OTTAWA — On Sunday, I went to a rally here full of people outraged by what they called the “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” taking place in Gaza.
There were 500 or so attendees, mostly in their twenties and thirties, mostly from the city’s Arab community. They came with their kids, and they marched, and there was a feeling of solidarity. They also said they were scared for the Palestinians in Gaza.
The rally came a little more than a week after Hamas, the terrorist group that rules Gaza, attacked Israel—murdering 1,300 people, including children and the elderly; kidnapping 200 and taking them into Gaza where their fates remain unknown; and raping women.
Now, the Israelis were striking back, pummeling military targets with their bombs and missiles, and Gazans were anticipating a massive ground invasion. (An Israel Defense Forces spokesman told The Free Press Tuesday the military was in the “advanced stages” of preparing for the invasion.) As the pro-Palestinian marchers trekked through Ottawa, as in so many cities across the West, one million Palestinians in the northern part of Gaza were being urged by Israel to evacuate to the south. (Hamas told them to stay; Egypt refused to open its border.)
At the rally, people wore black and white keffiyehs—the headscarves that have become trendy symbols of Palestinian resistance—and waved red, green, and white Palestinian flags.
They played Arab folk music, or dabke, and chanted “Free Palestine!” and “From the river to the sea!”—a reference to the hoped-for Palestinian homeland extending from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, a.k.a. Israel.
Most everyone I spoke with agreed Israel was an illegitimate “apartheid” state. They viewed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as an extension of the antiracist, progressive-identitarian crusade in the West—even though as many as 70 percent of Israelis are Sephardic or Mizrahi, meaning they come mostly from the Middle East and hardly “present” as white.
The marchers used words like colonizer and oppressor to describe the Jewish state.
“What Hitler did to the Jews, or the Zionists—sorry—the Zionists are doing worse now to the Palestinians,” Abdullah, a Palestinian, told me.
And they repeatedly distinguished between Jews and Zionists (those who believe that the Jewish people have the right to their own state).
“The Zionists are not Jews,” one young man told me. “We have a lot of Jews who stand with us.” (This is misleading. A 2021 Pew survey found that more than 80 percent of American Jews considered Israel “essential” or “important.”)
The marchers tended to romanticize the land of Palestine before the arrival of the Zionists in the late 1800s, portraying it as a harmonious blend of Muslims, Christians, and Jews. Zionism, they insisted, was little more than “white supremacy.”
And they appeared to know little, if anything, about the ancient Jewish connection to the Holy Land—including the destruction of the second temple in Jerusalem and dispersal of the Jewish community, in 70 AD; the subsequent emergence of the Jewish diaspora, six centuries before the birth of Islam; and, of course, that diaspora’s nearly 2,000-year ambition to return to Israel, which wasn’t fully realized until 1948.
Below are highlights from my conversations with several attendees of Sunday’s march (most of whom were reluctant to share even their first names):
I asked a couple waving a Palestinian flag—he was 20 and Lebanese; she was 19 and from Senegal—why they had ventured into the dreary, rainy morning to march.
“After the 1948 nakba, which is the ‘catastrophe’—in Arabic, nakba means catastrophe—they evacuated all the Palestinians, take them out of their homes, because they wanted to have a Jewish state by the Zionist project,” the Lebanese man told me. “And now they are doing the same thing that in 1948, and even worse, they are doing the . . .”
“It’s a nakba-cation,” the Senegalese woman said, apparently combining nakba and occupation.
The story of the nakba—widespread in the Arab world—not only ignores the Jews’ long history in Canaan, and later, Israel, but also United Nations Resolution 181, in 1947. The resolution called for a partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states. Israel accepted the plan. The Arab states did not, and on the night of May 14, 1948, the day Israel declared independence, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and Jordan unsuccessfully attacked the Jewish state.
Viewed through the lens of the nakba, Hamas—funded by Iran since 1992—cannot be regarded as terrorists, the U.S. and Canadian governments notwithstanding.
“Hamas is not a terrorist,” the Lebanese man went on. “Hamas, they are defending Palestinians. Hamas, they are labeled as terrorist from the Western media.”
He added: “Israelis, they want to erase Palestine completely. They don’t like Arabs. That’s the reason we are standing there, standing against racism and white supremacy.”
When I asked about reports of Hamas murdering and kidnapping Israelis, the Senegalese woman said, “It’s all misinformation.”
I asked whether they believed none of these things actually happened.
The Lebanese man replied, “It could happen, but this is nothing compared to what Israel is doing. Israel is doing a genocide.”
