February 23, 2009: So, who did the Israelis choose to lead?

By Michael Regenstreif

Back in November, just after the Canadian election and just before the American, I wrote that those elections, plus the upcoming one in Israel, make this a fascinating time for those of us interested in politics.

Looking ahead to the Israeli election, I asked a couple of questions: “Will Israelis choose Kadima’s Livni or Likud’s Netanyahu?” and “Given Israel’s proportional representation system, to whom will the next Israeli prime minister be beholden when it comes to putting together a governing coalition?”

Opinion polls leading up to the February 10 vote suggested Benjamin Netanyahu was headed to a substantial victory. But things changed as the campaign drew to a close. Ehud Barak’s collapsing Labor Party bled support to Kadima and the extreme right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu, headed by Avigdor Liberman, drew substantial support away from Netanyahu.

In the end, Livni squeaked ahead with 28 seats to Netanyahu’s 27. But both claimed victory: Livni because she had the most seats of the 30-something parties who ran in the election and the dozen that garnered enough votes for representation in the Knesset, and Netanyahu because the right-wing and religious parties could come together in a majority coalition.

There are a number of possible scenarios for coalition building that will play out in the days and weeks – and possibly months – to come. Some of the likeliest possibilities are detailed in Leslie Susser’s JTA report on Pages 1 and 2.

Of all the scenarios, Israel’s best hope for stability would be a national unity coalition that would bring Kadima, Likud and Labor together – perhaps with the rotating-prime-ministership model that followed the 1984 election. I wouldn’t expect either a Livni or Netanyahu coalition that’s beholden to Liberman’s support to last more than a year or two, if that.

After our fall election, there were calls for proportional representation to be introduced here and, in that same November column, I expressed some reluctance to the idea based on what I’ve observed of Israeli politics over the years where the leading party has always had to look for support from single-issue or narrowly focused parties in the Knesset.

I think these latest Israeli election results will only reinforce that reluctance. The day after the election, I got an email from an Israeli friend, Menachem Vinegrad, who lives in the Upper Galilee, commenting on the results. “No clear winner has emerged,” he wrote, “and the stronger parties must now bargain, barter and bribe in order to put together a ruling coalition. It’s altogether a rotten system.”

In the days after the election I read many editorials and columns in Israeli newspapers – from Ha’aretz to the Jerusalem Post – that pretty much agreed with my friend Menachem’s assessment and spoke of the need for a massive overhaul of a system that just doesn’t work very well.

* * * * * * * * *

The Batsheva Dance Company from Israel performed at the National Arts Centre (NAC) earlier this month.

A few days before the performance, someone forwarded a letter to me that was being circulated by Diana Ralph of Independent Jewish Voices encouraging a letter-writing campaign aimed at NAC management demanding cancellation of the event because Batsheva is “funded by Israel’s government, its performers include none of Arab extraction, and it is ‘proud to be considered Israel’s leading ambassador.’”

Independent Jewish Voices also demands that the NAC commit to boycotting all “Israeli-funded artists and cultural exchanges.”

I think back just a few decades to when the lives and livelihoods of many on the left were destroyed by McCarthy-era blacklists and boycotts. Now, it’s some groups on the left and a labour leader, CUPE Ontario’s Sid Ryan, who are engaged in McCarthyism.

* * * * * * * * *

In the Federation Report on Page 6, Linda Kerzner and Alana Kayfetz mention the daily challenges faced by students on campus who are engaged in Israel advocacy.

Disturbingly, there have been growing numbers of reports of anti-Israel incidents on Canadian campuses that have crossed the line into antisemitism, including several disconcerting reports of antisemitic violence at York University in Toronto and UBC in Vancouver.

While it is important that our universities remain venues for freedom of expression of all points-of-view, it is unacceptable that anyone be subjected to any form of hatred or violence.

February 9, 2009: Rising to the challenge of these hard times

By Michael Regenstreif

Finally, after 52 long, cold winter days, the OC Transpo strike ended when the City of Ottawa and the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 279 agreed to binding arbitration on January 29.

However, because the buses had not been serviced, maintained or inspected for almost two months, it was announced it would take until February 9 – the publication date of this issue of the Bulletin – for the first busses to start rolling again and up to 14 weeks, almost twice as long as the strike itself, for full service to be restored to all routes.

The further you are from the city centre, the longer it will take before you see a bus at your stop. Hardest hit routes could eventually be without bus service for more than five months.

The strike could not have come at a worse time. We were already into the worst global economic crisis since the Depression and what has turned out to be one of the harshest winters in decades.

It was only the threat of federal legislation after more than seven weeks of strike that led the city and the union to the last-minute agreement to submit to binding arbitration. However, it was pretty clear from the outset of the strike that positions of both the city and the union were so entrenched that legislation or arbitration would be the only means to the end. Given the obviousness of the situation, they should have gone to arbitration from the get-go and avoided the inconvenience – as the mayor put it – to all transit users and the motorists who normally share the roads, and the very real suffering for far too many people, including our most vulnerable.

