MONTREAL — A major political confrontation took place at City Hall here Aug. 24 when Projet Montreal, the opposition party, submitted a resolution calling on the City Council to sever all ties with Israel, falsely claiming Israel is an “apartheid state that is committing genocide” against the Palestinians.
The motion was backed by an open letter issued by the Central Council of the Confederation of National Trade Unions (CSN) for greater Montreal, League of Rights and Freedoms, Amnesty International Canada (Francophone), Quebec Coalition URGENCE Palestine, and Palestinians and Jews United.
Some 700 cultural figures signed a letter supporting Projet Montreal’s attack against Israel. A coalition of petty-bourgeois radical groups and nongovernment organizations, as well as the Confederation of National Trade Unions labor council, organized two demonstrations to support the resolution, each drawing 100 and 150 people on the day of the council meeting. They said nothing about the growing number of attacks on Jews in Montreal, or about the Oct. 7, 2023, pogrom by Hamas in which over 1,200 Jews and others were murdered.
On the other side, in the days leading up to the council meeting some 60 political, business and cultural figures called on the council to vote the resolution down in a full-page ad in the Journal de Montreal. Signers of the ad included Louis Lacroix, former president of Teamsters Canada; leaders of immigrant groups of Filipinos, Jamaicans, Greeks, Italians; and others. The Federation of Combined Jewish Appeal reported it gathered more than 6,000 signatures and over 150,000 emails, which were sent to City Hall.
The resolution was denounced by Montreal’s leading Jewish organizations and by the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, Federation CJA, and B’nai Brith National Organization of Canada. They pointed to the rise in attacks against Jews in Montreal over the past few months. “If passed, Projet Montreal’s proposed motion would further normalize the targeting of our Jewish community,” B’nai Brith Canada said.
Katy LeRougetel, who was the Communist League candidate for mayor of Montreal last October, issued a public statement calling for the defeat of Projet Montreal’s resolution. “The Canadian government,” she said, “is responsible for fueling these antisemitic attacks. Ottawa opposes Israel’s defensive war against the reactionary rulers in Tehran and their allies and says it is committed to arresting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he sets foot on Canadian soil.
“Fighting against all acts of Jew-hatred is a life-and-death question for working people,” she said. “Jew-hatred is the inevitable product of capitalism in crisis. Unions should take responsibility for physically defending Jews and building actions that protest Jew-hatred and violence.”
Joe Young, the CL candidate in the upcoming Oct. 5 election to the Quebec National Assembly, joined campaign supporters at City Hall to speak with people waiting to attend the debate. The majority of participants were there to oppose the antisemitic resolution, including Paola Samuel, B’nai Brith Canada’s regional director for Quebec and Atlantic Canada.
“The Holocaust by the Nazis in Germany didn’t happen all at once,” Ryan Stotland, a singer-songwriter who came to oppose the resolution, told the Militant. “First Jews were excluded from certain occupations. Then their businesses were seized and their movements restricted, and it escalated from there.”
Amended version fosters Jew-hatred
Mayor Soraya Martinez Ferrada, leader of Ensemble Montreal, the party in power in the city, argued the Projet Montreal resolution fell outside the city’s jurisdiction and was divisive. But neither she nor other members of Ensemble Montreal said anything about the anti-Israel slanders in the resolution.
Martinez Ferrada’s party used its majority on the council to pass a series of amendments stripping the Projet Montreal resolution of its accusations of Israel’s “apartheid” and “genocide,” as well as its call to sever ties with Israel, while retaining the rest of the motion. Seven members of Ensemble Montreal voted against it because a section calling for sanctions against Israel was not removed.
While welcoming the fact that the most offensive sections of the resolution were not adopted, Federation CJA President Yair Szlak said that members of Projet Montreal repeated “one-sided characterizations of Israel and the war with Hamas. They spewed misinformation and lies about the conflict, Israel, and the war, and did not refer to Hamas as a terrorist organization. That omission is not a technicality. It is a lapse that disgraces this council.”
“The Projet Montreal anti-Israel resolution needed to be decisively defeated, not amended,” CL candidate Young said. “The fight against Jew-hatred in Canada and the need to defend Israel’s right to exist as the only refuge for Jews against another Holocaust, threatened by Iran and its proxies Hamas and Hezbollah, is a key battle for the entire working class.”