Mr. Speaker, a recent campaign by the United Church and others targets Israeli products sold in Canada that include West Bank labourers.
Yesterday, activists harassed and insulted a Jewish person in front of a retail store in Toronto. The individual was accused of being a religious fanatic for disagreeing with the boycott.
This initiative, which purports to target goods produced in whole or in part in contested areas, is both misguided and misinformed.
This past September I visited an industrial area near Ariel, which employs about 7,000 people. Roughly half are Palestinians who pay taxes to the Palestinian Authority and earn the same wages and benefits as their Israeli counterparts, as prescribed by Israeli law. That is two or three times the wage prospects elsewhere in the disputed territories.
Do these anti-Israel activists care that if their misguided efforts were successful they would ultimately hurt the very people they claim to be supporting; or as the incident in Toronto suggests, is the real root simply old-fashioned anti-Semitism?