It’s hard to square protesters’ use of genocide with the facts: In 2000, Gaza’s population was a little more than one million. Today, it’s just over two million.
Not everyone at the march was comfortable defending Hamas.
“I’m not here because of that,” one woman told me, when I asked her what she thought of the organization. “I’m just here in solidarity with the Palestinian people.”
When I pressed her on whether Hamas is a terrorist group, she seemed to be offended.
“Okay,” she said, “we got to move on. Okay, thank you so much. Okay, thank you.”
I asked several people at the rally whether the ends of Hamas’s attack on Israel justify the means, which President Joe Biden has called “atrocities.”
“Palestinians have the right to resist the occupation and the ethnic cleansing and genocide that has been ongoing since 1948,” a 26-year-old woman named Noor told me.
“We’re not going to sit back and just be okay with being killed, okay with our homes being bulldozed, okay with our families being murdered, okay with our land being given away to Western colonizing.”
Gaza has indeed long been ruled by outsiders—and not just Israel. Starting in 1949, Egypt occupied the strip. Even after the Palestine Liberation Organization was founded, in 1964, Egyptian President Gamal Nassar didn’t really recognize it.
But then, in 1967, during the Six-Day War, Israel captured Gaza from Egypt in a stunning military victory.
Then, in 2005, Israel unilaterally withdrew its settlements and troops from Gaza—meaning that, since then, it has been unoccupied.
But the next year, Gazans elected Hamas to rule them, and the year after that, Israel, with Egypt, which borders Gaza to the southwest, imposed a blockade. (This should have surprised approximately no one, given that Hamas’s charter calls for the destruction of Israel.)
As of late 2022, 17,000 Gazans were crossing the border into Israel daily for work, and Israel subsidized Gazans’ electricity and provided free healthcare.
Attendees at the march portrayed Israel as a hyper-racist and classist dystopia nonetheless.
“If you want to go into the state, you have to be a slave to Jews,” the Lebanese man said. “This is why Christians are slaves in Israel to the Jews. They’re slaves to the Israelis over there, and they treat the Israelis like they are the kings and queens over there.”
In fact, Israel is the only democracy—and a multireligious, multiracial, and multiethnic one at that—in the Middle East. Nearly 74 percent of Israelis are Jewish, while 18 percent are Muslim, and nearly 2 percent are Christian. A 2022 State Department report on religious freedom in Israel found that the country’s “laws and Supreme Court rulings protect the freedoms of conscience, faith, religion, and worship, regardless of an individual’s religious affiliation.”
Everyone I spoke with said the political entity of Israel had to be wiped off the map, but they were unclear about what should happen to the Jews living there.
When I asked Abdullah and his friends, including a woman who only agreed to speak with me off-camera, where the Jews should immigrate to, they were vague.
“They should go back to their country,” the woman said. She added that Zionists “believe they have to be there and kill people and take their home, and no matter what they have to stay there. No matter what. There is a difference. But Jewish, they know, this is not their state. This is not their place.”
There’s a certain logic to this thinking—if you accept that the Zionists who first came to Palestine were trespassers, and the founding of the modern Israeli state was an abomination (a nakba). But this formulation glosses over the fact that, as of 2020, 78 percent of Israelis were native-born, or sabras.
Rupa Subramanya is a Canadian-based writer for The Free Press. Read her last piece “Justin Trudeau’s Self-Immolation,” and follow her on X, formerly Twitter, @rupasubramanya.
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I am not a Jew. I have never been to Israel. I have no religious convictions of any kind. I’m an American of mixed European descent from a family that’s lived in New England since it was a British colony. Technically I have no dog in this fight. Why, then, am I having such a visceral reaction of anger and disappointment to the anti-Israel rallies being held outside my door and in cities and college campuses across the country? A better question is: why isn’t everyone?
The people attending these rallies will tell you that they are not pro-Hamas, merely anti-Israel. Their timing and their rhetoric say otherwise. What I witnessed, what the world witnessed, were crowds of people gleefully celebrating the slaughter of 1,400 Jews before their families could even recover their bodies. They did this carrying signs that read “from the river to the sea” and “by any means necessary” and, in some cases, openly chanting “gas the jews”. Surely any reasonable, empathetic person would be appalled at this display. Apparently not. Surely those in the media who are quick to condemn celebrities who misuse pronouns will also condemn those who celebrate terrorism. Apparently not. Surely those college administrators who routinely censure professors for failing to tread ever-so-lightly on the ever-more-fragile sensibilities of their students will not allow an unambiguously racist rally on their campus to go without comment. Apparently not.
