Lessons from the Holocaust for Today

 By Henry Srebrnik, Jewish Post, Winnipeg

On April 12, I spoke at our annual Yom Hashoah memorial ceremony in Charlottetown. The last time I did so was in April 1976, in Montreal. It was, for Canadian Jews, a completely different time. Montreal was still the first city of Canadian Jewry, with Toronto a distant second. Israel seemed a secure country, having won a hard-fought victory three years earlier in the Yom Kippur War.

There were clouds gathering, true – after all the UN General Assembly had passed the “Zionism is a form of racism” the previous December, and a powerful Communist bloc led by the Soviet Union was still a formidable enemy.

Today, Jewish life has become far more precarious. Two things are essential for an anti-democratic political movement to succeed: ideological justification by academics and intellectuals, and control of the streets by violent mobs. Since Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas invaded Israel, we have seen both.

At McGill University in Montreal, a March 21 referendum by the Law Students’ Association (LSA) supported amending the group’s constitution to boycott Israeli academic bodies, though it was deemed illegitimate by the university’s president. Similar actions are taking place across Canada. Indeed, at Vanier College, a Montreal CEGEP,  it abruptly cancelled its Holocaust commemoration on March 25 because it didn’t think it could keep guests and the college community safe.

Unfortunately, we know a terrible precedent for this union of the intellectuals and the mob. Nazi ideology, too, was not formulated by street thugs. Historian Max Weinreich published his book Hitler’s Professors in 1946, noting that German scholarship provided the ideas and techniques that led to and justified unparalleled slaughter. All too many Nazi war criminals were holders of PhDs. 

As historian Niall Ferguson reminds us, in an article published in the New York Free Press of Dec. 11, 2023, “Anyone who has a naive belief in the power of higher education to instill morality has not studied the history of German universities in the Third Reich.” The “final solution of the Jewish question” began, he has written, with words -- “to be precise, it began as lectures and monographs and scholarly articles.”

The American writer Vivian Gornick, reviewing a book, “Turning a Blind Eye, A memoir of daily accommodation to fascism,” by the German historian Joachim Fest, about Hitler’s Germany in the 1930s (before the Holocaust), quotes this passage:

“Everyone sees that life for the Jews is gradually shutting down. Take their neighbor and good friend, Dr. Meyer: one day he can no longer subscribe to newspapers and magazines; another, he has to hand in his bicycle and typewriter; another, he can no longer keep a pet or buy flowers. Then all the Jews simply start disappearing from the neighborhood.” The Nazi march to power literally begins with shutting Jews out of public life while using academia as the heavy hand of indoctrination.

 Is this slowly happening to Jews in Canada today, as they are pushed out of or refused admittance to cultural events, colleges, universities, and graduate schools, academic university positions, publishing, music, theatre, and so on?  In “Canada’s Polite Pogrom,” By Jesse Brown, Atlantic, March 24, 2026, he writes: “Is a national tolerance for zealotry purging Jews from public life?”  Jewish life in Canada may have “forever changed,” he argues. “I can no longer take for granted that people like me are represented in Canada’s hospitals, schools, newsrooms, and legislatures.”

We may see the quiet withdrawal of Jews from Canadian society “without any glass or bones being broken,” simply because the evidence that they are no longer welcome has become overwhelming. Another writer calls it the social and academic “shtetelization” of Western Jewry.

We even face obstruction from the Canadian government. In just the last two years, eight explicitly Jewish non-profit charities, including the Jewish National Fund, have been stripped of their ability to collect tax-deductible donations by the Canada Revenue Agency -- often amid pressure campaigns from anti-Israel activists. The delisting was also celebrated by the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada (PIPSC), the union representing CRA workers.

We now witness continuous large “pro-Palestinian” rallies through our cities, invasions of shopping malls and thoroughfares, including intimidating behaviour against Jewish passersby. Today, police stand and watch mobs chant for Israel’s destruction, call for the genocide of its people, harass visibly Jewish citizens, and drive antisemitic intimidation deep into urban life. They now believe their job is to enforce the law only if it does not risk upsetting violent constituencies. This makes Jews expendable, because defending them risks confrontation. 

And these events are not just “political protests.” At an al-Quds rally in Toronto March 14, protesters held signs that showed rats crawling out of a Star of David, depicting a Jewish man as a goblin-like creature emerging from a cave, and showing a Jewish man as a hook-nosed caricature.

Three Jewish synagogues in Toronto were hit with gunfire in one week in March. After every such incident, we hear that “antisemitism has no place in Canada.” But if that were true, synagogues would not require concrete barriers. Jewish schools would not need armed security. Community institutions would not conduct threat assessments before hosting events. Yet big city mayors like Toronto’s Olivia Chow don’t seem, to put it diplomatically, be losing much sleep over what’s going on in their cities.

The attacks on Jews, including physical assaults and social media campaigns, are part of a purposive campaign designed to make Jews think twice about gathering with other Jews, entering a synagogue, going to kosher restaurants, putting a mezuzah on the doorpost of their apartments or dorm rooms, or wearing a Jewish star around their necks. In fact people have been attacked on the street for speaking Hebrew. 

