Canada's complicity in Gaza genocide shows its leaders are morally bankrupt

The current crisis is rooted in decades of a brutal occupation, peace processes repeatedly sabotaged by Israel, and repeated incidents of Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity.

 

By Fareed Khan 
A version of this article can be found on Substack.

 

Last week, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney issued a strong public condemnation following a social media post by Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. The post included footage of activists from the Global Sumud Flotilla—who were attempting to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza—being intercepted by Israeli forces in international waters. The video showed the activists bound and held in stress positions while Ben-Gvir taunted and insulted them. Carney stated: “The abominable treatment of civilians aboard the flotilla, including that which is documented in footage shared by Itamar Ben-Gvir, is unacceptable.”

This selective outrage exposes a glaring moral inconsistency at the heart of Carney’s foreign policy. While his government rightly condemns specific abuses against flotilla participants—including Canadian citizens—it continues to pursue policies that fuel a far broader conflict, enabling civilian suffering on a horrifying scale, including the sale of Canadian weapons to Israel. Critics rightly argue that this reveals a government that is both unacceptable and morally bankrupt—one that maintains normalized relations with a state accused of genocide, while turning a blind eye to Canadian-made weapons and components flowing to Israel as it brutalizes a helpless population.

The Gaza genocide, triggered by Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attacks, has escalated into one of the deadliest episodes of mass violence in the region’s history since the Iraq War and the Syrian civil war. According to data released by Euromed Human Rights Monitor, the only organization providing independent death toll figures, it is estimated that more than 80,000 Palestinians have been killed as of the end of May 2026, with estimates that there may be anywhere from 377,000 to more than 680,000 buried under Gaza’s rubble, most of them women and children. Entire neighbourhoods have been devastated, infrastructure including hospitals, schools, and water systems lies in ruins, and mass displacement has occurred repeatedly creating a refugee population of approximately 1.9 million.

Multiple respected organizations have concluded that Israel’s actions meet the legal threshold for genocide--defined under the 1948 UN Genocide Convention as acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. These include:

• Amnesty International: Documented “sufficient basis” for genocide, citing killings, serious harm, and conditions calculated to bring about physical destruction.
• Human Rights Watch: Accused Israel of genocidal acts, including deprivation of water and essential resources.
• B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel: Prominent Israeli organizations that examined policies, official statements, and outcomes, concluding coordinated action to destroy Palestinian society in Gaza.
• International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS): Declared Israel’s policies constitute genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, citing mass civilian casualties, destruction of life-sustaining systems, and targeting of children.
• United Nations bodies and experts: Various reports and special rapporteurs have highlighted patterns consistent with genocide characteristics, including starvation as a weapon and widespread destruction.

Noted Israeli Holocaust and genocide scholars, have added weight to these assessments by drawing on direct evidence from within Israeli society, including a poll published by Haaretz in May 2025 which reported that 47% of Israel Jews support the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, and 82% who support their ethnic cleansing, and 56% support ethnically cleansing all Palestinians from territories controlled by Israel. These are not fringe views but conclusions from rigorous documentation by human rights monitors, legal analysts, and scholars.

Canada’s Role: Arms Exports and Complicity

Despite these findings, Canada under Prime Minister Mark Carney (as well as former PM Justin Trudeau) has maintained elements of military cooperation with Israel. While direct export permits to Israel were paused, loopholes persist which allow components routed through the United States. Reports from civil society and parliamentarians indicate ongoing flows of Canadian-made weapons and technology, contradicting claims of a full embargo.

This is unacceptable. International law, including the Arms Trade Treaty and Canada’s own Export and Import Permits Act, imposes obligations to halt transfers where there is a clear risk of use in serious violations of international humanitarian law or genocide. Continuing such sales—directly or indirectly—implicates Canada in prolonging the suffering. Critics, including NDP voices and groups like Oxfam and Unifor, argue this breaches both domestic commitments and international duties.

Carney’s government singles out figures like Ben-Gvir for sanctions while sustaining the broader military relationship with Israel. Ben-Gvir is an extremist, but focusing solely on him distracts from systemic issues: the 19 year blockade of Gaza (deemed collective punishment by many), illegal settlement expansion in the West Bank (a violation under international law), and the human toll in the Gaza genocide. Official Israeli statements invoking “erasing” threats or total destruction, combined with operational outcomes, fuel the genocide determinations of international voices.

Historical Context and Moral Failure

The current crisis did not emerge in a vacuum. It is rooted in decades of a brutal occupation, peace processes repeatedly sabotaged by Israel which has voted against the creation of a Palestinian state, and repeated incidents of Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity. Israel’s right to security after October 7, 2023 is clear. However, international humanitarian law requires that any response respect the principles of proportionality, distinction between combatants and civilians, and the prohibition on collective punishment. Critics argue that Israel has disregarded these obligations. The immense scale of destruction in Gaza—death toll estimates of up to 30% of the population, the erasure of entire family lines, and the devastation of cultural and educational infrastructure—has prompted serious questions about whether the campaign goes beyond legitimate self-defence and reflects an intent to inflict indiscriminate harm on an entire society.

A morally coherent policy for Canada would be to impose a comprehensive two-way arms embargo, push for accountability for Israel at the ICC and ICJ, suspend the Canada-Israel free trade agreement, call for an end to the occupation, and support a viable political solution that pursues freedom and justice for Palestinians. Instead, Carney’s selective statements and dangerous comments about a “Zionist Palestinian state”, and continued arms exports project ignorance and hypocrisy. Condemning flotilla abuses while enabling the larger machinery of war undermines Canada’s claimed commitment to human rights and the so-called “rules-based international order.” This is not mere policy disagreement. It is moral bankruptcy. When a government prioritizes alliances and trade over halting contributions to alleged genocide—despite warnings from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Israeli NGOs, the UN, and genocide scholars—Canada forfeits ethical legitimacy. Canadians deserve better--a foreign policy grounded in consistent principles, not selective indignation.

