As Israel continues to bomb, shoot and starve their way forward on their genocidal campaign, most of the Western world continues to sit idly by, but fear not; for our courageous prime minister is putting his foot down.
In response to Israel’s latest plan to take over the entirety of Gaza City, Mark Carney bravely says, “We join many others in viewing that this is wrong.” Strong words.
If one recalls — in what seems like ages ago — Carney, along with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron, issued a joint statement condemning the “intolerable” amount of human suffering taking place in Gaza and the West Bank, going so far as to threaten “to take further action, including targeted sanctions”.
That was May 19, and yet it seems the prime minister has developed a stiff tolerance for human suffering: a whopping two sanctions have been issued since, for Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, two of the most openly genocidal members of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet, yet it appears that’s as far as the Liberal government is willing to go.
In a slip of the mask, during a June 24 interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, Carney, almost gleefully, called for a “Zionist Palestinian state … that recognizes a right … not just for Israel to exist, but to prosper and not live in fear”. The remarks are as hideous as they are confusing.
How does one make sense of this framing, where Israel is the fearful, peace-loving country constantly under siege by the meager Gaza concentration camp and Hamas? Where one side harbors one of the most sophisticated military forces on the planet, supplied and funded with a blank cheque by the world’s largest military superpower, and on the other side you have a foot militia outfitted with small arms fire and bottle rockets, with no navy, air force, artillery or mechanized weapons systems to speak of; living in an area under constant surveillance and such brutal occupation, so as not to allow even chocolates or children’s books to cross their border?
Doubling down, the prime minister announced he intends to recognize a Palestinian state in September, contingent on a Hamas-free, demilitarized Palestine. The message is clear: we will only recognize Palestine on our terms; it’s up to the Palestinians to prove to us, the civilized people of the West, that they are willing to shed their inherent barbarism and antisemitism before they can earn their right to sovereignty.
For Mark Carney and his government to observe the horrors in Gaza — the shootings of innocent, desperate people seeking a cup of rice or flour; the bombings of children fetching a pail of filthy water; the starvation of newborns with no formula; the babies born into genocide without anesthesia; the crowded beds and patients on the floors of hospitals that lack proper medical supplies and electricity; the stench of the dead buried under the rubble that fills the streets — and to continue to recite banal platitudes of condemnation with no concrete action in the face of such atrocities is nothing short of disgraceful. Palestinians need sanctions on Israel now; they needed them yesterday; they needed them years ago.
When people look back on what Canada did for the Palestinians during this moment in history, they will find only cowardice.
Erik McCormick
Greater Sudbury