November 2, 2006

A changing political landscape?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Liberal Party leadership candidate Michael Ignatieff’s recent comment referring to the Israeli bombing of the Lebanese village of Qana during the war against Hezbollah as a war crime prompted Liberal MP Susan Kadis, who represents the Thornhill riding in suburban Toronto, with its very large Jewish population, to step down as co-chair of his Toronto-area campaign.

It also caused Ariela Cotler, wife of the former justice minister in Paul Martin’s Liberal government, Montreal-area MP Irwin Cotler, to quit the party altogether. Cotler’s riding, Mount Royal, is home to the majority of Montreal’s Jews.

Earlier this year, a number of high-profile Canadian Jews announced their support for Stephen Harper. And when the prime minister spoke to a large audience at a dinner sponsored by the Jewish service organization B’nai Brith in Toronto recently, he was treated, in the words of one commentator, “like a rock star.”

The Liberal Party has traditionally been the “default” party of Canada’s Jewish community, but this may be changing. Many are clearly unhappy with the party’s Middle East positions, and are being swayed by Harper’s more uncompromising – some would call it principled – stance. The year 2006 may have ushered in one of those watershed periods when a group of voters moves en masse from support of one party to another.

“The Liberal Party has lost significant support from one of its traditional strong bases over the last few months, over this Lebanese conflict,” admitted Steven Pinkus, a vice-president of the party’s Quebec wing.

The various ethnic constituencies that the Liberal party has managed to keep onside as part of its political coalition all these many decades now seems to be falling apart. The contradictions can no longer be papered over by bromides about multiculturalism and diversity. Of course, when it comes to defining war crimes, some of the fault lies not with Ignatieff or others in the Liberal Party, but stems from confusion regarding the right of states to defend their populations and territorial integrity.

We saw this back in the spring of 1999, when Canada joined in the NATO campaign against Serbia when it tried to suppress the Kosovo Liberation Army’s attempt to wrest that province away from Belgrade.

For people such as Ignatieff, who avidly supported the war against Serbia, Israel too has been culpable, though it has made far greater efforts to minimize death and injury to civilians than did the Serbs in Kosovo.

Yet, as noted Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz remarked recently, “Democracies simply cannot protect their citizens against terrorist attacks of the kind launched by Hezbollah without some foreseeable risk to civilians. There cannot be any absolute prohibition against such self-defensive military actions so long as they are proportional to the dangers and reasonable efforts are made to minimize civilian casualties.”

In this age of “asymmetrical” conflicts, when the rules of warfare, such as they are, become increasingly meaningless, and international law is flouted completely by non-state actors, we have to confront grim new realities. And this may be changing the domestic political landscape as well.