Dan Freeman-Maloy, "AIPAC North," ZNet, June 26, 2006.

"AIPAC North" about the dramatic restructuring of what Freeman-Maloy calls "Canada's new Israel advocacy apparatus." Part 1 starts with a brief history of Zionism and carries on to the development of the Canadian branch of the Israel lobby.



In the early 20th century,

"Many Canadian Jews rejected Zionism as unfeasible, in favor of class solidarity, or out of loyalty to a project of internationalist struggle for progressive social change. Sometimes, these currents ran directly against the Zionist leadership. In 1937 Montreal, for example, a mass meeting of Jewish leftists and trade unionists denounced the "chauvinist propaganda" generated around Palestine's anti-Zionist revolt of 1936-1939, and called for "solidarity of the Jewish and Arab toiling masses."[7] ...

"But class-based notions of solidarity between oppressed people remained weak on the question of indigenous struggle. Zionism, after all, reflected a broad European consensus regarding the moral soundness of colonizing inhabited territory. And in Canadian society, itself the product of just such a process, sustained resistance to this was rare. It became weaker still as the base of Canadian Jewish working class radicalism eroded."

[...]

The Nazi holocaust "annihilated the principal base for Jewish working class radicalism, and also the most relevant context for its largely progressive nationalist varieties. Jewish radicalism's East European centre of gravity was mostly obliterated.... Jewish immigration to Canada was prohibited during the time of the worst atrocities, and a 1946 Gallup poll put Jews second from the top of the list of immigrant ethnicities unwanted by the Canadian public (after Japanese)....By the late 1940s, Canadian Jewish identification with the Zionist project had become extremely widespread.[8]"

[...]

"Every year from 1976 on, Israel was the lead recipient of U.S. foreign aid.[13] The U.S. supported Israel as it maintained its artificial Jewish demographic majority, attacked the refugee-led Palestinian resistance, and expanded settlements further into occupied territory. Israel continued the tradition of Zionist collaboration, joining the U.S. in supporting the contra war against Sandinista Nicaragua, the South African Apartheid regime, and brutal dictatorships from Zaire (Congo) to El Salvador.[14] Through the Jerusalem-based parent organization of Canada's United Israel Appeal, and through membership of the fundraising federations which directed it in the U.S. Council of Jewish Federations, the Canadian Jewish establishment was tied to both sides of this alliance. And as the century wound down, mainstream Canadian Jewish organization was pulled into increasing alignment with it."

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