The flotilla incident is abominable but not surprising given Israel’s criminal leadership. Far more so is the tolerance of policies enabling mass death and destruction. Prime Minister Carney must end all Canadian military support and cooperation with Israel, lead in international accountability efforts against a state committing genocide, and align pro-human rights rhetoric with actions that uphold universal human dignity. Anything less remains unacceptable.
  
© 2026 The View From Here. © 2026 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.

Reflections on the 78th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba (Catastrophe)

There will be no peace in the Middle East until the foundational injustice at the heart of the region—the creation of Israel on stolen land, and its repercussions—is addressed.

By Fareed Khan 
A version of this can be found on Substack.

As Palestinians and their allies mark the 78th anniversary of the Nakba we need to reflect on how the world arrived at this moment in history and what it means. 

In the 1930s and early 1940s, Western governments watched Nazi Germany’s escalating persecution of Jews with a mixture of indifference, appeasement, and self‑interest. That moral failure helped clear the path to the Holocaust. Today, a parallel pattern of ambivalence, active support for Israel, and deep anti‑Palestinian racism among Western political elites is enabling another catastrophe in full view of the world—the ongoing Nakba and the Gaza Genocide being perpetrated by Israel on Palestinians.

This is not rhetorical excess. It is what emerges when one takes Palestinian history seriously, listens to the growing number of Jewish and Israeli voices breaking from Zionist orthodoxy, and examines the historical record—including the United Nations’ own documentation of its permanent responsibility on the question of Palestine, and its role in creating the situation of the Palestinian people.

The reality is the Nakba—“catastrophe” in Arabic— never ended. It refers to the mass expulsion, ethnic cleansing and dispossession of approximately 750,000 Palestinians during the 1948 war and the erasure and depopulation of more than 400 Palestinian towns and villages. For decades, Western discourse treated this as an unfortunate but closed chapter, a tragic birth pang of a necessary state. But for Palestinians, the Nakba is not a date, it is an ongoing structural injustice that has affected generations of their people.

The UN itself acknowledges that the Nakba was not merely a by-product of war but a systematic process of displacement and dispossession that created one of the world’s largest and longest‑standing refugee populations. The UN’s “About the Nakba” page explicitly states that the events of 1948 “resulted in the displacement of more than half of the Palestinian Arab population” and that the consequences of this displacement “remain unresolved to this day.”

Palestinian writer Aziz Abu Sarah describes the Nakba as having “a dual meaning”—both the razed villages and refugee camps of 1948, the daily reality of land confiscation in the years and decades that followed, settlement expansion, family separation, and legal discrimination that continues to this day. His parents cannot legally live in the house they built just outside Jerusalem without losing their Jerusalem IDs, while nearby illegal Jewish settlers enjoy full rights. Every checkpoint, every denied permit, every demolished home is experienced as a renewed Nakba.

Independent Jewish Voices Canada (IJV) reinforces this understanding, arguing that the Nakba is “not a historical event but an ongoing process,” one that has evolved from ethnic cleansing in 1948 to what they describe as genocide in Gaza today. Their analysis emphasizes that the logic of elimination—removing Palestinians from their land—has been consistent since the creation of Israel.

Human rights organizations and Palestinian institutions now explicitly frame Israel’s current genocide in Gaza as a continuation of that same project of displacement and replacement. The Al Mezan Center for Human Rights calls the present war “a renewed Nakba manifested in a genocidal war,” noting mass killing, starvation, siege, and the displacement of nearly two million people in Gaza as part of an “ongoing colonial policy based on population replacement, land control, and the erasure of Palestinian national identity.”

The UN’s 2024 Nakba commemoration made the same point: “The Nakba of 1948 and today’s Nakba in Gaza are not two separate events, but an ongoing process of Palestinian displacement and replacement.”

The truth is that to call Israeli oppression of Palestinians merely “a conflict” is to participate in the erasure of Palestinian history and almost eight decades of Palestinian suffering.

Western complicity: From 1948 to Gaza today

The Nakba was not only the work of Zionist terrorist militias and the Israeli army. It was made possible by Western powers—particularly the United States—that endorsed partition of historic Palestine, recognized the new state created on lands beyond the UN partition plan, and then looked away as refugees were barred from returning by Israel in defiance of international law.

Ardi Imseis, in his 2024 UN‑commissioned study The Nakba and the United Nations’ Permanent Responsibility for the Question of Palestine, argues that the UN bears a unique and ongoing responsibility because it played a direct role in partitioning Palestine and then failed to enforce the rights of the displaced population. Imseis notes that the UN’s responsibility is “not episodic but permanent,” rooted in the fact that the organization “helped create the conditions that made the Nakba possible.”

UN Resolution 194 affirmed the right of Palestinian refugees to return or receive compensation, but Western governments never seriously enforced it. Their strategic interests—Cold War positioning, oil, and alliance with a self‑styled “outpost of the West”—took precedence over Palestinian rights.

The same pattern is evident today. As Gaza is bombed into ruins, with hundreds of thousands killed and many more maimed or starved, Western states continue to arm, fund, and diplomatically shield Israel. Legal experts, UN rapporteurs, and civil society groups have warned of a serious risk, and ultimately, the reality of genocide. Just as Western governments once found reasons to downplay or rationalize Nazi persecution of Jews until it was too late, they now supply endless justifications to excuse or minimize Israel’s destruction of Palestinian life. Then, the rationales centered on fear of refugees, antisemitism, and geopolitical calculations. Now, they invoke “counter-terrorism,” “self-defence,” and the imperative to stand with an ally—no matter what that ally does.

