WAR IS PEACE. HATE IS LOVE.

Words have no definitions now. A recent event in Vancouver is a case study in moral equivalence. Oh, and it's genocide if I say it's genocide.

What arrogant, self-satisfied privilege looks like on stage.

It is rare to get so comprehensive an illustration of what is wrong in the dialogue around Israel and Palestine as I did recently listening to a pair of arrogant, self-satisfied, mutually congratulatory authors at an event recently in Vancouver.

In the week before October 7, Raja G. Khouri, a Palestinian-Canadian, and Jeffrey J. Wilkinson, a Jewish American-Canadian, published their book The Wall Between Us: What Jews and Palestinians Don’t Want to Know About Each Other.

The event was billed as a dialogue across the divide.

Except — spoiler alert! — there is no divide! Both the authors think Israel is evil and needs to be ended. There. You don’t have to read the book. (You actually have no idea the favor I just did you.) This whole conflict could end immediately if Israel would just commit national suicide. Easy peasy. Problem solved.

You’ll note I don’t quote Khouri much. This isn’t because I’m silencing the Palestinian. It’s because he made a typical case from an expat Palestinian perspective. We’ve all heard that before and he seems like a nice guy. Wilkinson, as you will see, is something else.

The whole conflict, Wilkinson argues, is due to trauma on both sides. The Palestinians are traumatized by the “naqba” and the Israelis are traumatized by the Holocaust.

OK, perhaps. But the naqba and its 75 years of consequences are a result of Arab-initiated war and Palestinian statelessness caused by their refusal to coexist. The Holocaust is the systematic murder of six million Jews with the objective of ending the Jewish presence on earth.

“That impact is not about the numbers,” Wilkinson says. “The impact is about that loss, that something being taken from you, that feeling of anger, resistance.”

See how grotesque immorality dresses up as compassion? Wilkinson knows it will always seem inappropriate to compare numbers of dead. But he barges on ahead anyway disregarding the difference between six million murdered in a premeditated genocide versus 15,000 to 20,000 Arabs killed in an Arab-initiated war.

I give Wilkinson credit. He condemned the encampment protestors who resorted to “hateful words” like telling Jews to go back to Poland. This is revolutionary. It is one of the only times I have heard an unambiguous acknowledgement (rather than a dismissal, denial or defence) of this hatred.

Of course, the fact that, practically in the next breath, he calls for the destruction of the state of Israel and the return to statelessness for the Jewish people kind of undermines his moral legitimacy.

The authors argue that we need to address the conflict here at home because we have never seen a foreign conflict polarize Canadian society the way this one has.

And whose fault is that? Time to cut the crap. The polarization and conflict we see in Canada is not Zionists smashing windows, firebombing holy places, threatening people who disagree with them and blocking streets. It’s so-called “pro-Palestinians” doing things like that. So let’s not pretend there is a conflict polarizing Canadian society. There are antisemitic thugs terrorizing Jews. Enough equivocating.

My fave part of the evening came when Wilkinson, who often bears a Jimmy Carter grin and a Jimmy Swaggart sincerity, expressed his beatific patience for Jews who haven’t yet ascended to his level of moral supremacy.

“I believe that Zionism and my Judaism are not compatible,” he says. “That does not lessen my compassion for the vast majority of my community who are somewhere on that journey but not where I am and I embrace you as you walk through that. … I know many, many Jews who are deeply, deeply concerned about Palestinian rights but they still really believe that the Zionist ideal or project can be renovated. And I embrace their struggle as they go through that. I don’t know where they’re going to end up with that.”

Flakejargon-to-English translation: I think Israel should cease to exist and if you are so hidebound and retrogressive as to believe otherwise, I will magnanimously grant you a little more time to advance to the high moral plane to which I have soared. I will embrace you until you too conclude that Jewish statelessness (and possible genocide, which is a potential that I am so unconcerned with I won’t bother acknowledging it long enough even to dismiss it) is the manifest outcome that will bend the inevitable arc of justice.

I would rather walk on my lips that say an unkind word about another human being, but what an insufferable snot this guy is.

The authors say the quiet part out loud.

“Zionists are saying 1967, 1967, 1967. Palestinians are saying 1948, 1948, 1948,” says Wilkinson. “The two-state solution does nothing to address 1948. I’m not saying it’s a bad solution and you can’t support it but I want you to frame it from the perspective of justice and it does not address the injustice of Palestinians.”

Got that? I’m not saying it’s bad. But Israel = injustice. Destroying Israel = justice. Coexistence sucks! Justice means fighting to annihilate Israel even if that means generations more war. This, to be clear, is probably the mainstream “pro-Palestinian” position: We wave signs saying “Ceasefire now!” But we are committed to permanent war.

For all their peacey, New Agey language, it all comes down to defending violence and rejecting negotiated peace.

“The whole Oslo process was tilted from the beginning,” Wilkinson declares. “When the PLO agreed to go into these negotiations, the PLO was on its knees. [Arafat] went to Oslo basically on his knees and he surrendered the only card remaining in terms of power in his hand, which was armed resistance.”

And there you have it. Instead of thinking, well, 75 years of violence hasn’t worked, let’s give talking a chance, more violence is the only thing we know. When your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

How despicable is it for privileged men living comfortable lives in peaceable Canada to egg on combatants half a world away to continue the killing? And how grotesque to do that in the language of “justice.”

But this is the point I took away from the whole horrible evening (which was hosted, by the way, in one of Vancouver’s tabernacles of progressive theology, Canadian Memorial United Church and Centre for Peace): To a certain cadre of anti-Zionist political extremists, words mean nothing. Not only do activists have a sliding scale of morality regarding violence, they reject narrow-minded, parochial ideas like the concept that words have definitions.

“The key to any new understanding is to step outside your understanding of it,” Wilkinson said. “Lens the word from the person who speaking.”

Case study: “Genocide.”

“Some are very hesitant to use the word because genocide is normally labeled after an event is over, after the full facts are out.”

Fair enough. Then …

“I can tell you there isn’t a Palestinian I know who isn’t convinced that this is absolute genocide because the mass killing that has happened — whether it meets the legal definition of genocide or not — it feels very much like genocide,” he says.

Oh, OK. My husband didn’t unload the dishwasher yesterday and that feels like genocide to me. So it must be.

“Same thing with intifada,” he goes on. “When you hear someone say we’re calling for intifada, ask them what they mean by this. Do you mean going and blowing up cafés and buses?”

Wilkinson never explains how he defines the word. But, yeah, I can assure you that the thousands of families who lost loved ones in the intifada’s bus bombings and terror attacks on cafés absolutely hear it that way.

But the faux-peacenik flake dictionary defines that as justice.

If you wonder why there is a miscommunication between people in the West over the conflict in the Middle East, this should give you a better understanding. When we literally can’t agree on definitions of words like “genocide” and “intifada,” when war means peace and the erasure of the Jewish state means justice, you see how there’s a bit of a schism in the discourse.

And that’s not a problem we see on both sides. There can be no equivocation here. This is the slippery, devious misuse of language and ideas by the “pro-Palestinian” side.

Which brings me back to the main point. They use the language of peace, justice and ceasefire, but they seem prepared to continue this battle until there’s no one left to fight. If there is one thing I keep banging on about, it is that the term “pro-Palestinian” always deserves scoffquotes. Because these people are “pro-Palestinian” the way I am pro-cake. I love it. I support it. But leave me unsupervised with it long enough and I will absolutely annihilate it.