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That Hamas has persisted in the costly acquisition of ever more deadly missile arsenals should not be anathema to a progressive analysis of the oppression of the people of Gaza. That Hamas has robbed the Palestinian people to pay for the construction of heavily-fortified underground command bunkers and a vast underground “terror tunnel” network that has taken the lives of at least 160 child labourers, “prized for their nimble bodies” should not be unmentionable.

But these things are very controversial to speak about out loud, especially if one is an official of, say, the Green Party, so much so as to induce moral panic. That is how far the “anti-Zionist” toxin has spread. It has gotten so that the Canadian Left has lost the practical capacity for a broadly decent and legitimately progressive, pro-peace critique on the question of Israel and Palestine. The hysterics drown out everything else.

The “anti-Zionists” are right about one thing: there isn’t much in the way of a robust and defensible Oppostion critique of Ottawa’s uniquely militant and unashamedly “pro-Israel” posture towards the conflict. The NDP’s Paul Dewar has been reduced to whining that Ottawa is just “rubber stamping everything that comes from Benjamin Netanyahu,” but has nothing to offer beyond a timid insistence that Ottawa should instead be telling Netanyahu that “there are too many civilian casualties and it’s unacceptable.”

When a Green Party president merely allows himself to think out loud in an honest and harmless essay that sets out the reasons why Gaza makes him sad, and for his trouble he’s subjected to a cyberlynching, it should tell you that we’ve entered a realm of moral bedlam. It becomes a nuthouse of the kind that saw the “anti-Zionist” crank, 911 Truther and Moammar Qadaffi devotee Cynthia McKinney elected leader of the Green Party in the United States.

Canada’s Greens will have to find their own way out of this mess, but the sooner they see the merits of the NDP leadership’s interim antidote – quarantine, inoculate, bar, isolate, marginalize – the better.