Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the outstanding member of Parliament for Humber River—Black Creek.
The boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement, also known as the BDS movement, is a global campaign launched in 2005 in response to calls by Palestinians and international civil society groups for international sanctions against Israel. The BDS movement currently promotes a variety of actions intended to restrict trade with Israel. This includes targeting Canadian companies that engage in trade with Israel, or Israeli businesses, and calling for a boycott of those Canadian companies and their products. There have also been calls in Canada to boycott Israeli products.
The BDS movement, however, goes well beyond trade issues. Much of the movement is focused on university campuses in Europe and North America and includes repeated calls and intense pressure in favour of academic and cultural boycotts of Israel. Examples of this include pressuring musicians, writers, poets, and artists not to perform in or visit Israel. Similarly, professors and researchers are increasingly being pressured not to work with Israeli universities.
These bans threaten the intense and ongoing research collaboration between Israel and Canadian academics in areas such as the health and life sciences sector, environmental and clean technologies, and information and communication technologies.
Activities, such as the annual Israeli Apartheid Week events at Canadian universities promote the BDS movement and seek to equate Israel with apartheid.
Many organizations and individuals in Canada and abroad support the BDS movement out of the belief that it will somehow accelerate the peace process and lead to a lasting resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. However, it is important to understand that the goal advocated and supported by Canada and many of our partners worldwide of a two-state solution with a secure, stable, and democratic Israel living side-by-side with a secure, stable, and democratic Palestinian state is not a solution that can be imposed from outside. A lasting peace will only come through direct negotiations between the two parties through negotiations without preconditions. Such actions only exacerbate the tensions in the region. The peace process would be better served by efforts to bring people together than those that seek to divide them.
These facts lead to the conclusion that the real intention of the BDS movement is not to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but to delegitimize and single out Israel. This is demonstrated by the one-sided nature of the movement. It targets Israel alone. It punishes Israel alone. It calls on Israel alone to act.
Canada has been firm in its opposition to the Arab boycott of Israel since it began in the 1970s, and Canada remains deeply concerned by all ongoing efforts to single out Israel for criticism and to isolate Israel internationally. Once again, this is not a recipe for achieving a lasting peace settlement.
It is important to recognize that the BDS movement is in fact a form of collective punishment. It is not carefully targeted toward the ends it claims to support, but instead seeks to punish all elements of Israeli society. Its effects go well beyond the government whose policies the BDS supporters claim to oppose. All segments of Israeli society are affected because the BDS movement's economic, cultural, and academic boycotts threaten to adversely affect all aspects of Israeli life. This highlights once again that the BDS movement is really about punishing Israel and not about advancing the peace process.
Furthermore, there is evidence that the BDS movement is hurting the very people its supporters claim they are seeking to help, the Palestinian people. In one case, a world-renowned Israeli company, SodaStream, was forced through threats of a BDS boycott to close its factory, which was located in the West Bank, in order to preserve access to global markets. This resulted in the loss of hundreds of well-paying jobs for Palestinians. The owner of the company went on the record to condemn the BDS movement and highlight its negative affect on the Palestinian people and economy.
Canada believes that supporting the economic prospects of the Palestinian people is a vital goal for ensuring their prosperity and dignity, and that it has the valuable side effect of creating stability and security in the region. Israel benefits when the Palestinian people are prosperous. In this spirit, Canada funds a host of projects to better the livelihood of the Palestinians. Working toward that goal is the sort of activity that will advance prospects for the peace process. Canada looks forward to being able to contribute to a reinvigorated Middle East peace process.
We noted with optimism the recent announcement by the Quartet. The governments of the United States, the European Union, and Russia plus the United Nations would work with all key partners in the region to create a report that provides recommendations for relaunching the peace process and advancing down the road to a two-state solution. It is vital that such efforts receive the support they require in order to be successful, and that efforts that are counter-productive to a lasting peace, like the BDS movement, be abandoned immediately.
Canada and Israel are strong, vibrant democracies where legitimate criticism within a legitimate discourse is expected and accepted. Nevertheless, discussion of the BDS movement too often descends into anti-Israel and even anti-Jewish rhetoric. There are also disturbing reports of Jewish students feeling unsafe at Canadian universities.
As Canada considers the Middle East process and seeks opportunities to move it forward toward a lasting solution that meets the interests of all the Israeli and Palestinian peoples, we should not be asking ourselves how to punish one party, but instead how we can remotivate people to get into a dialogue again, and how to start a positive process with the Israelis and Palestinians to relaunch a peace process.
Canada should reject the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement wholeheartedly. We should oppose calls to boycott Israel and Israeli products or to ban cultural and academic exchanges. We should instead seek to build bridges among the people of the region rather than use divisive language and counter-productive tactics. Although Canada recognizes that Israel should not be immune from criticism, Canada will continue to work to defend Israel from the BDS movement.