Suppressing the story: Nakba denial as a Western project

The Nakba is not only being continued on the ground, it is being suppressed in classrooms, parliaments, and media studios across the West.

In the United States, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy barred Palestinian‑American Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib from holding a Nakba commemoration at the Capitol after lobbying from the Anti‑Defamation League, forcing the event to move to a different room offered by Senator Bernie Sanders. Senator Jacky Rosen condemned the very idea of calling Israel’s establishment a “catastrophe” as “deeply offensive,” erasing the lived catastrophe of Palestinians in favour of a sacrosanct (albeit false) state narrative.

The Jewish Currents newsletter that reported this incident drew a sharp parallel between this discomfort with Nakba education and white uneasiness about teaching Black history in the United States. It described a “collective narcissism” that reads any expression of Palestinian identity—flags, commemorations, the kheffiya Palestinian scarf, even grief—as an attack on Jews, and noted that Israel‑advocacy organizations are increasingly using the charge of antisemitism to preemptively repress Palestinian speech, from the U.S. to Germany, where Berlin police have repeatedly banned Nakba Day protests.

Inside Israel, the state has passed laws penalizing public institutions that commemorate the Nakba, and Palestinian educators face constant pressure. Abu Sarah notes that the Israeli government not only ignores Palestinian history but “is also trying to force Palestinians to forget their own narrative, by forbidding commemoration of the Nakba.” Organizations like Zochrot, which work to educate Israeli Jews about the Nakba and Palestinian return, have been marginalized and attacked, even as they collaborate with groups like BADIL to bring Nakba testimony to international audiences.

In the U.S., Jewish Voice for Peace’s “Facing the Nakba” curriculum exists precisely because mainstream Jewish and general education has erased this history. The curriculum explicitly teaches that the Nakba “began with Israel’s establishment, and continues to this day,” and is designed to help U.S. Jews confront why they were never taught this story and how that omission shapes their politics. It is initiatives like this that are attempting to resist the Zionist attempt to deny the reality of what Palestinians have endured.

From Nakba denial to a new form of Holocaust denial

Holocaust denial is not only the crude claim that the gas chambers never existed. It is also any attempt to relativize, justify, or erase the systematic destruction of European Jewry. We rightly treat such denial as a moral red line.

Yet when it comes to Palestinians, Western political and media elites routinely engage in analogous forms of denial. They:

• Erase the original crime by refusing to acknowledge that Israel’s creation involved mass expulsion and dispossession.

• Justify ongoing violence as unfortunate but necessary “self‑defence,” even when it clearly targets civilians on a massive scale.

• Suppress testimony by banning Nakba commemorations, criminalizing Palestinian solidarity, and smearing critics as antisemites or terrorist sympathizers

The UN’s 2024 Nakba commemoration made explicit what Palestinians have long said: “The Nakba is an enterprise of displacement and replacement of people that continues to this very day,” and Gaza’s people now face a choice between “displacement, subjugation, or death—in other words, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, or genocide.” To deny this reality, or to insist that it cannot be named because it offends Western sensibilities, is to participate in a form of historical and moral erasure that echoes the mechanisms once used to minimize the Holocaust while it was unfolding.

Jewish voices breaking the spell

One of the most hopeful developments is that more Jewish and Israeli voices are publicly challenging the myths that sustain this denial. The Al Jazeera feature on Jewish voices around Nakba Day highlights historians like Avi Shlaim, who calls Israel “a pariah and a war criminal state” whose brutality in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank have created a crisis with world Jewry. Within Jewish communities, projects like “Facing the Nakba” and the work of Jewish Currents, Jewish Voice for Peace, and others are insisting that Jewish ethics demand confronting Palestinian dispossession, not denying it.

Independent Jewish Voices Canada adds that confronting the Nakba is not only a moral obligation but a necessary step toward ending what they describe as Israel’s “genocidal campaign” in Gaza.

Their message is simple: acknowledging the Nakba and opposing genocide in Gaza is not anti-Semitic, it is a Jewish obligation grounded in the very lessons of the Holocaust that Western elites claim to honour.

Justice for Palestinians: The defining human rights struggle of our time

Because the Nakba is ongoing, justice for Palestinians is not one issue among many, it is the central test of whether the international human rights system means anything at all.

The UN’s own language now recognizes that 1948 and Gaza are part of a single process of displacement and replacement.[5] Anthropologists describe Israeli institutions, including universities, as “settler universities” embedded in a 78‑year project of ethnic cleansing and “Judaization.” Palestinian and international human rights groups document patterns of apartheid, persecution, and now genocide.

If the world cannot—or will not—stop a state that openly talks of a “second Nakba,” that has destroyed every university in Gaza, that starves children and then blames their parents, then the post‑1945 promise of “never again” has been hollowed out and is meaningless, not only for Jews, but for everyone.

There will be no peace in the Middle East until the foundational injustice at the heart of the region is addressed—the creation of a state on stolen land, the exclusion of its indigenous people, and the ongoing attempt to erase their presence. 

The UN’s worst decision and what it would mean to undo it

In hindsight, the UN’s endorsement of the partition of historic Palestine and the creation of a Jewish state in a region where Palestinians were the majority may be the single most disastrous decision it made in the 20th century. Not because Jews did not deserve safety after the Holocaust, but because that safety was pursued through the dispossession of another people rather than through de‑Nazification, open borders, and genuine global responsibility for refugees.

