Some civil-society leaders today call for a boycott of Israel… Most disgracefully of all, some openly call Israel an apartheid state. Think about that. Think about the twisted logic and outright malice behind that… A state, based on freedom, democracy and the rule of law, that was founded so Jews can flourish as Jews, and seek shelter from the shadow of the worst racist experiment in history.

Now perhaps credit to Harper for trying, but this sort of statement seems to indicate misunderstanding of a few things, as well as outright ignoring others. By calling any critical statement towards the Israeli government anti-Semitic, Harper appears to be claiming that the state of Israel is in fact the entire Jewish population. Not only is this mistaken, but it serves to highlight Harper’s questionable approach to issues in the Middle-East.

As Tyler Levitan, spokesperson for the Ottawa Independent Jewish Voice, said in a recent press release on the issue: “This is a continuation of Harper’s outrageous efforts to disparage the Palestinian people, as well as the growing international solidarity movement that supports the non-violent Palestinian campaign to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel until Israel is willing to accept Palestinian rights.”

During his speech Harper repeatedly compared recent calls to boycott Israel to that of the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany, during which Jewish shops were boycotted. He then went on to describe that Israel was being singled out for criticism on a global scale, and that such an approach was unbalanced, weak, and wrong.

However, as Levitan notes, ‘“Palestinian human rights activists support universal human rights for all people, so we are not singling out Israel. It is Harper, who refuses to challenge Israel’s systematic human rights abuses, who is making an exception of Israel by exempting it from criticism.”

Harper’s biased approach to the Middle-East was commented on by some of the Knesset—two of their members openly heckled Harper, and then stormed out in protest. Ahmad Tibi, one of the hecklers, said that he walked out on Harper’s speech as the approach Harper was taking was “biased, non-balanced,” and added “that’s why Canada has a very marginal role in the Middle East.”

Not only this, but Harper seems to have completely ignored how the Canadian government is against the Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. In fact Harper was deafening in his total exclusion of the subject, refusing to be dragged into commenting on it at all.  Tibi’s view on the situation was: “When you are controlling, discriminating, confiscating, occupying lands from one side and putting them in the corner without any basic rights, you are by this way ruling and committing apartheid in the occupied Palestinian Territories.”

While Harper is on his tour, there is a planned protest outside the Israeli consulate happening today, January 22, at 4pm in Toronto, as well as twelve other cities across Europe and North America. The protest is in support of nearly 50,000 African asylum seekers on strike since the  January 5. The strike is in response to a recent amendment to the Prevention of Infiltration Law, which previous amendments were condemned by the High Court of Justice as “a grave and disproportionate abuse of the right to personal freedom.”

More information on the protest can be found here.

Michel Warchawski standing in Canada Park near Jerusalem. Photo by Jillian Kestler-D’Amours.

Sitting cross-legged in a circle, a group of about 20 Israeli school children are chatting excitedly under the shade of tall pine trees one sunny afternoon in March. A few meters away, the names of hundreds of Canadians are prominently displayed on row upon row of beige, ceramic plaques. Montreal. Toronto. Winnipeg. Vancouver. Welcome to Canada Park.

The Jewish National Fund of Canada built this vast and sprawling national park, just 30 minutes’ drive from Jerusalem, in the early 1970s. The idyllic setting of the park today, however, belies its bitter origins.

Three Palestinian villages—Imwas, Yalu and Beit Nuba—once stood on this land, now covered in pine trees and narrow, winding hiking trails. But that history has been largely scrubbed from the landscape and Israeli and Canadian memory.

“It’s either ancient times or Israel. There’s nothing in between,” Israeli activist Michel Warschawski tells me, as he stops the car to read a sign in Hebrew marking the site of a Byzantine-era wine press inside the park.

Warschawski was 17 when he witnessed the forced exodus of Palestinians from the three Palestinian villages in June of 1967, during the Six Days War. Palestinian men, women and children marched quietly up the hillside just past the Jewish kibbutz of Sha’alvim where he lived.

Standing inside Canada Park at the edge of a lush, green field, Warschawski pointed towards the red roofs of Sha’alvim in the distance, just beyond what once was the “no man’s land” between Israeli and Jordanian controlled areas from 1948 and 1967.

We continued along the rocky path in silence, him lost in thought and I busying myself with examining the shrubs, trees and overgrown grass under my feet for anything that would hint at the deep Palestinian roots of the area.

Today, more than 40 years after Imwas, Yalu and Beit Nuba were demolished, a few olive trees, cactuses, and the crumbling stone foundations of old homes are the only indicators of the area’s Palestinian inhabitants.

Ahmad Abu Ghosh was 14 when Israeli soldiers forced him and his family out of their village of Imwas. The villagers weren’t allowed to take any belongings with them, and were told by the Israeli army to march eastward in the direction of what is now known as the West Bank.

“We walked about 32 kilometers that day from 5 o’clock until 5 o’clock p.m. Then we reached Ramallah,” he said. Without a permit to enter Israel, the last time Abu Ghosh visited his family’s former village was 1991.

I had our conversation in mind as I surveyed the broken stones and collapsed former Palestinian homes, which, despite years of erosion and wear, remain the only witnesses to a planned and systematic expulsion of Palestinians from the land where Canada Park now sits.

“If you lived in some place for 14 years, in the childhood time, you have many memories there. Your house, the trees where you go and the fields where you run or walk,” Abu Ghosh told me. “When you see that everything is destroyed, you have to be shocked. I can’t exactly say how I feel.”

