March 30, 2015: Netanyahu made Israeli election campaign deliberately divisive

By Michael Regenstreif

Like many, I was terribly unhappy, as the Israeli election campaign wound down, to see Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seemingly reverse his support for a two-state solution to Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians; a stand he has taken – at least publicly – since a 2009 speech at Bar-Ilan University.

But, in an interview published March 16, the day before the election, Netanyahu told NRG, a Hebrew-language Israeli news website, “I think anyone who is going to establish a Palestinian state and to evacuate territory is giving radical Islam a staging ground against the State of Israel. This is the reality that has been created here in recent years. Anyone who ignores it has his head in the sand.”

Perhaps taken aback, the interviewer sought clarification from Netanyahu. “If you are a prime minister, there will be no Palestinian state?” he asked. “Indeed,” Netanyahu responded.

It was a purposeful message aimed at getting hardline supporters of other right-wing parties to coalesce around Likud. With polls consistently showing right-wing support stagnant and Likud trailing the Zionist Union led by Isaac Herzog, the prime minister understood his path to victory could well depend on drawing voters away from other right-wing parties.

And it worked. The number of right-wing seats in the new Knesset will be the same as in the last one – but significantly more of them will be held by Likud MKs.

I believe the two-state solution is the only resolution to the conflict that will protect Israel’s future as a Jewish and democratic state and offer Palestinians the ability to build their own state and future. And it is a position that has been consistently supported by the majority of Israelis in countless opinion polls.

The two-state solution is also supported by the governments of virtually every Western democracy – from the countries of the European Union to the United States to here in Canada. Yes, even Canada, where our prime minister, Stephen Harper, seems to be almost alone among world leaders in having a genuine personal friendship with Netanyahu, our government has never wavered from its official support for a negotiated two-state solution to the conflict.

While Netanyahu understood that changing his public stance on a two-state solution would help keep him in the Prime Minister’s Office, he also surely understood that such a policy would further isolate him – and Israel – on the world stage and would provide ammunition to those seeking to delegitimize the Jewish state.

Truth be told, reaching the two-state solution is highly unlikely under the current Palestinian leadership – and the current Israeli leadership. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas walked away from a 2008 settlement offer that should have ended the conflict. And, since then, he has used any and every excuse to avoid negotiations.

And Netanyahu’s government has frequently taken actions – particularly in regard to settlement expansion – that it knew would give the Palestinians the reasons they need to justify avoiding negotiations.

And then, on Election Day itself, Netanyahu took to Facebook to rally his supporters because Arab-Israelis were voting “in droves.” As Barbara Crook suggests in her analysis on page 49, the comment was racist and divisive.

So, would racism and opposition to a peace settlement be the face of the next Netanyahu government?

The day after the election, I saw an interview with Israeli Ambassador Rafael Barak on CBC News Network’s Power and Politics. The ambassador, when asked about those statements, suggested they were made in the heat of a campaign and would be dialled back.

And, sure enough, Netanyahu himself took to American TV the next day, to do just that.

“I don’t want a one-state solution, I want a sustainable peaceful two-state solution, but, for that, circumstances have to change,” he told NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell, pointing to Islamist turmoil in the Middle East and the Palestinian Authority’s recent arrangements with Hamas.

And about his comments on Arab voters, Netanyahu said he wasn’t trying to suppress Arab voters, he was trying to stand up to “foreign-funded” efforts to topple his government by getting out the Arab vote. “I was calling on our voters to come out.”

It will likely be some weeks before we know the composition of Israel’s next government. While it appears probable that a right-wing coalition will emerge, I can’t help but think, after such a deliberately divisive campaign, that a national unity government is what’s truly needed.

March 9, 2015: Canada takes a strong stand against global rise of antisemitism

By Michael Regenstreif

There were a couple of disturbing stories out of Montreal late last month as we worked on this issue of the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin. The first involved a swastika attack, February 23, on four cars in the garage of an apartment building in the west end neighbourhood of Notre Dame de Grâce – more popularly known by its initials, NDG – an area and building with many Jewish residents. Not only were the cars defaced by crudely painted Nazi swastikas, envelopes were left at the scene with single bullets and the message, “You Will Die.”

“This was not just an act of simple vandalism, but a crime targeting the Jewish community,” said Rabbi Reuben Poupko, speaking on behalf of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs.

To their credit, Montreal police are investigating the attack as the hate crime it clearly was – at press time, there had yet to be any arrests – and Quebec’s provincial legislature, the National Assembly, unanimously passed a motion condemning the crime.

Incidents of antisemitism have been on the rise globally in recent months, most spectacularly in Europe where four Jewish shoppers were murdered in a terrorist attack on a kosher supermarket in a Paris suburb and a Jewish volunteer guard was murdered outside a synagogue in Copenhagen.

In Ottawa, this rise in global antisemitism has not gone unnoticed by our political leaders. On February 24, the House of Commons unanimously passed a motion condemning the “alarming increase in antisemitism worldwide,” noting “the firebombing of synagogues and community centres, the vandalizing of Jewish memorials and cemeteries, incendiary calls for the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people, and anti-Jewish terror.”

