On September 23, 2018, the town of Windsor in Nova Scotia, Canada commemorated the 100th anniversary of the training of the Jewish Legion, a battalion of the British army that fought to liberate Palestine from the Ottoman Empire during World War One. In 1918, a young Jewish man named David Ben-Gurion was trained along with the rest of the Jewish Legion at Fort Edward in Windsor. He would later become Israel’s ‘independence’ hero and the country’s first prime minister. But according to Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, Ben-Gurion was also responsible for the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the Palestinian people. Continue reading
Tag Archives: palestine
Correcting the Zionist Narrative of Israel
The Zionist narrative exists to justify the existence of the state of Israel. It is the narrative that dominates the perspectives of the US and Canadian governments as well as the mainstream media in North America. This narrative accepts as its starting point the right of a Jewish state to exist based on the fact that Jews lived in the biblical lands 2,000 years ago and that these lands belong to God’s chosen people: the Jews. But does this narrative reflect the truth? Or is it self-serving propaganda? After all, given this starting point, the inevitable outcome of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine was the ‘cleansing’ of the existing Arab population in that region because a Jewish majority was required to make a Jewish state viable. Continue reading
Why Israel Should Not Exist
The creation of a Jewish state in the middle of the Arab world represents the continuation of European colonialism, in the form of settler colonialism, in Palestine and constitutes an apartheid system that has consisted of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by a rogue nation that has repeatedly violated international law. Given this reality, and the fact that Palestine is the Holy Land of three religions, the only just solution to the Zionist project of the Israeli state and its Western backers is the establishment of a single country: a democratic secular state of Palestine in which Jews, Arabs and Christians all have equal rights. Continue reading
Thanks to Stephen Harper, ‘Canada No Good!’
Walking through the old city of Nablus in the West Bank last week, I encountered a Palestinian man who worked as a tailor in the small store situated in his family’s home. We struck up a conversation. “Where are you from?” he asked me. “Canada,” I replied. Shaking his head from side to side, he stated, “Oh, Canada no good!”
The next day I was riding in a taxi in the city of Ramallah, which is the Palestinian capital of the West Bank and seat of the Palestinian Authority government. The driver asked me where I was from. Again I replied, “Canada.” He raised his index finger in the air and while moving it side to side declared, “Canada no good!” Continue reading
Obama Rewrites History at the UN
Last week US President Barack Obama addressed the UN General Assembly and the unintended irony in his speech would be humorous if it were not so cruel—and dangerous. Obama touched on a variety of global issues from the Ebola epidemic to the Ukraine to the Islamic State (formerly known as ISIS). So what was this unintended irony so prevalent in Obama’s speech? Continue reading
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“A gripping tale of savagery and terror, but also of tenderness, compassion, and renewal.” —Noam Chomsky
Garry Leech 