If each Jewish holiday will now be seen by antisemites as an opportunity for terror, then the prognosis for diaspora Jewry is bleak. Unless things change, Jewish life in the diaspora will become more sealed off from the larger society.

We may be returning to a time that we thought was long behind us. And we are less prepared for it than our forebearers were, because they were used to living in a semi-segregated world, and expected less from the larger society. As large swaths of the Jewish community are beginning to retreat inward, the greater long-term fear is the collapse of Jewish life here altogether.

 

Is Lebanon Even a Country?

 By Henry Srebrnik, Saint John Telegraph-Journal

It’s hard to believe today, but until the 1970s the Israeli border with Lebanon was the quietest of Israel’s frontiers. Lebanon, as a country, never really participated in the Arab wars against the Jewish state. As a state it still doesn’t, actually. So why is this now Israel’s most dangerous boundary?

The problem, of course, is that Lebanon is a failed state, in the fullest sense of the word. It hasn’t really had control of itself since the 1970s, first due to the interference of the PLO and, since the 1980s, the entity in its Shi’ite south adjoining Israel, Hezbollah. In effect, part of Lebanon remains a vassal of Iran.

After the First World War, as the new polity of Greater Lebanon emerged from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. Its Maronite-Catholic and French planners envisioned it as a “Christian national home” reminiscent of the Jewish one promised by the Balfour Declaration in Palestine. One prominent Maronite delegate to the postwar peace talks in Paris, Emile Eddé, used the term explicitly.

It was therefore split from the far larger French Mandate of Syria. But the Christians were geographically a small population and desired more territory. So its borders were significantly more encompassing than those of its Ottoman predecessor, the predominantly Christian governorate of Mount Lebanon. In fact, the French authorities worried that the Maronites, Lebanon’s largest Christian denomination, were overreaching by absorbing so much land inhabited by Sunni and Shia Muslims.

But the Christians had suffered from a great famine while under Turkish rule during the war. After the armistice the traumatized Maronites were desperate for agricultural land, and insisted, despite French reservations, on the inclusion within the emerging Lebanon of the mostly Sunni Akkar area north of Tripoli and the heavily Shia Beqaa Valley along the eastern border with Syria. This would eventually lead to their political downfall.

The Shias were the poorest and most downtrodden of the country’s myriad groups, their marginal importance made plain by images of the 1920 ceremony creating the French Mandate of Lebanon. The religious figures flanking the French General Henri Gouraud were the Maronite Patriarch Elias Peter Hoayek and the Sunni Muslim mufti of Beirut, Sheikh Mustafa Naja. The Shias were not even invited.

Eddé had been clearest among Maronite leaders “in wanting a proper Christian Lebanon rather than a multicommunal mélange.” In 1932 he even begged Paris to lop off the Sunni-majority area around Tripoli and, crucially, the Shia-majority south. “This Christian majority is much too weak to defend against the attraction exerted on it by Syria,” he wrote in a memo.

France eventually buckled to mounting Arab nationalist pressure in its Syrian mandate and granted it qualified independence. To dampen Lebanese Muslim support for unification with Syria, President Eddé agreed to name a Sunni Muslim as prime minister.

This led to the confessionalism that would be codified in the 1943 National Pact that created an independent state. Lebanon would have a Maronite president, a Sunni prime minister and a Shia parliamentary speaker.

Lebanon soon became a sectarian battleground within its borders. In 1975, confrontations between Christians and Muslims, and Lebanese and Palestinians, exploded into a 15-year civil war. Syria soon invaded and wouldn’t leave for three decades.

Meanwhile, the new Shia rulers in Tehran created a far more militant movement and called it Hezbollah, the Party of God. Intermittent violence, including four major conflagrations, between Hezbollah and Israel has followed ever since, with the Lebanese state virtually a bystander. Hezbollah is embedded in residential and commercial areas of nearly every city and town south of the Litani River. And the Beqaa Valley is a depth zone that includes social presence, logistics, and at times funding and smuggling routes.

Disarmament was the purpose in theory of a November 2024 ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah. But that task was left to the Lebanese Armed Forces, which were not up to the job.

Since the current war with Iran began in February, Hezbollah has stepped up its bombardment of northern Israel and has refused to abide by a ceasefire between Israel and the Lebanese government. A fragile peace has been declared, but it wasn’t negotiated between the two parties that are actually in conflict with one another.

Hezbollah has no interest in any peace deal with or recognition of any kind of Israel because it would be a violation of its raison d’etre which is to be Iran’s protector. Israel can weaken Hezbollah significantly, but until the Lebanese are able to end being occupied by this movement, Hezbollah will always remain a threat.

Hezbollah maintains its power not only through weapons but also through services, welfare systems, credit, local mediation, and patronage mechanisms. This is why physical strikes on its strongholds do not necessarily translate into a loss of public support.

There is little will and little capacity within Lebanon to disarm Hezbollah. Lebanon is not a functioning country, but an amalgam of at least five or six factions; compromise has been the order of the day for years and there is no centre that can commit to and enforce any meaningful decision. Until then, Hezbollah calls the shots – literally.