Friend of Shpitz, IEC

On March 16, 2003, an Israel Defence Forces bulldozer was demolishing houses in the Rafah refugee camp in Palestine. Seven western Palestinian solidarity activists were, through means of non-violent intervention, trying to disrupt the work of the IDF and prevent the destruction of Palestinian homes. What exactly happened that day is unclear (and the subject of many investigations) but whatever the particulars an American activist, Rachel Corrie, was run over and killed by an American-made armoured Caterpiller D9 bulldozer.

Her name has since become synonymous with the efforts to isolate the state of Israel and end the occupation of Palestine. Ships attempting to run the blockade of Gaza have borne her name, plays have been written about her and documentaries have recounted her story. Since her death, Rachel Corrie’s parents have taken up her activism and, most recently, launched a suit against the Israel Defence Forces asking for a nominal $1 in damages.

Despite the low dollar figure associated with the trial, it has proven to be tremendously disruptive. Israeli press is reporting that Caterpillar is refusing to deliver $50 million worth of bulldozers to the IDF while the trial is in progress. Caterpillar has long been the target of various Palestinian solidarity activists. Many, including Corrie’s parents, have demanded that the company stop its shipments to the IDF.

To some activists, this is a sign that the arguments used to support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign are gaining widespread traction. As Sydney Levy of Jewish Voice for Peace wrote, “We take this as an indirect admission by the company that these bulldozers are being used to violate human rights and to violate the law.”

Tracey Sandilands, 49, arrived in Canada from her native South Africa in November 2008. The next day she began her new job: executive director of Pride Toronto. After a bumpy first year in the demanding job, Sandilands is looking ahead to the 30th edition of Pride and what she hopes will be one memorable anniversary party.

Q&A

This: What experience did you have organizing an event such as Pride Week?

Sandilands: I had worked on Pride in both Cape Town and Johannesburg, but neither was as large as Toronto’s, which is the third biggest in the world. South Africa has the only Pride parades on the continent and the Jo’burg parade goes back to 1990.

This: You inherited an organization that had every staff member quit due to burnout before you arrived. How tough was that?

Tracey Sandilands. Illustration by David Donald.

Sandilands: You have no choice but accept it. The board helped incredibly. I hired some people by phone before arriving.

This: Did you suffer culture shock?

Sandilands: I did to some extent but nothing I couldn’t handle. The biggest difference is the budget, which for this year will be $3.3 million. In South Africa it was a tiny fraction of that.

This: Was there resentment of an outsider coming in?

Sandilands: Probably some but that’s to be expected. I think the only nasty experience was a comment posted after an article appeared in XTRA! [Toronto’s gay and lesbian biweekly newspaper). Someone suggested I take my “white supremacy attitude back to South Africa.”

This: That person accused you of being upbeat despite Pride having run a $138,400 deficit in your first year.

Sandilands: That’s right. But the deficit was a result of many things, including complicated timing issues relating to grants. We all had a right to be positive about what we had accomplished.

This: XTRA! is no longer a media sponsor. Was it because you criticized it for having some inaccuracies in a story about you?

Sandilands: I don’t think that was the reason. We just never had a discussion about sponsorship.

This: But the community can be political.

Sandilands: Oh, yes. But nothing more than any other activist group.

This: Pride was criticized for allowing Queers Against Israeli Apartheid to take part in last year’s parade.

Sandilands: It was decided that we shouldn’t keep anyone out of the parade because of their political views

This: What will happen this year?

Sandilands: This is a matter that [Toronto Pride’s] board of directors will decide on. As of now it’s being debated but no decision has been made.

This: What major changes are there this year?

Sandilands: A lot. We’ll have events outside the Gay Village, such as at Queen’s Park. More events for young people under age 19 and for those older than 40. Some of the latter have complained that the music was not their kind of music.

This: The date is a week later (June 25 to July 4). Is this because of the G20 summit occurring during your previous time period?

Sandilands: We made this move on our own. This allows us to incorporate the Canadian and U.S. holidays as well as keeping the anniversary of Stonewall, June 28,, in our festival. More people than ever should be there.

This: You have Cyndi Lauper giving a free concert during Pride Week. That’s a coup.

Sandilands: We’re so excited. She’s such an icon in the queer community.

This: Will you be able to enjoy any of the festivities?

Sandilands: I hope so, but it’s a very demanding time. The previous ED suggested I go up on a rooftop and enjoy the parade, enjoy what all of us have accomplished.

This: You’ll do that?

Sandilands: If there’s time.

Last update: Monday, May 31, 19:12 pm EST

Al Jazeera correspondent Jamal Elshayyal reports from on board the Mavi Marmara, one of six ships that were intercepted by Israeli Defence Forces while attempting to break the blockade of Gaza on May 31, 2010. Screengrab from Al Jazeera web video.

Al Jazeera is live-blogging flotilla-related news today with frequent updates. AJE also has a video report from on board one of the convoy’s ships filed before communications were cut off.

The Guardian has a good photo gallery online. The paper’s Middle East editor Ian Black calls the operation “a disastrous own goal.” The New York Times added a photo gallery later in the day.

Haaretz columnist Bradley Burston: “The siege itself is becoming Israel’s Vietnam.” The pseudonymous blogger Moshe Yaroni calls it “Israel’s Kent State.”

The Twitter hashtag that seems to have caught on is #freedomflotilla. There were questions this morning why #flotilla appeared and then disappeared in Twitter’s trending topics. Unknown parties have set up the spoof Twitter account @IsraelGlobalPR (mimicking the highly successful satirical feed @BPGlobalPR).