Ardi Imseis argues that the UN’s failure to uphold Palestinian rights after partition created a “permanent responsibility” that the organization has yet to fulfill. The turmoil, wars, occupations, and cycles of violence that have followed are not unfortunate side effects, they are the predictable consequences of building a state on a foundational injustice and then refusing, decade after decade, to confront it.

The Nakba was not an accident. It was a choice. Continuing it is also a choice.

© 2026 The View From Here. © 2026 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.

In the face of the ongoing Gaza Genocide we cannot break or be silent

We cannot allow ourselves to be numbed into despair, exhausted into silence, or lied to until the last Palestinian child has been murdered by a terrorist, genocidal regime.

 

By Fareed Khan 
A version of this article can be found on Substack.

To every person of conscience, to every soul still capable of outrage and hope—we have watched horrors unfold that history will never forgive. Since October 2023, Gaza has been subjected to a relentless campaign of annihilation. The numbers are staggering and merciless—tens of thousands murdered outright by the Israeli military, hundreds of thousands more dead from starvation, disease, and the deliberate destruction of every means of sustaining life. The bombs dropped on this tiny strip of land have exceeded—by more than six times—the destructive force of the Hiroshima atomic bomb.

The most documented genocide in history

What Israel is doing is not war. This is genocide as confirmed by the International Association of Genocide Scholars, the United Nations, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, respected Jewish Holocaust scholars, and various international medical organizations.

This crime of crimes has been carried out with weapons and political cover supplied by the United States, Britain, Germany, France, Canada, and other nations which still dare to speak of upholding “international law” and “human rights” but do nothing uphold the ideals behind those terms. And the genocide continues—even now—despite every ceasefire announcement, every diplomatic phrase, every claim of restraint.

In all of this we see clearly who Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu is—a man who has turned the attack of October 7 into a license for the permanent conquest and erasure of the Palestinian people. He speaks of “peace” while ordering extermination. He speaks of “security” while directing the systematic destruction of an entire people’s future—its homes, its hospitals, its schools, its history, its children, its future. Every lie he utters, every racist edict, every mass grave he creates, stains not only his name but the moral credibility of the state he leads carrying out these crimes in the name of the Jewish people.

Netanyahu’s actions will stain Jewish communities around the world for generations. When a state commits atrocities while claiming to act on behalf of an entire people, the world too often answers with the oldest and most dangerous reflex—collective blame. We have seen this movie before, and we must refuse to let it be written again.

The Palestinian people are not collateral damage, they are the target. Their only crime is existing. Their only demand is to live free on the land their ancestors tended for centuries—free from military occupation, free from apartheid walls, free from settler violence, free from the daily humiliation of having their very existence debated as a security threat.

In the face of all this we cannot allow ourselves to be numbed into despair. We cannot allow ourselves to be exhausted into silence. We cannot allow ourselves to be lied to until the last Palestinian child’s voice is extinguished.

The day of reckoning for the criminal perpetrators of the Gaza genocide is inevitable. Those who ordered, enabled, financed, and excused this genocide will one day face justice, the judgment of history and of humanity. And that day arrives faster when ordinary people refuse to look away and be complicit through their silence.

As human beings witnessing horrors we will never forget, we demand—loudly, unapologetically, and without compromise—that our governments:

• Use all political, diplomatic and military means at their disposal to stop Israel’s genocidal crimes; 
• Open all of Gaza’s borders to allow humanitarian aid into the enclave;
• Immediately and unconditionally call for the release of the thousands of Palestinians held in Israeli detention without charge or trial;
• Support the suspension and expulsion of Israel from the United Nations and all international institutions until it complies with international law;
• Impose a full military, economic, and trade embargo on Israel;
• Issue arrest warrants for all of Israel’s political and military leaders involved in implementing genocidal policies;
• Expel the Israeli ambassador and recall our own from Tel Aviv;
• Publicly and definitively reject the very flawed IHRA definition of antisemitism;
• Uphold and defend the rights of Palestinians to freedom of expression, freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly;
• Require the full withdrawal of Israeli forces from all occupied Palestinian territories;
• Pursue accountability through international courts and under the concept of universal jurisdiction for every individual and every individual and institution responsible for crimes against humanity, and genocide in Gaza.

This is not a list of distant ideals. These are the minimum conditions of justice. Anything less is continued partnership in a crime against humanity.

The eyes of the world are watching those who have power to act. The future of an entire people—and the soul of the so-called “rules-based international order”—now depends on whether our leaders choose cowardice and political expediency or courage.

Do not wait for the perfect moment. Do not wait until the last house in Gaza is rubble and the last Palestinian child has been silenced.

It is our duty as beings who claim to be human to rise up, speak out, organize, disrupt, and demand until there is justice, safety and freedom for Palestinians.

We cannot bend or break. We cannot forget, and we will not forgive complicity.

Free Palestine—from the river to the sea—and from the river to the sea, justice will prevail.

© 2026 The View From Here. © 2026 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.

Dismantling the Zionist myth of divine entitlement to claims on Palestinian territory

Palestinians can trace their roots to ancient Canaanites, with genetic continuity linking modern Palestinians to Bronze Age populations far more directly than the vast majority of Ashkenazi Jew.

By Fareed Khan 
A version of this article can be found on Substack.

The notion that the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea—historic Palestine—was divinely ceded to the Jewish people, granting them perpetual ownership, has long served as a cornerstone of Zionist and Israeli narratives. This claim, rooted in ancient religious texts, has been invoked since the 1940s by Israel and its supporters to justify decades of displacement, occupation, and violence against Palestinians. Yet, it crumbles under scrutiny.

