Dan Freeman-Maloy, "AIPAC North, "Israel Advocacy" in Canada, Part 2: The Emergence of CIJA," ZNet, June 26, 2006.

In 1998, Canada's UIA and the CJF's Canadian region merged to form the United Israel Appeal Federations Canada (UIAFC). Under the increasing power of these groups, working class culture and organization had already been marginalized within the Canadian Jewish mainstream. A Toronto respondent to a study published in 1990 by the deeply conservative Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs explained that "there is little respect for the poor" in mainstream Jewish organization, "and not only are they not represented, they are not missed."[1] As for Israel-Palestine, the establishment's uncritical support for Israel had already been tested by the massacres of Palestinian refugees in 1982 Lebanon and the brutal repression of the 1987 uprising in the occupied West Bank and Gaza. It had held firm.[2] This support so thoroughly permeated mainstream organization that the same Jerusalem Center study identified "public support for the Palestine Liberation Organization cause" as a way for Montreal Jews to lose established community affiliation.[3] At the turn of the century, Canada's mainstream Jewish organizations thus found themselves under the consolidated control of a corporate establishment loyal to Israel and tied to the United States.




Recommend this Post

Sphere: Related Content