Justin-Ling
By Justin LingContributing Columnist
Earlier this month, Ottawa’s Pride festival put out a statement that denounced, in “solidarity with Palestine,” the “ongoing genocide” in Gaza and called for an immediate and permanent ceasefire.
The conflict has killed nearly 1,400 Israelis and at least 40,000 people in Gaza, many of them children; and more than a thousand others across the West Bank and Lebanon. ”Escalating levels of violence in Israel and Palestine,” Capital Pride wrote, has been “polarizing” and “painful” for many in Ottawa.
Polarizing it was. Dr. Nili Kaplan-Myrth, a local school board trustee, began calls for a boycott on Twitter, accusing the organizers of turning Pride into an “anti-Israel stunt.” The parade, she said, would not be “safe for Ottawa Jews.” More than a dozen groups, including prominent Jewish organizations, mayor Mark Sutcliffe, and the Liberal Party of Canada, boycotted the Pride parade.
It’s a frustrating response. Far from its critics’ charge, Capital Pride was clearly striving for nuance — it denounced an evident rise in antisemitism, condemned the terrorism of Hamas, and called for a release of all Israeli hostages. Yet still it spurred a boycott.
It’s an illustration of just how drastically the boundaries of acceptable discourse have closed in. Pretty much any position is likely to prompt not discussion and debate, but condemnation and boycott. Nor is silence an option, as protests at other Pride parades have shown.
I wanted to understand how we got here, so I called up Kaplan-Myrth. This boycott, she told me, came about because Jews “feel that they are being targeted.” It’s a sentiment she feels personally — she’s been visited by taunts of “go back to Poland” and “death to Israel” chants. “All of that language is exactly what Hamas wanted people to say,” Kaplan-Myrth told me. She’s right about that.
At the same time, Kaplan-Myrth bemoans, like I do, the lack of a nuanced discussion about the war. Israeli-Canadian, she counts herself as a progressive and says, if she were there, she would have been protesting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with tens of thousands of her fellow citizens. But, she laments, “there is no space” for that discussion here in Canada.
This is where I grew perplexed. Who is to blame for this lack of space? I suggested to her that, while some points in the statement merit debate, Capital Pride seemed to give voice to her concerns.
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“The problem,” she pivoted, “is actually that this is bringing the Israel-Palestine conflict into Pride.” This isn’t new, I responded: Capital Pride had previously denounced the homophobic regimes in Russia and Iran. She disagreed with the parallel: “Are you interviewing me, or arguing with me?” She continued that, if Queer Jews in the city say that the statement makes them feel unsafe “you don’t question it.”
Again, she has a point. Instances of antisemitic graffiti, firebombings, and violent assaults have risen dramatically. Just this week, bomb threats were sent to 125 Jewish institutions across the country. We should be alert to any language that may contribute to these attacks.
But, as Kaplan-Myrth curtly asked me to wrap up the interview, I couldn’t shake the feeling that we have to be able to criticize Israel’s conduct, and call for an end to the war, without being accused of enabling violence against Jews. We have to be able to argue.
The way these safety concerns are invoked can be “a bit of a red herring,” says Jason Toney, Director of Media Advocacy at Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME).
It’s not that antisemitic harassment and violence aren’t a problem, he says. They are. And of course some statements are meant to demonize and provoke. But invoking safety in any conversation where sensitivities and passions are high can be used to shut down needed debate. In recent years, it has been progressives who have been most to blame for using this tactic. Now they seem to be waking up to the risk of it.
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“People are angry,” Toney says, not just at Israel, but at Canada for doing too little to stop the war. This anger is also fed by a pervasive feeling that mainstream media is ignoring the conflict, or downplaying the horrors of war. Distrust in the news has been “skyrocketing,” he says.
The media ought to play a role in mediating this polarization. At its best, it can disentangle domestic polarization and provide a voice to constructive anger. Our underfunded media is not at its best right now. Worse yet, good coverage gets overlooked while errors or perceived bias get seized upon. Groups like HonestReporting Canada, a pro-Israel lobby group, marshal their supporters to fire off complaints to outlets, sometimes targeting individual journalists. These can be on such spurious grounds as publishing “four back-to-back portrayals of Palestinian suffering.” Meanwhile, the Postmedia chain regularly defames pro-ceasefire protests as “pro-Hamas rallies” and advocates the turning-away of Palestinian refugees.
These pressure tactics reward silence. Toney calls it “bullying,” and that’s pretty apt. It goes in both directions: Furious allegations of pro-Israeli bias, sometimes leveraging old antisemitic conspiracy theories and stereotypes, are a daily reality for many Canadian journalists.
Fed up with Canadian media, many young people have decamped to platforms like Instagram. Online, they are faced with the raw images of refugee camps hit by Israeli bombs, of children dying in the arms of their parents, of Gaza City reduced to rubble. It’s hard to see those images and not want to do something about it.
But we know Meta’s algorithms push people from concern into obsession, all for the sake of engagement. We know that vortex rewards extreme positions: Like those who, on one side, describe Hamas’ terrorism as “legitimate resistance” or justify continued violence until Israel is “decolonized.”
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When I suggested to Toney that groups like CJPME have a role to play in discouraging the most inflammatory rhetoric, he demurred. “It’s not really our lane to be policing what’s being said at protests.”
It’s a frustrating refrain that seems to permeate this problem. We have come to enforce a rhetorical no-man’s-land.
On October 8, Shimon Fogel — still reeling from the horrific violence of the day prior — knew where things were going and wanted to head it off. As CEO of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, he knew Canada would “import the violence and toxicity” unless it found a way to mediate that polarization. He sent an invite to Muslim and Arab members of the Liberal Party caucus to sit down and talk. His concerns proved prescient. “Unfortunately, only a couple of people were willing to get together,” he says. The party has been riven ever since.
Fogel insists that there is absolutely room for reasonable criticism of the war and solidarity with the Palestinian people. But he didn’t accept that Capital Pride’s statement was nuanced — when I asked why, he wondered why they would make “common cause with those who want to string them up on a crane.”
At least Fogel was willing to be introspective. I suggested to him that Haaretz — the liberal Israeli paper, a fierce critic of Netanyahu, which has relentlessly covered allegations of Israeli war crimes — could not publish in Canada without being deluged with complaints and criticism. “I don’t think you’re entirely wrong,” he says. “What passes for the norm in Israel is sometimes seen by the Jewish community here as crossing the line.”
How can we have a serious discourse with all these invisible lines? Fogel gave me a fatalistic answer: “I’m not sure you can.”
It’s a variation of an idea I heard from Toney, and Kaplan-Myrth, and a host of other people in recent months: we’re too far gone, too polarized, too emotional to be able to talk about this crisis. Many say they respect the positions of the other side, and are keen to figure out points of agreement, yet often caricature their ideological opposites as inflexible, radical, impossible to reason with.
Mediating this conflict through the body politic doesn’t necessarily mean striving for compromise or capitulation, and it doesn’t entail a return to an age of elite gatekeepers. But it has to mean engaging in discussion, debate and argument without immediately calling it all off. Enabling genuine discourse doesn’t fuel hate, and may act as a pressure release valve to actually prevent it. At the same time, we can’t accept hateful language, online or in the street, just because the author insists their side has a monopoly on morality and justice.
There’s nothing naive about this idea: It is literally the foundation of our society. It is deeply cynical to say that our ideological opposites must be silenced, boycotted, or shouted down because they are dangerous or immoral.
Polarization is not a thing that other people do to us. It is a thing we do to each other. In the same way, mediation is not something that will be done for us, but something we have to commit to and work on, every day, ourselves.
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