"This Land Is Mine": A History of Who Owns Palestine

Not only does the premise lack a foundation in modern international law, but it ignores the deep, continuous ties Palestinians—Muslims, Christians, and indigenous Jews—have to the land, far surpassing those of the predominantly European Ashkenazi Jews who arrived in waves over the past 125 years. The reality is that Palestinians are not interlopers in the lands that Israel controls despite what Zionists claim.  They are the indigenous stewards of this territory, their presence woven into its soil for millennia. In contrast, the Zionist colonial project mirrors the settler colonialism that ravaged the Americas and Australia, where European arrivals displaced indigenous and aboriginal populations under the fabricated pretexts of empty or unclaimed land.

The Zionist myth of divine right perpetuates a dangerous exceptionalism, portraying Israelis as the “chosen” inheritors while erasing Palestinian history and humanity. The stark reality is that the land is not too small for coexistence between two peoples, as evidenced by nations like Belgium and Haiti, which share similar sizes and populations (around 12 million each) without descending into ethnic purges. What obstructs peace between Israeli Jews and Palestinians is Israel’s adherence to policies of apartheid and ethnic cleansing, initiated in the 1947-1948 war and continuing until the present day. Coexistence demands rejecting the idea that God favours one group over another, a concept absent from equitable interpretations of faith and incompatible with the concept of universal human rights.

Historic Palestine’s story begins not with divine decrees but with human habitation. Palestinians can trace their roots to ancient Canaanites, with genetic continuity linking modern Palestinians to Bronze Age populations far more directly than most Ashkenazi Jews. Studies of the DNA of Palestinians—encompassing Muslims, Christians, and Sephardic or Mizrahi Jews who lived harmoniously under Arab rule—reveals that they share over half their ancestry with ancient Canaanites, the biblical forebears of the region. In contrast, Ashkenazi Jews, who form the majority of Israel’s population, exhibit significant European ethnic heritage, with origins tracing to migrations and conversions in Europe, not a straight line to ancient Israelites. One analysis notes that Palestinians in the Holy Land retain a genetic makeup far closer to first-millennium BCE Israelites and Canaanites than Ashkenazi Europeans. This underscores that Ashkenazi arrivals are relative newcomers, with their claims bolstered primarily by colonial-era migrations rather than an unbroken lineage tracing back to ancient times.

The Zionist narrative also conveniently overlooks the fact that while Jews were expelled from Jerusalem by Romans in the first and second centuries CE they were never barred from settling within Palestine. Historical records show that while many dispersed into the diaspora, Jewish communities persisted in the territory and there was no absolute prohibition that prevented them settling outside that city. Roman policies led to the creation of a diaspora, but some Jews remained, and others could have returned under varying rulers but didn’t. The region saw waves of conquerors over the centuries, yet under Arab and Ottoman governance—from 637 to 1917, spanning roughly 1,200 years, interrupted briefly by Crusader and Egyptian interludes—Palestine experienced relative stability. The Ottoman Empire controlled the territory for about 400 years (1516–1917), and during this era, indigenous Palestinians—Muslims, Christians, and Jews—coexisted, with the land’s defined by a shared culture and history.

A pivotal example of inclusive Muslim rule in Palestine is Saladin’s conquest of Jerusalem from the Crusaders in 1187. Far from excluding Jews, Saladin explicitly invited Jewish families to return, guaranteeing freedom of worship. He extended tolerance to Christians, preserving their churches and allowing pilgrimage to holy sites. This benevolence contrasts sharply with European Christian persecutions, where Jews faced massacres and expulsions. Many Jews thrived in Muslim-majority lands from Morocco to Iran, enjoying relative peace and prosperity, which explains why mass returns to Palestine did not occur until Zionist mobilization in the late 19th century. The “eternal dream” of return was, for centuries, a minority pursuit given the peace and prosperity that Jews experienced in Muslim lands. This is also evidenced by the fact that at the turn of the 20th century, Jews comprised only about 4% of Palestine’s population, around 24,000 out of approximately 586,000.

Zionist leaders were acutely aware of this demographic reality—the overwhelming Palestinian majority in a land they sought to claim—but they pressed forward with their colonial vision undeterred. The infamous slogan “a land without a people for a people without a land,” popularized by early Zionists, mirrored the European colonial doctrine of “terra nullius,” which falsely declared indigenous territories as empty or unowned to rationalize conquest and dispossession. This legal fiction was wielded by European powers to seize lands in the Americas and Australia, ignoring thriving native civilizations with deep-rooted societies, economies, and spiritual connections to the land.

Similarly, in Palestine, this Zionist myth served as propaganda to portray the region as desolate, ripe for Jewish settlement, despite irrefutable evidence to the contrary. Palestine was no barren wasteland. It was a vibrant mosaic of life, teeming with hundreds of cities, towns, and villages where Palestinian families had nurtured olive groves, tended fruit orchards, herded livestock, and forged communities over centuries of continuous habitation. Archaeological and historical records, including maps from the Roman era onward, consistently label the region as “Palestine” or “Palestina,” debunking Zionist assertions that the land or its people never existed as such. Palestinians’ continuing self-identification as a distinct people, with a shared language, culture, and heritage, further solidifies their national identity, even if formal nationalism, like Zionism itself, only emerged in the modern era. This parallel development does not diminish Palestinian indigeneity. It highlights how both identities were shaped by 19th and 20th century political awakenings, yet Palestinians’ ties to the soil predate these constructs by millennia.

The Nakba of 1948 laid bare the true intent of Zionism, which was not peaceful coexistence, but systematic erasure of the Palestinian presence to engineer a Jewish ethnostate. Zionist militias, considered terrorists by British Mandate authorities, well-armed and organized under plans like Plan Dalet, launched a premeditated war to seize territory beyond the UN partition proposal, expelling over 750,000 Palestinians—more than half the indigenous population—and erasing more than 500 villages to prevent their return. This catastrophe was no accidental by-product of conflict but rather was orchestrated with chilling precision.

