The People's Deaths
The People’s Deaths
Note: For regular readers of this series on Long COVID and health policy, this may read as a departure from my usual content. Given the state of the world, the severity of death and disability in Gaza, the destruction of hospitals and targeting of doctors, the blockade of access to COVID vaccines, and the high rates of infection still circulating in refugee camps, I hope you will understand and see the connection.
On Friday, Global Affairs Canada published a Statement on Canada’s abstention in the UN General Assembly vote to upgrade Palestine’s privileges to a non-member observer state. In the statement, the death clock starts on October 7th, not 2006, or 1987, or 1948, or the Balfour Declaration of 1916 that led irrevocably to a zionist and right-wing turn in Jewish diaspora organizations and activism. The ~1200 Jewish deaths of October 7th are named first and attributed directly to Hamas; the Palestinian deaths in Gaza, named in the "thousands" (in line with Israeli statements that the majority of the +30,000 internationally-reported deaths are not civilians), are said to have been killed "in" joint military conflict, not "by" the Israeli military.
I am not a historian, a religious scholar, or an international human rights lawyer but I have been an archivist and librarian, a labour researcher, and a socio-economic and health policy analyst. I am a federal public servant, but I am not supposed to say that in public writing that criticizes the policies of the government I work for, regardless of which department is responsible for the policy, for fear of undermining the political neutrality of the public service. And I am a Jew, but I am not supposed to say that in analysis and research on this subject, because identity is perceived as a research bias, not an expertise or strength.
I’ve written previously about the role of public servants in times of mass protest and resistance, what skills we bring to the apocalypse, and can offer to our communities, our role in explaining the bureaucratically obtuse, whether a passport application process or a media release. This week, as both a Jew and a public servant, in grief over my country’s unwillingness to speak out and intervene in the eminent death of an entire people, to raise refugee claimant caps in line with prior international conflicts, my religion’s turn to violent nationalism, the use of police against peaceful protest, in a time when I can walk into my provincial legislative buildings in a prayer shawl but not a keffiyeh, the best skill I can bring to bear right now is that of discourse analysis and storytelling.
When the government writes a declaration like this, it passes through dozens of expert hands: desk officers for the Middle East, communications advisors, senior bureaucrats, political staff. No word in it, no passive structure, no order of information, nor the timing of its release, is accidental. The world is governed through precisely chosen words that describe the internal logic of the institutions that run it, and unnaming is as powerful as naming.
In the context of COVID and the closure of long covid clinics and national surveys, I wrote recently that “collectively, bureaucratically, we simply don’t want to know how bad things are or how badly we are failing to solve them.” In this case, we know how bad things are. The Canadian government knows: it is thousands of people’s jobs, my peers across the public service, to know the precise details of the situation and advise politicians and public service leaders on how to act or not act. It is an intentional choice to undercount deaths and to not attribute them to a cause, to use the bureaucratically passive voice instead of declaring an entity responsible. As residents of Canada, we know how bad things are because we are lucky enough to live somewhere with relatively reliable internet access and freedom of information, and to benefit from the high-risk labour of journalists and international aid workers and civilians who are capturing, in irrefutable viral video, the breadth of destruction. It is impossible, in May 2024, not to know.
Yet, in the Canadian Statement, people “have been” displaced (actor unnamed), face imminent starvation (cause unnamed), their loss of life mourned (but not prevented) by Canada, the nation state, not its people, or the ~45,000 Palestinians who live here (as of the 2016 census). “Hostages must be released” but the grammar implies only Jewish hostages held in Gaza, not Palestinian hostages held in Israeli detention practices that long pre-date October 7th. “Humanitarian relief” must be provided unimpeded, but it is left unsaid who is responsible for its blockade or the actions that led to its need, and what Canada is doing to help. In a Statement’s list of guiding principles for Canadian policy, Israel’s right to defend itself (“in accordance with international law”) comes first, Palestinian people’s right to “realize their self-determination” second, the mutual protection of civilians a distant third. Blame for the failure of a two-state solution is laid diplomatically at the feet of both parties despite acute disparities in resources between the two, exacerbated by Israeli action and global inaction.
In the world conjured by this statement, there is no Palestinian right to defend or Palestinian hostages, no apartheid, no genocide, no destruction of farms or universities or hospitals, no blockage of aid or COVID vaccines, no targeting of journalists or aid workers or doctors, no conflict or displacement or civilian death and injury that predates Fall 2023, no role for Canada other than to abstain and observe until a time more “conducive to lasting peace”. While Israel “must refrain from military operations in Rafah”, all other neighbourhoods in Gaza, the West Bank, and those once marked by older borders are unnamed. Canada says we will “impose sanctions on extremist settlers”, but not the government that funds and quietly endorses them, the military that protects them, or the international and Canadian Jewish institutions that facilitate migration and settlement. We will halt weapons exports, but only “lethal weapons”, those we have not already agreed to send, and continue to buy those developed and tested in Israel, because a promise and a contract is worth more than lives.
