November 26, 2012: Things could have been so very different in Gaza

By Michael Regenstreif

As I write, on the morning of November 16, just before this issue of the Bulletin goes to press, the attention of the Jewish community here in Ottawa, and in Jewish communities around the world, is nervously focussed on Israel and its latest conflict with Hamas, the terrorist organization that controls the Gaza Strip.

Hopefully, by the time you read this column a week or so after it was written, Operation Pillar of Defense will be finished and Israel will have accomplished its goal of ending the ongoing barrage of rocket fire from Gaza aimed at Israeli civilians with minimal loss of life.

As I write, the conflict is in its third day. Rockets continue to fly out of Gaza and have reached as far as Rishon Lezion, just south of the Tel Aviv area, and three civilians were killed when a Hamas rocket hit an apartment building in Kiryat Malachi.

So far, Israel has been conducting the operation from the air. But 30,000 reservists were called up and troops have been massed near Gaza. Whether or not there will be a ground operation like Operation Cast Lead almost four years ago remains, at this writing, to be seen.

Operation Pillar of Defense was launched in response to a severe escalation of rocket attacks on Israel, which have recently reached levels not seen since before Operation Cast Lead – more than 120 attacks just in the three days prior to the operation.

As then-U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama stated during his 2008 visit to Sderot, “If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I’m going to do everything in my power to stop that. I would expect Israelis to do the same thing.”

The operation began with an amazingly precise hit on Ahmed Jabri, the head of Hamas’ military wing. Jabri, who was behind the recent escalation of rocket fire from Gaza, was a leader of the Hamas forces in its violent overthrow of the Palestinian Authority in Gaza and was the mastermind behind the kidnapping and long imprisonment of Israeli soldier Gilad Schalit. The air operation then continued, targeting rocket launchers and other military installations belonging to Hamas and other terrorist groups.

It should be stressed that, while Hamas specifically targets Israeli civilians, Israel has acted with restraint in this operation and the loss of life by Palestinian civilians, while tragic, has been minimal (and stands in great contrast to the massive loss of civilian life almost every day in the Syrian regime’s war against its own people).

And, while there has been great outrage towaard Israel from much of the Arab world, democracies like the United States, Great Britain and Canada have stood solidly behind her right to self-defence in the wake of the ongoing attacks.

“We fundamentally believe that Israel has the right to defend itself and its citizens from terrorist threats,” said Foreign Minister John Baird in a statement released after the first day of the operation.

“Far too often, the Jewish people find themselves on the front lines in the struggle against terrorism, the great struggle of our generation. Just last weekend, more than 100 rockets rained down on civilians in southern Israel from positions in the Gaza Strip.

“Canada condemns the terrorist group Hamas and stands with Israel as it deals with regional threats to peace and security.”

I yearn for peace in the Middle East and am convinced the two-state solution is the only way it can be achieved. The two-state solution is the key to both Israel’s long-term future as a Jewish and democratic country, and to the long-term future of a democratic and prosperous Palestine. But, to be sure, Hamas is an enemy of peace. Its terrorist acts are aimed at preventing peace and provoking Israel into conflict.

Israel, in a move that many – including, I believe, its top leadership of the day – hoped would help pave the road to peace, unilaterally ended its occupation of Gaza in 2005. It was an incredible opportunity for the Palestinian people to show the world they, too, were ready for peace, for statehood, for the future. Instead, Gaza has been the launching pad for thousands of rockets and other terrorist attacks.

Things could have been so very different in Gaza. Hopefully, someday sooner than later, they will be.

October 31, 2011: Sukkot this year was a time to be happy and rejoice

 By Michael Regenstreif

One of the obligations of the festival of Sukkot is to be happy and rejoice.

And Ottawa’s Jewish community – along with Israelis and Jewish communities around the world – did rejoice when Israeli soldier Gilad Schalit finally came home, October 18, the sixth day of Sukkot.

Gilad’s return came 1,941 days – almost five years and four months – after he was kidnapped from southern Israel by a squad of Palestinian terrorists on June 25, 2006 and taken to captivity in Gaza, a captivity that was more than cruel in its isolation.

Gilad was allowed no contact with the outside world. Hamas would not even allow the International Red Cross to see him. The most recent evidence that he was still alive – in fact, the only evidence in the long years of his captivity – came in a brief video shot more than two years ago.

Gilad became a national symbol in Israel. One of Noam and Aviva Schalit’s three children, almost every Israeli parent knew it could just as easily have been their son or daughter in his place. Israelis – joined by Jewish communities around the world – prayed and campaigned relentlessly for his freedom.

Israel paid a high price for Schalit’s freedom, releasing more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, among them the perpetrators of some of the most heinous acts of terrorism, which was particularly difficult for the families of some of the victims of terrorism to accept. Some of them launched an unsuccessful bid to have Israel’s Supreme Court stop the prisoner exchange.