Meanwhile, Israeli forces have created a buffer zone in southern Lebanon to severely reduce a potential ground incursion by Hezbollah. But it’s a band-aid solution.

 

Jordan is Caught Between Iran and Israel

 By Henry Srebrnik, Saint John Telegraph-Journal

The war against Iran launched by Israel and the United States on February 28 placed Jordan, geographically, militarily and politically, in the firing line, a precarious position for this relatively weak state.

The war came in the midst of a severe crisis in Israeli-Jordanian their relations. Since October 7, 2023, the leaders of the two countries have neither met nor spoken publicly, and the level of relations was downgraded; joint infrastructure projects discussed before the war were frozen.

This state of affairs reflects the anti-Israeli sentiment prevalent among parts of the Jordanian public, which has intensified over the past two and a half years against the background of the war in Gaza. However, despite the rupture between the leaders of the two countries, military coordination between the Israeli and the Jordanian armed forces has continued.

Jordan has not allowed its airspace to be used against Israel, helped keep threats away from the countries’ long-shared border, and enabled travelers from Israel to use Jordanian airports. This conduct has not been easy, in the context of the kingdom’s struggle against Islamist elements seeking to draw Jordan into the “ring of fire” of the Iranian-led Axis of Resistance.

Jordan has refrained from condemning the Israeli-American attack on Iran despite pressure to do so from the Islamic Action Front, the Muslim Brotherhood’s political arm in the Jordanian parliament. In this regard, a historic decision was made in April 2025 to outlaw the Muslim Brotherhood itself because of its involvement in terrorism and its challenge to the state’s monopoly on the use of force.

During the June 2025 twelve-day war, Iranian missiles and drones on their way to Israel were intercepted over Jordanian territory. In the current conflict, about half of the attacks have been directed at Jordan itself and were carried out with the involvement of pro-Iranian militias in Iraq.

The 2026 war has led Jordan to adopt a declared policy of “positive neutrality,” namely, intercepting Iranian missiles in its sovereign airspace on their way to Israel and actively defending its territory against direct attacks, while also declaring that it is not a party to the conflict and calling for de-escalation and a diplomatic settlement.

Despite Iran’s hostile activity, Jordan’s public position has remained measured and ambivalent: on the one hand, it condemned the Iranian attacks against it and against the Arab Gulf states and made clear to Tehran that harm to the security of the kingdom and its citizens constitutes a “red line.”

On the other hand, it declared that it is not a party to the conflict and was careful not to express support for overthrowing the Iranian regime. In conversations King Abdullah held with dozens of world leaders, foremost among them U.S. President Donald Trump, he indicated the need for dialogue and diplomacy in order to halt the escalation, resolve the crisis, and achieve comprehensive calm.

Overall, Jordanians view their country’s alliances as anchored primarily in the Arab world,

particularly with Saudi Arabia and Egypt, while also recognizing the United States as a central

external partner. The fact that Palestine features so prominently underlines how closely public

perceptions of Jordan’s alliances are bound up with the ongoing conflict and its wider regional

implications.

The troubled relationship between Jordan and Iran has historical roots stretching back decades and is unrelated to Israel. In the 1980s, King Hussein supported Iraq in its war against Iran. In 2004, his successor King Abdullah coined the term “Shiite Crescent” to warn of expanding Iranian influence in the Middle East. Iran’s involvement in Syria and Iraq, both of which border Jordan, has confronted the kingdom with direct threats, including border infiltration, terrorism, and the smuggling of weapons and drugs. In addition, King Abdullah has for years urged the United States to adopt a hard line toward Iran. In 2015, he expressed reservations about the nuclear agreement with Iran advanced by President Barack Obama, although he refrained from criticizing it publicly.

Iran’s attacks have placed Jordan’s leadership in an uncomfortable light, and Amman’s frustration with Iran has only deepened. Jordan’s Foreign Ministry summoned the Iranian chargé d’affaires for a reprimand on March 1, protesting Tehran’s “flagrant violation” of Jordan’s sovereignty and an “unacceptable escalation that threatens civilian safety.” On March 18, Jordan complained that Iran had fired over 200 missiles and drones at the Hashemite Kingdom. King Abdullah declined to critique the killing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Although many Jordanians view Iran as a negative factor undermining the region’s stability, they are more antagonistic toward Israel, which they still view as a greater danger to their country’s sovereignty than Iran. They doubt that the war can achieve one of its principal objectives of creating conditions for regime change in Iran and consider the American-Israeli plan to overthrow the regime as unclear and resting on wishful thinking. Under these uncertain conditions, an explicit Jordanian alignment against Iran could prove a dangerous gamble.

In any case, even as Jordan rebuked Iran for its attacks, few believe that the conflict will lead Jordan to boost relations with Israel. Jordan’s Foreign Ministry also condemned the Jewish state for its military campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon and its policy toward Jerusalem’s holy sites. Amman’s policies for the foreseeable future remain unlikely to change.