Since the deadly strike on the Ahli Arab hospital and the horror of the bodies littering the ground in the Gaza Strip, the whole world has been in a state of shock. Faced with the catastrophe, the New Democratic Party continues to be the only party in the House of Commons to demand an immediate ceasefire. A handful of Liberal MPs are also calling for an end to the bombings, apparently trying to put pressure on their own government.
Justin Trudeau certainly supported the opening of a humanitarian corridor at the Rafah border crossing earlier this week. But faced with the horror of war, it is rather the words that the Canadian government does not speak that resonate the loudest.
“War crimes”: a term that was immediately used when Putin’s army began bombing Ukrainian civilians.
“Collective punishment”: a war crime, more precisely, which can take the form of cutting off water, food and electricity to a population of more than two million people, half of whom are children .
“Forced population displacement”: another potential war crime to keep in mind as the Israeli army forces a million people to leave the northern part of the Gaza Strip to take refuge (for the moment) in the south of the Gaza Strip. territory, already overpopulated and without resources.
These words and so many others, although everywhere in the public space, do not find their place in the debates of the Canadian political class. Given the extent of the discrepancy, a question arises: how can we explain the weakness of our government’s empathy and support for the Palestinian people? Below is a track of answers that are too few named which completes the analysis of Canada’s relationship with the rest of the world by exploring our country’s relationship with itself.
The Canadian government put down the last major indigenous military resistance to the dispossession of their lands at the end of the 19e century. On the scale of thousands of years of indigenous history in North America, it is yesterday. Most of us have never heard of the Tecumseh movement during the War of 1812. And if we have been harped on about the hanging of Louis Riel, we have not dwelled on what followed the purchase of the Canadian prairies from the Hudson’s Bay Company by the federal government.
The Métis people were driven from their lands and condemned to several generations of wandering. First Nations were locked up on reserves where the Ottawa government controlled every aspect of daily life: access to food and medicine, the right to come and go. Then, we took the children to “kill the Indian” in them. We made sure to break souls so that there would never be any more large-scale military resistance.
A few decades after the danger of revolt had passed, we began to relax the rules and “modernize” the Indian Act little by little. But when we see, for example, what the popular and political reactions were to the Oka crisis, we say to ourselves that our collective ghosts are not yet very far away. For several years, from the heights of the security of the victors, we have been told about reconciliation – preferably rather than symbolically, please.
We could make a series of maps of Canada and the United States where we could see the territories on which Indigenous people can move and live freely, shrinking, then shrinking again. Although each historical context always has its share of unique realities, we cannot help but think that these maps resemble, in many respects, those that we are used to showing us of Israel and the Palestine in 1948, in 1967 and today.
Already, for several years, there has been a significant gap between the theoretical territory of the West Bank and the reality on the ground. The colonization and land occupation enterprise, accelerated by Netanyahu’s government, no longer leaves much for the Palestinians.
It is no coincidence that the great power which gave us the golden age of Hollywood and all its “cowboy and Indian” films, where violent dispossession is glorified, is the no longer capable of critical thinking about Benjamin Netanyahu’s decisions. It is entirely logical that Canada and the United States, where we still refuse to think seriously about the origin of State sovereignty over territory, adopt moral postures on the international scene by consistency with their own history.
A good number of the most fervent pro-Palestinian activists, moreover, still struggle to fully grasp that by immigrating to Canada, one is registering de facto in a colonial project which is not so dissimilar from the one they condemn. Many come from families who came here to escape war (or the structural consequences of colonialism, more broadly) in their corner of the world. The Zionist movement was rooted in the trauma of centuries of pogroms, then the Holocaust in Europe.
Everywhere, some people’s dream of security is based on the dispossession of others. To linger on this question is to lose somewhat one’s posture of moral superiority, to think in a less abstract way about human proximity in a “settlement colony”, to consider other forms and possibilities of peace. It is recognizing that we are all inescapably linked and caught up in the great quagmire of human history.
There are of course several big differences between the conquest of the Canadian and American “Wild West” and the colonization of the West Bank and the occupation of Gaza, in particular. No comparison is perfect. One of these big differences is that here, we have more than a century of emotional distance since the end of the great indigenous military resistance.
Unless we reverse the tide – and perhaps we are at a decisive moment in history – we can imagine one day official Israeli events opening with fine declarations of recognition of traditional territories more or less ceded. It will probably be very emotional.
Anthropologist, Emilie Nicolas is a columnist at Duty and to Release. She hosts the podcast Detours for Canadaland.