David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding prime minister, openly advocated for ethnic cleansing in plans for the conquest of Palestine. In a 1937 letter to his son, he declared, “We must expel Arabs and take their places... and, if we have to use force... then we have force at our disposal.” A decade later, in 1948, he reinforced this when he said, “We must do everything to insure they (the Palestinians) never do return.” Echoing this ruthless resolve Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first president, dismissed Palestinians as mere “rocks of Judea, as obstacles that had to be cleared on a difficult path.” Yosef Weitz, a key figure in the Jewish National Fund, was even more explicit: “There is no room for both peoples together in this country...The only solution is a Palestine without Arabs.”

These damning statements, drawn from personal correspondences and official records, confirm that the Nakba was a deliberate campaign of violence and displacement, paralleling settler colonial genocides in other continents where indigenous peoples were forcibly removed to make way for European settlers. Additional Zionist voices, such as Israel’s second prime minister Moshe Sharett, lamented the “Arab problem” and endorsed transfer (ethnic cleansing), and Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who advocated an “iron wall” of force against the native population.  All these statements underscore the ideological commitment of Zionist leaders to demographic engineering through expulsion, ethnic cleansing, and eventually genocide.

Today, the demographic balance in Israel and the occupied territories remains strikingly even, with approximately 7.8 million Jews and over 7.4 million Palestinians, including 2.1 million Palestinian citizens of Israel and about 5.3 million in the West Bank and Gaza. Yet Israel’s policies of a decades long brutal occupation, blockades, expanding settlements, and repeated military assaults are designed to disrupt this parity, perpetuating a system of apartheid and demographic control. The ongoing genocide in Gaza, ignited by the October 2023 Hamas attack, exemplifies this brutality. The official Palestinian death toll now exceeds 76,000, but comprehensive studies incorporating indirect fatalities from starvation, disease, and collapsed infrastructure paint a far grimmer picture. Research by Ben Gurion University academic Yaakov Garb, using data from the Israeli military, estimates 377,000 to 400,000 deaths, while analyses by Australian academics Richard Hil and Gideon Polya suggest 680,000 to 700,000 Palestinian dead as of April 2025. These staggering figures include up to 380,000 children under five, drawing inescapable parallels to Nazi atrocities—systematic crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, and genocide that have decimated generations.

Israel’s actions embody textbook settler colonialism--the displacement of native populations, the importation of foreign settlers, and the rewriting of history to legitimize land theft. Just as European conquerors in the Americas dismissed complex indigenous societies as primitive and in Australia proclaimed Aboriginal lands as empty, Zionists reframed Palestine as vacant, ignoring its millennia-old societies and civilizations. Yet Palestinians endure, their bloodlines, cultural traditions, and historical narratives inextricably bound to the land, far more so than the European-descended settlers who arrived in the 20th century. Over seven million Jews and more than seven million Palestinians claim no other homeland.  And that Palestinian claim to the land erases the Zionist narrative of absolute entitlement that has perpetuated almost eight decades of Israeli injustice.

True peace demands the urgent dismantling of these colonial myths through robust international intervention, including deploying a multinational peacekeeping force to shield Palestinians from Israeli state-sponsored violence, mandating the immediate evacuation of over 700,000 illegal Jewish settlers from the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and affirming Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem as sovereign Palestinian territory under international law, with conditions or restrictions. This is not merely pragmatic, it is a moral imperative to rectify decades of brutal dispossession and affirm the universal right to self-determination of the Palestinian people.

Only by prioritizing human rights over divine or ancient historical claims can a shared future be forged embodying dignity, equality, and genuine coexistence, where the land between the river and the sea becomes a beacon of reconciliation rather than a graveyard of conquest. The world must act now before more generations of Palestinians are lost to ensure that justice prevails and peace becomes a reality from the river to the sea rather than a fleeting and unfulfilled dream.

© 2026 The View From Here. © 2026 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.

Trump’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian protesters signals a slide into fascist authoritarianism

This crackdown serves as a broader warning to all Americans: political dissent will not be tolerated.  If the government can detain and deport legal residents for exercising their rights, what protections remain for anyone else?

  

By Fareed Khan

 

In recent months, a chilling pattern has emerged on American university campuses.   Students and faculty, many of whom hold green cards or student visas, are being arrested, detained, and threatened with deportation for participating in pro-Palestinian protests or speaking out against Israel’s genocidal crimes in Gaza.  These individuals, exercising their constitutionally protected right to free speech, have found themselves targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under the directives of the Trump administration for their political protests.  This is not merely a policy disagreement or an immigration enforcement issue — it is a stark demonstration of authoritarianism, one that echoes the repressive tactics of fascist and dictatorial regimes, and signals a dangerous erosion of democracy in the United States. 

The First Amendment of the US Constitution guarantees the right to freedom speech, a cornerstone of American democracy.  Protests, even those that challenge government policies or those of powerful allies like Israel, are not only legal but are a vital part of the nation’s political fabric.  Yet, the Trump administration has chosen to weaponize an obscure law — one that allows the Secretary of State to deport non-citizens deemed a threat to US foreign policy — to silence dissent.  This law, rarely invoked in the past, was intended to address genuine national security risks, not to punish students and scholars for their political views.  By repurposing it to target pro-Palestinian voices, the administration reveals its true face, one that is fascist and racist, that intends to intimidate, suppress, and punish those who dare to criticize Israel’s crimes and US complicity, in what Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the International Court of Justice have described as a genocide in Gaza.