But the exchange had the overwhelming support of Israeli society – including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Agreeing to the prisoner exchange with Hamas must have been a difficult decision for Netanyahu. In his 1995 book, Fighting Terrorism: How Democracies Can Defeat Domestic and International Terrorists, Netanyahu wrote, “Prisoner releases only embolden terrorists by giving them the feeling that even if they are caught, their punishment will be brief. Worse, by leading terrorists to think such demands are likely to be met, they encourage precisely the terrorist blackmail they are supposed to defuse.”

But prisoner exchanges with such a high price are not new to Israel. Since 1957, Israel has released 13,509 prisoners in exchange for just 16 Israeli soldiers. It is a demonstration of the importance that Israel – and successive Israeli governments of both the left and right – places on the lives of its soldiers.

And so, on Sukkot, we rejoiced and were happy in celebration of the freedom and homecoming of Gilad Schalit.

Remembering Deanna Silverman

It was with great sadness that we learned that Deanna Silverman, Kid Lit columnist in the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin for more than 21 years, passed away on September 29, Rosh Hashanah, following several years of ill health. She died less than two months after her husband of 52 years, Saul Silverman, also a long-time Bulletin columnist, passed away.

Deanna was a passionate advocate for children’s literature – particularly Jewish children’s literature – and traced her passion to her early involvement in a Zionist drama group for children in her home city of Winnipeg. Her Kid Lit column first appeared in the October 6, 1989 edition of the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin and she rarely missed an issue. Generations of Jewish kids in Ottawa had their childhood enriched thanks to the hundreds of books Deanna reviewed and recommended over more than two decades.

In 2008, Deanna told me her health was problematic, that she was unsure how long she’d be able to keep Kid Lit going. But the column was important to her and she did keep it going for more than another two years. What turned out to be her final Kid Lit was published in our March 21 edition. Deanna missed our April issues, but told me she hoped to return soon. In May, though, she regretfully told me she was too ill to continue writing the column.

On behalf of everyone at the Bulletin, I send our sincere condolences to Deanna’s children and grandchildren.

July 18, 2011: The history of the Canadian Jewish Congress should be honoured and celebrated

By Michael Regenstreif

The Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC) website – which was still accessible as of July 7 – includes a brief history of the organization that first came together to represent the Jewish community on a national basis in March 1919.

I presume the page was written about two years ago because the last line is, “From coast to coast, Canadian Jewish Congress is still going strong at 90 years old.” At 92, though, the CJC, ceased its operations. On July 1, as you may already have read in the JTA reports on page 4, the CJC, the Canada-Israel Committee, the Quebec-Israel Committee, National Jewish Campus Life and the University Outreach Committee, were all merged into a new organization temporarily being called CIJA 2.0.

CIJA (the Canadian Council for Israel and Jewish Advocacy) itself is a relatively new body. It was established in 2004 by UIA Federations Canada – the national organization of the Jewish federations in Canada, including the Jewish Federation of Ottawa – as an umbrella organization to coordinate the advocacy efforts of the organizations it has now absorbed. In the original CIJA model, each of the advocacy organizations remained independent with its own structure, board of directors and staff.

In the months since the news of the CIJA restructuring began to emerge late last year, there have been many expressions of concern, particularly from CJC activists, present and past, that CJC’s rich history will be forgotten and that its advocacy work on a broad range of issues of concern to Canadian Jewry will be overshadowed by the new organization’s concentration on Israel-related issues (hitherto, the domain of the Canada-Israel Committee).

One suggestion on the table throughout the merger discussions is that the new organization be called ‘Canadian Jewish Congress.’ This would provide a measure of historical continuity to Canada’s national Jewish advocacy organization and also recognize the CJC’s long and venerable history. The other organizations merged into CIJA 2.0 are all much newer creations, none of them nearly as well known as the CJC.

According to the JTA report, CIJA 2.0 CEO Shimon Fogel has said in the past that it’s possible the new agency will be called ‘Canadian Jewish Congress.’

I suppose the choice of a permanent name for CIJA 2.0 will depend on whether the decision-makers want the new organization to reflect a long history of Jewish activism in Canada or whether they want to start from scratch in building a new brand for Jewish and Israel advocacy.

If it were up to me, I would choose to honour the many thousands of people whose actions have been a part of the CJC over a period that almost reached a century and retain the name ‘Canadian Jewish Congress.’ It’s a history that should be celebrated and not forgotten.

The Gaza Flotilla

As I write on July 7, there have been several reports that organizers of the so-called Gaza Freedom Flotilla have finally decided to abandon their ships after none of them made it out of the Athens port in their attempt to sail the Mediterranean past the Israeli navy bringing “peace, freedom and humanitarian aid” to the Palestinian people.

