John Ibbitson - Friday, October 15, 2004 Globe and Mail
A storm is brewing at Foreign Affairs.
Senior government officials are increasingly angry - that most undiplomatic of emotions - about what they claim is a major but surreptitious shift in this nation's foreign policy. Canada, they say, is moving away from a balanced approach toward the Middle East in favour of explicit and virtually unqualified support for Israel.
Traditionally, Canadian foreign policy has sought to mediate the competing claims of Israel and the Arab world. This country supports Israel as a democratic country under threat from terrorism and entitled to defend itself. It supports as well the right of the Palestinian people to a state of their own, and has not hesitated to criticize actions by Israel that impair progress toward that goal.
This has led many supporters of Israel to accuse the Canadian diplomatic corps of being inherently pro-Arab. Arabists respond that the political influence of the Canadian Jewish community distorts this country's supposedly evenhanded approach.
People close to the issue within the bureaucracy are alarmed by what they say is a recent and emphatic tilt by the Paul Martin government in favour of Israel. They maintain that responsibility for managing the Middle East file has shifted from the Lester B. Pearson Building, home of Foreign Affairs in Ottawa, to our embassy in Tel Aviv, where senior diplomat Jill Sinclair serves as special co-ordinator of the Middle East peace process. They complain that Ms. Sinclair is ignoring Arab and Palestinian contacts in favour of close co-operation with Israeli officials.
They cite a recent United Nations General Assembly vote criticizing Israel's security wall. One hundred and fifty nations supported the resolution. Only Israel, Australia, the United States and its dependencies opposed it. Canada was one of 10 nations, and the only developed nation, that abstained.
They cite as well a statement by Canada strongly criticizing Peter Hansen, commissioner-general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, who acknowledged that UNRWA may have Hamas members on its payroll. They claim that Justice Minister Irwin Cotler, a passionate supporter of Israel, is involving himself in Foreign Affairs deliberations, and generally exerting pressure on the administration to take a more pro-Israel stand. And they point to Jonathan Fried, the Prime Minister's foreign policy adviser, whom they insist is fixated on security issues, at the expense of retaining a balanced foreign policy.
Indeed, the whole tilt toward Israel, critics claim, is part of a reorientation of the Martin government toward a security-trumps-all stand, part of this country's efforts to reassure nervous Americans about Canada's trustworthiness as an ally. It also reflects once again the schism between the Chrétien and Martin wings of the Liberal Party. Jean Chrétien was sympathetic to the argument that Western indifference to the plight of the Muslim peoples contributes to Islamist terrorism.
Sources report that cabinet debated the issue last week, though nothing was resolved. Nonetheless, a large body of officials at Foreign Affairs and at the Canadian International Development Agency are convinced that Canada is about to sacrifice its hard-won reputation as an honest broker in the Middle East - a reputation stretching back to Pearson's intervention in the 1956 Suez crisis, which led to the first UN peacekeeping force - in exchange for uncritical, ready-aye-ready support for Israel, partly for its own sake and partly as a strategy to win American approbation.
Are these criticisms fair? The many supporters of Israel in Canada would say no. They would say that, to the extent any rebalancing is under way, it simply redresses the historic pro-Arab bias in Canadian foreign policy.
A discussion this fundamental to Canada's place in the world deserves to be moved from the corridors of Foreign Affairs into the light of public debate. If Canada is in the midst of altering its stand on the Middle East, especially at such a critical time, the country should be behind that change. Foreign policy is too important to be left to politicians.