Tikkun Magazine has published a statement from the Network of Spiritual Progressives that encourages synagogues around the world to say Kaddish for the flotilla victims at services this weekend.

The Exodus, pictured in 1947 after British troops took it over.

A New York Times blog has this take on the historical parallel between today’s naval incident and the British government’s violent repulsion of the Exodus in 1947, a ship carrying thousands of Jewish holocaust survivors attempting to immigrate to Palestine: “The attack and its aftermath, which focused attention on the plight of many European Jews after the war, made headlines worldwide and helped marshal support for an Israeli state.”

Rabble has the names of the two Canadians known to be part of the flotilla: Kevin Neish, 53, of Victoria, B.C., and Mary Hughes, 77.

Wikipedia now has a page on the clash that is being continuously updated.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will remain in Canada, AFP reports.

The BBC provides a backgrounder on the Gaza blockade, under way since 2007.

Al Jazeera has a 25-minute video of their show “Inside Story,” with more analysis and background on the blockade and the flotilla. It’s embedded below:

A security guard separates pro-Palestine and pro-Israel groups during York University’s Israeli Apartheid Week in February 2009. Photo by Jad yaghmour (Excalibur).

It started out on a hopeful note. To kick off the second hearing of the Canadian Parliamentary Inquiry into Anti-Semitism, Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld, director of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, flew to Ottawa at the committee’s request to testify [PDF]that Canada is a “pioneer” of university-campus anti-Semitism. Faster than you can say “Oy vey!,” his statement became the headline on a press release [PDF] issued by the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Anti-Semitism.

Jews are special—we now have our own parliamentary coalition devoted to protecting us from Jew-haters lurking in the ranks of Canadian liberals and leftists. Seriously: Lawrence Hart, of the Canada-Israel Committee, wrote in 2003 that we should identify “the forces of anti-colonialism, antiimperialism, anti-racism and pacifism as major facilitators of today’s anti-Semitism.”

The CPCCA, established by Conservative Minister Jason Kenney and Liberal MP Irwin Cotler, is designed to combat the growing anti-Semitic menace—especially in universities. They want to expand the definition of anti-Semitism to target any “unfair” criticism of Israel and Zionism. The headache for the CPCCA? Their handpicked witnesses are totally lame.

The CPCCA invited 22 Canadian universities to send representatives. Sadly, only a few actually showed up—it was snowing that day. Dr. Fred Lowy, former president of the infamous Concordia University in Montreal— where they had a riot when Israel’s former president, Benjamin Netanyahu, tried to speak there—deflated their mood with a bummer of a statement [PDF]: “By and large, Canadian campuses are safe and are not hotbeds of anti-Semitism of any kind.”

Undaunted, the CPCCA scheduled additional hearings and eight more universities testified. They, too, failed to expose the anti-Semitic peril brewing under their noses. Dr. Jack Lightstone, Brock University president, Concordia veteran, and scholar of Judaism, brushed aside the entire premise of the hearing [PDF]: “Criticism of any government’s policies, by anyone, must be acceptable, and in universities is to be encouraged,” he said. The CPCCA did not bother with a press release for that one.

Doron Horowitz, director of community security for Toronto’s United Jewish Appeal, an umbrella organization for several major Jewish organizations and charities, perked things up for the coalition members. After listing his Israeli Defense Force counter-terrorism bona fides and elaborating on his connections to various police and intelligence agencies, he testified there is proof of a demonstrable rise in anti-Semitic incidents: Toronto’s February 2009 York University fracas between students representing Israel and the Palestinian rights movement. [PDF]

Considering the fact that the swarm of news reporters, campus security guards, and university administrators present at the event failed to document any anti-Semitic insults, threats or actions, Canada’s Israel lobby showed considerable chutzpah by entering uncorroborated incidents from that day into the country’s record of anti-Semitic acts. Voila! York University is the current official hotbed of Canadian anti-Semitism. Finally the CPCCA asked a group of Canadian police chiefs to testify. They all reassured the committee they work closely with major Jewish organizations to investigate and prosecute hate crimes. But they had no evidence to indicate Jews live under exceptional threat from hate crimes. (Or perhaps the chiefs’ suspicious downplaying of the danger could prove how vast this anti-Semitic conspiracy really is.) The Toronto Police reported that while Jews do report a large number of hate crimes directed against them in the form of mischief, like graffiti, it is lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and trans people who suffer the highest number of assaults and physical threats among all reported hate crimes. No mention was made of starting a parliamentary coalition investigating homophobia.

Fortunately, our elected politicians are here to save the day for the Israeli government. They are voluntarily targeting Canadian public activities critical of Israeli policies and Zionism. Provincial and federal politicians publicly denounced Israeli Apartheid Week, which took place on Canadian university campuses in early March, as “anti-Jewish hate fests.” Schools were pressured by the Israel lobby to ban the “anti-Semitic” event. A “biased” photo exhibit of Israeli soldiers and Palestinians was hastily removed from a library by the mayor of Côte St-Luc, Montreal. The federal government’s minister of science and technology threatened to defund an academic science organization for holding an “anti-Jewish” conference on the “two-state solution” for Israel and Palestine. The government says it is showing “zero tolerance” for “anti-Semitism” and “Palestinian terror” by cutting off funding to human rights organizations that endorse the “Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions” campaign directed at pressuring Israel to change its policies toward Palestinians.

The problem is that just like the CPCCA, these individuals and organizations are unable—despite investing serious time and effort—to show that criticisms of Israel’s policies are, in fact, rooted in bigotry against the Jewish people. That, of course, is because the origin of these critiques is not anti-Semitism; it is the conduct of Israel’s government. But that doesn’t stop the CPCCA from crying wolf.