The flotilla, in reality, was a sham that had nothing to do with peace or freedom and little to do with humanitarian aid. It was simply about delegitimizing the State of Israel.

The amounts of food and other aid that flows daily into Gaza from Israel and from Gaza’s now-open border with Egypt dwarfs anything the flotilla might have brought.

The flotilla’s real goal was to lend support to Hamas, the terrorist organization that governs Gaza while continuing to practise terrorism, while continuing to hold Gilad Schalit – who was kidnapped from Israel – captive for more than five years.

You can’t support Hamas, in word or deed, and be a peace activist. Hamas rejects peace. Hamas is in league with Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian dictator whose regime has murdered thousands of his own people in recent months.

“Peace activists” who want to fight for human rights in the Middle East should try sailing their flotilla into Syria.

January 26, 2009: ‘If somebody was sending rockets into my house’

By Michael Regenstreif

As this issue of the Bulletin went to press, Israel’s three-week war with Hamas in Gaza seemingly came to an end when Israel said its goals had been met and declared a ceasefire.

Hopefully, the guns, bombs and rockets will remain silent.

As many of the speakers noted at the Ottawa Jewish community’s solidarity rally with Israel on January 8 – one of many rallies held in cities across Canada that evening – the loss of every innocent life in this war, Palestinian and Israeli, was a tragedy.

The Palestinians had such a tremendous opportunity to further their society when Israel withdrew its settlers and military from Gaza in 2005. Their leaders could have seized the opportunity to begin building a prosperous economy that would have lifted their people out of the terrible poverty they’ve known for too many generations. Instead, they fought what amounted to a civil war, resulting in Hamas seizing control from the Palestinian Authority.

Houses and other buildings and farms and greenhouses for growing food – left behind by the departed Israeli settlers – were not put to use by the Palestinians; they were destroyed. Imagine, in a society where too many children don’t get enough to eat, farms and state-of-the-art greenhouses that could have been used to feed their children are destroyed. Instead of building an economy, Hamas built rockets to terrorize nearby Israeli communities like Sderot and sent a terrorist squad into Israel to kidnap Gilad Schalit.

Last March 31, a delegation from Sderot came to Ottawa. They met with politicians on Parliament Hill during the day and with the Jewish community in the evening at the Soloway JCC, where they described what life in their community was like under the constant rocket attacks from Gaza.

In a conversation over dinner that March evening, Eeki Elner, one of the Sderot visitors, told me that, as a child of Holocaust survivors who came to Israel as refugees, he understands the terrible plight of the Palestinian refugees and fully supports the principles of trading land for peace and the two-state solution with the Palestinians.

“But Sderot is not in disputed territory,” he said. “The rocket attacks on Sderot are an attack on the very existence of Israel.”

Clearly, Israel could not allow the rocket attacks to go on forever. As Barbara Farber said at the January 8 rally, “It’s an unconscionable way to live.”

And as then-presidential candidate Barack Obama said on a visit to Sderot last summer, and reiterated this month less than two weeks before his inauguration, “If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I’m going to do everything in my power to stop that. I would expect Israelis to do the same thing.”

By the start of the war, the range of the Hamas rockets reached far beyond Sderot, which lies close to the Gaza border. As Marty Davis tells us in his report on Page1, his community of Ashkelon, about 10 miles from Gaza, became a regular target of Hamas rockets. So, too, did the much further away Beer Sheva.

That is the sad state of affairs that brought Israel into the war with Hamas and to its terrible consequences for so many innocent people.

Obama has now begun his tenure in the Oval Office. As Thomas Friedman wrote January 13 in his typically astute New York Times column, the focus of Israel, and the Obama team, “should be on creating a clear choice for Hamas for the world to see: Are you about destroying Israel or building Gaza?”

* * * * * * * * * * *

Sid Ryan, the president of CUPE Ontario and long-time anti-Israel activist, wants Israeli academics banned from Ontario universities, unless they explicitly denounce the Gaza policies of the Israeli government (presumably in a way that meets his standards).

Would Ryan apply such a ban to Israeli Arabs or just Israeli Jews? Beyond issues of discrimination, any such ban would mean the utter abandonment of the principles of academic freedom to which our institutions of higher learning are supposed to aspire.

But don’t assume that Ryan speaks for CUPE. Paul Moist, the national president of CUPE, says “such a resolution is wrong and would violate the antidiscrimination standards set out in the CUPE constitution. I will be using my influence in any debates on such a resolution to oppose its adoption.”

I don’t suppose we should hold our collective breaths waiting for Ryan to propose the banning of Palestinian academics from Ontario universities unless they explicitly denounce the Sderot-Ashkelon-Beer Sheva policies of Hamas.