Many Canadian political leaders were overjoyed by the Balfour Declaration. Several years after the First World War, Conservative Party leader Arthur Meighen, a Christian Zionist, claimed, “of all the results of the (war), none was more important and more fertile in human history than the reconquest of Palestine and the rededication of that country to the Jewish people.”

Open Bethlehem reveals how policies developed by the Canadian government in regard to First Nations evolved over centuries, from decimation to assimilation, to marginalization and finally, segregation. This came to inspire efforts by the governments of both South Africa and Israel to suppress the human rights and citizenship of its indigenous inhabitants.

As Canadian Dimension readers know, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign is a Palestinian movement of resistance to Israeli settler-colonialist expansion and corporate complicity with it — a successful strategy learned from the struggle against the South African Apartheid regime whose aims it echoes.

Without international pressure, Israel will continue to steal Palestinian land, demolish olive groves, build Jewish-only roads, imprison without due process and impose collective punishment on innocent Palestinians. It will continue to violate international law and dominate a defenceless people. Canadians cannot wash their hands of Palestinians’ plight.

The implication is that, should the Palestinian leadership insist on the settlers being “ethnically cleansed” from their illegal colonies, Israel would be justified in demanding tit-for-tat. If the settlers have to return to Israel, why not a population swap, with Israel’s Palestinian minority forced into the occupied territories?

After diluting a resolution about revoking the Jewish National Fund of Canada’s charitable status strongly endorsed by members in an online poll, May threatened to resign if the party didn’t organize another vote on a BDS resolution members strongly backed in a pre-convention online poll, convention caucus and full convention vote.

Yet whether we think of Syria as the paradigm of twenty-first century warfare or the Israeli matrix of control, it is “the people,” or a mobilized segment, that is being victimized. Halper’s book does the best job so far of depicting this new cartography of warfare, and deserves to be widely read and its main theses debated.

Tens of thousands of Palestinians have joined demonstrations taking place in dozens of cities across historic Palestine and in refugee camps in neighbouring Arab countries. Palestinians continue to struggle for their fundamental rights of freedom, self-determination, equality, and a right to return.

On Palestine is based upon a paradigmatic historical understanding of the ethnic cleansing of 1948, when more than half a million Arab people were forced from their homes to make way for a Jewish state. This understanding “clarifies” the connection between Zionist political ideology and the movement’s policies in the past and present.

Morgan Wheeldon seems like the ideal NDP candidate. Young, energetic with a good mix of the thoughtful and the practical—just the kind of person the party needs if it wants to connect to the younger generation of activists in Canada. So why did the party throw their candidate for Kings Hants under the bus with the 2015 campaign just a few days old?