My great grandparents were Labour Zionists and community leaders of their time, founders of “People’s Book Store” in Winnipeg’s North End, a community-organizing hub and educational and cultural space. You can hear the echoes of that leftist history in the names of the student protest encampments: The People’s Circles for Palestine; The People’s University. They were part of a radical Jewish workers movement in Winnipeg, galvanized by the Balfour Declaration; the conditions and disempowerment of workers in the 1910s around the world and the 1919 General Strike; the disenfranchisement of Jews by the Wartime Elections Act, which removed the voting rights of citizens born in ‘enemy’ countries and naturalized after 1902; the use of “anti-loafing” laws to harass minorities – including Jews; and police investigation of Jewish institutions and businesses including our bookstore, the Baker’s Press, and the Liberty Temple. Labour Zionists were only one faction of international Zionism. They grew alongside and debated with and organized with non-Zionist leftist movements, who argued that any nation state would be inherently capitalist and that as Jews we had more in common with the Arab workers of Palestine than the international political powers that sought to offer us their land.
In interviews archived at the Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada, my great-grandfather describes his bookstore as a place where multiple factions of the complex and sometimes overlapping Jewish movements (both Zionist and not) held meetings; ate meals; attended lectures and cultural events; picked up books, newspapers, religious objects, language lessons, and ideas. In the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike, my family lore says the strike leaders hid from police in the basement.
The bookstore is where Winnipeg Jews would have found copies of Di fraye arberter shtime, the international Yiddish anarchist newspaper; Morgan frayhate, its communist counterpart; Der Keneder Adler, the Canadian Yiddish paper; the more conservative Hebrew weekly ha-Deror; Minikes, newspaper collections of Yiddish stories reprinted before holidays, when workers and their families might have more time to read, alongside dictionaries, novels, memoirs, and transcripts of speeches. My great-grandgrandfather saw this distribution of information and facilitation of discussion as part of nurturing Jewish civic life and education. In interviews, he says it took them a year after opening to create a regular culture of reading and buying newspapers, in a community that until then had not had much access to news in their language. I trace my own close reading skills and interest in politics and policy, the ability to dissect the fine lines of a news release, through 4+ generations of this family history.
Out of this community activity and organizing in the 1910s and 20s came the predecessors of many modern Canadian Jewish institutions: schools, community centres, charities, workers organizations, communal, and cultural organizations, as well as future political leaders. Today, even prior to October 7th, there are almost no mainstream Jewish spaces where this co-existence and cross-pollination is still possible; Zionism is so inextricably wound through our institutions, calcified into funding streams, founding documents, religious practice, and intracommunity policing, such that most of my anti-Zionist peers have long since removed themselves. We have lost the Jewish art of debate and questioning, of holding space for diversity of ideas, our pluralistic history, that better scholars than me have traced through thousands of years of religious and secular texts and practice. And that loss shows in present-day media discourse and Canadian policy, which tiptoes carefully around the geopolitical, financial, and trade landmines of Israeli and American policy stances and Canadian Zionist lobbying to downplay death and responsibility in public statements.
“Canada has decided to abstain on the General Assembly resolution in response to efforts to prevent the realization of a two-state solution” the Statement says. Which is to say, Canada has decided that Palestinian rights, and fuller participation in the global forum of the General Assembly, must wait until the Israeli government is more amenable, until Palestinian leadership is more palatable to Israel’s allies, until Jewish hostages are released and Hamas unarmed. Canada is asking a people whose world, to put it in passive language, is being destroyed to wait to have access to the right to make statements and submit proposals and amendments to the General Assembly, to raise procedural issues, join committees, and request agenda items, to participate in international community and governing forums that have the power to intervene in a growing crisis instigated by another state.
I have thought often of The People’s Books in the past months because there are almost no institutions left standing in Gaza (….the Israeli military has left almost no institutions standing) that served to document history through text and distribute information, to offer the kind of third spaces between home and work for leisure and connection that librarian and translator Faith Jones described of our family bookstore. These spaces, she writes “enable(d) citizen engagement and democracy” and “forge(d) ties between people and place.”
Librarians and Archivists with Palestine reported in February 2024 that over a dozen libraries and archives had been destroyed by the Israeli military since October, including the Central Archives of Gaza City, the Gaza University Library, and the Omari Mosque Library, and with them hundreds of thousands of books, manuscripts, archival materials, and civic data, as well as people — librarians, archivists, cultural workers, and municipal employees. The report states: “The destruction of cultural heritage in Gaza impoverishes the collective identity of the Palestinian people, irrevocably denies them their history, and violates their sovereignty….The destruction of libraries represents the loss of not only book collections, but the efforts of Gaza’s librarians to acquire, care for, and provide access to reading materials, despite Israel’s ongoing blockade of the Gaza Strip.”
To express horror, we sometimes say that we “have no words” but I do not think my great-grandparents would accept that declaration, or want me to hide behind the neutrality of my profession, while the people’s deaths go undocumented and Canadian government news releases belie the newspapers and the history books. They believed in the power of information and words to affect change and build community, in the imperative to document and share a culture that was once at risk of destruction, in the importance of using one’s skills for the benefit of one’s community. I write this for them and for the People of Palestine.