The Liberal Party's Real Israel Policy
Bob Rae’s letter to the editor of the National Post about the Liberal Party’s Israel record is a shabby document.
When I say the letter is shabby, I don’t just mean that its tone is obnoxious and its message is dishonest (although both are true). I mean: it’s not even an ordinarily competent piece of spin-doctoring. I take for granted that Rae did not write the letter he signed. I wonder whether he even read it.
So let me speak directly here to the letter’s ghostwriter.
Mr or Ms Ghostwriter: You’re only a week away from a federal election. You are writing to a pro-Israel paper with a pro-Israel readership. Your task is to defend your party’s not-so-solid record on Israel. Obviously – obviously! – you should open with some ringing declaration of support for Israel. “Israel will have no better friend than a Liberal government under the leadership of Michael Ignatieff.”
Or something like that. Put it in your own words.
Granted, those words would not be true – but your explanation of what happened to Canada’s hopes for a seat on the UN Security Council is not true either, and that did not bother you.
But no. You did not bother to affirm friendship for Israel until the very last paragraph of your letter, and then in the most backhanded way, and then only after you have first declared in much warmer language your commitment to a “viable” Palestinian state. Wrong! Not how it’s done!
In fact, every line of the Rae letter exemplifies “how it’s not done.”
Attack Stephen Harper because his management of a coalition government has not left him time to visit Israel? Are you kidding? Every friend of Israel remembers that the important visit in Israel-Canada relations was the visit by Prime Minister Netanyahu to Canada in May 2010. Two months after President Obama brutally snubbed the Israeli PM during a White House working visit, Prime Minister Harper organized a visit of warm welcome to Canada culminating in a rare invitation to the Canadian prime minister’s country house, Harrington Lake.
Mr or Ms Ghostwriter, you want to avoid placing the words “visit” “Israel” and “Stephen Harper” in the same sentence – they only remind your readers what a good friend to Israel Harper has been. And they remind readers with longer memories that Netanyahu’s visit to Canada was the first by an Israeli prime minister in 16 years: Three Israeli prime ministers in a row – from three different parties – all decided that they preferred not to repeat Yitzhak Rabin’s experience with the newly elected Jean Chretien in 1994.
But where you get truly and utterly slapdash, Mr or Ms Ghostwriter, is where you unfavorably compare Stephen Harper to Angela Merkel.
Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor who has made several visits to the country and the region, and has long been a strong friend of Israel, somehow managed to win a seat on the Security Council on the first ballot.
That would be the Angela Merkel whose country sold Iran the control equipment for the centrifuges now enriching the uranium for Iran’s nuclear bomb? If that’s the Liberal Party’s idea of “strong friendship,” then the Canada-Israel relationship will be headed for a bumpy ride indeed under an Ignatieff prime ministership.
Yet the real news in the letter signed by Bob Rae is the same news that I reported from the English-language leaders’ debate: When they speak about the Middle East, the Liberals double-message: professing friendship for Israel while signaling to anti-Israel voters.
Rae’s own letter is filled with such signals. Thus Rae: “This is really an argument about intimidation, an effort to avoid discussion and debate.”
Now reverse-engineer that sentence. What is the debate that Rae thinks is being avoided by the alleged intimidation? He doesn’t say, but other people who use similar language are not so coy.
“…[A]busive reactions directed at [President Carter’s book Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid], are designed to intimidate an open public discussion. - Zbigniew Brzezinski , Dec. 4, 2006.
“Jewish groups intimidate critics of Israel.” – Desmond Tutu, Aug. 28, 2009.
“[Jewish Voices for Peace] encourage[s] discussion both within our own community and outside of it of the growing BDS [boycott Israel, divest from Israel, sanction Israel] movement. JVP defends activists’ right to use the full range of BDS tactics without being persecuted or demonized. – Jewish Voices for Peace June 9, 2010.
Behind Rae’s words is a telling assumption: that there exists in Canada insufficient anti-Israel comment – and that the main reason for this insufficiency is “intimidation” exercised by Jewish groups.
Personally, as somebody who often finds himself on the minority side of various arguments, I find this kind of whining unbecoming. You want to say something? Quit complaining about how intimidated you are: just man up, and say it. Nobody will put you in prison.
But if you don’t quite have the nerve to say it, don’t think you can mumble to one side of the argument without being heard by the other.
Friends of Israel hear you, Bob Rae. They understand you. And as I said before: They are warned.
Originally published in the National Post.
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