As a contemporary Jew with a passion for Jewish history, I am a particularly dyed-in-the-wool Zionist. After retiring from the practice of law in Canada, my Israeli-born wife and I now spend our winters in Israel, in the central town of Tel Mond, 20 miles north of the first Hebrew city, Tel Aviv. I still get an incredible charge by living (part-time) in Israel, and every day that I am there, I revel in the modern Jewish miracle of the ingathering of the Exiles in Zion, the revival of the Hebrew language, the flourishing of Hebrew culture, and the return, after 2000 years of wandering from place to place as a diaspora minority, to Jewish sovereignty in the location of our ancient homeland. But you only have to read the headlines in Haaretz and The Globe & Mail to be keenly aware of the existential peril that Israel is in, isolated internationally, a nation that dwells alone, with millions around the world who hate her very existence, and powerful religious extremist enemies with proxies and missiles - and, sooner or later, nuclear missiles - who publicly yearn and openly call for Israel’s destruction. We live with the poignant awareness that despite our vows of “Never again!”, there are no guarantees for Israel’s survival.
But as a Diaspora Jew, with a half-completed MA in Jewish history from the University of Toronto, I am also interested in the fate of the Jewish community in which I grew up. Discouragingly, my study of Jewish history shows that almost every major Jewish Diaspora community - from Moslem Andalusia to Catholic Spain to the Eastern Orthodox realms, from Weimar Germany to the post-War Arab and Muslim lands - ended badly: in extreme discrimination, convert-or-die, death or exile.
Will North America be the exception?
I had always thought so, based (as the young people say) on my “lived experience”. Born in 1957, I grew up in the North American Jewish Golden Age after World War II. Until quite recently, I thought that Jews, although a tiny minority in Canada, were highly favoured, and despite the unfortunate record of previous Jewish Golden Ages, the Canadian Jewish Golden Age would continue. But now I am less hopeful about my children’s future, and even less so about my grandchildren’s generation. Seemingly overnight, the demographic and ideological landscape has changed. A kind of climate change. Canadian Jews, the vast majority of whom support Israel, are learning once again what Jews in past Diasporas experienced, of no longer being part of a favoured minority, and instead, being part of what the 12th century Andalusian Hebrew poet and Arabic philosopher of Judaism, Yehuda HaLevi, called (in the sub-title of his book, The Kuzari,) “al-din al-dhalil”, a despised belief system.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has often repeated the unproven assertion that “our diversity is our strength”. As a proud member of the Jewish community which was once a keystone of that liberal ideal of Canadian diversity, I personally feel betrayed by Trudeau and his government post-October 7. Unlike my parents, who lived in a far more mono-ethnic and mono-religious society, my grandchildren are growing up in a Canada that is more like the Ottoman Empire, ethnically and religiously diverse. Even when I grew up, “non-Jewish Canadians”, immigrants included, were almost all some flavor of Christianity, mostly Catholic and Protestant. But now most elite Christians are some flavor of post-Christian, for whom political and sexual identity has replaced denominational religious identification. And there are millions living in shared-belief-system communities of Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists and Confucians. If diversity is our strength, then, based on what I was taught in my youth – that we all share not only a common humanity, but universal values - Canadian Jews can have alliances with other Canadian minorities, and with other liberal groups. About that, too, I am these days less hopeful. If even the most liberal Canadian Jew supports Israel, that’s considered by former liberal allies to be a mark against the Jew.
What about other minorities? When my dad came as an 8-year-old Polish Jew to Edmonton in 1930, the formal and disdainful WASP antisemitism was mild compared to that of fellow-minority Ukrainian immigrants who bullied him in public school. Another data point: when I was practicing law, I hired as secretaries graduates from U of T, and this being Toronto, they were from all sorts of ethnic backgrounds: Tamil, Caribbean, Chinese. When we worked together, we had an excellent rapport. After they left my practice for further study or other jobs, some became Facebook friends, and I see now from their posts how some (none Muslim or Arab) are strongly anti-Israel.
