Canada once played a constructive role in the Middle East, but not anymore

When Prime Minister Mark Carney announced in July that Canada would recognize a Palestinian state, he reversed almost eight decades of Canadian policy regarding Israel and its Arab protagonists. That reversal was ill-formed, badly timed and bound to give comfort to Israel’s enemies and strengthen the extreme right-wing nationalists in the current Israeli government.

Canada’s involvement with the birth of the modern State of Israel began in 1947, the year the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) — an 11-member body tasked with exploring the Palestine question and charged to make recommendations to the General Assembly on the future of the area — was formed.

One member of the committee was Justice Ivan Rand of the Supreme Court of Canada. After extensive travels, interviews and hearings, UNSCOP — with Rand in the majority — decided to divide the area into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. The General Assembly agreed.

The Jews accepted the recommendation and the Arabs did not. On May 15, 1948, the Jewish community in Palestine declared the independence of the State of Israel. This was followed by the invasion of a half dozen Arab states, including Egypt, Jordan and Syria. Israel won the war.

Canada recognized the new state in 1949, largely because Rand had supported the partition and also because Canada — like most European countries, the United States and the Soviet Union — recognized that the Jews had already established workable political, economic and social institutions there, while the “West Bank,” as we now call it, had been seized by Jordan and the Gaza Strip by Egypt.

Canada’s longtime policy was that any solution to the ongoing conflict had to be created by the parties themselves. In other words, Israelis and Arabs would have to come to a solution — one should not be imposed on them. That remained Canada’s official policy until last month.

In late October 1956, Israel, Britain and France invaded Egypt in response to its seizure of the Suez Canal. Two Canadians played key roles in damping down the crisis: Foreign Minister Lester B. Pearson proposed the invaders withdraw and be replaced by a United Nations Emergency Force (for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize), which was commanded by Lt.-Gen. E.L.M. Burns of Canada. Canadian troops remained a part of that force until it disbanded in 1967.

After the Six-Day War of 1967, when Israel occupied the Golan Heights, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 242, which was largely drawn up by George Ignatieff, the permanent Canadian representative on the Security Council.

Its formula suggested that Israel trade land it had conquered for peace. In the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Security Council Resolution 338 again called for the implementation of Resolution 242 of six years earlier. Again, George Ignatieff was key to the resolution.

All through those tumultuous years, Canada stuck by its idea that Arabs (including Palestinians, of course) and Israelis should decide the terms of the end of their protracted war. It stuck by the idea that no peace imposed from the outside would ever stay in place. And that simple idea was killed by Carney when he announced that Canada would recognize a Palestinian state.

Canada is hardly a major player in the Middle East anymore. But it’s ludicrous that Canada would try to punish Israel for its campaign in Gaza by recognizing a Palestinian state that has no defined borders, an effectively non-functioning and certainly non-democratic government that’s paid bonus money to the families of terrorists who died attacking Israel. Indeed, Canadians should ask themselves: what is this action supposed to accomplish?

For the hard-line extremists in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, the action is a green light to annex the West Bank. Their reason is simple: if Canada, Australia, France, Britain and others say there really is a Palestine state, let us annex the West Bank and build more settlements to ensure that a real Palestinian state never appears.

For the large majority of hard-line Palestinians who still believe after almost 80 years that they will push the Jews of Israel into the sea, this recognition of a state will encourage them to continue to resist the reality that Israel is too powerful, too populous and too advanced to disappear.

Thus Carney’s tilting at windmills just makes the situation worse, and Canada’s position more ludicrous. Giving up Canada’s longtime policy makes no sense whatever.

David Bercuson is a senior fellow at the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy, teaches Canadian military and diplomatic history at the University of Calgary and is the author of “Canada and the Birth of Israel: A Study in Canadian Foreign Policy.”