During the nine years I served as a Member of Parliament in Canada's House of Commons, I was at the forefront of the fight for same-sex marriage (which is now legal in Canada).
I supported complete decriminalization for possession of small quantities of marijuana.
I stood up for women's right to choose in any and all abortion debates.
I demonstrated and made speeches in Parliament against Canadian participation in George W. Bush's Iraq war.
I pushed for the Kyoto Protocol on climate change.
I am in favour of a (well-defined and regulated) right to end one's life in the case of painful, late-stage terminal illness.
Although I believe any government should be fiscally responsible, I also believe the state has an integral role to play in the economy, including to ensure fairness and some measure of equality with regard to income distribution.
And I am a well-known opponent of Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
By any standard, one would think that all this makes me a liberal -- and it does.
Hijacking liberalism
Still, those self-styled liberals who accuse right-wingers of having "taken possession" of the word "Zionism" are trying to equate Liberalism with one-sided criticism of Israel. As if to be a true liberal, one must basically put the blame solely on the Jewish state for the current situation in the Middle East.
I refuse.
I will not let anyone tell me I am not a liberal because I believe that, while not being blameless, the State of Israel has been on the right side of the debate more often than not.
I believe in nations' right to self-determination. That is what I stood for in Canada's Parliament as an MP for the Bloc Québécois. While that right to self-determination is the foundation of the Jewish state, it must also be realized for the Palestinians. They too have a right to their own free, independent, contiguous, peaceful and democratic state beside Israel.
I have publicly supported Palestinian statehood so often that I have developed a reputation as a pro-Palestinian Zionist, a moniker I cultivate as a reminder to others that peace is not a zero-sum game.
But self-determination means taking responsibility for your actions. For the good things you do and the mistakes you make.
The same people who say they support Palestinian self-determination absolve Palestinians of any and all responsibility while effectively blaming Israel at every turn.
The two-state solution could have happened -- many times
The two-state solution could have happened a long time ago, if the Palestinians had really wanted it.
It could have happened in 1937 when the British Peel commission suggested partition and the Arabs (they weren't called Palestinians then) rejected it.
It could have happened in 1947 when the newly-created United Nations voted for partition, which the Jews accepted and the Arab world rejected.
It could have happened after the Six Day War when Israel offered to give back most of the territories it won in that war. But the Arab League in Khartoum responded with the infamous "Three Nos": no negotiations with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no peace with Israel.
It could have happened at Camp David in 2000, had Yasser Arafat not simply walked out without making a counteroffer and instead attempted (at the very least) to instrumentalize the ensuing campaign of Palestinian violence.
It could have happened in 2008 had Abbas been willing to accept Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's generous offers.
The real world
It is not being liberal to make abstractions of the real world -- it is being naïve.
It is not being liberal, it is being naïve, if one does not factor in the Palestinians' and the Arab world's deep-seated and ongoing rejectionism of Israel.
It is not being liberal, it is being naïve, to forget that the Arab Spring did not produce Western-style democracies but has instead opened the door to Islamic fundamentalist groups that often espouse anti-Semitic and anti-Western interests and objectives.
It is not being liberal to not live in the world I've described above. It is pure naivety. True liberals must not disconnect themselves from reality, but rather leverage reality to change the world.
In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, only by being practical idealists (that is, by not losing sight of their goals while taking reality into account) will liberals be able to help achieve what they set out to accomplish: two states, one Arab and one Jewish, living side by side in peace.
Follow Richard Marceau on Twitter: www.twitter.com/richardmarceau
Isn't it great when words mean whatever you want?
"Hey, I'm a PhD who never went to college!"
This is great...
With that said i find your article and many of its assertions baseless and the tone of your article is exceptionally smug and your claims vastly hypocritical.
You make comments about self determination being important and then complain about the 1 year old Arab spring not yet bringing about western democracies the way YOU wanted. This is eerily similar of the USA & Isreal demanding Palestinians hold free/fair elections and when they did, they refused to accept it because it was not the outcome they wanted.
You ignore the fact that western democracies took decades and CENTURIES to come to the point they are at now. How many revolutions, world wars and civil wars have been fought for us to get to this point? My last count was dozens if not close to 100. You also gloss over that western deomcracies also had to throw off the oppression of fundamentalists of the Christian church in order to do this.
The mid-east has not had this chance and in fact been stunted in this as the west (USA mainly) has been backing and propping up the very dictators they have now thrown away.
So please stop using your "liberal" bona fides as a shield against criticism of your policies that exist now.
I've heard the opposite of what the writer states. I've heard that the entire international community, plus Palestine have voted for the two-state solution, and that Israel and the U.S have been the only 2 to vote no for the last 30 years. As I do not see Palestine invading Israel, but the other way around...common sense tells me the U.S and Israel are at fault. I could be wrong, but given the U.S "diplomacy" with the Middle East, it just rings true for me. Israel and the U.S need to quit trying to control the region. Noam Chomsky is a great resource for anyone curious.
This claim that the Jews of the world are all the descendents of those who were exiled by the Romans is pure historical nonsense, and , furthermore, it just contradicts known subsequent Jewish history. There was a massive Jewish revolt in Palestine against the Byzantine Romans, with the aid of the Sassanid Persians, in the early 7th century, roughly 500 years after the Exile supposedly occured.
Judaism was once a religion like Christianity and Islam, I.e. it welcomed converts and even sought them. There were Jewish converts all over the Roman Empire. The core population of European Jews are the descendents of Jewish converts, not migrants from Palestine. And DNA analysis tend to confirm this given that European Jews are very closely related to Italians and other Mediterranean Europeans. This is not to say there is not some genetic contribution from Palestinian Jews. However, it is obvious that the people we now call the Palestinians are much more closely related to the Jews of Palestine than European Zionists. Modern-day Palestinians are simply acculturated Arabs who converted to Christianity and then mostly to Islam. This is just common sense in any other context. If I were to say that the modern-day Lebanese are the descendents of the Phoenicians, everyone would agree with this.
Of course, to make the analogy a better fit, the rest of America would have to be run by various state religions that defined all Algonquian people as "enemies of God".
if only the arabs had done ----this that and the other thing
that is the kind of ""spin the wheels" argument that ensures progress will never be made -
post about that on his blog today:
Israeli Spy Chief Condemns Netanyahu for Iran Hype, Messianism
Posted on 04/28/2012 by Juan
Camp David huh: Shlomo Ben Ami the Israeli Foriegn Minister at the time has publically said that if he was Arafat he would not have accepted the proposal. Readers can go to You Tube to see this statement.
Jews do not need Israel in order to survive. But its continued existence threatens them more than they can know; the push-back re. Zionist misbehavior is too immense, and more often than not, justified.
Face it. The Abrahamic cult and its offspring religions have done enormous collective damage to the world's psyche. Credit the Jews with coming up with this scheme. Disdain the hundreds of millions who have been wannabees, including Christians, Moslems and Mormons.
Just clear the decks you guys. Bring the nightmare to an end. Walk away proud.