Maybe I'm being spooked by the 100% rise in anti-Semitic crimes – the May 25, 2024 shooting at a Jewish school in Toronto, the May 29, 2024 shooting at a Jewish school in Montreal, the May 30, 2024 arson at a Vancouver synagogue. Or the February 13, 2024 nighttime trespass and demonstration, loud chanting in Arabic in front of the polite Canadian “HOSPITAL Quiet” sign, as two unidentifiable males scaled scaffolding to plant a Palestinian flag on the front entrance roof of Toronto’s Mount Sinai hospital. Or the November 10, 2023 blood-red paint on the glass doors of the midtown Toronto flagship store of Canada’s largest booksellers, which is owned and prominently operated by a pro-Israel Toronto Jewish woman.
But maybe to find out what Canadians really think about Jews requires looking past the violent actions of what may be only a few?
In early 2024, Robert Brym, a University of Toronto sociology professor, conducted an attitudinal study to find out. Rather than counting “incidents”, Brym, in collaboration with EKOS Research, asked a group of 3,000 Canadians a series of questions about what they thought of Jews, and of Israel, after the Hamas attack on Oct. 7. There were also questions in light of the Hamas Health Ministry’s reports about tens of thousands of Palestinian casualties as a result of Israel’s ongoing war against Hamas in Gaza.
With qualifications, Brym concluded that most Canadians actually have strongly positive feelings about the Jewish community.
“We’ve still got 83 percent expressing positive attitudes towards Jews. The number of people who express extremely negative attitudes towards Jews is very small,” Brym told the Canadian Jewish News Daily on May 9, 2024.
Sounds like good news. What’s the bad?
Brym found that in Canada in 2024 there certainly ARE more antisemites — but almost all of the anti-Jewish and anti-Israel hate is coming from a small section of Canadian society: Muslims, political extremists on both sides of the left-right spectrum, university students, and French Canadians in Quebec.
Given that there are now 2 million Muslims in Canada (vs 400,000 Jews), French Canadians in Quebec are about 20% of Canadians, and university students are tomorrow’s Canadian elites, that’s not exactly reassuring news about the Jewish future in Canada.
Being on the board of the New Israel Fund of Canada, a left-wing Zionist funder of progressive and liberal causes in Israel, Brym makes a recommendation about the importance of reaching out to Muslim Canadians and other minorities, presumably appealing to at least our "common humanity” if not “universal values”. I am less hopeful about the chance of that working out, and not only because it seems that part of the anti-Israel playbook is to vehemently oppose any Muslim-Jewish dialogue with pro-Israel Jews - or even Israeli cultural performances - as that might suggest “normalization” of Israel’s existence.
I am less hopeful because my history-based understanding of “human commonality” is a bit darker than Trudeau’s platitudinous sunny ways. True, humans have a remarkable ability to cooperate - that seems to be baked into our DNA. But also baked in - human tribalism, even if contemporary “us vs them” is based on an alliance of ethnic, religious and ideological tribes, united against a common enemy. The history of humanity is one part progress towards cooperation, and one part a long unrelenting story of conflict.
Interestingly, one place in the world where there actually is genuine day-to-day cooperation between Jews and Muslims is in Israel. In early May 2024, in our small town of Tel Mond in central Israel, fixing the flat roof of our duplex was a crew of four manual labourers: two Jewish Israeli brothers, carrying on their father’s roofing business, who employ two Arab Israeli brothers. You would not be technically wrong to describe our roofers as Jewish and Arab brothers.And in Tel Mond, the pharmacists who work in the Superpharm (Israel’s “Shopper’s Drug Mart” chain) are all Muslims from the adjoining Israeli Arab towns of Ti’re, Taibe and Jaljuliya, as is the staff of our local supermarket, the Muslim single mother cosmetologist who rents the back room from the gay hairdresser in town, and the highly skilled carpenter who built all the cabinetry in our house. So I am somewhat optimistic about coexistence between Jewish and Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel.
But less so about Jewish co-existence with anti-Israel citizens of Canada.
