January 22, 2018: U.S. announcement was recognition of the obvious: Jerusalem is Israel’s capital

By Michael Regenstreif

The Ottawa Jewish Bulletin only publishes one print edition per month in December and January and the December issue comes out early in the month while the January issue comes late in the month. That production schedule was set up years ago to allow the Bulletin staff to take vacations in what is usually one of the quietest times of the year for news.

Perhaps the biggest news to break in the Jewish world during our production break was U.S. President Donald Trump’s announcement recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital city and that the U.S. embassy in Israel would eventually be moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

In fact, a law recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and providing for the embassy to be moved to Jerusalem was passed by the United States Congress in 1995. So, Trump’s announcement was really an acknowledgement of what has been American law for more than two decades. By the way, the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995 was passed with overwhelming bipartisan support: 93-5 in the U.S. Senate and 374-37 in the House of Representatives.

One of the provisions in the law provides for a waiver to enable the president of the United States to delay moving the embassy to Jerusalem for six months. Since 1995, every U.S. president – Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Trump – has signed the waiver every six months.

Indeed, after making the announcement, Trump signed a waiver keeping the embassy in Tel Aviv for another six months and it remains to be seen if or when he will stop signing them.

In many ways, Trump’s announcement was recognition of the obvious. Jerusalem has been the capital of the modern State of Israel for almost 70 years. The Knesset – Israel’s parliament – is in Jerusalem. So are the Israeli Supreme Court and other important institutions and offices of government.

And although no country currently locates its embassy in Jerusalem – ambassadors from all countries present their credentials at the Jerusalem residence of the Israeli president.

But the status of Jerusalem – a holy city for Judaism, Christianity and Islam – has been in dispute for as long as Israel has been a modern state. Recall that the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, passed in 1947, called for the creation of two states: one Jewish and one Arab. But partition was rejected by the Arabs and the new State of Israel was invaded by the surrounding Arab countries when the Jewish state declared independence in 1948. When the War of Independence ended, Israel held West Jerusalem and Jordan held East Jerusalem along with the West Bank.

Under Jordanian rule, Jews were not allowed to live in East Jerusalem or the West Bank, or to have access to such holy sites as the Western Wall. That was the status quo until 1967 when East Jerusalem and the West Bank were captured by Israel in the Six Day War. Jordan had renounced any claims it had to East Jerusalem and the West Bank long before signing a peace treaty with Israel in 1994.

Palestinians now claim East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state and the policy of the Canadian government, like that of many democracies, is that the final status of Jerusalem should be resolved in the context of settling Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians – a policy that has been long unchanged by both Conservative and Liberal federal governments.

Trump’s announcement, while recognizing the obvious fact that Jerusalem is, indeed, Israel’s capital, did not preclude an eventual shared sovereignty for the city (a shared sovereignty that Israel offered the Palestinians in peace negotiations as recently as 2008 – negotiations the Palestinians walked away from).

I believe that a two-state solution will be the best possible outcome for Israel’s future and for the future of the Palestinian people. But settling the conflict, and creating a Palestinian state, will take serious negotiations. While many – me included – question how serious Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is about settling the conflict, at least he insists he’s ready to negotiate.

Unfortunately, the Palestinians continue to seize on any excuse – including Trump’s announcement – to refuse to even come to the table.

April 19, 2017: Syria and the world’s ‘Responsibility to Protect’

By Michael Regenstreif

I’m writing this column on April 7 just as this issue of the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin is about to go to press.

April 7 is a significant date. In 2008, a unanimous vote in the House of Commons approved a motion put forward by then-MP Irwin Cotler, a former minister of justice and legendary human rights activist, making April 7 Canada’s National Day of Reflection on the Prevention of Genocide.

The date was not random. Cotler specifically chose it because it was the anniversary of April 7, 1994, the start of 100 days of genocide in Rwanda that saw more than 800,000 Tutsi people murdered by the Hutu-dominated government – a genocide that the world community was aware of, but did not act to prevent or stop. As Cotler wrote in an op-ed published in the National Post last year on April 7, “Indeed, what makes the Rwandan Genocide so unspeakable was not only the horror of the genocide itself, but the fact that it was preventable. No one can say that we did not know – we knew, but we did not act.”

In an op-ed for the Huffington Post that was also published last year on April 7, Cotler wrote about the principles of the Responsibility to Protect Doctrine (R2P) adopted by the United Nations in 2005.

The R2P doctrine, Cotler wrote, “mandates international action to ‘protect a state’s population from genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing.’ In a word, if such mass atrocity crimes are being committed, and the state where these crimes are occurring is unwilling or unable to act – or worse, is the author of such international crimes – the Responsibility to Protect arises.”

Cotler goes on to discuss the devastating humanitarian crisis arising from the civil war in Syria and the crimes against humanity committed by the regime of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. “Indeed, if mass atrocities in Syria – with 500,000 killed, 12.5 million displaced, five million refugees – are not a case for R2P, then there is no R2P.”