Israel is desperate to improve its sullied image while muzzling its critics. The latest “Re-brand Israel” tourism effort is the “Size Doesn’t Matter” campaign. It was introduced by a video parodying the double meaning of Israel’s small size and an Israeli man’s penis. What were they thinking? Did Howard Stern design the campaign?

And there was more bad news for Israel: a parliamentary motion to denounce Israeli Apartheid Week was defeated on March 11, and the Bloc Québécois recently quit the CPCCA, declaring it “biased” in favour of Israel and against the Palestinians. Will the NDP stay in? Or will they, too, wilt under pressure from Canadians opposed to the new Jewish censorship and attacks on civil rights?

Anti-Semitism is real and it is always wrong, but the Israel lobby does Canadians no favours—nor Jews, frankly—by hysterically hurling accusations of “anti-Semitism” at Palestinian rights supporters and inventing trumped up anti-Semitic incidents.

From overcoming vicious crimes against my people, the fight against anti-Semitism has been hijacked to protect Israel from actions to end its illegal occupation and the expulsion of Palestinians. It’s cynical and— like the misguided “size doesn’t matter” ad campaign—it’s become a joke.

Surf’s up in Ashkelon. So I hop on the train in Tel Aviv bound for the southern Israeli city with my surfboard bag in tow. The bag, stencilled with Boards Not Bombs, attracts more than a few stares and the interest of Israeli state security at the train station. The bag is scanned, the board is tapped up and down its length, and the question has to be asked:

“You came here to surf in Israel?”

Well, yes.

“And what does this mean,” says the security soldier “Boards Not Bombs? You know we take bombs very seriously here in Israel.”

Don’t I know. I went to Israel in February 2009, during the biggest military operation in Gaza in more than a decade. Israel had launched an enormous offensive reply to years of Hamas bombs on southern Israeli towns like Ashdod, Sderot, and Ashkelon. On January 2, foreigners were ushered out of Gaza. On January 3, Israeli tanks rolled into Gaza to begin a ground offensive. A month later the death toll in Gaza was estimated to be close to 1,000 civilians.

So you can be forgiven if surfing is not the first thing you think of when Israel, Gaza, or the Middle East is mentioned. Neither is peace. But there is a thriving surf scene in Israel and an emerging one in Gaza, and both are part of the global brother- and sisterhood of surfers united by the waves that connect us all.

The members of the Gaza Surf Club

I’m a Jew—but my true religion is surfing. I had come to Israel because I was increasingly disturbed by the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, and it was precisely because the situation had become so bad that I felt it necessary to see it myself. I believe surfing and peace are related: surf-ers everywhere know the peace that can come from riding a perfect wave. So I went to Israel in the hopes of delivering wetsuits to members of a loose-knit group of surfers known as the Gaza Surf Club, along with the T-shirts I made with the (now-notorious) Boards Not Bombs phrase printed on them. Call it fun over fundamentalism.

The security guard is still waiting for an answer to his Boards Not Bombs question.

“Ever hear of the Beach Boys?” I ask him.

“Of course,” he says.

“Well, it’s true,” I tell him, breaking into song. “Catch a wave, and you’ll be sitting on top of the world.”

He shakes his head like I’m meshuga and sends me through, anyway.

Once on board the train we travel south for an hour through a jumble of expressways extending out of Tel Aviv, lined by orange groves, the occasional camel, Arab and Jewish villages, and the faint blue line of the Mediterranean and its fickle waves.

On the train I meet Avram, a young Israeli soldier in uniform who is curious about my board. I tell him of my plans to surf in Ashkelon and then, hopefully, Gaza.

“I surfed Gaza,” says Avram, to my surprise. He served there during the second intifada and smuggled his board in on a troop vehicle.

“There were a few soldiers in the water and a few Gazans. Some of us lent them our boards.”

You see? I think, there it is—the aloha spirit! Not so fast. “In Gaza they said we were stealing the waves,” says Avram. “We told them, ‘learn how to surf.’”

For all the laid-back spirit of surfing, there is also a testy localism, a result of limited carrying capacity: too many surfers, not enough waves. Territorial conflict, already abundant in the Middle East, apparently extends to the beach, too. Sometimes I think the Middle East is a case of localism gone crazy—spiralling out from the Old City of Jerusalem divided into its quarters of Muslim, Jewish, Christian, and Armenian. Jerusalem is more carved up than Bobby Orr’s knee.

Dorian "Doc" Paskowitz

In 1956, eight years after the formation of the State of Israel, surfing arrived with the American surfer and physician Dorian “Doc” Paskowitz, the undisputed father of Israeli surfing. He brought his 10-foot Hobie surfboard with him. Four years later he returned with six surfboards, each emblazoned with the Star of David. Aiming to repopulate the world with Jews, he raised nine kids out of a 1949 Studebaker and then later in an RV, while chasing waves; his life was recently vividly captured in the feature documentary Surfwise. Paskowitz was like Moses carrying the Ten Commandments down from Mount Sinai: Thou shalt surf.

The first surfer Paskowitz taught on a Haifa beach happened to be an Arab boy. He’s been trying to bring Arabs and Israelis together to surf ever since.

The sport grew slow and steady in Israel: in the late ’70s, a group of hardcore surfers were centred in Tel Aviv. In the early ’80s, Shaun Thomson, a Jew and world champion surfer, came to Israel to teach a surf clinic. He was treated like a rock star and thousands of Israelis watched Thomson from the beach. The next year Tel Aviv played host to a stop on the World Surfing Tour.