The number of protesters targeted are far greater than the few whose stories have been covered by the news media.  Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently disclosed that the State Department has revoked the visas of at least 300 foreign students, and many others are in the government’s sights.  This figure, however, likely underrepresents the full scope of the crackdown, as high-profile cases covered by the media — such as those of Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, Momodou Taal, and Yunseo Chung — are just the tip of the iceberg.  These individuals, all racialized immigrants with legal status in the US, have been singled out for their activism.  Their stories paint a grim picture of a government willing to trample constitutional rights and deploy Gestapo-like tactics to intimidate protesters and enforce ideological conformity.

Consider Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder married to an American, who led protests at Columbia University.  He now languishes in a Louisiana ICE detention center, his green card revoked, as the State Department seeks to deport him.  Or Rumeysa Ozturk, a Fulbright scholar and PhD student at Tufts University, detained by plain clothes ICE agents near her home for writing an op-ed critical of her university’s ties to companies supporting Israel.  Momodou Taal, a Cornell graduate student and dual UK-Gambia national, faces deportation proceedings after being a prominent voice in pro-Palestinian demonstrations.  And Yunseo Chung, a 21-year-old permanent resident who has lived in the US since she was seven, is now at risk of being deported to South Korea because of her constitutionally protected protest activities.  These are not isolated incidents but part of a systematic campaign targeting hundreds of students and faculty who have spoken out against the Gaza genocide.

The parallels between the actions of the Trump administration to authoritarian regimes are unmistakable.  In Russia or Communist China, dissenters are routinely “disappeared” into detention centres, their human rights denied under the guise of protecting state interests.  Today, the Trump administration is employing similar tactics, using ICE as a modern-day equivalent to the Soviet KGB to round up and silence those who challenge America’s support for Israel.  The racialized nature of these detentions — targeting people of colour — further underscores the administration’s fascist undertones, evoking the scapegoating and exclusionary policies of 20th-century fascist dictatorships.  What we are witnessing is not about national security, it is about control, power, and punishing those whose opinions and views with whom Trump disagrees or opposes.

Legal challenges are mounting as attorneys for those detained argue that the government’s actions violate the Constitution and represent egregious government overreach.  The use of a foreign policy statute to suppress free speech is a flimsy pretext, one that courts are likely to scrutinize closely.  Yet, the damage is already being done.  The chilling effect on campuses is very real — students and faculty, particularly those in the US on visas or green cards, now face a stark choice: speak out about Israel’s human rights crimes and risk detention, or remain silent and abandon their principles.  This is not the hallmark of a free society but of a dictatorship where dissent is met with retribution and imprisonment.

The Trump administration’s motivations appear twofold.  First, it is signalling unwavering loyalty to Israel and its influential Zionist supporters in the US, who have loudly condemned the protests.  By cracking down on pro-Palestinian activism, Trump is doing the bidding of a foreign government and its domestic allies, prioritizing their interests over the basic rights of individuals in the US.  Second, this crackdown serves as a broader warning to all Americans: political dissent will not be tolerated.  If the government can detain and deport legal residents for exercising their rights, what protections remain for anyone else?   This is the behaviour of a dictator who believes he is above the law, unbound by the Constitution, and free to act with impunity.

The administration’s defenders might argue that these measures are necessary to maintain order or protect US foreign policy interests.  But such claims crumble under scrutiny.  The protests have been overwhelmingly peaceful, and the individuals targeted pose no credible threat to national security.  Mahmoud Khalil is not a terrorist, he is a husband and human rights activist.  Rumeysa Ozturk is not a spy, she is a scholar who wrote an editorial in a university newspaper.  The government’s actions are not about safety — they are about silencing voices that challenge the status quo.  This is the essence of authoritarianism — the use of state power to crush opposition and criticism, regardless of legality or morality.

The implications extend far beyond the current moment.  If the Trump administration succeeds in normalizing these tactics, the precedent will be set for future crackdowns on any group or cause deemed inconvenient.  Environmental activists, racial justice advocates, or critics of US militarism could be next.  The erosion of free speech and assembly rights does not stop with one issue — it metastasizes, undermining the democratic foundations of the nation.  What we are witnessing in the US is not a temporary overreaction but a deliberate step toward a fascist state where dissent is criminalized, human rights are ignored, and the government operates without accountability.

The American public must recognize this for what it is, a betrayal of the values the US  claims to uphold.  The Constitution is not a suggestion, it is the bedrock of the nation’s identity.  By targeting pro-Palestinian protesters, the Trump administration is not just attacking a specific group of people — it is attacking the very idea of freedom.  The detained students and faculty are not the only victims, every American who cherishes their rights is at risk.  Silence in the face of the Trump administration’s overreach is complicity. 

History offers a sobering lesson.  Regimes that begin by targeting minority and marginalized groups — immigrants, students, religious communities — rarely stop there.  The Gestapo in Nazi Germany did not emerge overnight.  It was built through incremental steps, each one justified as necessary until dissent was extinguished entirely.  The US is not yet Nazi Germany, but the parallels are too close for comfort.  The arrest and detention of legal residents for exercising their rights, the use of immigration laws as a political weapon, and the blatant disregard for constitutional protections, are the hallmarks of a government sliding into fascist authoritarianism.

The Trump administration’s actions demand a forceful response.  America’s Courts must strike down these abuses of power, Congress must investigate and hold those responsible accountable, and citizens must raise their voices — on campuses, in the streets, and at the ballot box — to reject this descent into fascism.  The detained students and faculty are not threats to America they are its conscience, reminding Americans of the principles they risk losing.  If Americans allow these voices to be silenced, they will forfeit the claim to being a free nation.  The time to act is now, before the last vestiges of democracy are swept away by a dangerous regime that day by day is showing that it knows no bounds and will tolerate no dissent.

