Canada Finally Reckons with Netanyahu’s War on Gaza

What is happening in Gaza can no longer be claimed to bear any resemblance to Israeli self-defence.

That’s been true long enough that Prime Minister Mark Carney seemed to be tagging along rather than trail-blazing when he announced Wednesday that Canada will recognize the state of Palestine in September if reforms are made.

Canada joined 14 other countries in a joint declaration that also demanded “an immediate ceasefire” and “the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages of Hamas.”

Carney reiterated support for Israel’s right to exist and defend itself but blasted the “ongoing failure by the Israeli government to prevent the rapidly deteriorating humanitarian disaster in Gaza, with impeded access to food and other essential humanitarian supplies.”

The nightmare kept escalating. A global gambit became overdue. And so Canada now “recognizes the Palestinian right to self-determination and supports the creation of a sovereign, independent, viable, democratic, and territorially contiguous Palestinian state,” according to Global Affairs Canada.

Oct. 7 and after

In the immediate wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas that killed more than 1,200 Israelis, with 240 more taken hostage, the world stood shoulder to shoulder with the Jewish homeland. There was universal condemnation of the terrorist group and its monstrous crime.

In response, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the invasion of Gaza in October 2023, citing Israel’s right to defend itself. He called on the residents of Gaza to “leave now because we will operate forcefully everywhere.” His own words made clear there was no place to go. Netanyahu also declared that Israel would reduce Gaza to “rubble.”

And that is the form that “self-defence” has taken. Gaza has been virtually razed by the Israeli military. Homes, hospitals, mosques, churches, roads, schools and even refugee camps have been blown to bits. A reported 70 per cent of Gaza’s buildings have been destroyed.

Early in the war one of Netanyahu’s cabinet ministers, Amichay Eliyahu, even suggested that dropping a nuclear weapon on Gaza and killing everyone would be one way of dealing with Hamas. He was temporarily suspended from cabinet for his outrageous outburst but quickly reinstated.

The minister of heritage from the far-right Jewish Power party told radio station Kol BaRama “all Gaza will be Jewish” and cleared for new settlements.

He also initially denied there was a food shortage in Gaza but then blamed Hamas. “We are starving them? They are starving them!” Eliyahu said, adding “there is no nation that feeds its enemies.” He said, “The government is racing ahead for Gaza to be wiped out.”

Eliyahu is not some fringe voice in Israel. As Yair Rosenberg wrote this week in the Atlantic, the far-right constituency he represents provides essential coalition support for Netanyahu’s political survival — as long as Netanyahu delivers on their obsession with Israeli expansion into Gaza.

The casualties resulting from that ruthless pact have been horrifying. According to Wikipedia, 59,866 Palestinians have been killed during the 21-month war. The darker disaster behind that grotesque number is that about 80 per cent of the deaths have been civilians. Seventy per cent of those killed in residential buildings in Gaza were women and children and the elderly.

According to multiple reports, more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed while trying to access food at Israeli and American-run distribution sites. There are now reports of people who have starved to death, while thousands of Palestinian children are suffering from malnutrition. Aid organizations from around the world are begging Israel to allow food and medicine into Gaza to avoid a further humanitarian disaster.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney added his voice on July 25 to the growing disapproval of how conditions on the ground in Gaza are spiralling towards disaster.

“Canada condemns the Israeli government’s failure to prevent the rapidly deteriorating humanitarian disaster in Gaza,” he said in a statement. “Israel’s control of aid distribution must be replaced by comprehensive provision of humanitarian assistance by international organizations. Many of these are holding significant Canadian-funded aid which has been blocked from delivery to starving civilians. This denial of humanitarian aid is a violation of international law.”

For its part, the Netanyahu government has blamed Hamas for the food shortages and says it is “investigating” reports that the Israeli military fired on Palestinians trying to get what little food Israel is distributing. The results of those investigations are rarely made public.

Global support for Israel’s government receding

Given the humanitarian disaster unfolding in Gaza, international support for Netanyahu’s war has been dwindling. The universal and unqualified support for Israel after the Hamas attack has been replaced by worldwide criticism of how the war is being conducted. Calling it “self-defence” has become a cruel joke.

Former president Joe Biden criticized Israel for what he called its “indiscriminate” bombing campaign that often targeted civilian sites. Biden stopped sending 2,000-pound bombs to Netanyahu and told his government to take greater precautions to reduce civilian casualties. President Donald Trump has restored these massive weapons to Israel.

The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The International Court of Justice at The Hague determined that Israel’s settlements on Palestinian territory were “unlawful” and should be immediately disbanded. The court also said that Israel should pay reparations to Palestinians for the damages of the illegal occupation that began in 1967. It is the longest-running occupation in modern history.

The United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to call for Israel to end its occupation of Palestinian territories within a year.

France, Germany and the United Kingdom issued a joint statement demanding that the catastrophe unfolding in Gaza come to an immediate end.

In April, French President Emmanuel Macron presaged Wednesday’s 15-country announcement by making his the first of the G7 countries to signal an intent to recognize Palestinian statehood when the UN returns in the autumn.

