Of all the staunchly pro-Israel Western powers who mouth support for a ‘two-state’ solution to Israel’s ‘conflict’ with the Palestinian people, no one puts its money where its mouth isn’t more than Canada.

Ottawa’s formal position appears straightforward, even just-minded.

Canada “recognizes the Palestinian right to self-determination,” Foreign Affairs Canada declares at its website, and is “committed to the goal of a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East, including the creation of a Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security with Israel.”

Canada doesn’t recognize “permanent Israeli control” over the Palestinian territories, territories Israel has occupied for the past 57 years, colonizing them with its own citizens, and effectively annexing them.

Israel is indeed an occupying power, Canada has consistently maintained since 1967, therefore subject to the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Israel insists the Palestinian territories are “disputed,” not occupied, and that Geneva IV doesn’t apply to its presence there, but its steadfast ally, Canada, begs to differ.

Geneva IV has been embedded in Canadian domestic legislation, as the Geneva Conventions Act, so Canada is strictly bound to abide by it, beginning with common Article 1 of all four of the 1949 Geneva Conventions.

“The High Contracting Parties [e.g. Canada] undertake to respect and to ensure respect for the present Convention in all circumstances.”

As for those 300-plus Jewish-only settlements and outposts up and down the West Bank and encircling Jerusalem, now home to 750,000 Israeli Jews (“Les colonies,” Canada calls them at its French-language website), these are illegal under Geneva IV, Canada maintains, and “constitute a serious obstacle to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace.”

To be precise, Israel’s colonies breach Article 49(6) of Geneva IV — a “grave breach” under Geneva’s 1977 Protocol Additional, and a war crime under Article 8(2)(b)(viii) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

Palestinian youth detained at a Hebron checkpoint.

Lest there be any doubt about its commitment to the rules-based international order, Canada’s official position is that Israel “must fully respect international human rights and humanitarian law” — the sina qua non for creating a “climate conducive to achieving a just, lasting and comprehensive peace settlement.”

Thus goes Trudeau government lip service to a just, durable peace in occupied Palestine/Israel.

In the first two months of Israel’s plausibly genocidal war on Gaza, however, Ottawa green-lit $28.5 million worth of military exports to Israel. Among these, bombs, torpedoes, rockets, missiles, other explosive devices, and a variety of unmanned aerial vehicles and aviation hardware.

With the death toll rising, in mid-September, Canada suspended 30 active permits for weapon transfers to Israel, and declared its opposition to the transfer of 50,000 “highly explosive” mortars from Quebec to Israel, via the US.

Still, notwithstanding the July 19 Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice that Israel’s occupation and associated settlement enterprise are unlawful, and that UN member states must refrain from extending aid and assistance, the Canadian government continues to allow settlement products to be sold in Canada, tariff-free under the Canada-Israel Free Trade Agreement — labeled ‘Product of Israel,’ no less.

And, the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) grants charitable status to a host of Canadian organizations that funnel funds to Israeli settlement groups and ‘lone soldiers’ of the Israeli Occupation Forces, some of them Canadian.

Palestine advocates Ahed Tamimi & Miko Peled confront Israeli cop in Nabi Saleh (David Kattenburg)

In 2022, over 200 registered Canadian charities funneled $362 million to Israeli organizations linked to the Israeli army and air force, Israeli government agencies, Jewish supremacist groups, and West Bank colonies, in breach of CRA statutes.

Now, a group of Canadian organizations are calling on the CRA to cut these groups off.

They have reason to be optimistic about their prospects. On August 8, Canada’s most venerable Zionist charity and benefactor of the Jewish colonization project, the Jewish National Fund of Canada, had its status revoked.

JNF appealed the decision, seeking judicial review at the Federal Court of Canada, and requesting the court to expunge the publication of the revocation in the Canada Gazette.

The court hasn’t the jurisdiction to do so, Federal Court of Canada Justice Whyte Nowak ruled on November 8, dismissing the request. The Court will now proceed to consider the remainder of JNF’s judicial review application.

Meanwhile, in a report released this past Friday, Just Peace Advocates and Independent Jewish Voices Canada document millions of dollars in charitable donations funneled by ostensibly charitable Canadian groups to a handful of other Israeli organizations engaged in colonizing the West Bank, and soldier-settler violence against Palestinians. Just Peace Advocates and IJV are calling on the Canadian government to suspend the charitable status of these organizations, and to carry out audits and criminal investigations of their activities.

Among these groups — Mizrachi Organization of Canada, Jewish Heritage Foundation of Canada, and the Heseg Foundation.

“Under the Guise of Charity: Canadian Funding for War Crimes in Occupied Palestine” was publicly released at a press conference in Toronto on November 8. Listen to the proceedings in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

In order of appearance: Alice Klein, member of Independent Jewish Voices Canada; Anver Emon, Professor of Law and History at University of Toronto; Khaled Mouammar, founder of the Canadian Arab Federation, and, the report’s co-author, Miles Howe, Assistant Professor of Critical Criminology at Brock University.

The press conference also featured a presentation by Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Since the release of her most recent report to the UN Human Rights Council, “Genocide as Colonial Erasure,” Albanese has been the target of attacks by Israel and its surrogates across Europe and North America.

Listen to Friday’s press conference in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.