August 25, 2014: Israel’s war with Hamas also plays out in the media, online and in the streets

By Michael Regenstreif

In the book review on page 38, I write about Nora Gold’s fine new book, Fields of Exile. Set 14 years ago as the Second Intifada was breaking out, the main theme of the novel is the effect on a Jewish graduate student at a Toronto-area university of campaigns meant to demonize and delegitimize the State of Israel – campaigns that too often cross the thin line into what is now referred to as the “new antisemitism.”

Despite the fact that Judith, the book’s protagonist, is a committed liberal who had just returned to Canada after a decade in Israel where she had been active in the peace and civil rights movements and in Jewish-Arab dialogue efforts, to the anti-Zionists among her professors and fellow students, she was just a Zionist.

To those who would demonize and delegitimize the State of Israel, a Zionist is a Zionist. A liberal Zionist working for a two-state solution to Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians and for fully realized civil rights and equality for Israeli Arabs is no different from an extremist who would annex the West Bank and Gaza while offering no rights to the Palestinians living there.

Fields of Exile proved to be timely reading this summer as war raged between Israel and Hamas and the other terrorist groups in Gaza – groups that have subjected Israelis to unrelenting rocket fire aimed almost exclusively at civilians and who have poured so much of their resources into building an extensive network of cross-border tunnels to be used to commit acts of terrorism.

While Israel has been fighting the Gaza-based terrorists, battles have also raged in the media, in social media and in public demonstrations. The kind of marginalization and antisemitism experienced by Judith in Fields of Exile, and by pro-Israel university students around the time of campus events like the so-called Israel Apartheid Week, have also been experienced by many of us who have Facebook or Twitter feeds or who follow the news – especially by reading articles online at sites with un-moderated comments.

This summer, Europe has witnessed levels of widespread antisemitism unheard of in the post-Holocaust era and too many disturbing reports of antisemitism have surfaced close to home in places like Calgary where a small group of pro-Israel demonstrators were assaulted, in Toronto where antisemitic rhetoric was spouted at a Al-Quds Day rally at Queen’s Park, and even here in Ottawa where the Hamas flag was proudly carried at an anti-Israel march past Parliament Hill.

Make no mistake, waving the flag of a terrorist organization whose charter explicitly calls for the killing of Jews is a profoundly antisemitic act.

I’ve read several articles and blogs this summer by people who have seen their social media feeds disintegrate into confrontations – sometimes ugly confrontations – over the conflict. I’ve seen it on my own Facebook feed where I have unfriended a couple of people after they’ve posted articles or written comments that I perceive as having crossed the line into antisemitism.

Like Judith in Fields of Exile, I see myself as a liberal person committed to peace, to universal civil rights and to the two-state solution, which I believe is the key to both Israel’s future as a Jewish and democratic state and to the future prosperity of the Palestinian people.

It is because I am a liberal that I support Israel – seemingly the only bastion of liberalism in the Middle East – and am profoundly disappointed to see anyone who claims to be committed to peace and civil rights finding common cause with groups with Hamas or Islamic Jihad, which have no interest in anything to do with peace, civil rights, or justice.

Those marching alongside the Hamas flag, or cheering at the Al-Quds rally, or even posting a stream of one-sided articles on Facebook that blame Israel alone for all of the ills in the Middle East, are not really advocating for peace or civil rights.

As I write on August 15, there is a cease-fire in effect and rumours that a long-term truce is close. I pray that it will have come by the time you read these words.

July 28, 2014: When terrorists attack, there is no choice but to respond

By Michael Regenstreif

I’m writing this column on July 18, the day this issue of the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin goes to press. Hopefully, by the time you read these words, Operation Protective Edge, Israel’s mission to stop the seemingly constant barrage of rocket fire from Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists in Gaza will have ended.

As Jewish Federation of Ottawa President and CEO Andrea Freedman said at Ottawa’s Rally for the People of Israel on July 16, “This has been a hard few weeks, hard to be a Jew, hard to be a human being,” as we’ve watched the news come in from Israel.

First, there was the 18-day search for Naftali Fraenkel, Gilad Shaar and Eyal Yifrach, the three Israeli teenagers kidnapped on June 12, and then the tragic discovery that they were murdered, likely almost immediately after they were taken hostage, allegedly by Hamas-affiliated terrorists from Hebron who – as I write – are yet to be captured.

Then, there was the brutal torture and murder of Muhammad Abu Khdeir, a Palestinian boy from east Jerusalem, by three Jewish Israelis who reportedly confessed to this horrible crime of revenge – which has been, quite rightly, classified as an act of terrorism by Israel’s Ministry of Defense.

And, in the aftermath of these crimes, Hamas and like-minded groups in Gaza dramatically increased their rocket attacks aimed at terrorizing Israelis and ultimately forcing Israel to launch Operation Protective Edge, it’s third such campaign – after Operation Cast Lead in late-2008 and early-2009 and Operation Pillar of Defense in 2012 – to stop the barrage of rockets.