Today there are close to 30,000 surfers in Israel. In Gaza, the scene is much smaller, with perhaps 50 or 60 surfers— equipment being one limiting factor. For instance, Salah Abu Khamil is considered the first Palestinian surfer in Gaza: now in his 40s and working in Israel, he first saw surfing on Israeli TV in the early ’80s and started out on a homemade board he painted himself. Lacking anything else suitable, he used knives for stabilizing fins.

The train station in Ashkelon has a quiet, eerie quality. The city does not see many tourists these days. In early March 2008, rockets fired by Hamas from the Gaza Strip hit Ashkelon, wounding six and causing property damage, marking the first time that Hamas had been able to reliably strike the town. In May 2008, a rocket fired from the northern Gazan city of Beit Lahiya hit this shopping mall in southern Ashkelon, causing significant structural damage and a number of injuries, but amazingly no deaths. Outside the train station is a big-box discount store. Though it’s open, the parking lot is almost empty.

Pulling up to meet me in his Toyota Corolla with a short board strapped to the roof is Chico Maayan. Maayan, now 42, a diminutive former Israeli surfing champ, has lived here in Ashkelon, a coastal community of 120,000, for 30 years. We are off to Delilah’s to check the waves there. Delilah’s is a popular beach named after the legend of Samson and Delilah, which played itself out here on the shores of Ashkelon and Gaza 15 kilometres to the south. We drive through a maze of modern white three- and four-storey apartments with red-tiled roofs separated by patches of green, the building style typical of much of Israel.

Ashkelon’s current slow pace means the waves are not crowded today. That suits Maayan fine for now, but he runs a surf school in Ashkelon, and since the bombing, business has been in the toilet. He tells me about a surf lesson he was teaching a while ago that ended abruptly.

“I was in the army, so okay, I know combat,” says Maayan. “I hear this whistling. I know it’s a rocket. I tell the kids, ‘Get down! Get down!’ The bomb landed 100 metres from us, a mushroom of smoke. We were shocked; this is the middle of summer. All the parents call me and tell me to bring the kids home. Since then it has been a problem.” (In surf lingo, catching a big wave is called “riding a bomb.” So you can imagine that Maayan’s experience brings a whole new meaning to the idea.)

This year the celebration of Purim—the festive holiday where children and adults dress in costumes that commemorate the deliverance of the Jewish people of the ancient Persian Empire from Haman’s plot to annihilate them—was cancelled in Ashkelon. “No one comes here,” says Maayan. “It’s a ghost town.”

Maayan’s parents are from Chile and came to Israel around 1960. They are proud Zionists. “My mother will kill anyone if they say anything bad about Israel,” he chuckles. Maayan served in the army during the first intifada. He describes himself as a patriotic Israeli. “Israel didn’t do enough in its recent war in Gaza,” says Maayan. “Not until we see a white flag from Hamas should we stop.”

And yet Maayan believes in a twostate solution and that Israel should support the more moderate Fatah party in Palestine. I ask Maayan how he feels about the Gazan civilians during the operation going on not far from here. “Really it didn’t bother me very much,” he says. “Sometimes I get a clinch in my heart; it’s a pity, but really, the Israeli army dropped flyers warning people to clear the area. We did our best. Hamas has got a policy that they hide behind their citizens…. Fatah is more reasonable; they recognize Israel. They are more suitable to rule. If not, then it’s like having Iran next door.”

And yet, Maayan is optimistic. “Things will get better. I love Ashkelon, I love the place, the people; I know the beaches, and this is my home.” I tell Maayan that tomorrow I plan to go to Gaza in hopes of hooking up with the surfers there and delivering some equipment. He looks at me and says, vaguely, “So you are like that, I see.”

The next day I plan to enter Gaza. Mohammed Alwayn is my surfing contact there: Alwayn is an agronomist who works for Care International. “When you surf, you don’t think about the situation,” he tells me over the phone. “When surfing, we feel free.” Alwayn and I made plans to meet up and and he’d introduce me to some of his surfing friends. All I had to do was get across the border.

My friend Arthur Rashkovan is to drive me to the Gaza border. Now 30, Rashkovan grew up two blocks from Israel’s famed Hilton Beach, home to some of the best surf in the country, and has lived there his whole life. A former Israeli skateboard champion, he’s a first-generation Israeli whose parents are from Moldova in Eastern Europe. I asked him what brought his parents to Israel and he told me, “The usual: anti-Semitism.”

Rashkovan grew up in what he calls a “mini-California, a surfer’s paradise.” Despite the conflicts, life continues as normal in Tel Aviv. It’s an extremely safe city. With a population of 400,000, street crime and homelessness are virtually nonexistent, children are free to play in the streets and parks by themselves, and women can safely walk the streets late at night in a city that never sleeps.

“Tel Aviv is in a bu-ah, a bubble,” says former Israeli surf pro Maya Dauber, 36. “For me, the last war with Gaza was like a reality TV show. You feel removed.

“You have to understand. This is not the first war we ever had,” says Dauber, who served in the military while being allowed to compete as a surfer in the World Qualifying Series. “Every few years we have a war. Every few years I know a soldier who died or was hurt because of a war. You start to develop a thick skin. You start to protect yourself more and more. You don’t want to hear about it. That’s why Tel Aviv is one of the best cities to hang out in in the world. Because people want to forget. They want to go out and have fun, to drink to clear their minds. Surfing,” she says, “is an extension of that.”

