On the first anniversary of the October 7 terrorist attack on Israel, it’s worth looking back at the lessons we learned, or should have learned, over the past year.
First, it’s always appropriate to remember what happened a year ago. In a surprise attack, Hamas terrorists stormed across the Gaza-Israel border, torturing, raping and killing over 1,200 Israeli citizens and foreign nationals. Hamas also took 251 hostages — some have returned, some have been killed and many remain captive.
Taking a broader regional perspective is also helpful. From Israel’s establishment in 1948 to the Yom Kippur War in 1973, each decade saw Israel face down hostile Arab states. Eventually, many of the Arab countries accepted Israel’s existence. With the signing of the Abraham Accords in 2020, many of those same countries agreed to work with Israel, both militarily and economically.
At the same time, Israel made numerous attempts to achieve peace with the Palestinians, who repeatedly rejected such overtures. With the imposition of the radical Islamic regime in Iran in 1979, tensions between Israel and the Palestinians were turned into an opportunity for Iran to work through its proxies — Hamas, Hezbollah and others — to destabilize the Middle East generally, and prevent peace between Israel and the Palestinians specifically.
In short, this is a regional conflict that’s been inflamed by Iran’s exploitative radicalization of local populations, including the Palestinians. This context is helpful when we consider some of the responses to October 7 in Canada. Among the more disturbing reactions that followed the attack were pro-Palestinian protests in major cities coupled with the establishment of encampments on several Canadian university campuses.
Many of the protests took place outside Jewish community centres or near neighbourhoods with large Jewish populations. This was the case with the January protests on an overpass in Toronto, as well as anti-Israel protests in front of a synagogue in Thornhill, Ont., in March.
Pro-Palestinian university encampments engaged in even more aggressive tactics, staking out and commandeering sites on campuses from Halifax to Victoria. Students and non-students alike, often supported by a coterie of academic staff, demanded that their respective institutions divest from all companies with ties to Israel and its defence efforts.
Eventually, university administrators acted to remove the encampments, either by police intervention or legal injunctions using trespass laws, despite the misleading objections of a gaggle of law professors.
Encampment protesters, along with those on the streets, habitually chanted the slogan, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” This antisemitic invective clearly implies the elimination of Israel. Its justification derives from the notion that Jewish Israelis are somehow “settlers” on the land, and the Palestinians Arabs, by contrast, are the indigenous population.
This claim is made even though the Jews have an ancestral claim to the region stretching back centuries before the arrival of the Arab population, with archeological evidence dating to at least to the time of the First Temple and the Assyrian (722 BC) and Babylonian (597 BC) invasions.
When confronted with the charge that their chants are antisemitic, protesters adamantly argue that opposing Zionism — and even the very existence of the Israeli state, the only democracy in the region — does not constitute antisemitism. Again, they turn to the justification that Israel and Israeli Jews form an illegitimate “settler society.”
By making these claims, the protesters narrow and diminish the concept of antisemitism, to the point that virtually any hostile action against Jews is now seen as legitimate. Even the ultimate antisemitic act of the Holocaust is thrown back at Israel, with claims that its defensive actions against Hamas constitute a “genocide.”
The old lesson we need to remember here is that this is exactly what antisemitism is. Since the time of the medieval blood libel, Jews have been repeatedly dehumanized by those who diminish their humanity while expanding the scope of their imaginary treachery.
Today in Canada, as elsewhere in the West, the return of antisemitism is justified by the ideology popularly called “wokeism,” though it is better labelled as “progressive illiberalism.” This doctrine was born in our universities from a mixture of postmodernism, post-colonialism, critical theory and neofeminism.
Over the last decade, it has made immense gains throughout our society. It now expresses itself explicitly through theories of anti-racism, gender ideology and in the settler-colonial narrative that’s used to attack Israel.
Ultimately, it should not surprise us that this same ideology was at the intellectual heart of the Islamic Revolution that took Iran from a relatively free secular society to an oppressive Islamist dictatorship in 1979. And now, in Canada, in addition to promoting antisemitism, it has contributed to the weakening of our immigration system, which has allowed terrorist operatives to use Canada as a staging ground.
As for Islamist ideology, Canada permits groups like Samidoun, which is banned in Germany, to actively support pro-Hamas rallies across the country. The alliance between progressive illiberalism, settler-colonial ideology and the Islamism promoted by the Iranian regime is undermining Canadian politics and society, while threatening our Jewish and Muslim communities.
While Israel and many of the Arab states understand the true nature of the threat to their countries, Canadians have a few lessons yet to learn on this solemn anniversary.
National Post
Collin May is a senior fellow with the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy, a lawyer, a former chief of the Alberta Human Rights Commission and the author of numerous articles on the psychology, philosophy and social theory of cancel culture.