Here’s a pop quiz for the aspiring foreign service officers out there.
If a rocket fired by a major transnational terrorist organization slams into a soccer field in a Druze settlement in northern Israel, killing a dozen children and teens, does the tragedy warrant condemning the group that launched the attack by name?
And, for that matter, is the country where the deadly attack took place worth specifying in an official statement on the matter?
If you’re Mélanie Joly, Canada’s geopolitically challenged foreign affairs minister, the answer to both questions is evidently a firm “no.”
In a terse statement on the weekend attack on the northern Israeli town of Majdal Shams posted to X, Joly demanded only that “Iran and its affiliated terrorist groups refrain from destabilizing actions in the Middle East.” Conspicuously absent from the statement was any reference to Hezbollah, the southern Lebanon-based militant group that has fired over 6,000 rockets at Israel since Oct. 7 — including, almost certainly, the Iranian-made rocket that hit the town of 11,000 on Saturday evening.
And this wasn’t the statement’s only glaring omission as Joly appeared to studiously avoid mentioning that Majdal Shams, located in the Golan Heights, is part of Israel. The territory was taken from Syria during the Six Day War.
Even the lame duck Biden administration to Canada’s south was quick enough on the uptake to acknowledge on Monday that the rocket attack took place on Israeli soil.
Senior Biden official John Kirby also reaffirmed on Monday that the administration views the Golan Heights as part of Israel, continuing a policy first announced by then-president Donald Trump in 2019.
Joly took a second crack at a statement in the late hours of Sunday night, this time at least naming Hezbollah in connection to the heinous attack that killed 12 innocent young people.
Even so, Joly’s updated statement referred to Hezbollah only as an “Iran-backed terrorist organization,” conveniently leaving out that it is also one of Lebanon’s most successful political parties, controlling more than 10 per cent of seats in the country’s parliament.
The omission of Hezbollah’s country of origin feels an awful lot like political hedging with rumours of an extension of the war in Gaza into Lebanon running rampant even before Saturday’s rocket attack. Joly herself urged Canadians in Lebanon to leave the country while they still could last month.
The diaspora politics-obsessed Liberal brain trust is no doubt already fixated on how the approximately 400,000 Canadians of Lebanese descent may react to an all-out war in Lebanon.
Joly’s milquetoast messaging on Hezbollah could accordingly foreshadow future efforts to sidestep inconvenient facts about Lebanon’s support of the atrocities committed against Israel, including the finding that eight in 10 Lebanese approved of the October 7 massacre.
Who needs facts when there’s a vote bank to fill?
Even after giving herself a mulligan, Joly still failed to articulate clearly that Saturday’s rocket attack was a hostile incursion into Israeli territory.
While her amended statement began with nod to “Israel’s security,” it went on to specify “the Golan Heights” as the site of the fatal blast, making no mention of Israel’s sovereignty over the region.
To reiterate, Joly’s position appears to be that the Hezbollah-fired rocket violated Israel’s security but didn’t necessarily explode on Israeli territory.
You’ve heard of Schrodinger’s cat; now get ready for Joly’s rocket.
What’s especially vexatious about Joly’s Golan Heights doublespeak is that it gives political cover to a Syrian regime that’s killed untold thousands of its own citizens over the course of a decade-long civil war. Syria’s Druze community is one of several groups that has been brutally targeted by President Bashar al-Assad’s forces.
The widespread harassment of Druze in Syria clashes starkly with their growing acceptance in Israel. On Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stepped away from his war cabinet to pay a “sympathy visit” to Majdal Shams — a meaningful symbolic gesture in recognition of the Arab-speaking minority population.
Joly is doing the Druze community no favours by tacitly recognizing Syria’s claim to the Golan Heights. Golan Druze have, by and large, made peace with Israel control of the region. An increasing number of Druze have, in fact, applied for Israeli citizenship in recent years.
Mélanie Joly’s double-barreled comms misfire over the weekend proves, once again, that she is the wrong person to manage Canada’s relations with a volatile Middle East. Canada may not be a global heavyweight, but we at least deserve a foreign affairs minister who can point out Israeli territory on a map.
National Post