During his youth Rashkovan would “surf my brains out. I lived like a true beach bum. Nothing else mattered.” When he turned 18, Arthur had to serve in the military. “I realized I need to serve my country, and I didn’t want to get out of the army. So I had a goal of getting the best job I could have and keep on skating and surfing.” So he took a desk job not far from home. “My experience in the military was a lot of skate injuries,” laughs Rashkovan. “I broke my arm twice and my ankle from skateboarding. Luckily you get a very long leave to heal up, so I went on two surf trips to San Diego. The third time I got injured the army had no use for me, and they released me.”

After Rashkovan left the army he gradually became one of the prime movers and shakers in the burgeoning Israeli surf industry. In 2004, Doc Paskowitz came to Israel looking to meet some Arab-Israeli surfers. Rashkovan was in a position to help him out. Paskowitz and Rashkovan gave impromptu lessons to Arab kids on the beach between Tel Aviv and Jaffa, a spot where Israelis and Arabs surf together. “At that moment, I realized, hey, why not organize the first surf event for Arabs and Israelis?” says Rashovan. “I thought it would be a good opportunity to show that surfers can overcome barriers such as religion and politics.”

The 2004 Arab-Israeli surf contest was just the beginning. Last year, as part of something he describes as beginning as a “lark,” Rashkovan got together with Doc Paskowitz and surfing god Kelly Slater (who is of Syrian descent) to teach surfing clinics to Arabs and Israelis. They dubbed it Surfing for Peace. Young Arab girls in hijabs and young Israelis with yarmulkes caught waves with Slater looking on. Fun versus fundamentalism.

Then, pushing his luck, Doc Paskowitz, along with his sons David, Josh, and Jonathan, headed for the border to deliver some surfboards to Gaza. Despite there being a total blockade on entry, Doc managed to cajole some border guards into letting him exchange the boards with some waiting Gazans. “Kissing was the secret to getting across the border,” says Doc. “All the guys that want to shoot me, I grab them and kiss them.”

Nobody believes that you can actually bring peace simply through the act of surfing. But you can create moments of peacefulness, create some friendships, and demystify your so-called enemy. Or, as Doc says, “God will surf with the devil if the waves are good enough.”

“That day when we delivered the boards was a very magical day,” recalls Rashkovan. “We were swamped by the media. Everybody was calling me: the New York Times, the L.A. Times. I had newspapers call from Germany, South Africa, Indonesia, Brazil—really everywhere. The funniest part is we had maybe one or two minutes on Israeli TV. People are turning cynical here and indifferent. Because on one side we have war all around and we have gotten a bit insular. You get used to what’s going on around and just get on with it. The whole world was excited and Israel was like, ‘Whatever.’”

Friends asked Rashkovan why he was bothering with Surfing for Peace. “I want to prove that there are large populations on both sides who want to live their lives peacefully,” he says. “The problem is they are controlled by politicians who have other interests. Peace is a political process, but luckily friendship isn’t. Initiating actions on the grassroots level between common people is a much faster way to move things. Surfing as a peaceful way of living is just perfect for this goal. Why not just go out and forget about our worries for a moment? This what the Arabs in Israel do when they go surf, this is what the Israeli surfers do when they go out, and it’s the same for the guys in Gaza.”

Rashkovan is determined to keep Surfing for Peace grassroots and out of politics. “We know there is a huge population in Gaza that wants to live its life quietly, but it’s controlled by extremists,” he says. “I wanted to show the Gazans on the other side that there are a group of people here who want to have the same life. And maybe through the common ground of surfing show the world something else. We just want to make friends with a few guys on the other side.”

As you get closer to Gaza the highway winnows down to two narrow lanes surrounded by farm fields and overhung by orange groves. There is a sweet perfume of orange blossoms in the air. The pastoral landscape is abruptly interrupted by a clearing covered in asphalt and a big sign that reads Welcome to the Erez Crossing. The Gaza crossing looks like a hangar in a mid-size airfield with plenty of parking spaces. There are many people milling about their cars—simply waiting.

The gate has a parkade shed with a gate. At the gate Lior, a friendly, engaging young Israeli soldier, greets me. The surfboard makes him smile. I tell him surf’s up in Gaza and I want to join my Palestinian brothers on the waves.

“Not today.”

“Come on, I heard it’s as big as Indo in Gaza.” He laughs at my reference to the surf mecca of Indonesia. I spend about a half-hour trying to charm and disarm the young soldier, but there will be no getting into Gaza today—or on several other attempts I make. Hamas and Israel are still lobbing bombs at each other and things are just too hot.

Having come all this way from Tel Aviv, we stop at the Arab port of Jaffa instead to visit Rashkovan’s friend Abdallah Seri. An Arab-Israeli, Seri lives with his family in a simple flat with a patio garden. His father, a fisherman, joins us over strong Arabic coffee while a soccer game plays on the TV.

Abdallah Seri with one of the "Boards Not Bombs" T-shirts

Seri, now 28, learned to surf at the age of 12 and is part of the Surfing for Peace project. He talks about his love for Doc Paskowitz and for surfing and how it can bring people together. But then he turns serious. “The people in Gaza are not an autonomous people,” he says. “They don’t know how to think for themselves anymore, and they can’t tell right from wrong anymore. They’re victims of both the Israelis and their own Arab brothers and sisters.”

Seri’s father points to the soccer players on the screen: “Look at these guys. They’re from all over the world, playing together as a team. That is what sport can do. That is what surfing can do.”

Using surfing as an approach to solving an intractable problem like the Middle East conflict involves a leap of faith. In fact, many writers have questioned whether surfing itself is a faith. Does God reside in a double-overhead wall of blue? (The ancient Polynesians prayed over tree trunks to their god of surfing before shaping them into surfboards and built temples dedicated to the sport.)