The Jewish community is generally perceived as relatively affluent. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t significant poverty and hardship in the community. Long before the current crisis, it was estimated that about 17 per cent of Canadian Jews, including about 20 per cent of Jewish seniors, live below the poverty line. The current crisis has exacerbated the situation, and will continue to do so.

A little over a year ago, Barry Fishman wrote in this space about the problems the Ottawa Kosher Food Bank, headquartered at Congregation Agudath Israel, was having just in keeping up with the demands of serving its already established clientele. You can be sure the demand will increase as unemployment rises during this economic crisis.

The situation for some Jews in Ottawa is so dire that they live on the streets. We have a story on Pages 1 and 2 by Cynthia Engel about the kosher lunch Jewish Family Services (JFS) served January 27 to 200 homeless people at Beth Shalom Synagogue.

At the lunch, Rabbi Arnold Fine, who works with the JFS StreetSmarts program to provide chaplaincy services to Ottawa’s homeless, estimated there are about 50 homeless Jews living on Ottawa’s streets and that several more were newly identified that day. When Barry wrote that column in late-2007, the StreetSmarts estimate was that 10 to 12 homeless Jews lived on the streets in Ottawa. Clearly, things have already worsened.

Some of you may be shocked to learn there are homeless Jews living in Ottawa. These are not people worried about making the payments on second or third cars; they’re people worried about whether they’ll have a second or third meal every day.

By the way, organizers and volunteers expected to serve at least double the number of about 200 who turned up for the lunch. But, without bus service, many of the homeless beyond walking distance of Beth Shalom could not get there.

All of these problems, the effects of the bus strike, the economic crisis, poverty – in the Jewish community and in society at large – are symptoms of the hard times we’re living in.

As Jonathan Freedman discusses in the Federation Report on Page 6, the economic crisis has a very real impact on the community’s ability to help our most vulnerable just as more people are becoming more at risk. Jonathan points out that the community has always risen to the challenges of difficult times and, as he says, it’s up to us to do so now by digging deeper into our pockets and/or donating that great human resource, volunteer time, so that programs and services can be maintained and expanded to meet the greater demand.

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.

December 15, 2008: OPIRG reinforces perception leftist anti-Zionism is antisemitic

By Michael Regenstreif

Reporter Liana Shlien has a story on page 13 of this issue of the Bulletin about a visit to Ottawa on November 20 by Israel Siriri, the chair of the small Abayudaya Jewish community in Uganda, and a talk that he gave about his community at the Soloway Jewish Community Centre. The primary sponsor of Siriri’s visit here was Hillel Ottawa – the Foundation for Jewish Campus Life.

In advance of Siriri’s visit, Hillel approached the Ontario Public Interest Research Group at the University of Ottawa (OPIRG-Ottawa), a group funded by a $3.38 annual levy on every uOttawa student, and asked for assistance in promoting the event with the African Jewish leader.

OPIRG-Ottawa states that its “mission is to bring together and build upon a broad-based community dedicated to social, economic and environmental justice. OPIRG is concerned with the contribution that students, the university and the community can make towards social change.”

Given OPIRG-Ottawa’s mandate, it is quite logical to assume they would be anxious to lend their support to a presentation by the leader of a small community in Africa about the history of his community, and about the kinds of projects it undertakes to sustain the community, its infrastructure, its schools and its outreach to other communities in the region.

Hillel didn’t hear back from OPIRG-Ottawa in advance of Siriri’s visit. Later, though, Hillel received an e-mail from the OPIRG-Ottawa board of directors explaining they had decided not to offer their endorsement of the event or to promote it.

The OPIRG-Ottawa email went on to say they rejected the event because of Hillel’s “relationship to apartheid Israel” adding that “Zionist Ideology [sic] does not fit within OPIRG’s mandate of human right’s [sic], social justice.”

Leaving aside the nonsense about “Israeli apartheid” – for that, see the article by Dan Schloss, Hillel Ottawa’s Israel advocacy coordinator on page 26 – OPIRG-Ottawa’s flapping about Zionist ideology wouldn’t have been a surprise had Hillel been asking for their support for an appearance by Benjamin Netanyahu. But other than the fact that Siriri’s first name is ‘Israel,’ his talk had absolutely nothing to do with Israel or Zionism. One of Hillel’s co-sponsors of the event was the Kurdish Youth Association of Canada, hardly a Zionist organization.

By promoting a Jewish-oriented event perfectly in tune with its proclaimed mandate, the evening with Siriri would have provided OPIRG-Ottawa with the perfect opportunity to show that the perception that leftist campus anti-Zionism is not tinged with the antisemitism many people perceive. Instead of seizing the opportunity, OPIRG-Ottawa reinforced that perception.