I don’t think the correct historical parallel to what is happening to the Jews in Toronto - and throughout the West - is “Berlin in the 1930s”. Nazism was a racial antisemitism. If even one of your grandparents was “racially” Jewish, there was nothing you could do. Even the most assimilated anti-religious anti-Zionist Jew in Germany was to be deported to the East. By contrast, the current anti-Israel version of antisemitism is more “religious” in that it is only about your “beliefs”. If you are “racially Jewish”, (better yet if you grew up in any sort of Jewish environment, extra points if you’re a descendant of Holocaust survivors), then so long as you publicly denounce Israel as a white colonial settler entity, and publicly declareyourhostility to Zionism, (like members of “Jewish Voices for Peace”, or Vancouver psychiatrist Gabor Mate and his children), then you are not only acceptable, but especially welcome. You can be a spokesperson.
In light of this distinction, the proper historical parallel is not the end of the German Jewish Golden Age in the 1930s but the end of the Arabic Jewish Golden Age in Andalusia - Moslem Spain - in the 1150s, when the fundamentalist Almohads swept into Southern Iberia and overcame the relatively moderate "get along go along" Muslims of Cordoba, Granada and Seville. If Arabic-speaking Andalusian Jews were willing to publicly convert to Islam, they could stay. And some - the Gabor Mates and Norman Finkelsteins of their day - didpublicly convert. However, most Andalusian Jews fled, either to the relatively more accepting Christian north of Spain, or across the Mediterranean to North Africa, Italy, Egypt. The wandering minority Jew off to a new exile.
Another reason 12thcentury Andalusia and the rise of the Almohad fundamentalists is a more apt parallel to our time is because the persecution of the Jews by the Almohads, (specifically, no longer allowing Jews to have dhimmistatus by paying the ji*zya “head tax” for the privilege of being allowed, in a Muslim polity, to live openly as Jews), was just one plank of the Almohad program. The Almohads, who had crossed over the Mediterranean into southern Iberia from the mountains of North Africa, were zealous Islamic fundamentalists, chiefly opposed to Andalusia’s mainstream Muslim ascendancy, which the Almohads judged as insufficiently righteous.
The Almohads condemned the taifa kingdoms of Cordoba and Granada for engaging in trade with the Christian kingdoms, for sometimes even going into alliance with Christian kings to defeat fellow Muslim rival taifa kingdoms. And the Almohads condemned taifa kings for employing Jews as doctors for their families, just because of the Jews’ knowledge and skill, while ignoring their religious adherence to a non-Islamic faith.
Like the woke movement now, the Almohads had a binary Manichean vision of the world, divided simplistically between, on one hand, God’s chosen path of righteousness: a pure fundamentalist kind of Islam; and the evil ones, being those who opposed the Almohad program (or, in today's parlance, “were complicit in support of the system that opposed their program”). In this regard, the 12thcentury Arabic-speaking Jews, who had to choose between public conversion to Islam, or exile, were not even the Almohads’ primary enemy. Muslim moderates who weren’t sufficiently religious were as much a hated enemy as the Jews. But through violence and political consolidation, Almohad ideology came to dominate Andalusia, and as a side effect, it spelled the end of the Jewish Golden Age of Muslim Spain.
As has been widely noted, springing from once obscure academic theories, today among young Western elites there now prevails a purist fundamentalist Manichean worldview that divides the world into two camps: white European colonialist settler oppressors, who are powerful and evil, and any actions they take, no matter how justified, are pure evil (killing civilian shields, for example, is “genocide”); and across a sharp moral divide are dark-skinned non-European indigenous victims, who are weak and are thus pretty much purely good, and therefore any actions they take, however violent or apparently evil, are justified (murder, taking hostages, and rape, for example, is “resistance”).
