

Similarly, Foreign Minister Bill Graham gave an undertaking to Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Rabbi Michael Melchior in Geneva to work with Israel to fight the systemic anti-Israel bias of the Commission and to vote against unbalanced and unhelpful resolutions. Canada was full value for that commitment.

Minister Graham’s perspectives on the Israeli-Palestinian situation have been much more realistic and helpful of late and Canada’s voting record at the United Nations is improving. Canada has been very supportive of Israel in other international fora, such as the Inter-Parliamentary Union as well.

The letdown to the Jewish community of Canada has come from elements of the private, non-governmental sector, and this distresses me greatly. Let me be clear: we do have friends in the NGO sector and one good example that you may not be aware of is the Canadian Red Cross. Many of you know that Israel’s Magen David Adom, or Red Shield of David, is not a full-fledged member of the Red Cross Red Crescent Societies because it cannot adopt either of those two official protective symbols. The answer to this problem is the establishment of a new, third universal symbol that MDA can ratify. In recent years, the Canadian Red Cross has been active in promoting this option and in gathering support for MDA’s full admission. In the meantime, the Canadian Red Cross has enhanced its level of cooperation with MDA and will be inviting MDA’s President to address their AGM this fall.

Elsewhere, the results are more problematic. Just last week, the Canadian Labour Congress passed a resolution at its constitutional convention in Vancouver that, while condemning Palestinian suicide bombings, emphasized the moral equivalence by also condemning the “violence perpetrated by the Israeli occupation forces” and calling on the Israeli government “to cease its military aggression.” The CLC’s accompanying policy statement shamelessly compared the Palestinian situation with South African apartheid. One piece of good news: in discussing the need to negotiate the right of return of Palestinian refugees, the statement noted that, “such a package should also be offered to Jewish refugees from Arab countries who have had to flee to Israel.”

Earlier this spring, CJC suspended its participation in the national interfaith dialogue known as the Canadian-Christian Jewish Consultation. This followed published policy statements on the Middle East by the Anglican and United Churches that were anti-Israel, based as they were upon factual errors, biased interpretation of events and a complete lack of balance in assessing accountability for the crisis. Everything is reduced to the “occupation” in their narrow focus. We are now exploring ways to restore the consultation to its proper role as a liaison group and sounding board on such policy statements.

We see the same approach from human rights NGOs as well. Former Cabinet Minister Warren Allmand recently ended his term as President of Rights and Democracy, a human rights think tank based in Montreal that receives considerable federal funding. In April, Mr. Allmand wrote to Foreign Minister Graham and said, among other things, that the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza was illegal under the Geneva Conventions; was the “root cause of the Palestinian crisis” and that an end to the Israeli occupation will “lower tensions and lead to a reduction in the level of terrorism worldwide.” Mr. Allmand stuck to that position in a meeting with CJC in May.

I look back on the great groundswell human rights movements at the end of the last century, such as the anti-apartheid campaign, the women’s movement, our own Soviet Jewry effort, and I see inclusive coalitions across the NGO sector. These partnership efforts were natural constellations of civil society, bringing human rights activists together with unions, ethnocultural organizations, faith communities and churches, social justice organizations, and a variety of professional organizations all fighting for the cause. Why, then, is the Jewish community so isolated now in garnering support for Israel, particularly when viewed in the bigger picture of the international fight against terrorism?

I don’t have all the answers. But CJC expends considerable time and resources in outreach to various NGO sectors, in addition to the work we do with governments in conjunction with our partners at the Canada-Israel Committee and United Israel Appeal Federations Canada. From this effort I can glean a few themes that help explain the position of Canadian organizations and groups.

Sometimes when we point out the lack of balance in a policy statement or resolution of a particular group their response is that we are accusing them of antisemitism because they are critical of Israel. But we are very careful not to carelessly hurl the accusation of antisemitism and I resent the charge that we do so, because unfounded charges of antisemitism are meant to chill our criticism and put us on the defensive.

The fact is, however, that some of the opposition we are facing stems from groups that are openly hostile to the Jewish community and to Israel. We have sadly seen the evidence of that in Canada in recent weeks and months.

By and large, though, I don’t believe that anti-Israel sentiment as expressed through the actions of Canadian NGOs is inspired by antisemitism. Rather, I believe that these organizations have internalized the key themes of the human rights culture that has emerged in recent years. These include: opposition to occupation, perceived or real; favouring the underdog; and placing primary importance on UN resolutions and international instruments aimed at protecting and enhancing human rights.

In this scenario, these groups see Israel as the impediment to Palestinian statehood in defiance of the will of the international community. Thus NGOs identify the “occupation” as the “root cause” of the plight of the Palestinians and exculpate Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority from any responsibility for their own situation. This leads to the moral equivalence through which the NGOs criticize both sides for violence against civilians and wash their hands of the imperative specifically to condemn the outrage of suicide bombing. These groups readily buy into Palestinian propaganda about the “right of return of refugees” who are portrayed as helpless victims of military aggression and they are comfortable accusing Israel of racism and practicing apartheid in the territories. This, of course, resonates back to Durban.

Often these groups criticize Israel for what they say is the failure to implement UN Resolution 242 and demand an immediate Israeli withdrawal from what they mistakenly call “Palestinian territory.” Of course, in so doing they misconstrue what Resolution 242 is really saying. They also selectively omit the second part of the resolution. This calls for the “termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force.”

Into this mix I would add the anti-globalization sentiment and anti-Americanism that we see at the heart of so much protest these days, not the least of which has already led to violence in Vancouver, Halifax and Ottawa and will likely attract some attention in the south of this province next week. In the Middle East picture, Israel stands in as proxy for the United States.

In this context, consider also that Canadian Jewish Congress was virtually the only Canadian NGO to support the government’s anti-terrorism legislation known as Bill C-36. The NGOs opposed to these critical and necessary measures claim that, “bad things happen in the name of fighting terrorism.” They suggest that governments, under the guise of fighting terrorists and protecting national security, are placing human rights at risk, cracking down on all types of dissent, and promoting unfair community profiling. These groups downplay the threat of international terrorism, freeing their hand to criticize governments taking action to fight this menace. I need not tell you who their targets for such criticism are.

So, friends, we have much work to do. We must continue our efforts at outreach to key sectors of the NGO community, to engage them, educate and sensitize them. We must continue to make the case for Israel and against antisemitism here and worldwide. We must identify our friends within these sectors and work with them to advance our agenda. As President of Canadian Jewish Congress, I assure you that we will continue to do all of this on your behalf.

But we cannot do it alone. We need your help at the local level, with NGOs and leaders of organizations in your community. Often in smaller communities such contacts are closer and more longstanding. We need you to join in the effort to engage elements of civil society that in the past have made common cause with the Jewish community and to help restore coalitions and partnerships that have proven productive and successful.

In this week’s Torah portion we read of Balaam, a man sent to curse the Israelites who instead praises Israel and gives it his blessing. Let us work together here in Canada so that those who today criticize Israel may one day say, “Ma tovu ochalecha Ya-akov, mishkinotecha Yisrael”: “How goodly are thy tents, O Jacob, thy dwelling places O Israel.”

Thank you very much.