Mr. Speaker, I rise in the House to debate the tragic situation in the Middle East, mindful that yesterday was the day of mourning and remembrance for the victims of the Shoah, the terrible Holocaust of the last century where six million Jews were systematically exterminated in what became the most unfathomable act of evil in the many sad centuries of human history.
In contemplating that terrible evil we have learned to respond with the simple rallying cry of Eli Wiessel “never again”. Never again will those who believe in human dignity allow an entire race to be targeted for extermination. Never again will the free world stand by as an ideology of hate takes root and grows strong enough to destroy an entire people. In particular, never again will free nations allow the cancer of anti-Semitism to metastasize into a mortal threat to the Jewish people.
I fear that as the horror of the Holocaust begins to fade in our collective memory after five decades the promise “never again” becomes a hollow one, an empty cliché for too many of us in the liberal west.
That is why the Jewish democratic state of Israel is a pearl of such great price. It is the concrete manifestation of the promise “never again”. The free world can best discharge that promise and honour its very serious moral debt to the Jewish people by guaranteeing the security of Israel as a beacon of hope and self-determination and democracy for the Jewish people.
When addressing complex issues such as the conflict in the Holy Land I try to start by identifying principles. For me this is the first operative principle: if given a chance Israel's enemies would not think twice about destroying it and launching the world on a second Jewish Holocaust.
Some 4.8 million Jews, fewer than were murdered in the European Holocaust, live in a democratic state on a tiny parcel of land smaller than any of our Great Lakes and only nine miles across at its narrowest point. Israel is surrounded by 23 Arab or Islamic states, almost all of which are dictatorships with combined populations of more than 300 million and standing armies that outnumber Israel's by more than fifteen to one.
These Arab states have repeatedly tried to destroy Israel: first at its inception in 1948 by attempting to override the international mandate for separate Jewish and Palestinian states and then again in 1956, 1967 and 1973. Many of these belligerent states remain formally committed to the annihilation of Israel and its Jewish inhabitants and as a matter of policy deny the very right of Israel to exist.
As they have done for three decades many of Israel's enemies are again using the Palestinian people and their struggle for self-determination as a surrogate battleground against the so-called Zionist aggressor.
Syria continues to sponsor Hezbollah's attacks against northern Israel through Lebanon. Iraq has upped the ante for its blood money payments to Yasser Arafat's martyrs at a rate of $25,000 per family.
On top of financing the murderous terrorism of Hamas, Iran was caught red-handed sending a shipment of a 50 tonne armory of weapons, explosives and rockets to the Palestinian authority's so-called security police aboard the Karine A earlier this year, a shipment which was clearly authorized and approved by Yasser Arafat but of which he has so ridiculously and disingenuously denied knowledge.
All this has contributed to the vicious wave of suicide bombings that over the past 18 months have taken the lives of hundreds of innocent Israeli citizens, proportionately far more than the 3,000 innocent civilians killed in the United States by Islamic terrorists on September 11. Innocent Israelis in prayer, in leisure, in the midst of ordinary life were mauled and murdered by bombers raised in the cult of the shahid or martyrdom.
However what frightens me most is that the enemies of Israel are willing the moment they obtain the means to prosecute a second Holocaust using weapons of mass destruction.
Just last month former Iranian President Rafsanjani explicitly threatened Israel with the use of nuclear weapons should Iran obtain them. Of course Iraq continued to develop its biological weapons program and has the power to deploy such weapons to Israel using mid-range Scud missiles. For a country the size of Israel a major first strike with weapons of mass destruction would in fact be a last strike.
All this flows from a virulent and growing strain of anti-Semitism in the Middle East and increasingly in western democracies. If one listens to the voices of many Islamist and Arab nationalist political, religious and media institutions in the Middle East, one hears a hatred for Jews in general and Israel in particular far more clearly than one hears a genuine sense of solidarity for the plight of Palestinian refugees.
