Canada should loudly oppose the genocide libel against Israel.

The claim of genocide against Israel by agents of Hamas and South Africa in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) is outrageous and unfounded, and should be loudly opposed by Canada.  It is particularly outrageous to level this charge against a nation that rose from the ashes of the Holocaust and is simply attempting to stop barbaric massacres of its own people like the one on October 7, and the endless barrage of rocket fire from Jihadist terrorists like Hamas, who unashamedly admit that they seek to kill all the Jews in Israel and, in fact, worldwide.

Pro-Hamas protesters all over the world are setting fire to Israel’s flag and chanting “we charge you with genocide.” In Toronto, protesters defaced an Indigo bookstore with posters accusing its Jewish owner with “funding genocide.” They have since been charged with a criminal offence.  Now the government of South Africa is going to the ICJ alleging that Israel is guilty of “genocidal” acts.

Israel has responded to the South African charge with angry indignation, calling it an “absurd blood libel.” In the United States, the President has called the accusation “meritless, counterproductive and completely without basis in fact whatsoever.”

Why hasn’t Canada added its voice to the condemnation?

The failure of the Canadian government to strongly reject these inflammatory charges against Israel fuels anti-semitic hatred in Canada and the world over.  It also legitimizes and encourages anti-semitic violence in Canada. For example, just this week a Jewish-owned Toronto deli suffered an arson attack - one of many acts of violence against Jewish Canadians since the October 7 massacre by Hamas.

It is one thing to level legitimate political criticism against Israel’s policies concerning Palestinians.  But it is quite another to blood libel an entire country with the allegation of “genocide”.  Genocide is a very specific term, coined by a Polish jurist to describe the systematic mass murder perpetrated by the Nazis, along with other historical instances. The United Nations genocide convention defines it as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” The Encyclopedia Britannica calls it “the deliberate and systematic destruction of a group of people because of their ethnicity, nationality, religion or race.”

This is not what is occurring in Gaza. The clear intention of Israel, in it’s military action in Gaza, is to destroy Hamas, not the Palestinian people. Unlike Hamas, which intentionally launched a terrorist action on Oct. 7 to kill civilians, Israel has taken extraordinary steps to avoid killing civilians in its operations against Hamas – but Hamas deliberately hides among its civilians, in and beneath institutions like hospitals and schools, making an innocent civilian death toll unavoidable. 

There is a world of difference between a democratic state attempting to stop a terrorist organization from continuing to attack it’s innocent civilians, and the attacks by that terrorist organization of those innocent civilians.  Genocide cannot mean the actions of a state to defend itself from ongoing terrorism.  And yet, that is how the term is being used in recent propaganda and protests by pro-Hamas protesters, and in the South African charges. 

If the number of innocent Palestinian deaths is the issue, why hasn’t South Africa levelled charges of genocide against Hamas, which hides amongst and beneath its own innocent civilians, knowing that Israel will have no option but to incur civilian deaths when it attempts to bomb Hamas?  Hamas literally revels in the number of innocent civilian “martyrs” Israeli bombs have killed, knowing this will turn international opinion against Israel.  The double standard of South Africa and pro-Hamas protesters is obscene.

This double standard is further reflected by the innumerable resolutions passed by the United Nations against Israel, condemning its treatment of Palestinians.  Israel has every right to be outraged. 

Canada has usually taken Israel’s side, and has refused to participate in this Israel-bashing at the UN.  As stated recently in the Globe and Mail, it should do so again in the South African case before the ICJ, saying with all the force it can muster that the charge of genocide against Israel is false.*

* This petition gratefully acknowledges and cites from the opinion piece in the Globe and Mail by Marcus Gee, entitled "The genocide libel against Israel", dated January 5, 2024.