 

© 2025 The View From Here.  © 2025 Fareed Khan.  All Rights Reserved.

Palestinians are the most persecuted people in the world today, and the West’s refusal to prevent their genocide proves it

What is happening now to Palestinians is no different than what happened to Jews in 1930s Nazi Germany.  Back then the West turned a blind eye to Germany's criminal violence, today they are doing the same with Israel.

 

By Fareed Khan

 

“Far too many Palestinians have been killed.”

 

These were the words of American Secretary of State Antony Blinken in comments he made to the media on November 11th about Israeli attacks against Palestinians in Gaza.

 

At what point did we reach the stage of “far too many” deaths?  What is the red line in terms of human misery and suffering where a politician comes out and uses these words?  Because if we have reached the point of “far too many” this presumes that there is a Palestinian death toll that is acceptable to political leaders.

 

Blinken’s statement and similar statements by other Western leaders demonstrates that they have shed their humanity and finally revealed to the world their deep seated anti-Palestinian prejudice.  Their ambivalence and apathetic response to the slaughter in Gaza since October 7th is allowing Israel to commit war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide against a people, who one can accurately say, are the most persecuted people in the world today.  The words that Blinken used imply that there is a death toll that is “just right”, which is a perverse concept to imagine.

 

His words make one think about what Jews faced in the 1930s when violent antisemitism was on the rise in Nazi Germany and across Europe.  Because what the world is witnessing with regard to Palestinians today is no different than the ambivalence and apathy that Western leaders showed to Jews fleeing Nazi Germany seeking safe harbour in Western countries.  The political leaders of that era also expressed some level of sympathy for the oppression European Jewry was experiencing, but in the end they refused to do what was needed to protect them from what was to come.  What is happening now to Palestinians is no different than what happened to Jews then, and we are seeing the result of the West turning a blind eye to Israel’s criminal violence against Palestinians.

 

Canada’s leaders are no strangers when it comes to operating without a moral compass, where humanity is put aside, and where acts of genocide are ignored.  This is how Canada operated in its treatment of Indigenous people in this country since before Confederation, and they are demonstrating the same attitude towards the Indigenous people of historic Palestine.  It proves that Canada’s political establishment has still not shed its white privileged and racist mindset, or learned lessons from its racist and genocidal history.

 

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his government, and Official Opposition leader Pierre Poilievre, and his party, have shown that they care little about what Palestinians are living through right now, or the oppression they have lived under for decades under Israel’s Apartheid regime.  As the Palestinian death toll has continued climb over the past five weeks, millions of people around the world have been demonstrating in the streets demanding that their governments call for a ceasefire, and do whatever is necessary to prevent further Palestinians deaths.  In Canada tens of thousands have marched in the streets to protest, and recent polls have shown that 71% of Canadians want our leaders to call for a ceasefire.  But neither Justin Trudeau, his cabinet nor anyone in the Official Opposition is listening to what Canadians want.  The total disregard being shown by Canada’s political elites to the wishes of Canadians on an issue of fundamental justice and humanity will be the enduring legacy of these men.

 

The commitment of Canadians to this cause is evident over the past five weekends as thousands of people have been taking to the streets in massive demonstrations in cities and towns across the country in support of Palestinians and demanding the Canadian government to call for a ceasefire.  Every day for more than a month Trudeau, Poilievre and their MPs have been witnessing the inhumanity and depravity of war on a scale that is even worse than what we have seen in Russia’s war in Ukraine.  And we should take note that while the Ukrainians are able to defend themselves and have been receiving massive amounts of military aid from the West, the Palestinians, with neither army, navy nor air force, are barely receiving desperately needed humanitarian aid to help the sick and injured.

 

For over a month now, since the Hamas attacks which killed more than 1200 Israel civilians (also a war crime and crime against humanity), the Israeli government’s goal to “destroy Hamas” has resulted in more than 12,200 civilian dead and more than 30,000 injured, who have nowhere to go to treat their injuries because Israel has bombed every medical facility in Gaza and deprived them of the resources they urgently need to help the wounded.  Despite claims by the Israeli military that they not targetting civilians the horrific results say otherwise, and they are evidence of war crimes and a genocide in progress.

 

The one sickening fact that is galvanizing people around the world to come out against Israel is the number of Palestinian children that have been killed – 4,237 as of November 10th – more than three times the number of Israelis that were killed on October 7th.  The rising death toll of Palestinian children is the straw that has broken the camel’s back, and the anger of people horrified by images of dead Palestinian children is being played out in huge demonstrations across Canada, and around the world, with people demanding that their political leaders serve the cause of humanity.  But not all of the politicians are heeding the demands of their voters, and political leaders should remember that those who ignore the voices in the streets will be remembered for their inhumanity and their cowardice.

 

As Israel’s military assault on Gaza turns it into a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and the Palestinian death toll increases on average by 348 victims per day, Justin Trudeau, Pierre Poiliever, and other Canadian politicians had better consider what they want the history books to say about them.  Because at this moment it looks like they will say that these politicians were complicit in genocide and war crimes, and refused to do what was moral for a people who have been oppressed, persecuted and brutalized for more than 70 years.  They had better wake up to the reality and urgency of the situation and find the humanity which they seem to have lost.  Because the blood of the innocent covers their hands and their souls, and Canadians will not forget the way they have acted in a time of moral crisis.

 

Fareed Khan is a human rights activist and founder of Canadians United Against Hate.

 

© 2023 The View From Here.  © 2023 Fareed Khan.  All Rights Reserved.