Speaking as part of a panel of Jewish public officials on Tuesday, Robinson answered a question in part by saying there is an “entire generation” of young adults who do not know about the Holocaust or understand that the region on which the state of Israel was created decades ago was previously “a crappy piece of land with nothing on it.”
“There were several hundred thousand people but, other than that, it didn’t produce an economy. It couldn’t grow things. It didn’t have anything on it,” she said during a public Zoom call hosted by B’nai Brith, an independent Jewish human rights organization.
Every politician in Canada should have to take a test on world history before they are allowed to run for office 'cause crap like this is downright embarrassing.
She probably thinks the Native Americans are thankful that they now have all those nice reservations to live on as well, compared to the conditions they had before the Europeans came.
I mean this is the propaganda that has plagued the West for years. I remember it was a common argument that Palestine was a barren wasteland until the Jews came and built kibbutzes and farms.
As a Jewish person, this sort of behaviour makes me sick. It was a populated land filled with people living their lives.
This, right here, is our fundamental problem. The idea that everything and everyone has to be enclosed and developed or otherwise conform to some narrow master plan is behind everything from loss of access to public lands to colonialism and beyond.
If the land supported several hundred thousand people there, then it was obviously providing what the people needed and there had to be both systems of governance and economic systems. The fact that they did not conform to the ideals of someone from outside does not change those simple facts.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Critics say remarks like Robinson’s dismiss people who lived in the area for tens of thousands of years before the creation of Israel in 1948, including Palestinians, Muslims and Christians.
“I was surprised and flabbergasted by the comments because they are both incredibly ahistoric and inaccurate by every measure of knowledge,” said Adel Iskandar, an associate professor of global communication at Simon Fraser University.
The nation’s establishment represented self-determination for Jewish people after the persecution of the Holocaust, in which six million Jews were systemically murdered from 1933 to the end of the Second World War in 1945.
But the creation of Israel is deemed the “catastrophe” — or Nakba — for Palestinians whose society, culture and identity were destroyed as they were driven from their homeland to make way for incoming Jewish immigrants.
At a Friday press conference on an unrelated matter, Eby did not directly answer questions about whether he had considered firing Robinson, or if she had offered her resignation.
“Political interference into the internal affairs of universities and colleges must never be countenanced as it undermines their independence and the academic freedom of faculty that is necessary to preserve, share and advance knowledge,” CAUT executive director David Robinson wrote in a letter to the premier.
The original article contains 1,261 words, the summary contains 192 words. Saved 85%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
