Margaret Mayer's List: Canadian Foreign Policy on Israel

• Fowler is not alone in claiming that Canada has a reputation for being fair, just and objective as regards the Middle East. He is, in fact, only one of many reproducing this fantasy. Canada’s policy has always been markedly tilted toward Israel in a way that has compromised Palestinian rights and damaged prospects for peace and justice
• “I … deplore the abandonment of our hard-won reputation for objective analysis and decency as a result of our reckless Middle Eastern posturing.”
• contemporary Canadian policy is uncritically supportive of Israel.
• Early last year, as a member of the United Nations Human Rights Council Canada was the only state to vote against a motion condemning Israel’s January 2009 massacre in the Gaza Strip
• . According to scholar Paul Noble, Canadian policy in the 1970s refused to recognize Palestinian national rights, including the right to self-determination (Canada and the Arab World, University of Alberta Press, 1985, p.102).
• The assessment Peyton Lyon offered in International Perspectives in the 1980s is as accurate now as it was then (presumably during Fowler’s “measured” period and before his “shift” in Canadian policy towards Israel): “Canada’s approach [to the Middle East] has in fact long tilted in favor of Israel,” and “[o]utside observers have always categorized Canada as one of Israel’s most predictable supporters”
• The first step towards reconciliation and peace in Palestine must involve an honest historical accounting, particularly of the events of the 1947-1948 ethnic cleansing.

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