Artwork by Fayez Al-Hasani.
Ceasefire Grey Bruce is hosting 'United for Peace,' an educational event about Palestine, on Wednesday, October 9th at the Harmony Centre, 890 4th Avenue East in Owen Sound.
The event is set to get underway at 6pm and will feature a short video entitled 'How Israel Was Created', a Q&A discussion, and will welcome Guest Speaker Chava Finkler from Independent Jewish Voices (IJV).
Donations will be accepted to the Saugeen First Nations Food Bank.
We had a chance to chat with Chava recently by phone.
Chava became an activist in solidarity with Palestinians in 1982 when she was in her early 20s. "I had gone to Israel on a one way ticket because I'm Jewish and I thought I would make aliyah," Chava said, explaining that in Hebrew aliyah means 'going up, or 'raising yourself' and is used in reference to Jews moving to Israel.
The plan was to make a permanent move to Israel but Chava came back less than a year later. "I was living in a kibbutz [kibbutz means 'gathering' in Hebrew; a communal settlement in Israel] half a mile from the Lebanese border so I was there during the invasion of Lebanon in 1981," she said.
During a three week stay in a bomb shelter, Chava said she discovered "what they weren't telling us."
Israeli soldiers in the Kibbutz were bragging to each other about diverting water from the Litani River in Lebanon to northern Israel and about using Palestinians as target practice.
"I was a young, impressionable Jewish kid who wanted to make my home there," Chava said, adding that because she was walking with volunteers from Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland at the time the soldiers thought they wouldn't understand what was being said.
"It was emotionally very difficult," she said, adding that "that was the first time I realized that the Zionist myth that I had been inculcated with since the day I was born was actually a lie."
Shortly after returning home there was another invasion in Lebanon, followed by the massacre of Sabra and Shatila, two Palestinian refugee camps located in Lebanon.
"It was a wholesale slaughter," Chava said.
Outraged, Chava and some of her Jewish friends occupied the Israeli consulate in Toronto. "After the massacre we were organizing with other Jewish people and other Palestinians and progressive people to try to force some sense of justice," Chava said, adding that the largest protest in the world against what happened at Sabra and Shatila was actually in Israel when 400,000 people, mostly Israelis, took to the streets to protest the massacre.
Having attended Hebrew school in Toronto, Chava said she was educated into Zionism and characterized it as Israeli patriotism "that was devoid of social context."
"I was educated to be a Zionist without asking questions about what Zionism meant," she said.
"It's like as Canadians we're taught, we sing every day 'our home and native land' but who is the native," Chava said. "Nobody taught us about residential schools."
Chava added that Zionism was tied to British colonialism because it started with the British people. "It was politically expedient to create a home for a group that would be loyal to them," she said.
Laurence Oliphant was a UK Member of Parliament from 1865 to 1868 and was committed to establishing Jewish settlements in what is now Israel. In his book 'Land of Gilead,' in relation to Palestinians, Oliphant wrote, "In fact, the same system might be pursued which we have adopted with success in Canada with our North American Indian tribes who are confined to their 'reserves' and live peaceably upon them in the midst of the settled agricultural population."
When Chava was a child she thought Israel was a home for all Jewish people "and now I think that we were thieves, we dispossessed another people," she said, adding that the idea that Jews would be safe in their own land was the biggest irony because the current state of Israel is a very unsafe place for Jewish people to be.
Chava explained that with the escalation of violence in the region, Israelis from the north and the south have been evacuated and forced into the centre of the country.
"Israel has a political vision of a greater Israel so my worry is that they want more land and that they will justify occupation of the area just like they did earlier," Chava said.
While she acknowledged she doesn't know enough about the intentions of current leadership she said, "if you dispossess an entire people from their homes do you really expect them to walk away and give up, they're not going to, and there's no reason they should."
At the time of publishing Israel was bombing Beirut, southern Lebanon, Bekaa Valley, Syria, Yemen, Gaza and the West Bank.
After over 40 years of advocacy, Chava said, "Far be it from me to have an answer, it's for the Palestinian people to decide what they want," but said the current situation "can breed a real sense of hopelessness."
Chava went on to say that it can feel to the rest of us that we're powerless and that nothing is changing but added that over time things are changing.
"When I protested in 1982 there was not the kind of national organization or critique by Jews but now we have Independent Jewish Voices, that's a ground swell of Jewish people who reject Zionism and who reject the Israel status quo," Chava said, adding that Israel cannot survive without the financial and political support of Jewish people living outside its borders.
"So if you have communities where the people are saying, 'No we don't want to support Israel,' it's a problem politically for them, not only because they're not going to get the donations but because people aren't going to speak up for them, so things are changing, yes they're changing incrementally and far too slowly for the Palestinian people but they are changing."
Chava remarked about the rise of protests at the universities in the US and Canada and said that kind of uprising is very reminiscent of what happened during the Vietnam War.
She also wanted to make sure we didn't underestimate the power of organizing.
"Independent Jewish Voices is a national organization of Jewish people who support Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions [the BDS Movement] and the right of return of every Palestinian to their ancestral home," Chava said. "We are not a Zionist organization, we are its antithesis."
Chava went on to say that initially the mainstream Jewish community ignored IJV, calling them fringe and extremists, but since October 7, 2023, their membership has doubled. Chava belongs to the London chapter and said that they're in the process of initiating a new chapter in Grey Bruce.
She also didn't want us to underestimate the influence of rural Canada. "It's really easy to think that all the big decisions are made in Toronto or in Ottawa... but I think it's important for people who live on the outskirts to not underestimate their influence," Chava said.
"It's not just people who live in Grey Bruce, if we look at all the people who live rurally across the country, that's a large segment of the population, especially when in so many cases it's people who live rurally who provide the food and the labour that feeds the people in the cities... like with a certain degree of creativity there's a lot they could do that would have a political impact."
Join Ceasefire Grey Bruce for 'United for Peace' on Wednesday, October 9, from 6 to 9pm at the Harmony Centre in Owen Sound.
Chava Finkler is the guest speaker at the upcoming October 9 education event at the Harmony Centre in Owen Sound.
See also: Ceasefire Grey Bruce holds education event in Port Elgin
Last updated October 5, 2024.