This week, on April 4, a year after Cotler wrote that article, the Assad regime launched a chemical weapons attack against civilians in the town of Khan Sheikhoun in Syria’s Idlib province. At least 100 people, including infants and small children were massacred as the world looked on in horror.

It seemed like a repeat of a 2013 chemical weapons attack perpetrated by the Assad regime. A year before, then-U.S. president Barack Obama had warned Assad that using chemical weapons was the “red line” he must not cross, or the U.S. would act. Many commentators pointed to Obama’s failure to take military action in response to that crime against humanity as his greatest foreign policy failure. Others pointed to his diplomatic efforts to have Assad give up his chemical weapons stockpile as a great success in preventing both further chemical weapons attacks and American involvement in another Middle Eastern war.

Among those who vehemently opposed a U.S. response to the 2013 chemical weapons massacre was future U.S. president Donald Trump.

And, in the 2016 U.S. election campaign, Trump routinely ridiculed his opponent, Hillary Clinton, when she called for action in Syria.

It seems, however, that Assad held on to at least some of his chemical arsenal and may well have been emboldened by the Trump administration’s recent statements that regime change in Syria was no longer an American goal.

Then, last night [April 6], on Trump’s orders, 59 cruise missiles were launched at the Shayrat air base from which Assad’s forces launched this latest chemical weapons attack against civilians.

As I write, it is much too early to know if this missile response will make a difference in the Syrian civil war. Will it make a difference in helping to protect the Syrian people from Assad?

Trump said he was affected by the sight of the “beautiful babies” killed in the massacre. But it’s hard to forget that Trump’s policy has been to refuse to help any Syrian refugees. And, with all the controversy about Russia in recent months, Trump has had (at least, so far) nothing to say about Russian complicity with Assad in the Syrian civil war.

October 31, 2016: Trump’s campaign is an attack on democracy itself

By Michael Regenstreif

It’s been like watching a train wreck these last 16 months. Horrifying for too many reasons, but impossible to look away from.

I am referring to the Republican U.S. presidential candidacy of Donald Trump, the TV reality show star and real estate mogul. Despite a seemingly endless string of ongoing insults variously hurled at women, Hispanics, Muslims, the handicapped, prisoners of war, leaders of his own party, and so many others, his candidacy has endured.

Thankfully, it will soon be over. As I write – on October 21 – the election is just 18 days away and it appears that Trump has thrown away any chance of recovering and finding enough support to win the election. Although they were running neck-and-neck at one time in the national polls, his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, has widened her lead after each of the three head-to-head debates to the point where it now appears to be insurmountable.

Poll analyst Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com creates models based on the state-by-state polls to predict the eventual Electoral College results and constantly updates the predictions. As of now, Clinton holds an 86.2 per cent chance of winning the election while Trump has a 13.8 per cent chance. Minus some completely unpredictable and highly unlikely scenario, Clinton will surely be the first woman to be president of the United States.

While Trump’s campaign has been in freefall recently – thanks to Trump’s own behaviour – it is astounding that the least qualified candidate (at least in modern times) to ever win a major party’s nomination for the U.S. presidency, a man with no experience in public service (and, apparently, little experience in paying federal taxes), still maintains a base of support of about 40 per cent of the American electorate, despite all that he has said and done – and all that has been revealed about him.

And, as it has become obvious to all that he is losing the election, Trump has ramped up his attacks – on Clinton, of course, but also on Republican leaders like Paul Ryan, speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, and most appallingly, on democracy itself.

For weeks, Trump has been complaining that the American electoral system has been “rigged” against him and that the only way he can lose the election is if it is rigged. And he absurdly claims the American media has entered into a conspiracy against him. It is a tradition in Western democracies that, when the votes are counted and the winner of an election is determined, the defeated candidate(s) concedes the loss, and the government proceeds to an orderly transition of power.

But Trump is refusing to say he will concede a loss; only that he will accept the result if he wins. Many observers fear he will launch a post-election campaign to delegitimize Clinton’s presidency.

That is something that Trump has done before. He was cheerleader-in-chief of the so-called “birther” movement – a racist fringe movement – that for years tried to delegitimize the presidency of Barack Obama, the first African American president of the United States, by falsely claiming he was born in Africa. Trump continued to lead the movement for years, even after Obama released his birth certificate from the state of Hawaii.

Trump’s behaviour throughout the campaign has been appalling. He is the first presidential nominee candidate in more than 40 years not to release his tax returns and he has acted like nothing more than a schoolyard bully. Trump’s personal attacks on the women who have come forward to allege that he behaved toward them in ways that he himself described in the now infamous 2005 tape have been particularly disgraceful.

And, as a candidate for the most important office in the world, he has shown almost no real understanding of the myriad important issues he would face on both domestic and international fronts.

Hopefully, Trump will fade away – at least politically – after November 8.