In 2008, my wife and I made our first (and to date only) visit to Israel. It was for us in the nature of a religious pilgrimage, because we are members of a modern Christian faith termed “Messianic”. The church we attend in Abbotsford, BC, is called Shabbat Shel Shalom (“Sabbath of Peace”) Messianic Fellowship; we observe all the biblical feasts and the seventh-day Sabbath, and we believe that the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) is a communication from God to all mankind, and that obedience to its precepts (love, peace, honesty, integrity, respect for others, etc.) is a valid guide for moral behaviour. We also believe in Jesus the Christ, the Messiah, whose death, burial and resurrection are the salvation and hope for all who believe.

We were so impressed by the friendliness, kindness and entrepreneurial skills of the Israeli people that we subscribed to a service called Aritza, which every other month sends us objets d’art representative of life in Israel. These mailings give us both pleasure and inspiration.

Our ability to receive these much-desired objets is now about to be taken away from us by the Canadian federal government’s arbitrary decision to ban imports from companies operating in the mis-named “West Bank”—which should properly be called “Judea and Samaria”.

This policy has never been debated in Canada’s Parliament; it is an arbitrary political policy enacted by the federal Cabinet without Parliament’s authority. I submit that this fact alone renders the recent Canadian government decision against Israel ultra vires.

As I will illustrate, this rash political decision is also made on the basis of several levels of wrong information.

In news stories about this mistaken policy, various mistaken and false so-called “facts” have been cited:

• The so-called “occupation” does not exist. The land in Judea and Samaria where Jewish “settlements” are being built are in every case land that belongs to the State of Israel (there are no other legal states in the region).
• Judea and Samaria were illegally occupied for 19 years—by Jordan; they were liberated and returned to Israel as a result of Israel’s defensive victory in the Six Day War of 1967.
• There has never been a Palestinian state in the region. Before the First World War, when the region was called “South Syria” and ruled by the Ottoman Empire for 500 years, there was never any attempt to establish a “Palestinian” state.
• The term “Palestinian” formerly meant a Middle Eastern Jew. It was only coined as a putative state in the 1960s by the international terrorist, Yasser Arafat, who formed the Palestinian Liberation Organization for the purpose of abolishing the Jewish state of Israel, which had been approved by the League of Nations, the San Remo Conference, and confirmed in 1947 by the United Nations. Arafat was the nephew of Hajj Amin al Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem who conspired with Adolf Hitler to plan the global eradication of Jews, and who recruited Bosnian Jews for the Nazi SS.
• The International Court of Justice (ICJ), which has no legitimate authority, has repeatedly condemned Israel while neglecting to discipline openly criminal nations like North Korea, China, Somalia, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Iran…the list is almost endless.
• I am dismayed that Canada openly places itself in league with such oppressive states by condemning the only liberal democracy in the Middle East. The only country in the Middle East where Christians can freely exist is Israel.
• The ICJ has levelled unproven charges of “apartheid” and “ethnic cleansing” against Israel; there has been ethnic cleansing in Judea and Samaria—but the only such cases on record have all been by Arab Muslims and against Jews and Christians, like riots against Jews in Hebron and the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem, and purges of Christians in Syria, Bethlehem and Egypt. The ICJ never mentions those.
• The continuous presence of Jews in Israel has been long established—in excess of 3,300 years—by archaeology and by secular records, as well as in biblical history.

Canada’s federal Cabinet and the Prime Minister’s Office must rescind this unjust and arbitrary imposition on the liberties of Canadian citizens.

CHP Canada supports Israel’s right, as a Sovereign nation, to defend its borders and protect its democracy in the hostile environment of the Middle East.