Are Israeli Soldiers’ Lives Really Worth More than Gaza Kids?

Elizabeth May believes the memory of Jews killed in Europe eight decades ago is more important than living Palestinians. The Canadian Green leader’s Jewish supremacism is a stain on her legacy, the party and Canadian left.

Last week supporters of Maccabi Tel Aviv FC yelled racist slogans, ripped Palestinian flags, destroyed taxis and beat individuals before their team’s match in Amsterdam. The night before the game 10 Israelis were arrested and “local police and authorities considered calling off the Ajax v Maccabi Tel Aviv match because of violence the night before.” Anti-Zionist Dutch Jewish organization Erev Rav cancelled its commemoration of Kristallnacht — the night in which Nazi thugs attacked Jews as a prelude to the extermination of European Jewry — out of fear Maccabi hooligans would disrupt it. In March, Maccabi supporters beat a pro-Palestinian Arab man unconscious in Athens when their team played Olympiakos.

Multiple Maccabi supporters in Amsterdam have been fighting in Gaza and Lebanon. According to the Jerusalem Post, Mossad agents accompanied the Maccabi supporters to Amsterdam, likely to participate in framing the (expected) violence.

In response to Israeli claims that Amsterdam inhabitants beating a handful of football ultras was a “pogrom”, May posted to X, “On behalf of Canadian Greens I am horrified by anti-semitic attack on Israeli soccer fans in Amsterdam. We condemn such hate. Ironically learned of it while attending event commemorating Kristallnacht horror of 86 years ago. Never Again.”

While she attends a Kristallnacht event promoting genocidal football hooligans, I couldn’t find any instance of May attending a rally or march over the past 13 months against Israel’s holocaust in Gaza (there have been weekly protests in the city she represents in parliament as well as regular marches in Ottawa).

However, on October 7, May attended an Ottawa event put on by Israel’s embassy and the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs to promote Israel’s holocaust in Gaza and terror in Lebanon. Simultaneously she released an explicitly supremacist statement to be read at a commemorative event in Victoria for what May labeled “the worst act of senseless violence against Jews since the Shoah.” The statement called the violence perpetrated by Palestinian militants who broke free of the Gaza cage to attack a half dozen Israeli military bases as “horrific”, “savage” and “barbaric”. But May doesn’t employ those terms to describe Israel’s far worse crimes against an occupied population, labeling the horrors befalling Palestinians over the past year as “additional grief”. May concludes, “Every life is precious. All this pain and grief has taken its toll. We are all in this global human family traumatized by October 7 and its aftermath. But the bell that tolls the loudest is for those souls lost in the diabolical attacks of October 7.”

Why does the bell toll louder for the 313 Israeli soldiers killed that day, who enforced an illegal occupation of Palestinian land, than for innocent children in Gaza?

May has made explicitly philosemitic/Jewish supremacist statements before. In 2015, May responded to a Canadian Jewish News request to make her pitch to Canadian Jewish voters by saying “you have been the heart and soul and conscience of Canada on many issues for a very long time… I would urge you to look at the Green party’s policies and platform and see if you don’t see yourself there. If you don’t, let me know, I certainly would apologize if we are not meeting the aspirations of Canadians who have done so much for this country.”

Paradoxically, May’s Jewish supremacism is partly rooted in her Christianity. Her October 7 statement concludes with a Christian Zionist Psalm that mentions Israel three times. May studied to be a priest in an Anglican church with a long history of Zionism, as I detailed eight years ago. In an expression with Christian Zionist echoes, May praised the colonial Jewish National Fund for “the great work that’s done in making the desert bloom.” May’s 2013 comment erased the existence of the indigenous Palestinians and promoted an explicitly racist institution that has Judaized historically Arab areas and continues to discriminate against Palestinian citizens of Israel in its land use policies.

Christian Zionism, philosemitism and deference to power has led May to promote anti-Palestinian positions antithetical to Green members’ and party interests. In 2016 May threatened to resign as leader if the party didn’t organize a special convention immediately after members strongly backed a partial Boycott Divestment and Sanctions resolution in a pre-convention online poll, convention caucus and full convention vote. In response she forced the party to spend over $100,000 to organize a special convention five months later in a bid to overturn a single resolution. As part of her stunningly undemocratic bid to reverse members’ BDS vote, May fired the sponsor of the resolution, Dmitri Lascaris, and two other shadow critics who defended the members vote.

While May expected the backers of the BDS resolution to give up in the face of her control of the party apparatus, Palestine supporters out organized May in the lead-up to the special convention. As such, May was forced into agreeing with a resolution that deepened the boycott call but withdrew the BDS formulation. But through her control of the party’s megaphone May spun a false narrative of the consensus resolution, claiming the party did not support BDS. In 2019 May told the Canadian Jewish News “We have nothing to do with BDS. We repealed it. We are not a party that condones BDS. We would never tolerate anybody in our party who violates our core values, who are anti-Semitic.”

On multiple occasions May has insinuated that pro-Palestinian members, notably Lascaris, were antisemitic and during the 2020 Green Party leadership race she smeared Lascaris. It was part of why Lascaris was barred from running (he ultimately overturned the ban).

As she worked to undermine anti-apartheid voices, May threw her weight behind the little known Annamie Paul, securing her victory in the leadership race. Deeply anti-Palestinian, Paul destroyed her leadership and severely damaged the Green Party by pushing racist positions during Israel’s 2021 slaughter in Gaza.

Even as Israel commits a holocaust in Gaza and wages incredible violence across the region the Green Party leader’s bell tolls loudest for the apartheid state. Based on the evidence, Elizabeth May seems to be an anti-Palestinian bigot.

Yves Engler is the author of 12 books. His latest book is Stand on Guard for Whom?: A People's History of the Canadian Military . Read other articles by Yves.