The United Kingdom followed, earlier this week, saying it will do the same if Israel doesn’t adhere to a ceasefire.

As of last week, 148 of the 193 member states of the United Nations have independently recognized Palestine as a way of keeping the two-state solution alive.

Regardless, Israel has made it clear it has no interest in a two-state solution.

Wednesday’s joint announcement further isolates Israel on the international scene. The European Union was Israel’s largest trading partner in 2024, receiving 32 per cent of Israeli exports, leaving the country seriously vulnerable to sanctions.

Still, it remains to be seen if the reforms required by the 15 countries can materialize. Carney yesterday said the Palestinian Authority would have to make serious changes to how it governs, hold elections in 2026 without any role for Hamas and demilitarize the Palestinian state.

The case for calling it genocide

As Carney mulled whether to join the call to recognize Palestinian statehood, he faced a momentous question. Does the Netanyahu government’s conduct of the war and explanations for it amount to genocide?

In 1948, the UN defined genocide as the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”

In December 2023, South Africa went to the International Court of Justice, where it accused Israel of genocide in Gaza. Israel was given nine months to prepare its rebuttal.

But when time ran out, the 17-member panel of judges of the court gave the Netanyahu government a six-month extension to prepare its case. There are reports that it could take years for the court to reach a decision.

In December 2024, the human rights group Amnesty International issued a landmark report accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza.

A number of experts working in this field agreed. One of them is Omer Bartov, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University in Rhode Island. Brown is a leading research university with a world-renowned staff.

Bartov is uniquely qualified to assess what is really going on in Gaza. Writing an exhaustive guest column in the New York Times, this is what he thought a month after the Hamas attack on Israel.

“I believed there was evidence that the Israeli military had committed war crimes and potentially crimes against humanity in its counterattack on Gaza. But contrary to the cries of Israel’s fiercest critics, the evidence did not seem to me to rise to the crime of genocide.”

But then Bartov began to see an undeniable connection between the genocidal statements of intent from the Netanyahu government and the operations of the Israeli military.

The politicians described Palestinians as “human animals” and called for their “total annihilation.” Nissim Vaturi, the deputy Speaker of Israel’s parliament, said that Israel’s task was “erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.”

The Israeli army was listening. By May 2024, the Israel Defense Forces, or IDF, had ordered a million Palestinians living in Rafah, the last intact city in Gaza, to move to a beach area where there was no shelter. The IDF then proceeded to destroy Rafah.

The Israeli goal was becoming crystal clear to Bartov: to either force the population to abandon the strip altogether, or ensure that there wasn’t the food, water, shelter or infrastructure to “maintain or reconstitute their existence as a group.”

That conclusion crushed Bartov but didn’t stop him from declaring what he thought was really going on.

“My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the IDF as a soldier and officer, and spent most of my career writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one.”

So, apparently, can two of Israel’s best-known human rights groups. Both B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel publicly concluded that Israel had crossed the ultimate red line in the Gaza war.

It marks the first time that major human rights groups within Israel have levelled that dire change against the government.

Noting the displacement of all of Gaza’s two million residents, B’Tselem concluded that the Israeli campaign amounted to “co-ordinated action to intentionally destroy Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip.... In other words, Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”

The Netanyahu government has dismissed out of hand the claims of these Israeli human rights groups as “baseless.”

It is the standard tactic that Netanyahu uses against all his critics. Denial or deflection.

When accusations come his way, Netanyahu says all the blame belongs to Hamas. The denials are sometimes absurd. Netanyahu, for example, called claims that Israel was causing starvation in Gaza “a bold-faced lie.”

That denial flies in the face of the heartbreaking pictures the world is seeing out of Gaza.

“Mounting evidence shows widespread starvation, malnutrition, and disease driving a rise in hunger-related deaths,” the UN’s Integrated Food Security Phase Classification organization said in its most a recent alert. It is the first time the organization has reported that “famine” is underway in Gaza.

Netanyahu’s deadly recalcitrance

With mounting international pressure for Israel to agree to an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, will Netanyahu rebuff the far-right Israelis who keep him in power and chart a new path?

Likely only with token moves, such as the recent decision to allow 120 trucks of food per day into Gaza. It normally takes over 500 trucks per day to meet the needs of the people.

Behind such gestures Netanyahu will stay the course. And that’s because Israel still enjoys the military, financial and political support of Donald Trump.

That is the key voice missing from the group of 15 countries that jointly issued their call to recognize Palestine yesterday.

Without support from Trump, Netanyahu could not make endless war. But Trump, who likes to portray himself as a peacemaker, has turned a blind eye to what Pope Leo XIV has called the barbaric conflict going on in Gaza.

Last Friday the United States and Israel pulled out of talks aimed at achieving a ceasefire in Gaza. Just before Trump flew off for a weekend of golf at his luxury courses in Scotland, this is what he had to say about Hamas: “I think they want to die and it’s very, very bad.

“And it got to a point where you’re going to have to finish the job,” Trump said.

Those terrible words could give the green light to the genocide the rest of the world is trying desperately to stop.