The motion, which followed a four-hour discussion introduced by Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenney and Liberal MP Irwin Cotler, a former justice minister, noted, “This global antisemitism constitutes not only a threat to Jews but an assault on our shared democratic values and our common humanity.”

Our parliamentarians also recognized the role of delegitimization efforts against the State of Israel in promoting antisemitism by reaffirming the statement in the 2010 Ottawa Protocol on Combating antisemitism that “criticism of Israel is not antisemitic, and saying so is wrong. But singling Israel out for selective condemnation and opprobrium – let alone denying its right to exist or seeking its destruction – is discriminatory and hateful, and not saying so is dishonest.”

The other disturbing story from Montreal involved Judge Eliana Marengo of the Quebec Court refusing to hear the case of Rania El-Alloul, who was trying to get her impounded car returned, because she was wearing a hijab, the headscarf worn by many Muslim women.

“Decorum is important. Hats and sunglasses, for example, are not allowed, and I don’t see why scarves on the head would be. The same rules need to be applied to everyone,” the judge explained.

While the appropriateness of the niqab – which covers the face – may be debatable in court proceedings, there is nothing about a hijab, which does not cover the face or hide a person’s identity in any way, that should have been called into question. So far as I know, this was the first time a judge in Canada has made such a ruling.

From this judge’s statement, a Sikh wearing a turban or a Jew wearing a kippah would be similarly barred from court. This should not be an issue in our multicultural society.

February 23, 2015: OJCS high school – A difficult decision that had to be made

By Michael Regenstreif

The front page of this edition of the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin carries the sad news that the Ottawa Jewish Community School (OJCS) Board of Directors has made the very difficult decision to phase out its high school division.

OJCS came into being in 2009 when Hillel Academy of Ottawa, the city’s community day school founded in 1949, amalgamated with Yitzhak Rabin High School, founded in 1995.

The groundwork for the amalgamation began about two years earlier when community and school leaders – understanding various problems faced by both schools, including declining enrolment and financial viability – formed committees tasked with bringing the schools together as an institution that would be stronger than the sum of its parts.

In recent years, we have published many articles chronicling the innovative strides OJCS has made in reinforcing its credentials as a first-class educational institution from kindergarten to Grade 12. We have also covered such major issues as declining enrolment, tuition fees and financial viability.

While enrolment in the elementary grades is closer to sustainable levels at OJCS, enrolment at the high school has remained too low for too long. It was hoped that, when Hillel Academy amalgamated with Yitzhak Rabin High School, many more families would choose to have their children remain at the school for their high school years. But that has not happened.

Over the past two years, only seven of the 51 students who graduated from elementary school went on to high school there. This year, there were just 24 high school students at OJCS and only 20 were projected for the 2015-‘16 school year. When the school surveyed parents of current Grade 6, 7 and 8 students about their high school intentions, it was clear there was no way forward to a sustainable enrolment number for the high school.

As OJCS Board President Aaron Smith wrote in his letter to parents explaining the decision to phase out the high school, enrolment of at least 50 students was needed to sustain the high school.

The high school division’s deficit of $250,000 per year effectively amounted to $1 million for each class as it moved from Grade 9 through Grade 12.

It is estimated there are about 900 high school-aged Jewish students in Ottawa. That means only about two per cent of Jewish families in the city are choosing Jewish day high school for their children.

With efforts in the years since amalgamation to raise enrolment to sustainable levels unsuccessful – even among families who chose Jewish day school education at the elementary level – despite the school’s success an institution of excellence, the decision to phase out the high school had to be made.

There is probably no greater testament to the school’s educational success than the passionate feelings of its students. The day after the announcement was made, Grade 12 student Hannah Srour submitted an article about what the school means to her, while Grade 10 student Ella Sabourin launched a quixotic grassroots attempt to raise enough funds to keep the high school alive.

As the OJCS prepares to move forward as a strong and viable elementary school, it is clear the community must create new models for supplementary Jewish education at the high school level, which will serve a much broader proportion of our community’s teenagers.

Problems of declining enrolment and financial viability of Jewish day schools are not unique to Ottawa. Many communities throughout North America face the same problems. But, on one level, those problems are exacerbated for day schools in Ontario where the province remains the only jurisdiction on the continent that provides educational funding to one faith community to the total exclusion of all others.

A number of other Canadian provinces, including Quebec, Manitoba, Alberta and British Columbia, have formulas in place to provide public funding to faith-based schools that meet the provincial standards in their secular education (something that was never in question for OJCS).

The United Nations Human Rights Commission has twice ruled – in 1999 and in 2005 – that the province’s funding of Catholic schools but not those of other religions was discriminatory and a violation of Canada’s obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

An effect of Ontario not providing public funding is that tuition rates must be higher than elsewhere, which, of course, affects both enrolment and financial viability.