SOLIDARITY? WHATEVER.

JEWS HELPED BUILD CANADA’S LEFT. NOW THE LEFT BETRAYS THE JEWS AND ISRAEL. THEY MAY BE ABOUT TO GET THEIR COMEUPPANCE.

Not even pretending anymore: Under leader Jagmeet Singh, Canada’s New Democratic Party has become almost monolithically anti-Israel.

It may be a slight exaggeration to say that Jews in Canada built the left — the trade unions, the political movement that became the New Democratic Party, the networks of social justice and welfare organizations that form what we loosely call the left.

It is entirely safe, though, to say that without Jewish contributions to these areas, the left would all be much weaker than they are.

When Jews have come under attack, since 2000, but especially since October 7, 2023, it wasn’t the left who came to their defense. In fact, overwhelmingly, it was the left leading the attacks that have left Jewish Canadians feeling vulnerable, isolated and under siege.

Solidarity? Whatever.

So it is with some degree of satisfaction that I watch early indications that the New Democratic Party (NDP), for which I have campaigned and voted for most of my life, is in the tanks. As I noted in my last post, as Canada’s election campaign gets underway, it appears destined to be a two-party race, with the NDP, Greens, Bloc Quebecois, People’s Party and other “minor” parties likely to be left in the dust. Voters at this point seem focused on which of the two men vying to be prime minister — the Liberals’ Mark Carney or the Conservatives’ Pierre Poilievre — will best stand up to Donald Trump.

If, as polls currently suggest, the NDP are devastated on election night, it will, alas, not likely be due to their playing footsie with Hamas. There are a number of reasons they are low in the polls. (If anti-Israel activists try to make themselves a focus of the election, as I am sure they will, reasonable voters may associate them with the NDP and take their dissatisfaction with their disruptive, terror-aligned nonsense out further on that party’s candidates. But, at this point, Israel/Palestine is far from a ballot box issue.)

The irony, though, is that the betrayal by the left of the Jewish community is not merely a betrayal of Jews as a cultural community (which obviously, for a political party that masquerades as one committed to human equality and antiracism, would be bad enough). The left’s approach to Israel/Palestine is a betrayal of everything we claim to believe. This is, at root, the premise of all my writing.

As I’ve written before, I am still a leftist. You don’t stop caring about the things you care about just because some of your erstwhile allies take a turn for the crazy. The extremists who have taken over much of the left in Canada and other places are illiberal, antidemocratic and demonstrate hostility to all the things we are supposed to care about as progressives. However — until the NDP frees itself from the grips of those whackadoodles, I won’t be voting for them.

Now, something to remember: A political party is a bus, not a taxi. You grab the one that will get you closest to where you want to be. But none of them will take you all the way.

If you find a party you support on 90% of the things you care about, grab it! That’s an astounding correlation.

But if the other 10% is racism — if you agree on everything else but what you disagree on is something so inviolable as a party’s basic sense of right and wrong, a misshapen policy position that calls into question the group’s very moral legitimacy — that obliterates the other 90% of things you agree on.

One reader of my last post clarified (as I should have) that Jews are not “one-issue voters.” Absolutely correct. At the same time, it is hard to vote for people or parties that actively subvert your people’s rights and security.

Imagine a scenario where I generally agree with a party on economics, social welfare, foreign affairs, and everything else that matters to me. The one thing we disagree on is that I, as a gay person, deserve equal rights, including the right to marry. It might be possible to overlook this fundamental divergence if, say, it was not something that my political party trumpeted, if they were, for example, opposed to equality for LGBTQ+ people but generally avoided the subject and downplayed it. I might be able to convince myself that, while we might disagree on this, the party doesn’t really make it their top priority to deny my rights or to diminish my identity.

But imagine that they use their gay-bashing as a core tactic, make it a centre-point of their policy, build their entire identity around it.

That is what the NDP have done with Israel and Palestine. The party made a slow but steady shift over decades from a largely pro-Zionist party, in the 1940s and ’50s (when they existed under a different name) through the 1967 and 1973 Middle East conflicts. In the 1980s and ’90s, like many other leftists, the NDP lurched toward the Palestinian cause, though their leaders often tried to walk a middle road (like under former leaders Jack Layton and Tom Mulcair, when the party was becoming mainstream and had their best electoral showings) preferring to avoid the topic altogether except when activists forced the case.

Now, under Jagmeet Singh, the party has not only abandoned any pretense of balance or reason, but, in one of the most despicable acts imaginable, politicized Muslim and Jewish Canadians’ fears and security in one of the most unforgivable assaults imaginable against Canada’s multicultural cohesion.

Last year, in a horrific moral trainwreck that kept me and other Canadians glued aghast to the House of Commons channel during a daylong debate, the NDP used Canada’s Jewish and Muslim communities as a political football to gain political advantage. They saw divisions in the governing Liberal Party over Israel and Palestine and thought it would be fun to watch them squirm. The NDP presented a despicable, biased motion that — even if passed as moved, which it wasn’t; it was watered down to near-meaninglessness — would have had precisely no positive impacts on the lives of Palestinians. The only thing it would do was polarize Canadians and make minority communities, mostly Jews, feel even more attacked.

It was one of most shameful things I have seen in 45 years of obsessively watching Canadian politics.

The NDP now is probably as monolithically anti-Israel as the Conservatives are pro-Israel. To be fair, both sides could be accused of politicizing the issues for gain — fighting antisemitism and, indeed, supporting Israel, should be a nonpartisan consensus, not a political wedge — but at least the Conservatives are not trying to mobilize anti-Jewish racism for votes.

Returning to the Liberals, another reader rightly noted that it is political suicide for Jewish Canadians to put all their eggs in one basket. If the Liberals win, it will be a task for Jews and their allies to press our case in a renewed Liberal government and party.

Additionally, if the Liberals win, it would fly in the face of a global trend in which the centre cannot hold. But the global portents, I think, are limited, because there are very specific Canadian issues at play here — primarily our proximity to Trump. Pierre Trudeau (PM from 1968 to 1984 with a nine-month exception in 1979-’80) said of the United States: “Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.” The beast is not even-tempered anymore.

This election may not hold transferable omens. So, if the NDP are obliterated (or nearly so) it won’t presage equally bad things for anti-Israel parties in Europe (or for the Squad and their hate-Israel ranks in the US). But it will be a delicious comeuppance. There are a few particularly egregious individual Members of Parliament who are in safe constituencies and the only hope of dislodging them would be a case where almost the entire party is destroyed.

As someone who has given a vast amount of time and a bit of money to the NDP over the years, you would think I might have mixed emotions about this outcome. I don’t.

It was when the NDP was at its lowest ebb, after the 1988 election, that anti-Israel groups really took it over. If it is weakened to that level again, it may be possible for reasonable people to come in and remake it in the model of a genuinely progressive movement, reversing the trend of allying with baby-beheaders.

In the meantime, there is no question that the NDP have made Israel-bashing an absolute core of their party and their identity, and the effect this has on Jewish Canadians seems to be of no concern to them.

These are people who should not be allowed anywhere near the levers of power.

Thankfully, early polls suggest Canadians agree.

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