Irwin Cotler talks Iran, the Hamas war and Canada’s arms embargo

Irwin Cotler, former minister of justice and attorney general of Canada, sat down with JNS at his home in Montreal on Wednesday to discuss Canada’s approach to Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza.

Cotler discussed Ottawa’s recent arm embargo on Jerusalem and its resumption of funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).

He traced the eruption of Jew-hatred on North American campuses to the ’70s and discussed the tenets of the Israeli Defense Forces as the most moral army in the world.

Cotler, an emeritus professor of law at McGill University and an international human rights lawyer, also served as Ottawa’s special envoy on preserving Holocaust remembrance and combating antisemitism. He emphasized the importance of implementing in Canada the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)’s definition of antisemitism and listed concrete actions to overcome threats targeting Jewish communities.

Finally, the international chair of the Montreal-based Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights detailed his perspective on a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

JNS: There are security agents outside checking the identity of visitors coming in and out of your house, how did this happen?

Cotler: I am under constant security protection as you can see. It occurred not long after Oct. 7. After Oct. 7, my wife and I attended the March for Israel in Washington, D.C. When we flew back to Montreal, security asked us not to leave the airport. Security personnel spoke to me and informed me of what has been characterized as imminent and lethal threats, without going into further details.

I have excellent protection. I do my work as I always have. Last week, I even spoke at the March for Jerusalem (in Montreal). I don’t curtail any activities and live a normal life.

Do you think that Canadians understand the threat posed by Iran?

A: I believe that the community of democracies including Canada does not understand the threat of Iran. The Iranian threat is seven-fold. First, Iran is a nuclear threat. Second, it is a genocidal one.

People don’t appreciate that the 21st century began with the Iranian Supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei stating that there could be no resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict without the annihilation of the Jewish state. He didn’t even use the euphemism of the “Zionist regime.”

Third, it is a ballistic missile threat. Iran is now even selling missiles to Russia with regards to Ukraine. They are the main suppliers of weaponry to both Hamas and Hezbollah.

Fourth, Iran is the leading state sponsor of terrorism via its network of proxies. Fifth, Iran is a hegemonic threat. It effectively controls Lebanon through Hezbollah. It has its tentacles in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and so forth.

Sixth, Iran is engaged in transnational repression. It targets Iranian dissidents in the diaspora and it increasingly targets Jewish and Israeli leaders by its own acknowledgement.

Finally—this is for me the most important dimension of our failure to appreciate the full nature of the threat—the Iranian engaging in a massive domestic repression.

We need to exercise more solidarity with the people of Iran and align ourselves with the Women, Life, Freedom movement (which aims to counter Iran’s repression of women). The U.N. special rapporteur on Iran just reported about this litany of mass atrocities. I also don’t believe there is full appreciation that Israel is under assault on seven fronts in a war of attrition.

Do you believe the Canadian government has been supportive enough of Israel since Oct. 7?

A: The record is mixed. The Canadian government made some important and timely statements but the actions it has taken have not been supportive. We are engaged in a battle between democracies and tyrannies.

In this battle, democracies should stand together. In that sense, Canada has not been sufficiently supportive.

Canada says it recognized Israel’s right to defend itself. At the same time, it became one of the first countries in the G7 to impose an arm embargo on Israel. As we speak now, the foreign minister just extended the nature of that arms embargo.

Doing that, in the midst of a just war that Israel is prosecuting as it exerts its right to self-defense, means rewarding Hamas. While it is not the intention, it ends up being the effect.

Canada does not recognize the full nature of the Iranian threat for all the reasons we have discussed. Canada also criticizes Israel’s actions with respect to humanitarian assistance as it moved to be one of the first countries to refund the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), despite compelling evidence of UNRWA’s complicity with Hamas. We should have never rushed to refund UNRWA. We should have engaged in holding UNRWA accountable.

There has not been a full appreciation as to the extent to which Israel is involved in an existential conflict in which it is confronting an axis of evil.

I also believe that the Canadian government should not accept Hamas’s statements about civilian casualties. If it were the Islamic State and Canada was involved in the fight, it would never be accepting their version of what is happening.

In the example of the “bombing of the al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza, Canada rushed to condemn Israel. Then it turned out that it wasn’t a hospital that had been bombed but a parking lot, it wasn’t Israel that was responsible but an errant misfired missile of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and it wasn’t 500 people who were killed but 50. Canada never fully apologized for those false indictments, and there have been others.

The IDF prides itself on being a moral army. You are a human rights expert, why do you agree?

A: Even when prosecuting a just war with a moral army, immoral things occur. Israel like any other democracy must be held responsible for any violation of international human rights and humanitarian law. It should not get a free pass because of the horrors of the Holocaust and the likes of it. I believe that Israel acknowledges that.

Israel has a robust code of ethics and rigorous legal oversight, within the army and outside the army with for instance Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara.

There is a framework of accountability. If you compare the IDF to other armies and you look at the civilian combatant ratio, the evidence speaks for itself. The civilian combatant ratio is 1:1, whereas amongst many other democratic allies it is 9:1.

There has been immense suffering. It is undeniable, but even when considering Hamas’s statistics of 40,000 fatalities, 20,000 are terrorists and Hamas does not distinguish between combatants and civilians when it puts out these statistics.

I must add that Hamas also falsifies its casualties and statistics which are sometimes taken at face value by the media.

There is no armed conflict in which immoral acts don’t occur, but on the whole, Israel stacks up well against other armies in the same type of urban density context against a genocidal statelet.

In Canada and globally, there has been a deeply concerning rise of antisemitism and anti-Jewish attacks, including, in Montreal, firebombing of synagogues, shootings of Jewish institutions and just a general atmosphere of aggression and fear. What can be done to counter this?

