Common ground with Palestinians

Page 6

Dear Editor:

I agree wholeheartedly with the letter writers in the January 2003 issue of Windspeaker, who shared their dismay over David Ahenakew's racist comments about Jewish people. I also share their disappointment that such an attitude could be possible within the Aboriginal community in Canada, since Aboriginal people and Jewish people share, as Georges Erasmus wrote in his letter, an "acquaintance with this swaggering abomination called hatred."

However, I take exception to Jennifer Podemski's assertion that there are "more similarities than differences between Israelis and First Nations." To classify all Jewish people as "Israeli" and therefore equate Jewish identity with the idea of Israel is to conflate the notions of religion and nationality (or culture and nation-state).

According to Globe and Mail columnist Gabor Mate (himself a Jew), "The Zionist identification of a people with a state is incompatible with the real position of most Jews as freely chosen citizens of other countries. Long before Roman times, Jews formed widely dispersed religious, cultural and ethnic groups whose community was not based on geography or politics. Only their spiritual practices were centred on Palestine."

Furthermore, Mate says that "Zionist theory denied the legitimate presence of an indigenous nation in Palestine."

What the state of Israel is doing to the indigenous Arabs of Palestine is similar to what was done to First Nations people in Canada. At the 2001 World Conference Against Racism, it was recognized that "Palestinians are enduring a colonialist, discriminatory, military occupation" of their lands.

Israeli military forces bulldoze Palestinian homes and destroy centuries-old Palestinian olive and lemon groves so that the Israeli government can sponsor American Jews as settlers in Arab territories, while the Arabs are moved to refugee camps (much as the Canadian government sponsored Europeans to settle the West as starving First Nations peoples were herded onto reserves.)

Israel has been condemned by the UN, Amnesty International, and the Red Cross for its persistent use of torture and for its military courts, where Mate says Arabs are "accused, convicted and sentenced without the right to know the evidence against them."(We know how the justice system works for First Nations people here.)

Palestinians are routinely denied freedom of movement, and must pass through checkpoints (very reminiscent of our incarceration on reserves, when we had to show our pass card to the Indian agent). The economic, political, social, cultural, and educational institutions of the Palestinian people have been destroyed.

It is a fact that Israel has no constitution, and no Charter of Rights.

According to Mate, Israel has a policy that "grants settlers from New York six times as much fresh water per capita as native Palestinians."

Given the evidence, I fail to see how First Nations people share any "similarities" with Israelis. We do, however, share many similarities with disenfranchised indigenous Palestinians.

Suzanne Methot

(Cree Nation), Toronto