Dan Pujdak: A ceasefire in Gaza. What about at home?
Will the Israel-Hamas truce herald an end to the widespread antisemitism plaguing Canada?
By: Dan Pujdak
A ceasefire has been declared between Gaza and Israel, pending the return of dozens of Israeli hostages. Some have already been returned. For now, there is some peace, and a small glimmer of hope. How long it will last is anyone’s guess. But peace for now and freedom for some, at least, is good. It’s a starting place.
Hopefully, it will last beyond six weeks.
Yet, this ceasefire feels foreboding here in Canada. Perhaps because while the war has stalled in the Middle East, the rhetoric shows no sign of abating here at home.
On the first day of peace, anti-Zionist protesters descended on Liberal party leadership hopeful and former finance minister Chrystia Freeland’s campaign launch. They weren’t there to celebrate peace — they were there to disrupt, agitate, and intimidate — just as they’ve done since Hamas’s terror attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023.
The Jewish community remains angry and hurt — especially since it will never receive an apology for the antisemitism it suffered. For months, protesters have gone well beyond calling for ceasefires or justice for Palestinian people; they’ve spewed hatred towards Canadian Jews while lionizing terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, who they believe are correct to resist the existence of Israel “by any means necessary.”
The protest at Freeland’s launch event shows that ideologues will continue to try to hijack civil society in an effort to amplify their grievance against Jewish self-determination. Meanwhile, the run-of-the-mill activists who took part in the antisemitic protests will likely just move on to their next cause, unaware or uncaring about the damage they caused and the bedfellows they kept.
Even though Israel has won the war from a military standpoint, it seems obvious now that diaspora Jews — including those like me in Canada — have lost.
They have lost their sense of safety and home. They have lost the sense that someone, somewhere will protect them. They have seen the civil society they believed they belonged to ripped apart by polarizing divisiveness and have been told, quite literally, “you, Jew, do not belong. You are an oppressor. Go back to where you came from.”
The odious ideologues that continue to harass the Jewish diaspora in Canada may finally come to be viewed as the antisemites that they truly are. But the more moderate peaceniks — the ones who were apologists for antisemitism because of their good intentions and sincere concerns about the war — will move on. Who will hold them to account for the pain they caused their Jewish fellow citizens, or for the division they sowed in society?
Hamas did not extract the same heavy price from Canadian Jews as it did Israeli families and Gazan civilians, but the October 7 attacks sparked a conflagration of global antisemitism waged by our friends and neighbours.
When peace (or at least calm) comes to Gaza, Jews in Canada will be right to wonder: where is our peace? Are we safe from the protesters who have dehumanized us, from strangers firebombing synagogues and stores, from students plotting attacks on our lives? Will our unions now protect us? Will our politicians now believe us, and will the police now show up when we’re in trouble? Will we ever be safe at home in our diaspora again? And when the ceasefire ends, or the next war starts, will it get so bad that we will have to leave?
For the Jewish community in Canada, it will be difficult to forget — or forgive — the politicians who turned a blind eye to the rampant antisemitism, or the members of civil society (including union leaders, academics, and others) who either overtly supported or tried to justify Hamas’s barbarism against innocent civilians, including women and children.
Diaspora Jews do not get the luxury or certainty of a ceasefire. They don’t know if the antisemitic violence and hatred against them in Canada will stop. This means there will be no truth or reconciliation for them at the end of the past 15 months of terror and harassment. No politicians will launch a national independent inquiry into the bullet holes in synagogue walls, the children who were bullied out of schools, or the Jewish families who left Canada thinking the streets of Toronto felt a little too close to the climate of Nuremberg in 1935.
But it is almost certain that Jews will be expected to forgive those who were so eager to terrorize them simply for being Jewish. Canada is supposedly built on the ideals of mutual tolerance and a shared commitment to pluralism. And yet for months, Canadian authorities allowed antisemitic mobs to occupy our streets and campuses while chanting “globalize the Intifada.” Many of the protesters weren’t radicals — they were doctors and dentists, teachers and school board trustees, mortgage advisors and tradespeople and post-secondary students, everyday Canadians twisted by Jew hatred. How can Jewish Canadians ever again trust their neighbours in the wake of such blatant antisemitism?
If Jewish communities just “move on,” as they did after the last intifada, will Canada learn its lessons? Will it look hard at domestic radicalization? Will it root out extremism? Double down on pluralism and tolerance? Or will the country simply stumble forward into the next international conflict that once again rips our communities apart?
The next six weeks will be the first test of the next gut-wrenching chapter: how will Jewish communities in Canada begin to forgive? And will Canada have learned its lesson or merely demand and accept absolution?
Dan Pujdak is a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. He was the director of policy to the Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs and has worked extensively on reconciliation-based initiatives across Canada.
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"The issue is never the issue, the issue is always The Revolution" - David Horowitz
The hardcore Hamas enthusiasts will never change, best we can do is stop bringing so many of them in.
The "progressive" fellow travelers? We need to remember what they're really about the next time they take to the streets under the pretense of another issue
In our attempts to be open-minded and have open borders to all, we've created our own disaster by bringing the enemy into our home. That must stop now. And some citizenship must be revoked.