Rabbi Nachum “Shifty” Shifren, aka the Surfing Rabbi (he wrote a book of the same title), is a deep believer in the divine peace that surfing can bestow. “I think if there is anything that can bring about peace, it’s surfing,” Shifren, a former lifeguard and triathlete, tells me by phone from Santa Monica, California. “What I am advocating is a synthesis between the physical and the spiritual. I believe that surfing is the answer to modern man’s dilemma of stress, of lack of security, of lack of self-esteem, and even in the search for peace. Surfing is a spiritual connector. It’s like a conduit where one could appreciate God and the forces of the world.”

Divine conduit or not, surfing does seem to help individuals overcome barriers to understanding. Despite his selfdescribed hardcore rightwing views, Chico Maayan also took part in the Surfing for Peace operation. “We started Surfing for Peace because we thought of it as not connected to politics—it is connected to the ocean,” he says. “We’re surfing. The Gazans are surfing. We should surf together. It won’t bring peace, but we will see the enemy differently.”

Back in Tel Aviv, I call Alwayn in Gaza to tell him I hadn’t been able to get past the border. He was hardly surprised. “Have faith,” he says.

A week after I got back to Vancouver Island, Arthur Rashkovan emailed to tell me that a German-based journalist had received permission to get into Gaza and took along four of the wetsuits I had left behind. He also took some photos of the surfers unpacking the suits in delight.

So I keep the faith. Searching for waves and peace in Israel and Gaza may be an act of faith, but this is a region, after all, that hosts three of the world’s major religions. Faith is all we’ve got, and surfing is my religion. I do believe that hope resides in a double-overhead wall of blue. Or as Chico Maayan told me, “As long as there are waves, there will be a type of peace.”

Images of the Gaza Surf Club courtesy Alex Klein, director of God Went Surfing With The Devil. Below is the trailer for that documentary:

Leila’s Birthday — playing as part of the Toronto Palestine Film Festival, Friday Oct. 2nd Bloor Cinema at 7:00 PM

While most Torontonians know about TIFF—the hugely publicized Toronto International Film Festival—very few have heard about TPFF, the Toronto Palestine Film Festival. Unlike TIFF, the TPFF isn’t attended by Hollywood stars, doesn’t receive much mainstream media coverage and has no paid staff.

Despite these challenges, TPFF is an ambitious film fest that features over 40 films and documentaries about Palestine and the Palestinian Diaspora. By showcasing the diversity of Palestinian culture and people, the film fest attempts to dispel stereotypes of the victimized or violent Palestinian.

According to Dalia Majid, a TPFF spokesperson the aim of the festival is “to support Palestinian filmmakers and artists, because they often face major challenges in getting their films made and screened.” Another aim is to showcase “Palestinian culture, aspirations, humour, satire—the range of emotions all people feel, including Palestinians.”

Some festival highlights include the Canadian premiere of Amreeka, the North American premiere of To My Father (Tuesday, September 29, 7:00 PM), Checkpoint Rock: Songs of Palestine (Wednesday, September 30, 7:00 PM), and Laila’s Birthday (Friday, October 2, 7:00 PM), a film screened at last year’s TIFF. This year’s festival also includes an art exhibit, three discussion forums, a film and food brunch program, and will be attended by seven directors.

Majid says that the response so far “has been very positive. Last year people attended the film fest out of curiosity and left very impressed. We have big expectations for this year’s film fest.”

When asked whether the TPFF has an official position regarding the controversy that raged at TIFF this year, Majid explains that the TPFF has “welcomed the discussion that followed the petition and boycott” because “at the very least it got people talking,” which she said was better than silence and indifference.

The second annual TPFF started last Friday and ends this Friday, October 2. The programming guide is available at the fest’s website.

A protester on the streets of Iran, June 17, 2009. The sign reads "They Killed My Bro Koz He Asked "Where's My Vote." Creative Commons photo by Hamed Saber.

Two elections. Two women. Two killings. One legacy?

Not really. One victim became a world icon, while the other barely registered on the books of the international media. Such are the divergent post-mortem fates of Neda Agha Soltan and Zeina al-Miri. The former was shot in the streets of Tehran during post-election disturbances in June. Her story made headlines, and her name became the household kind for those who follow world news. The latter was shot in the streets of Beirut barely a week later, after clashes between supporters of two of Lebanon’s political factions following parliamentary elections. Locals barely remember her name.

Al-Miri’s anonymity is not unique. Videos of Israeli soldiers shooting unarmed pro-Palestinian protesters, in some cases fatally, surface regularly on the internet. North American mainstream media is hardly moved or concerned. Israel is on the good books of Western governments—those who demonstrate against its policies cannot be pro-democracy activists. Not so for Iran, where any opposition to the theocratic regime is cheered on, even if it is backed and led by the mullahs themselves.

The coverage of the Iranian crisis was a lot more than another case of double standards. It was a missed opportunity to understand the political dynamics at work in Iran after decades of bias and demonization of that country. It was also a missed opportunity to create genuine links of solidarity with the Iranian people that outlive the euphoria of mass street action. But instead of understanding, with a few exceptions, we got sensationalism. Instead of grassroots, long-term solidarity, we got sensational vows of support and government-driven initiatives of interference.

During Iran’s disturbances, the social networking site Twitter famously went so far as to move a planned maintenance blackout to correspond with nighttime in Iran, at the request of the U.S. State Department. Researchers at the University of Toronto who had developed an online censorship avoidance tool jumped into the fray and urged Iranian activists to use it to reach websites banned by the Iranian government.