Let me quote Ahmad Abu Halablya, an Arafat appointed and funded mufti, broadcasting live earlier this year on Palestinian authority official television. He stated:
The Jews must be butchered and killed, as Allah the Almighty said: “fight them”: Allah will torture them at your hands...Have no mercy on the Jews, no matter where they are, in any country. Fight them, wherever you are. Whenever you meet them, kill them.
That was broadcast on Yasser Arafat's Palestinian authority television, a broadcast from a mufti appointed and financed by the Palestinian authority.
A serious review of official Palestinian media broadcasts over the past year will demonstrate that this kind of incitement is increasingly the norm, as will a review of Palestinian school textbooks as has been mentioned in debate earlier tonight. In the words of the Washington Post Pulitzer prize winning columnist Charles Krauthammer:
During the past eights years...Arafat had complete control of all the organs of Palestinian media and propaganda. It takes an unspeakable hatred for people to send their children to commit Columbine-like murder-suicide. Arafat taught it. His television, his newspapers, his clerics have inculcated an anti-Semitism unmatched since Nazi Germany.
That is moral background of the situation which we face in the Middle East. I heard people in the debate tonight and over the preceding weeks talking about the need for even-handedness and balance, the need for both sides to give a little in order to gain peace. I certainly appreciate that sentiment. It is a sensible one and it is a typically Canadian one, but I am not sure whether those who somewhat blithely advocate that approach really understand the intricacies and the recent history of developments in the Middle East.
We could probably all agree in Canada, with very little dissent, on the basic principle of solving the crisis in Israel through land for peace and the implementation of certain of the recent United Nations resolutions.
Israel has given land and has not received peace in return. Israel has extended its hand and in return has been the recipient of violence, murder and mayhem directed at innocent civilians. Israel removed itself from 95% of Judea and Sumaria, the so-called occupied territories. Israel offered virtually everything ever asked by the Palestinian leadership at the Camp David and Taba negotiations, including joint sovereignty over the city of Jerusalem and a limited return of original refugees.
Everything has been put on the table and Israel has already vacated 95% of the territories. It has already given that land, but it expected and demanded in return a guarantee of peace. It expected that by recognizing a sovereign political authority in the Palestinian authority as led by Yasser Arafat that political authority would be able to enforce the rule of law and would be able to eliminate the cancer of terrorism directed at innocent civilians.
However, the Palestinian authority under Mr. Arafat's leadership has failed abysmally to deliver on that commitment. To the contrary, over the past 18 months and, some would argue, ever since the Oslo process began eight and a half years ago, Chairman Arafat has incited violence and increasingly, the evidence is quite clear, has used violence as a negotiating tool. Most of the recent suicide attacks in Israel in the past three or four months were in fact not carried out by Mr. Arafat's rivals in Hamas or Hezbollah or Islamic Jihad but in fact by his Fatah faction's own al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. In other words, Yasser Arafat has become not just incapable of controlling violence from extraneous terrorist groups that challenge his authority but he has become a direct perpetrator in that terrorism.
At the early stages of this intifada, his Tanzim militia were involved in certain skirmishes with Israeli defence forces, but now we actually have officials in the political organization of Yasser Arafat who are legitimizing and providing infrastructure, support, training, supplies, equipment, funding, military expertise and intelligence and, most odiously, perverse moral instruction to young Palestinian Muslims to go and kill themselves and to savage innocent Israeli civilians simply for the crime of being Jews.
I am all in favour of the idea of evenhandedness, of trying to bring both parties to the table. I support the idea of the Tenet process and the Mitchell report and I hope that perhaps some day we can see the parties there achieve a settlement which looks something like the Camp David accord, where there is a legitimate exchange for land and peace. I think that would be nearly a unanimous sentiment in the House.