In Canada, when anti-Israel protests are held by Palestinian-Canadians, I can completely understand, as they naturally identify with their family members and fellow Palestinians in Gaza. I naturally identify with my brother and sister and their kids, and other fellow Jews, in Israel. I can even understand how non-Arab Muslims, from Pakistan or Afghanistan, are supportive of Hamas, and hate even the idea of a Jewish state in lands once conquered by Islam. After all, Hamas is a fundamentalist Islamic movement, not merely a national liberation movement. When their fighters killed Jews in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, they didn't shout: “Two State solution Now!”. They shouted “Allah Akbar!”. When the young Palestinian called back on his victim’s cell phone to his Gaza parents, he didn't say: “Mom, Dad you'll be so proud of me, I killed 10 Israelis!” but “I killed 10 Jews!” So while to me it’s deeply regrettable, it's understandable that Palestinian-Canadians, or Arab-Canadians, or even Muslim Canadians, would participate in anti-Israel demonstrations and call for Israel’s elimination “from the river to the sea”.
But for me as a Canadian Jew it is much harder to see ultra-liberal college students, who in every other context are vehemently opposed to even verbal violence against women, let alone rape; who on abortion are strictly pro-choice; who are queer-friendly and trans-friendly; joining forces with those who support an Islamic fundamentalist movement violently opposed not only to Jews but to equal rights for women, hom*osexuality, even the playing of music. And how ultra-liberal college students, who will take great offence if the wrong pronoun is used, as it might make a trans listener feel “unsafe”, can engage in chants and actions that definitely make another minority (namely Jews) feel unsafe.
I have my own “dime store psychology” explanation. I think that in the case of the non-Arab non-Muslim demonstrators, who are anti-Israel because “Israel is an evil white European colonialist settler project which commits genocide against pure dark skinned non-European indigenous victims,” a good part of the emotional energy behind those strongly taken positions is a displacement of their own white guilt. After all, it is not clear that Israeli Jews, of whom 60% are descendants of dark-skinned refugees from Arab countries, and a significant portion of the other 40% are descendants of mostly penniless and often traumatized refugees from an actual European campaign of genocide, who returned to their Biblical and historic homeland, are really the best model of “white European colonial settlers”.
On the other hand, Canada and America ARE, without a reasonable doubt, white European colonial settler projects. But here white college students are in a bind. They certainly can't call for the return of Canada to the indigenous population. They won’t chant: “From the sea, to the sea, Turtle Island will be free!” They can't call for the millions of colonial settler immigrants, and their descendants, most of whom were born in the settler colonial project known as Canada, to “go back to Poland!” (or to Pakistan! or to China!). For one thing, there's 39 million non-indigenous colonial settler immigrant Canadians; that's just too many. And also, they themselves don't want to go back to Poland, or Pakistan, or China (even if they, or their own parents, came from there) because, as Canadians often say to each other, “Canada is the best country in the world”. They really like it here. And they’re perfectly fine speaking culturally appropriated English, or French (even though those are the languages in which actual white European colonial settlers, acting out of their prevailing belief system, claimed this land for the kings of England and France). And they really enjoy the political, legal and educational systems that the white European colonial settlers imposed on the land, and think overall it works well for them. And anyway, before every public event, don’t they always make solemn land acknowledgments about how we’re all living on the territory of the Wendat and the Chippewa? So since they can't do anything about these big settler colonial countries where they enjoy living, they join cause with their politics-makes-strange-bedfellow Muslim allies, and go after the Jewish state. (And there’s a realpolitik kicker: worldwide there’s 1.5 billion Muslims, and only 15 million Jews).