Where did all these efforts go when Israel banned all journalists from entering Gaza during its bombardment of the strip last January?

Instantaneous solidarity with ordinary Iranians seeped all the way to the higher echelons of power. North American and European heads of state, the same ones whose countries have imposed sanctions and waged proxy wars on the Iranian people for decades, were suddenly touched by the fate of Neda and felt compelled to express their support. Dozens of protestors killed in China or Honduras or Yemen around the same time simply did not tickle the right solidarity glands. When the Iranian protests started dying out, the voice of cold realism, The Economist, wondered whether the “dream” was over.

Whose dream of change was it, anyway? Shouldn’t it have been the Iranians’? The highly romanticized and superficial coverage of events exposed two key things. First, a deep-seated belief that Iran wants to be “just like us”—democratic, liberal, civilized—and that a shadowy force called the Islamic revolution is stopping it (the fact that Islamic rhetoric dominated both sides in Iran’s conflict seemed to fly right above the heads of North American and European media analysts).

Second, the coverage demonstrated the continued, powerful influence of Western governments and political elites over the tenor and content of news from foreign countries. Without a serious overhaul of how this coverage is conducted, North Americans will continue to receive a largely skewed and one-sided portrayal of events, one where pro-Western forces of good are battling anti-Western forces of evil. You would hope this cartoon notion had been demolished along with George W. Bush’s silly decree that “you’re either with us or against us.”

Around the same time, Bush’s successor, President Barack Obama, remained conspicuously vague on the question of a possible strike by the Middle East’s only nuclear power, Israel, on alleged Iranian nuclear facilities. Such a strike would spark another conflagration in the Middle East, and the security repercussions would be felt worldwide.

Shouldn’t Western mainstream media be just as worried about that scenario? And in light of such possible escalations, shouldn’t that drive them to make better sense of what happened in Iran? Crucial questions are going unasked: What is the long-term impact of the Iranian crisis on the nuclear file? Who are the power groups mobilizing both camps? Why did the protests fizzle out the way they did? How can an influential man like Iranian politician Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, accused of corruption, be leading a “democratic” movement of change?

Even if media outlets wished to make better sense of events affecting millions of people, they would have had little airtime or space to discuss these secondary matters at hand. After all, the King of Pop had died.

[Photo source]

Nova Scotia NDP Premier Darrell Dexter has a lot of reading to do, including This Magazine. Illustration by David Anderson.

The September-October 2009  issue of This Magazine should now be in subscribers’ mailboxes (subscribers always get the magazine early, and you can too), and will be for sale on your local newsstand coast-to-coast this week. All the articles in the issue will be made available online in the weeks ahead, though, so keep checking back for more. We suggest subscribing to our RSS feed to ensure you never miss a new article going online, following us on Twitter or becoming a fan on Facebook for updates, new articles and other tasty links.

On the cover of the September-October issue is Anthony Fenton‘s special investigation into the world of Canadian private security firms, armoured-car manufacturers and oil companies that are profiting from the chaos in Iraq. While Canadians are justly proud of the fact that we declined to join the misbegotten “coalition of the willing” that occupied Iraq in 2003, Fenton finds that in many ways — politically, economically, militarily — Canada’s involvement in Iraq today is deeper than ever. Three years after the legalization of same-sex marriage in Canada, Paul Gallant surveys the terrain of LGBT activism and finds it increasingly deserted. Marriage certificates in hand, middle-class gays and lesbians have drifted away from the movement, he finds, while the underfunded and burnt-out activists left behind say there’s still plenty of work to do. And reporting from Israel, Grant Shilling meets the beach bums, peace activists, and former soldiers who believe that the region’s world-class surfing could be one way to bring Israelis and Palestinians together—if only he can deliver a load of wetsuits to Gaza.

There’s plenty more, including Paul McLaughlin‘s interview with new Nova Scotia NDP premier Darrell Dexter; Sienna Anstis profiles the remarkable long-distance relationship between the University of Manitoba’s microbiology lab and a sex-worker clinic in Nairobi, Kenya; Andrew Webster meets the  independent videogame designers who make Canada an increasingly important player in an emerging art form; Hicham Safieddine says that during the election uproar over the summer, Western mainstream media got it wrong about Iran—again; Soraya Roberts finds that, in choosing Veronica over Betty, freckle-faced comic-book icon Archie Andrews has subverted seven decades of cultural expectations; RM Vaughan tests the limits of his solidarity during Toronto’s great municipal strike of summer 2009 as the litterbox threatens his sanity; Laura Kusisto digs into the real numbers behind Saskatchewan’s plan to pay $20,000 to recent graduates who choose to settle there; Souvankham Thammavongsa sends a postcard about the strange nighttime happenings in Marfa, Texas; and Darryl Whetter asks why, when 80 percent of Canadians live in cities, so much of our fiction takes place down on the farm.

PLUS: Chris Jai Centeno on University of Toronto budget cuts; Emily Hunter on overfishing and the seafood industry; Jenn Hardy on the DivaCup; Milton Kiang on better ways to recycle e-waste; Navneet Alang on microblogging service Tumblr; Jason Anderson on the Toronto International Film Festival; Sarah Colgrove on Len Dobbin, the Montreal jazz scene’s most important audience member; Kelli Korducki reviews Who’s Your Daddy?: And other writings on queer parenting; and Graham F. Scott on net neutrality and the CRTC.

With new poetry by Sandra Ridley and Lillian Nećakov, and a new short story by Kathy Friedman.