I have no doubt Israel would have preferred not to have been forced into these operations. So many innocent lives are lost – every one of them a tragedy – when the terrorists use civilians, including children, as human shields for their rocket installations or when horrifying mistakes are made, which should not take place, such as the four children playing soccer on the beach killed by Israeli fire.

When terrorists persistently attack a country, they do so in full awareness that the country will have no choice but to respond. The terrorists know that, in a situation like Gaza, when their rockets are hidden in populated neighbourhoods, in homes, schools, hospitals and mosques, the response will inevitably lead to much suffering and innocent lives lost among their own people.

But that is what they want. They are zealots whose goal it is to destroy Israel, no matter what the cost in suffering or innocent lives lost for their own people. While any caring human being sees such suffering and every innocent life lost as a tragedy, they are some sort of depraved victory to the terrorists. If Hamas cared about their own people they – as Israel did – would have accepted the cease-fire brokered by Egypt early in the conflict.

But, as MP Marc Garneau, a former military officer, pointed out, “to argue that you can’t attack Hamas terrorists because of the risk of killing innocent Palestinian civilians is equivalent to saying, you’re not allowed to defend yourself.”

It really is heartbreaking to see what is going on in Gaza. But Hamas knew what it was doing in bringing on this situation. Hopefully, it will be over by the time you read these words.

June 30, 2014: City Hall exhibit portrayed terrorists as ‘artists, activists, writers and leaders’

By Michael Regenstreif

By now, Invisible, the multi-media exhibit by Palestinian-Canadian artist Rehab Nazzal, has come and gone from the City of Ottawa’s Karsh-Masson Gallery at City Hall.

The exhibit was an installation that included a wall of photographs and several film clips, including one without sound and another that was just a soundtrack with no visuals other than subtitles, all meant to convey the artist’s interpretation of Palestinian life under Israeli occupation or of the brutality faced by Palestinians prisoners in a Negev prison during a military raid.

Most controversially, the exhibit also included “Target,” a slide show of quickly changing names and faces, which the exhibit brochure explains “are portraits of lost artists, activists, writers and leaders.”

While the whole exhibit could easily be interpreted as propaganda art meant to paint all Palestinians as innocent victims, it is the slide show that led Israeli Ambassador Rafael Barak to speak out, and for such organizations as the Jewish Federation of Ottawa, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs and the Canadian Coalition Against Terror (an alliance that includes a variety of Muslim, Christian, multicultural and other concerned organizations), as well as many individuals, including parliamentarians, to ask the City of Ottawa to remove the exhibit.

Looking at the slide show – I spent a morning at the gallery examining all facets of the exhibit – it seems obvious that Nazzal was portraying these so-called “artists, activists, writers and leaders” as innocent martyrs killed by Israel.

The fact of the matter is that these are portraits of people responsible for some of the most heinous acts of terrorism. Two of them, as Federation Chair Steven Kimmel and President and CEO Andrea Freedman pointed out in a letter published in the Ottawa Citizen on June 19, were Abu Iyad, the leader of Black September, who was responsible for several major terror operations, including the massacre at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich in which 11 Israeli athletes and a German police officer were murdered; and Dalal Mughrabi, who led the Coastal Road massacre in 1978 in which 38 people, including 13 children, were murdered.

Another, Khalid Nazzal, the artist’s brother, a leader of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was responsible for multiple acts of terrorism, most notoriously the Ma’alot massacre of 1974 in which 25 people, including 22 children, were killed and another 68 injured.

There are many other examples of terrorists who are memorialized in the slide show, too many to name here.

Mayor Jim Watson, in refusing to remove the exhibit from the City Hall gallery, cited the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and said “the artwork and the artist herself benefit from the Charter protection of freedom of expression,” and removing the exhibit “would constitute an infringement on the artist’s right to freedom of expression.”

However, as Kimmel and Freedman pointed out in their letter, the Charter clearly states that the rights and freedoms it delineates are subject to reasonable limits.

The City’s response to the controversy was to post a sign at the galley entrance explaining that its exhibits are “selected by an independent professional arts jury” and that “points of view or comments conveyed … do not represent those of the City of Ottawa.”

Now, while it is entirely appropriate that selections for public galleries be made by juries at arm’s length from government, I know, having sat on arts juries (specifically music juries, not visual arts), that such juries also operate within clearly defined guidelines. There are boundaries that should not be crossed and juries need to be aware of them and to act responsibly in their decisions.

And such boundaries have nothing to do with Charter freedoms.

Freedom of the press, for example, does not mean that anyone is free to say what they want in the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin. It means that we have the freedom to set the boundaries of what gets said in our newspaper. Similarly, the City of Ottawa needs to set boundaries as to what may be exhibited in its gallery.