Palestinians from Tantura, a small Arab fishing village, are expelled to Jordan during the Nakba, June 1948. Photo by Benno Rothenberg/Meitar Collection/National Library of Israel/Wikimedia Commons.

As a Canadian-born citizen of Palestinian origin, I learned that part of confronting my experience of intergenerational trauma and injustice includes reflecting on Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation policies towards Indigenous peoples, which in turn helps to explain how Canada shapes and advances Zionism’s aims.

Every year in May, Palestinians memorialize the Nakba (“the Catastrophe”) which refers to the process whereby Palestinians were forced out of their ancestral homelands through ethnic cleansing and political violence, driven by international collusion with Israel’s settler-colonial expansion that persists to this day. I use the word memorialize deliberately because the process that the Nakba names has been called a “memoricide”: a relentless effort to erase anything related to Palestinian identity or indigeneity and to expunge it from the world’s—and more particularly the West’s—collective historic and political imagination.

For Palestinians, preserving our stories, our teachings, our ways of being, and our identities are all part of resistance through memory. Remembering is what keeps who we are alive.

This year, I am remembering and honouring my parents, who survived being born and raised in refugee camps in Lebanon and lived through the Lebanese civil war. I am especially remembering my late father, who passed away last year, and who happened to be born on October 7, 1951—three years after the initial Nakba, and 72 years before a day that would change our world forever.

The Nakba is an ongoing process that officially began during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, although the Zionist ideological groundwork for it was first laid in 1799 during the French colonial invasion of the region by Napoleon. Some three decades years later, British colonialists stepped in. Since the events of October 7, 2023, the Nakba and Palestinian grievances have returned to centre stage, putting to rest any risk that they will disappear down the memory hole and vanish from the hearts and minds of people of conscience worldwide.

Renewed attention to the plight of the Palestinian people has cast light on the role of myriad elements of Canadian society in the Nakba: from academia to political organizations to state and non-state actors. It has also drawn attention to Canada’s outsize historic role in advancing Zionist aims, which also helps to explain Canada’s current policies and positions. And it provides perspective on the real nature of the politics of Truth and Reconciliation with respect to Indigenous peoples.

As Véronique Sioufi observes in a 2024 article titled “If Canada wanted reconciliation, it would stand with Palestine”:

The Canadian state has tried to cultivate an image and identity as an exception among settler colonial nations—a leader in both Indigenous reconciliation and multiculturalism domestically and a neutral peacemaker on the world stage.

There’s one obvious exception to this cultivated image. Canada has made an exception of Palestine in its self-proclaimed dedication to racial equity and global human rights, supporting Israel unconditionally despite its documented apartheid, arbitrary detention and torture (including of children), forced expulsions, illegal settlements, ethnic cleansing and genocide against the indigenous Palestinian people.

The author’s parents. Photo submitted.

The Jewish Legion in Canada

In 1918, a Jewish Legion was established in Windsor, Nova Scotia. Its objective was to recruit Jewish people from across North America to fight alongside the British Empire in the First World War. Jews enlisted from all over the world. Among the volunteers was David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel and architect of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, and Yitzhak Ben........

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