Suddenly, Canada decides state boycotts are okay.

The BDS Movement will be very interested to learn about this!

The government told these students that boycotting an entire state is bigoted. Now the government encourages them to do the exact same thing. | Copyright © Jake Landau, all rights reserved.

The BDS Movement is a nonviolent strategy adopted by Pro-Palestine activists, encouraging the public to boycott and divest from Israeli companies, and for governments to place economic sanctions on trade with Israel.

Opponents of this movement will reflexively call it antisemitic, and proponents will say that it has nothing to do with Jews, and everything to do with actions by the State of Israel which they oppose.

Personally, I side with the latter. For decades, Palestinians have lived under a system of oppression, regardless of whether they have residency in Israel, are occupied by the military in Gaza and the West Bank, or are permanent refugees in neighbouring states.

Millions of Palestinians live under the auspice of the Israeli government, and yet do not have full citizenship or the right to vote in Israeli elections.

This is clearly a system of apartheid, and it has been maintained through numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity for which Israel is now being prosecuted at the ICJ, and for which Benjamin Netanyahu has had an arrest warrant issued by the ICC.

So to be quite frank, the fact that a Palestinian Canadian whose family has been slaughtered by a state’s military might not want to purchase products from that state isn’t something thaat bothers me.

It’s probably one of the calmest reactions you could have, really. But for years, people who boycott Israeli products are frequently called antisemites, or when they’re Jewish, “self-hating Jews”.

On Israeli Independence Day in 2021, known to Palestinians as the Nakba, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau explicitly condemned BDS as attacking Jewish Canadians. I thoroughly disagree with this, and I condemn a fucking goy accusing anti-Zionist Jews of attacking their own people.

And a side note: If you ever accuse me of hating my own Jewishness, then I promise that even our almighty God will not be powerful enough to save you.

I am a proud Jew, and when I criticize Israel it is on the moral principles that Judaism teaches me to be right and true. Apartheid is wrong, ethnostates are wrong, and I have no interest in a country where my Palestinian friends are not equal to me.

Yet now, in the wake of Trump’s annexation threats, and his use of tariffs as an economic weapon, suddenly the Trudeau government has changed its tune.

After Trump may have dithered on his tariff threat with a thirty-day reprieve until March, Canada and the provinces similarly withdrew our retaliatory measures, but kept our powder dry for when Trump inevitably returns for a second bout.

However, many Canadians continue to boycott American products, and for the first time the “Made in Canada” and “Product of Canada” labels have become a true selling point which make Canadian consumers ignore the price.

But let’s play that back again. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the same Prime Minister who called it an “attack” to boycott Israel for killing people, gave a televised speech telling Canadians to boycott American products and stop travelling to American destinations.

Why is it morally wrong to boycott a state whose military commits war crimes, but morally okay to boycott a state for a trade dispute? It sounds like our principles aren’t very consistent here.

Mind you: I am participating in this boycott, and I have literally written a column called “Canada must freeze and starve the treacherous Yankee.”

Canada must freeze and starve the treacherous Yankee.

So I’m not saying we shouldn’t boycott America, but I am questioning whether we will continue to demonize people who participate in the BDS Movement. Because surely, their motivations are even more valid than ours are.

This double-standard is extremely clear. I will continue to point it out wherever I see it. And I expect you to point it out, too.