We learned on Wednesday in the Toronto Star that the new version of the Canadian Anti-Racism Strategy, which should be made public shortly, will not include a definition of anti-Palestinian racism.
This strategy, first released in 2019, “is designed to lay the foundation for combatting systemic racism through immediate actions across the Government of Canada.” Several groups put pressure on the Minister of Diversity, Inclusion and People with Disabilities, Kamal Khera, so that anti-Palestinian racism is now defined and therefore recognized by the federal government, in the same way as Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, anti-black racism or anti-Asian racism, for example. It will have been in vain.
For the moment, we therefore officially continue to denounce Islamophobia, at least on paper, leaving anti-Palestinian racism to spread in Canada. It’s not sufficient. Here’s why.
First, not all Palestinians are Muslims. Large parts of the Palestinian nationalist movement have always sought to unite around a cultural identity and a political situation — not a religion. The keffiyeh, for example, is both a cultural and political symbol, depending on the context, but not a religious symbol. The white and black scarf took on the meaning it has today after being worn for decades by Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
When the Ontario provincial parliament decides to ban the keffiyeh from its legislative chamber, as it did last month, the cultural and political expression of the Palestinian people is prevented within its walls. To speak vaguely of “Islamophobia” would be to misnomer things here.
In fact, to fully understand anti-Palestinian racism, you must know that it is deployed in particular as a form of anti-indigenous racism. And here, I am very careful with my words and the explanations I give.
Being indigenous is a political category, not just an ethnic one. It is not simply a term that refers to “who was there before”. It is important to understand this if we want to avoid going back to biblical times. The word “indigenous”, in our international bodies, refers in particular to a category of people who find themselves without a State that speaks on their behalf in the United Nations system, because a State has been built “on top of” their ancestral territory, in a way. If the word only referred to old roots in a land, all French people in whom we detect a form of Gallic DNA could participate in the United Nations Indigenous Peoples Forum, to give a crude example. The term “indigenous” gains much of its meaning at the intersection of “seniority” and dispossession. This is how I express myself.
When a State establishes its sovereignty over a territory by dispossessing another people of this same territory, it must deploy a national narrative and an ideological apparatus which normalizes this dispossession. The golden age of colonialism corresponds with the invention of the idea of terra nulliusfor example, which means that when a territory is not occupied — and by occupied, we mean occupied in the European way, subject to “productive” economic activities from a European perspective — it is considered vacant and therefore available for colonial possession.
It was also in the midst of colonial expansion that Friedrich Hegel and several other European thinkers developed their ideas on the teleology of History. First, we drew an arbitrary line between “prehistory” and “History”, then we posited the nation-state as the outcome of “History” and thus hierarchized peoples according to their “stage”. of development “. We have, in a way, invented the category of “primitive” — another way of naturalizing who has the right to exercise sovereignty over land, and who can be legitimately dispossessed of it.
These ideas continue to be used almost everywhere in the West today. In particular, they allow certain more radical pro-Israeli voices to deny the very existence of Palestine, since the Palestinian people did not have an independent nation-state before the founding of Israel.
These notions also allow us to better understand, for example, the comments of Selina Robinson, who was Minister of Post-Secondary Education in British Columbia, when she asserted, in January, that Palestine was a “shithole piece of land » (crappy piece of land) about which “there was nothing” before the founding of Israel. His comments were not “Islamophobic”. They were a perfect example of ordinary anti-Palestinian racism, based on a form of updating of the doctrine of terra nullius. Ultimately, Selina Robinson apologized, lost her ministerial position, and then left the provincial New Democratic Party caucus.
The mayor of Hampstead, Jeremy Levi, gave us another example of anti-Palestinian slippage. Last week, he again declared on X that the Canadian government should “reconsider its immigration plan for Gazans », since “their values seem incompatible with ours”. It is important to know that the idea of “incompatible values” was used during colonial history to justify the subordinate, “non-integrable” status of certain populations. The speech is still often used against Palestinians, particularly in Israeli and American media spaces, to justify certain inequalities or structural violence.
The list of examples could go on and on. To identify anti-Palestinian racism in the public space, we still need to understand it. To understand it, you must first name it clearly.