Montreal Has No Business Joining the anti-Israel Propaganda War

By Howie Silbiger

Projet Montréal wants Montreal City Council to declare that Israel is committing genocide and apartheid and to cut the city’s institutional ties with Israel, Israeli institutions and Israeli municipalities. The motion was postponed in June and is expected to return to council later this month. I think it should be defeated, and I don’t think it should be a particularly difficult decision.

There is no genocide taking place in Gaza. There is a war taking place in Gaza, a war that began after Hamas launched a genocidal attack against Israel on October 7, 2023, murdering civilians in their homes, attacking a music festival and entire communities, and kidnapping hundreds of people. Hamas did not accidentally kill civilians while trying to hit military targets; civilians were the targets, Jews were targets, Israelis were targets. The goal was to murder as many as possible.

Israel responded by going to war against the organization that carried out the attack and whose founding charter called for Israel’s destruction and contained openly antisemitic language about killing Jews. That is called defending your country.

Genocide also has an actual meaning. It is the intentional destruction, in whole or in part, of a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. It does not simply mean a war in which large numbers of civilians die, or a war that is particularly destructive, or even a war that somebody believes has been fought badly. The intent to destroy the people themselves is the essential part of the accusation. That is not what Israel has been doing in Gaza.

Israel has one of the strongest militaries in the region. If Israel had decided on October 8, 2023 that its goal was the extermination of Gaza’s population, nobody seriously believes it lacked the military capability to inflict destruction on a scale vastly beyond what we have seen and to do it almost immediately. It certainly would not have required a war lasting years. The argument that Israel is simultaneously an overwhelmingly powerful military force and somehow incapable of carrying out the genocide it supposedly set out to commit has never made much sense to me.

The war has been long and destructive because Israel went to war against Hamas. Civilian deaths are tragic and the destruction in Gaza has been enormous, but those facts do not by themselves turn a defensive war into genocide. The accusation has become propaganda by repetition. It gets shouted at demonstrations, printed on signs, repeated on university campuses and eventually picked up by politicians until it starts being treated as something that no longer needs to be proven. Now Projet Montréal wants the City of Montreal to add its name to it.

The apartheid accusation works much the same way. Apartheid is not simply another word for inequality, occupation, discrimination or a political situation somebody finds unacceptable. In international law it refers to an institutionalized system of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over another, maintained for that purpose. That was South Africa. The Israeli-Arab conflict does not fit that definition, and repeating the word does not make Israel into South Africa.

Arab citizens of Israel vote, hold public office, study in Israeli universities, work as doctors, lawyers and professors and serve throughout Israeli society. The conflict between Israel and the “Palestinians” is a national, territorial, religious and security conflict that has gone on for generations. It is complicated, violent and ugly, but turning it into a simple South African racial analogy is politically useful because once the apartheid label sticks, isolating Israel becomes much easier to justify.

Montreal’s sudden interest in all of this is also rather selective. Israel unilaterally withdrew its soldiers and removed its settlements from Gaza in 2005. What followed was not peace. For almost two decades, Israeli civilian communities lived with rockets fired from Gaza, repeated terrorist attacks and a growing Hamas military presence next door. In communities like Sderot, generations of children grew up knowing how many seconds they had to reach a bomb shelter when a warning siren sounded.

I don’t remember Montreal City Council becoming a foreign-policy body then. I don’t remember motions to cut ties because Israeli civilians were living under rocket fire, or because terrorists deliberately attacked buses, restaurants and civilians. I don’t remember this level of municipal urgency over Hamas building an armed Islamist dictatorship in Gaza while openly promising Israel’s destruction.

Then came October 7. After years of rockets, terror attacks and warnings about what Hamas intended to do, Hamas crossed the border and showed everybody. Israelis were murdered in their homes and communities. People at a music festival were hunted down. Families were slaughtered. It was a genocidal attack, and Israel responded the way any country that intended to survive would respond: it went to war against the organization responsible.

Somehow, in the years since, October 7 has been pushed further and further into the background while Israel’s response has become the centre of the story. Hamas attacked Israel, and within a remarkably short period of time the international conversation became almost entirely about what Israel was permitted to do in response. Israel could defend itself, apparently, but only under conditions that no other country facing the same threat would ever accept. Israel didn’t accept them.

