Reprinted from Yves Engler’s website.
Why don’t right-wing Canadian nationalists condemn those fighting in a foreign military? They should join the anti-genocide and pacifist minded critics of those involved in Israel’s holocaust.
Recently prominent former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson said that any American, who serves in the Israeli military should lose their citizenship. “There are a lot of Americans who’ve served in the IDF, they should lose their citizenship,” he told a right-wing audience. “There’s a lot of Americans who’ve served in Ukraine, and they should lose their citizenship. You can’t fight for another country and remain an American.”
Prominent Canadian military historian Jack Granatstein has made similar statements in the past. In 2014 he told an interviewer, “in my view no one who is a Canadian should be able to enlist in some other country’s military and keep his Canadian citizenship.”
Joining a foreign army should rest uneasily with right-wing nationalist thinking. It’s common for governments everywhere to seek to deter their citizens from joining other countries’ militaries. Canada’s Foreign Enlistment Act makes it illegal to “induce” Canadians to join another country’s military.
While the 1937 act was written to stop internationalist-minded leftist Canadians from fighting against Franco’s fascists in Spain, it is the successor to an 1870 British act that applied in Canada. That legislation was the outgrowth of rising nationalism in Europe (which later stoked Zionism).
On Monday, the Times of Israel published “‘I’m afraid to go home’: Canadian IDF soldiers fear fallout from war crimes probe.” Widely shared on social media, the story quotes a Canadian in occupation force stating, “I was supposed to go to Canada last week but after the investigation was announced, I felt afraid to go home.”
It also reports that “at least one Canadian-Israeli soldier has sought legal representation from Lt. Col. (res.) Maurice Hirsch, the former head of the IDF’s military prosecution in the West Bank.”
(In a related development, Belgian authorities detained and questioned two Israeli citizens over the weekend after pro-Palestinian groups accused them of war crimes in Gaza)
Canadians fighting in Gaza are panicking even though there’s been little push to apply Canada’s War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity Act by the NDP, media or even most Palestine solidarity groups. All Canadians who’ve fought in Gaza should be prosecuted.
As part of my bid to lead the NDP, I am pushing for the police/justice minister to prosecute Canadians who’ve fought in Gaza under the War Crimes Act and to apply the Foreign Enlistment Act towards those “inducing” Canadians to join the Israeli military. We should go further by modifying the War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity Act to empower the police to prosecute individuals without the approval of the justice minister. It’s probably a step too far to revoke the citizenship of everyone who has joined the Israeli military but the Foreign Enlistment Act should be amended to make prosecution more straightforward.
Opponents of genocide want Canadians to be prosecuted for fighting in Gaza while the peace minded don’t want Canadians fighting anywhere. For their part, nationalists are supposed to believe that participating in another country’s military is disloyal.
This should be something the left and right agree upon.
Yves Engler is the author of Stand on Guard for Whom? A People’s History of the Canadian Military and twelve other books.