However, I am not blinded by desire. To achieve that kind of peace does not blind me to the reality that Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian authority have lost all moral and political authority to be responsible interlocutors in this process today. We cannot negotiate with terrorists and Yasser Arafat and his leadership have opted for terrorism as a tactic. They have opted to use killing civilians in order to generate a crisis which would force the United States and the European Union to intervene to place pressure on Israel to back up.
I must say that I simply do not believe, and I do not think anybody who looks at the evidence ought to believe, in the sincerity of Chairman Arafat any longer. In fact, before his death last year, Faisal Husseini, who was a leading Palestinian so-called moderate, said that “Oslo was a Trojan horse...just a temporary procedure...just a step toward something bigger”. That something bigger was “Palestine from the river”, the Jordan, “to the sea”, the Mediterranean. He said Oslo was “a way of ambushing the Israelis and cheating them”.
Ever since Yasser Arafat began his Fatah faction in the early 1960s, prior to the so-called Israeli occupation of Judea and Samaria, he was an advocate of elimination of the Jewish state. There is no compelling evidence to believe that he has changed his fundamental objective.
As we have seen, not only the actions of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade but recently the incursions by the Israeli defence forces into Palestinian headquarters in Ramallah have found hard, concrete evidence that Arafat himself has authorized financing of some of these death brigades and invoices to finance the acquisition of bombs.
This goes back even to 1974, when the PLO adopted a phased plan for obtaining the Palestinian state. The first phase was to accept any territory, whatever size, offered within Palestine. The second was to make it the forward base for the war to destroy Israel.
It is within this context that the government and the people of Israel are responding to these attacks. This is where I must take sincere exception to some of the moralizing from the Minister of Foreign Affairs who has said that the Israeli response of the past 10 days has been disproportionate.
As a student of Catholic moral philosophy, I have a fairly good sense of what proportionality means. I appreciate it as one of the principles that ought to govern moral considerations of what constitutes a just war. However I fail to see the disproportionate response between a duly elected sovereign government conducting counterterrorism measures, arresting or killing known terrorists, seizing illegal weapons, armaments and explosives and destroying the financial and military infrastructure of terrorists and a deliberate campaign targeting the murder of hundreds of innocent civilians.
To be perfectly absurd, if the Minister of Foreign Affairs is looking for proportionality perhaps the Israelis should dispatch suicide bombers into Palestinian communities.
I think, and some columnists have remarked on this, that perhaps the Minister of Foreign Affairs should consider a little Canadian history. In 1972 two public officials were kidnapped in the province of Quebec. A Liberal government's response to that was to declare martial law and to send tanks into the streets of Montreal. Heaven forbid, if the FLQ had been killing, proportionately to the size Israel's population, thousands of innocent Canadian civilians, what would our proportionate response have been?
I simply ask the government, in asking for all parties to be restrained and pushing them toward the peace process and Tenet and Mitchell land for peace, not to be blinded by the urgent imperative for Israel to put an end to this immediate threat to the security of its people. That is what Israel is seeking to do in its current military presence in the West Bank.
Because I am something of a pessimist about the opportunities for peace, given what I believe to be the moral corruption of the Palestinian leadership, at least the leadership that we currently know, perhaps we will not end up with a settled negotiated land for peace arrangement.
I wish Colin Powell and the American administration all the best in their interventions. However, if the leadership of Chairman Arafat of the Palestinian authority does not have a fundamental sea change in the coming weeks, I imagine that the Israel government will have to begin looking very seriously at the option of unilateral separation, of erecting an enormous high tech expensive wall unilaterally between areas of a protected Israel and the Palestinian territories. What a terrible result that would be, to end the possibility of these two peoples living together, working together and benefiting from each other's commerce and trade and infrastructure, but that is the direction in which this headed.
In closing, I want to say that if “never again” is more than a slogan, then we must not be too quick to criticize Israel for doing what it little can to defend its sovereignty and security. The Jewish people in the past century have learned what it is to be vulnerable to the ugliness of when violence meets anti-Semitism. They are fighting against that evil today and I submit that we should support them.