There is another part of the human-rights argument that I find difficult to take seriously. Hamas did not govern Gaza as some kind of progressive democracy before Israel went to war. It ruled it as an Islamist dictatorship. Political opponents were imprisoned and tortured. Alleged collaborators were executed. Gay people faced persecution and possible imprisonment. Women lived under laws and social conditions that would be condemned without hesitation if they existed almost anywhere else.

Where were the motions when Hamas was torturing its own people? Where was the municipal campaign to defend gays in Gaza, political dissidents or women living under a regime that would be considered completely unacceptable by the same politicians who now speak endlessly about human rights? Apparently the human-rights emergency only became important when Israel could be blamed for it.

That is what makes this motion so difficult to take seriously. Montreal councillors were not elected to determine whether Israel is guilty of genocide. They were not elected to conduct Canadian foreign policy and they certainly were not elected to choose foreign countries to punish according to whichever international campaign happens to be popular among activists at the moment. Montreal has more than enough problems of its own.

What makes this even harder to swallow is that Montreal City Council already understood this problem. In June 2021, council unanimously condemned antisemitism, threats and violence against Jews in Montreal and specifically acknowledged that Jews here were being targeted in the aftermath of a conflict overseas. Council understood five years ago that importing the Israeli-“Palestinian” conflict into Montreal had consequences for Jews living here. Now Projet Montréal wants the same City Council to officially declare Israel genocidal and apartheid and cut ties with Israeli institutions and municipalities.

Since October 7, Montreal’s Jewish community has watched this war imported into our streets over and over again. Jewish schools have been shot at, Jewish children have been assaulted, synagogues and Jewish institutions have been targeted and Jewish businesses have been boycotted and vandalized. Protesters have called for the destruction of Israel and for the “globalization of the Intifada,” invoking uprisings that included suicide bombings and deliberate attacks on Israeli civilians. Too often, police have stood by while this rhetoric and intimidation played out in the streets, while Montreal’s city government appeared unwilling to confront what was happening.

Jewish Montrealers have spent almost three years watching the supposed line between anti-Israel activism and hostility toward Jews become increasingly dangerous. Into that atmosphere Projet Montréal has decided that what Montreal really needs is an official declaration accusing Israel of genocide and apartheid and cutting institutional ties with it.

They can put whatever disclaimer they want into the motion saying Montreal Jews are not responsible for Israel. It doesn’t change the message. If you officially declare the Jewish state genocidal, pronounce its institutions and municipalities unacceptable partners and announce that Montreal should isolate them, you are contributing to an environment in which Israel and anything connected to Israel is increasingly treated as toxic.

The activist movement around this motion also goes much further than a symbolic City Hall declaration. It openly pushes the “globalization of the Intifada,” boycotts, divestment and the isolation of Israeli institutions in business, culture, academia and sports. The motion before council may not contain every item on that agenda, but nobody should pretend it exists separately from it. Once you declare Israel an apartheid state committing genocide, the justification for everything that follows has already been created.

Supporters of the motion argue that Montreal has taken positions on international human-rights issues before, including apartheid South Africa, and that the scale of suffering in Gaza requires the city to speak. I don’t accept the comparison or the conclusion. Israel is not apartheid South Africa, the war in Gaza is not genocide, and Montreal City Council declaring otherwise will not improve the life of a single person in Gaza.

No Montreal resolution will rebuild a home, create peace, remove Hamas from power or change Israeli military policy. What it will do is bring this conflict even deeper into a city where it has already caused enormous tension and give politicians an opportunity to make a foreign-policy statement while the people who actually live here are left dealing with the consequences.

Mayor Soraya Martinez Ferrada and Ensemble Montréal were right to oppose the motion in June. They should oppose it again, and councillors should ask themselves why Montreal suddenly needs its own foreign policy now, after almost two decades in which Israeli civilians were subjected to rockets and terrorism without producing anything remotely resembling this response from City Hall.

There was a genocidal attack on October 7. Israel responded with a defensive war against the organization that carried it out. There is no genocide in Gaza, Israel is not an apartheid state, and Montreal does not need to join the propaganda campaign claiming otherwise.

Projet Montréal’s motion must be defeated.