Unholy alliances: DP World, a company from the UAE, handed out suspensions to workers who honored a picket line and refused to unload an Israeli boat in Prince Rupert, Canada. They aided the Israeli Zim shipping company in trying to squash grassroots support for Palestine in that remote northern British Columbia town, whose port is under the jurisdiction of Canada’s Minister of Transport, Arab-Canadian Omar Alghabra. A scenario that even the most creative writer could not possibly make up.

With Israeli soldiers and settlers rampaging through Jerusalem and another another rapacious attack on Gaza underway, it is not the role of supporters in the west to tell Palestinians how best to resist.

The NDP’s new pro-Palestine resolution is a victory and we must also continue to fight back against the Israel lobby’s efforts to delegitimize the Palestine solidarity movement by intensifing the work on all our campaigns – one struggle, many fronts.

On August 18, 2020, CBC’s current affairs program “The Current” carried an interview with Joe Sacco where the host used the word Palestine. The word was deleted in an online version and apologized for the next day, and now an Ombudsman says the program was “at odds with the CBC’s usual practice,” but producers should have left it as it was.

Canada says it supports the Palestinian right to self-determination, but refuses to recognize any Palestinian state.

The CBC’s censorship of the word “Palestine” had the unintended result of shining a spotlight on this decades-old erasure of Palestinian national identity in both the Canadian media and government.

Justin Trudeau’s appointment of Irwin Cotler is a blatant rebuke of any sense of a fair-handed approach by the Canadian government to the Palestinian cause.

There is a pressing need for a serious discussion of how and why Palestinian concerns are often dismissed and marginalized in progressive spaces.

There are certain profound events in a nation’s history that leave an indelible mark on all its people. The massacre in two Palestinian refugee camps outside of Beirut, Sabra and Shatila, on September 16, 1982 stands as one of those events.

A strong movement has coalesced opposing the Canadian government’s attempt to gain a seat on the UN Security Council. For Palestinian activists, this call to refuse to reward the Trudeau government is welcome.