Most of the people attending these rallies make some effort to obscure their identity with scarves, hats, sunglasses and surgical masks. They will tell you this is to protect themselves from the retribution of the authorities. That’s what klansmen say about their hoods. If you are lucky enough to live in a society where freedom of speech is a constitutional right you should have the courage of your conviction and make your case openly, even if you are arguing on behalf of those who would deny that freedom to others.
My father, who was a homicide detective for thirty years, once told me that the reason there are two sides to every story is usually because one side is lying. Those who would argue that it is the Israelis who are actually to blame for the recent attacks are either deceived or dissembling. Israel has repeatedly, for nearly eighty years, offered the Palestinians nearly everything they’ve asked in exchange for peace and been repeatedly rebuffed. Hamas does not want peace, they want genocide. They are not obfuscating about this, they proclaim it openly, repeatedly, and in writing. We should believe them. They’ve been offered peace, they’ve been offered independence and self governance, they’ve received billions in international aid and their position remains the same: they will not be appeased by anything short of the annihilation of the Jewish people. You can not negotiate with someone whose only demand is that you not exist.
Israel is, of course, like any nation, not without fault, but the overwhelming share of blame for the suffering of the people of Gaza falls on Hamas. If you attack your neighbors while hiding behind innocent women and children, you are responsible when those women and children are harmed, not the people you attacked. The people of Gaza continue to suffer because Hamas benefits from their suffering. The elected leadership of Gaza has, for years, deflected resources away from infrastructure, education, healthcare and basic human services and into weapons, missiles and tunnels. This is a win-win strategy for Hamas, they get the arsenal needed for their holy war and they get to blame the resulting suffering on Israel. It is barbaric, cynical and, thanks to the collusion of useful idiots in mass-media and academia, a very effective strategy.
In a way the anti-Israel rallies on college campuses should surprise no one. American academia has, in recent years, become a bastion of illiberal rhetoric. Its proponents have wormed their way in through the great loophole of liberal ideology which goes something like this: In order to be a good liberal one must be tolerant of the beliefs and practices of other people - even when those beliefs and practices are violently intolerant. This, in turn, has led to systemic rot in our academic discourse, a kind of moral cowardice which insists that there is no objective right and wrong and all sides of any argument must be equally legitimate by virtue of existing. The reality is that Israel, with all its many flaws, remains a democratic state in which personal and religious freedom are guaranteed by law regardless of race, gender or sexual orientation whereas a state governed by Hamas would resemble what the Taliban has created in Afghanistan. Why must we insist on pretending this doesn’t matter?
The people attending these rallies will tell you that the real issue is the disproportionate use of force by Israel. What would an appropriate Israeli response to what happened on October 7th look like? What does ‘appropriate’ even mean in the face of such unimaginable brutality? The unfortunate reality is that any response which leaves Hamas in control of any part of Gaza will guarantee future terrorist atrocities. A so-called ‘proportional response’ from Israel will only assure they will be attacked again. A proportional response to the confederate attack on Fort Sumter in 1861 would have left nearly four million people to languish in slavery. A proportional response to the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor would have done nothing to stem the tide of aggression from the Japanese and their German allies. Why is Israel, and only Israel, held to a different standard of self defense than every other nation on earth and in history? How can Americans tell the free citizens of a democratic nation that they have no right to defend themselves when threatened by fascists with extermination?
Attempts to apportion blame in this conflict become moot at some point and here’s why: The moment you embrace kidnapping, torture, rape and the murder of civilians, infants, the elderly, women and children as a valid means of expressing your grievance or achieving your goals, you have foregone the right to ask sympathy or support from any civilized person or state.
Fifty years ago Golda Meir famously said “If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence, if the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel.” It was true then and it remains true. It’s a statement that no honest person can dispute. And yes, it matters.
I find debate over what ethnic or religious group of people have the original claim to a piece of land as impossible as it is dangerous—the truth is that every inch of this planet has been fought over since the first caveman realized that the grass was greener over the next hill, so determining who bares the original sin is impossible. What matters most now is that the Jews are there, have been for half a century, and they are a beacon of liberal democracy and human rights in a region of the world that almost totally lacks both. The slippery slop of this "my people used to own this, so I have a right to take it back" way of thinking is dangerous—it could just as easily be used to justify horrible atrocities here in the US, or anywhere else for that matter. It must be stopped.