Opinion: Liberals Play Politics as Gaza Burns

Do you remember that picture of Alan Kurdi lying dead on a beach?

It’s hard to forget. 

Alan was two years old when his family fled the war in Syria. They boarded a raft in the Mediterranean Sea and set off for Europe before capsizing off the coast of Turkey. 

His family survived. He didn’t.

By the time his body washed ashore, Alan lay face down in the sand. That’s when photojournalist Nilufer Demir snapped a picture of the boy. Moments earlier, he was a toddler clinging to his mother. Now the tide swept against his cold skin.

I still can’t look at that picture without tears forming in my eyes. The photograph — taken on Sept. 2, 2015 — took on added meaning in Canada, where Kurdi’s parents had applied and were rejected for refugee status.

Deeply unpopular after nine years in power, Alan’s death painted Stephen Harper into a corner. On the one hand, a majority of Canadians were clamouring for the prime minister to do something — anything — to ease the suffering of the Kurdi family and thousands like them. On the other, the idea of accepting refugees was deeply unpopular with Harper’s conservative base.

With the party losing ground ahead of the 2015 federal election, Harper made a political decision: prioritize a military response to the crisis over a humanitarian one. Harper would address the “heartbreaking situation” and say that Alan’s death made him think of losing his own son. 

But given the scale of the tragedy, his words rang hollow. 

Faced with a leader unable to meet this moment in history, Canadians turned to Justin Trudeau. The young Liberal promised to resettle 25,000 Syrian refugees in Canada, exceeding the expectations of a country beaten down by years of austerity and scandals.

In the end, Trudeau blew out the Conservatives and his government went beyond the Liberal leader’s election promise, accepting over 28,000 refugees across the country. At home and abroad, Trudeau symbolized the promise of Canada, that imperfect democracy striving to live up to the words in its Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Nine years later, Trudeau’s sheen has worn off. Polls have the Liberals down 20 points to the Conservatives, the Prime Minister seems to limp from one scandal to the next and, just as Harper was nine years ago, Trudeau is feckless in the face of a historical crisis.

On Sunday in northern Gaza, a video emerged of a man burning to death while strapped to a hospital bed with an IV drip still in his arm. The victim, 19-year-old engineering student Shabaan al-Dalu, had just survived a bombing that killed 26 people sheltering in a mosque. But that night, after the IDF rained fire on a hospital courtyard, al-Dalu was not so lucky.

In the video, flames engulf al-Dalu’s body as he raises his arm to grasp helplessly toward the sky. Even for a war that’s shown us images of decapitated toddlers and starving babies, Sunday’s footage somehow managed to shock.

The attack on the al-Aqsa hospital killed 40 and injured 10 children. Along with that hospital, the IDF blew up a school and a bakery that night, pushing an estimated 400,000 civilians — half of whom are children — closer to starvation. More than 15,000 kids have died at the hands of the IDF since the war began and there hasn’t been food delivered to Northern Gaza since Oct. 4. 

“After years in this business, I’m pretty hardened. I’ve seen many horrors. But watching people burned alive last night, stretching out their hands for help. A man in a hospital bed with an IV attached going up in flames. It felt like a new horror, akin to a vision of hell.”

Barry Malone posted that to X on Monday as many of us ate turkey and mashed potatoes with our families. Malone isn’t what you’d call a bleeding heart. He’s the deputy editor at Thomson Reuters, one of the most trusted news sources in the West. This is a man who remained even-keeled in his assessment of the war even after one of his colleagues was killed by Israeli tank fire last year. 

The CBC journalist Shireen Ahmed posted about being “stuck between fury and sadness” and wrote that she would never forget knowing so many of us could watch a genocide unfold in real time and ignore it. Ahmed said this knowing that speaking out could cost her, as it has so many of her colleagues.

But perhaps the most telling response came from Trudeau and Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly: silence. 

In the days after the massacre that killed al-Dalu, the pair tweeted about Thanksgiving, carbon tax rebates, Canada’s trade relationship with Southeast Asia, and took the time to condemn the Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network as a terrorist organization. 

Children being burned alive by the IDF? Sorry, they must’ve missed that. Reports that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu plans to starve, annex and settle northern Gaza? Yes, that is literally genocide but Israel has a right to do whatever it wants when the Liberals are behind in the polls. There’s an election to think about and we don’t want Pierre Poilievre winning, do we?

“Where is Canada calling out the shameful violence in Gaza, who represent nearly half the population?” former Liberal cabinet minister Catherine McKenna wrote on X Monday. “This is clearly a violation of international law.”

McKenna, once one of Trudeau’s closest allies, was responding to a post by the aid organization UNICEF, which stated there is no safe place for children in Gaza and that the “shameful” violence must end. 

It was only late Wednesday — after the United States, Italy and other G7 allies condemned the attack — that Joly drafted a statement in response to the massacre. The minister wrote that she is “deeply disturbed” by the “increasingly dire humanitarian situation.” 

That Joly’s office would use such clinical language to describe starvation and infanticide feels like a sick joke. But it isn’t a joke. It’s our government. 

Which brings us to Anthony Housefather. On Wednesday, as Joly’s staff focus-grouped different ways of avoiding the word “genocide,” The Montreal Gazette published a letter by friends of the Liberal MP begging voters in his riding to support Housefather in the upcoming federal election.