Not only are the Jews a very small minority in Canada (400,000 out of 40 million), and in the world, (15 million out of 8 billion), but there's just one solitary Jewish majority state out of 195 countries worldwide. You can get an automatic majority in the UN General Assembly for any resolution that is anti-Israel. Pro-Palestinian demonstrators calling for a free Palestine, “from the (Jordan) River to the (Mediterranean) Sea” try to make plausible the claim that they're not anti-Semitic but only anti-Israel, even though Israel is home to half the world’s entire Jewish population. But that claim is even less plausible when you acknowledge that, while there are 157 Christian-majority countries, and 49 Muslim-majority countries, there is only one tiny Jewish-majority country in the world: Israel. And what a coincidence! Out of 195 nation states, it is only that one solitary Jewish-majority state that should be eliminated. And the fate of Israel’s 7.5 million Jews? Perhaps killed, as on October 7, 2023, or perhaps expelled, like from the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s old city, as on May 28, 1948 – so that “from the river to the sea, Palestine can be free!”. Somehow, calling for the elimination of the world’s solitary Jewish state, presently thriving in the ancient land of the Jewish prophets, and where half the world’s Jews live, has nothing to do with Jews. Sounds implausible to me.
I believe that the current Israeli coalition government is the worst government Israel has ever had. And my fervent hope is that at the next election (which can't come soon enough) there will be a change in leadership. But just as I didn't stop believing in the essential goodness of America even when in 2016 approximately half of the electorate voted in Trump, (for all sorts of internal American political reasons), even after having re-elected America's first black president just four years previously. So I don't stop believing in the essential goodness of Israel even when in November 2022, after the parliamentary collapse of the first Israeli government in which an Arab party was part of the coalition, approximately half of the electorate (for all sorts of internal Israeli political reasons) voted in this terrible coalition.
The way things look from Tel Mond is so different from the way things look from Toronto. Abroad, the impact of October 7th is long forgotten. In Israel it is front and centre 24/7 - in radio and television stories, political arguments, daily consciousness. Every week there are large demonstrations by the families and friends of the hostages still held by Hamas, and their plaintive cries and posters are heard and seen everywhere. They really need to convince Hamas to release the hostages, but since that is impossible, they direct their frustration, sorrow and anger against the government. Almost every day there are explosive laden drones and rockets fired into Israel from Lebanon by Hezbollah. About 200,000 Israelis are internally evacuated from their homes both in the North and near Gaza. And then in April, Iran fired at Israel over 300 drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles – yes, ballistic missiles, which one day soon may be tipped with nuclear bombs. The whole country is suffering from PTSD and has been seriously traumatized.
At sunset of the evening before Yom HaZikaron May 2024, the annual remembrance of Israelis who fell in war or in terror attacks, which takes place 24 hours before Israel Independence Day is celebrated, my Israeli-born wife and I attended the ceremony held in the town square of Tel Mond, population 15,000. In the prior year, four people from Tel Mond were killed: a 20-year old soldier doing his mandatory army service, who on October 7 rushed in to Kfar Aza to defend its residents; a young woman, 22, a member of the local Tel Mond dance troupe, just about to go on her post-army travel, who was killed at the Nova music festival on October 7; a 32-year old third generation doctor, serving in the reserves, who was killed in the front lines on October 11; and just in April, a 22-year old officer, a beloved local son, killed in battle. Much of the town came out to this event, which began with a siren and two minutes of silence. I think it would be hard to convince these local citizens of the proposition of the university campus encampments that only the Palestinians of Gaza are victims, or that Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Iran do not pose an existential threat to the Jewish state.
Back in the Western Diaspora, where demography is democracy, the Jews are an increasingly small and marginal minority, who areswimming upstream against a very strong ideological and demographic current. Canadian Jews are daily confronted by the media-amplified public performance of a Manichean narrative about Jews and the Jewish state that seems to be “in the air”, fueled by a new world of instant communication, TikTok messages, and rhyming group chants (“Four legs good! Two legs bad!”) that make old-fashioned “soundbites” seem, by comparison, like full-fledged essays.
In Canada, October 7, 2023, is just a date among other dates, like June 21, 2024, National Indigenous Peoples Day; or November 5, 2024, the Biden-Trump presidential elections in America. World history moves on relentlessly. Just as, in the Iberian Peninsula, history moved on after the Almohad fundamentalist takeover. During the “Reconquista” of the next century, Muslim strongholds fell to Christian armies, in the decisive battles of Las Navas de Tolosa (1212), the siege of Cordoba (1236), and the siege of Seville (1248), leaving only the small Muslim enclave of Granada as a tributary state. After Granada’s surrender in January 1492, Christian rulers controlled the entire Iberian Peninsula.