Housefather is one of just a few Liberals who opposed the federal government’s call for a ceasefire in Gaza last year. Since the Oct. 7 massacre, no crime committed by the IDF has been too depraved to warrant even the most gentle rebuke from Housefather.

The Member of Parliament for Mount Royal has posed for a photo with and praised a well-known anti-Arab racist while fueling speculation that he would cross the floor to sit with the Conservatives. Meanwhile, last summer, *someone* commissioned a poll to see if Housefather could win his riding as a Conservative. 

After months of empty threats, Housefather came back to the party in exchange for a promotion: being named Trudeau’s special advisor on Jewish relations and the fight against antisemitism. 

But voters in Mount Royal are souring on Housefather. 

Over 30 per cent of the riding’s population is Jewish, many lost relatives on Oct. 7 and at least two of Mount Royal’s Jewish schools have been targeted by gunfire while others have been vandalized with hateful graffiti. My daughter’s daycare is next to one of those schools. We see those kids every day. I’ve played with a few of them at the park and the thought of any one of them being the target of violence is horrifying to us.

Support for the war, among many in Mount Royal, is seen as essential to secure Israel’s future and the safety of Jewish people around the world. In this climate, Housefather has lost ground to Conservative candidate Neil Oberman, a lawyer and an unapologetic supporter of Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government. 

Should the riding go blue, it’ll be the first time in 84 years that voters in Mount Royal don’t elect a Liberal.

Sources close to Housefather say that if he calls for a ceasefire, he will lose the race. There are people, in his inner circle, who’ll privately acknowledge that Israel is out of control and its military is committing war crimes. But none will say this on the record.

I’m going to do something stupid here and burn a bridge. 

Early in the war, Housefather and I had a terse conversation over the phone. I had worked with Housefather on a story about efforts to save jobs at The Montreal Gazette amid massive cuts from the paper’s parent corporation. Housefather worked tirelessly behind the scenes to try to stave off disaster at The Gazette — a paper that hasn’t always been kind to the Liberals. I respected him immensely for that. 

So when he called me last year to talk about some angry tweet of mine, I didn’t hesitate to pick up the phone. We argued, I probably yelled a lot, but in the end we were able to find some common ground. I came away from the conversation with the understanding that Housefather, like his party, could at least acknowledge that the presence of Israeli settlements in the West Bank is illegal under international law.

Not only did he acknowledge that but I distinctly remember him saying that he didn’t believe there should be “a single settlement” in the occupied territories. Maybe I heard him wrong, maybe he’s had a change of heart and I’ll happily amend this article if Housefather wants to clear up his stance on settlements.

But I sincerely doubt he would answer this question directly if asked.

As the months went by and Israel expanded its annexation of the West Bank at an unprecedented pace, I would check Housefather’s social media to see if he would at least say something. He did not. I don’t know if this silence is a political calculation. But I get the impression Housefather is trying to play both sides of the issue and voters are picking up on that.

If you think Housefather’s views on the war are troubling, Oberman’s are far worse. The Conservative candidate is a close associate of Hampstead Mayor Jeremy Levy, who said last year that he would continue supporting the IDF even if 100,000 Palestinian children died as a result. Oberman is also the lawyer who filed two injunctions against the pro-Palestinian encampment at McGill University.

I abhor the politics of Poilievre and an increasingly radical Conservative party. 

And as a journalist, his repeated attacks on my profession, his promise to defund the CBC and end government grants that support our industry, could be the final nail in our coffin. But if you gave me a choice between keeping my job and an end to the genocide, I should hope I would pick the latter.

Apparently, some of Quebec’s most prominent anglophones disagree. 

Their letter to The Gazette claims Housefather represents “all English-speaking Quebecers” in Ottawa, a statement that shows just how out of touch the Anglo elite is with those of us going paycheque to paycheque. The assumption that we would look past Housefather’s embrace of a war that’s created more child amputees than any in modern history just because he’s an Anglophone is incredibly patronizing.

Anthony Housefather doesn’t represent us. He does not represent the Muslim Anglophones who’ve noticed the MP’s silence as they’ve faced an alarming rise in hateful attacks and seen since the war began. He does not represent the English-speaking Jews who take to the streets every month to call for an end to the killing. We are not a monolith. We will not fall in line because powerful Anglophones demand it of us.

I know many if not most of the people who signed that letter to The Montreal Gazette. I wish them well. I hope that their loved ones are safe and that they go to bed at night with food in their bellies. And I recognize that many of these people volunteer in their communities and simply want what’s best for their loved ones. I would also remind them that history doesn’t look kindly on those who put politics above their own humanity.

One day, when the killing stops, we’ll get a full accounting of exactly how bad things got in Gaza. But what we know so far is damning enough.

We know children have starved to death, we know they’ve suffocated under collapsed buildings, we know they’ve been targeted by attack drones and we know they’ve suffered gunshot wounds to the head and chest. We’ve watched them die in their parents’ arms, screaming for God’s mercy because they know not to expect it from their captors. 

We know these things because of the images coming out of Gaza. Not only from the victims of this genocide but also from the hundreds of Irsaeli soldiers who filmed themselves committing war crimes. The people trying to save Housefather’s seat could have used their collective voice to advocate for a ceasefire, to call for an end to attacks on aid trucks or to implore the Trudeau government to use what little credibility it has left to be a broker for peace.

But just as Stephen Harper did in the face of the Syrian refugee crisis in 2015, these Liberals would rather play politics as Gaza burns.