And as the pre-Reformation Christians were, by military conquest, reducing the physical territory of the Muslims in Iberia, they were tightening the screws on the minority Jewish community that lived in their midst. Over four days in July 1263, in the royal palace of King James of Aragon, there was held “The Disputation of Barcelona”, over then-burning questions of the Christian belief system. Volunteering to defend the Jewish position was Nachmanides, the renowned leading Jewish scholar of his day. Among those on the other side, the most vociferous in attacking the mainstream Jewish belief system was the Gabor Mate of his day, the Dominican Friar Pablo Christiani, a convert from Judaism to Christianity. In the aftermath, James I forced Nachmanides to leave Aragon, and ordered the censoring of the Talmud.
Here’s another pivotal date: July 30, 1492, which in the Hebrew calendar year of 5252 fell on the 9th of Av, the annual commemorative fasting day of Tisha B’Av, anniversary of the destruction of Jerusalem’s First Temple (in 586 BCE, by the Babylonians) and the Second Temple (in 70 CE, by the Romans). But the 9th of Av, 5252/July 30, 1492, was also the date of the Alhambra Decree, (known to the Jews as “the Edict of Expulsion”), when the Jewish communities in Castile and Aragon, some 200,000 people who were not willing to convert to Catholicism, were forcibly expelled. Ethnic cleansing of Iberians of the Jewish belief system.
Also for the Muslims, 1492 was a pivotal year. The Christian military conquest of Granada, Andalusia’s final remnant, marked the end of the 700-year Islamic conquest and domination of Iberia, including (from 929 -1031) the Golden Age Muslim Caliphate of Cordoba. Granada’s defeat was followed by a series of edicts from 1499 to 1526 which forced the conversions of Muslims in Castile, Navarre and Aragon, and later expelled them from the Iberian realms of the Spanish crown by a series of decrees starting in 1609. Approximately 3 million Muslims emigrated, or were driven out of Spain, between 1492 and 1610. The Andalusian Nakba.
And of course 1492 was also a pivotal year in history for the indigenous peoples who were living in North and South America, lands which white European colonialists called the New World.
It's not just history's multitude of dates, conquests, sieges, forced conversions and expulsions. In Canada there are plenty of problems that have nothing to do with Jews or Israel: the indigenous crisis, Canada’s original sin; but also the cost of housing, foreign political influence, and more generally, the environment, deaths of despair, social isolation and loneliness and depression and drug overdoses and suicide, the threats of AI, the rise of China, and the possible re-election of Trump.
And soon a “black swan” will unexpectedly arise, and the news cycle will move on, to some other event, development, or crisis.
As a student of history, as a dyed-in-the-wool Zionist, how do I find hope in all this?
I have a sustaining messianic vision (like the late 19thcentury Zionists) that despite the present dire circ*mstances, the turmoil in the world, and the rise and fall of empires, nevertheless, the prophetic in-gathering of the Jewish exiles in Zion, the rebuilding of the Jews’ ancient capital Jerusalem, and the post-Enlightenment creation of the State of Israel will persist and flourish. That the power of contemporary Israel’s Jewish “Almohadian” fundamentalists will be replaced by a renewed and sustainable liberal Zionist ideology. And - the most messianic part of my vision - that modern Israel will persist and flourish in conjunction with a post-Enlightenment Arab world, and a post- “Islamic Reformation” Muslim world, led by the economicallysuccessfulmoderate Arab Gulf states and by the Israeli Arab minority. Some would say that this is a dream. But I would respond with Herzl: “if you will it, it is no dream”.
Maybe the darkest hour is just before the dawn. After all, just four years after the disastrous 1973 Yom Kippur war, President Sadat visited Jerusalem, addressed the Knesset, and met with Prime Minister Begin. And that led to the Camp David accords, a peace agreement with Egypt, and later with Jordan. Hatikvah, hope, springs eternal.