A: First, the leadership, federal, provincial and municipal, has to unequivocally condemn these actions. It has to effectively enforce the law against hate crimes, intimidation and violent assaults. It must implement the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance‘s definition of antisemitism. It’s not enough to adopt it as Canada has done on the federal level and in most provinces, but it has to implement it.

Law enforcement and the judiciary must understand what antisemitism is to combat it, and that is where the definition is so crucial.

The approach to effective law enforcement has to be organized around the four P’s: Prevention of that kind of violence; Protection of the victims by the government who must provide enhanced security, protection and assistance to the targeted Jewish community and institutions; it has to hold the Perpetrators accountable; and finally, there must be Partnerships between federal provincial and municipal authorities.

They can’t operate in silos and they can’t delegate this responsibility from one authority to another. It has to be an integrated whole-of-government and society commitment. I don’t think it’s being done as effectively as it should.

Why do you think Israel is losing or has lost the battle of ideas and the war for public opinion?

A: Israel is losing the battle for public opinion, but I don’t think it’s a post-Oct. 7 phenomenon. I think Oct. 7 only exacerbated it. It’s such a paradox when one thinks about it that the mass atrocities perpetrated by Hamas on Oct. 7 were perpetrated not only by a terrorist organization but a genocidal antisemitic one, a statelet. They say so in their founding charter.

One would have hoped and believed that this unprecedented explosion of antisemitism in the post-Oct. 7 universe would have resulted in an increased combating of antisemitism, but instead it resulted in the silencing or denial of antisemitism and at times even the glorification of it.

Antisemitism is not only the oldest, longest, most enduring and most lethal hatred, but one that mutates and metastasizes over time and which reflects whatever the zeitgeist is at any given moment.

When the zeitgeist was religion, the Jews were guilty of deicide, when it was the black plague, the Jews were the poisoners of the wells. When it was anti-racism, the Jews were racist white supremacists.

From 1975, human rights emerged as the new secular religion of our time; I remember celebrating that as a law professor.

Then, Israel began to be held out as the geopolitical meta human rights violator of our time, and that continued and was never really effectively combated.

The 2001 World Conference against Racism (WCAR), also known as Durban I, was held, which became a world conference of hate of the Jewish people as they singled out Israel. All the epithets of demonological antisemitism and the notion of Israel as a racist imperialist, colonial, settler, ethnic-cleansing, child-murdering, apartheid, genocidal, Nazi state were born in Durban.

It has been metastasizing slowly from the ’70s with U.N. General Assembly Resolution 3379 stating that Zionism is racism, and turned thereafter into the weaponization of U.N. agencies.

Antisemitism is being laundered under the protective cover of the U.N., with tipping points arising with the various Israel-Hamas wars, where each time Hamas broke ceasefires and each time they were allowed to rearm.

The fires of antisemitism were burning before Oct. 7 and we did not combat it. Antisemitism is not just threatening to Jews, it is not just threatening to the Jewish state. It’s a threat to democracies, to our national security, to our common humanity. The community of democracies must mobilize against this threat.

Were you surprised by South Africa’s initiative to bring Israel before the International Court of Justice for allegedly conducting a genocide in Gaza? 

A: I was not surprised that South Africa took the action. Before it took this action, South Africa was itself one of the main purveyors of the apartheid lie. It gets a certain credibility as we presume that they have expertise on apartheid. When they say it, it’s taken at face value.

South Africa today is not the South Africa of Nelson Mandela. Mandela was a strong supporter of Palestinian self-determination, as I am. He was a strong supporter of two states for two peoples, but he also said, and it’s been ignored if it’s even known at all, that Israel has a right to exist within secure and recognized boundaries.

It’s ignored that Mandela came to Israel and received an honorary doctorate from Ben-Gurion University. He would not have done so if he believed the lies about Israel being an apartheid state.

The South African government acted here almost as a proxy for Hamas. They were in consultation with Hamas on the occasion of launching this action.

I regret that South Africa is not the democracy that I and many others supported and that Mandela established. I regret that Mandela is not with us today, because I do not believe that this action would have been launched. I think he would have been somebody who continued to strongly support the Palestinians and call out any Israeli breach of law of armed conflict but he would maintain his support for Israel.

We’ve seen an explosion of antisemitism on campuses at supposed institutions of higher learning. As a scholar, how do you explain this?

When the human right revolution occurred in 1975, Palestinian rights became a poster child for rights in the campus culture.

The students have been regrettably at the forefront of the apartheid label on campus. In the immediate aftermath of the Durban conference, the U.N. General Assembly passed 20 resolutions condemning Israel and only five resolutions against the rest of the world combined, and no resolutions against countries like Iran.

I was at Durban as a member of the Canadian delegation, and I have never seen such a hate festival as I witnessed there. It was a tipping point with respect to campus culture. That’s when the Israeli Apartheid Week was born. That’s when students gathered at the University of Michigan where a motion for a two-state solution was rejected because Israel was not a democratic state and a motion was passed with respect to boycott, divestment and sanctions. That too was born out of Durban.

The embers were burning already before Durban for the reasons I mentioned, but Durban was a major tipping point. The campus culture had internalized all these condemnations of Israel as a major human rights violator of our time, the political anti-Christ of our time, for over 75 years. It has now metastasized and exploded in the aftermath of Oct. 7.

One of my principal findings as special envoy on antisemitism was that the conventional paradigm for combating antisemitism has always been combating antisemitism from the far right, the far left and radical Islam. That trilogy still holds true.

What I found is that there’s been a mainstreaming, normalizing, legitimation of antisemitism and an absence of outrage in the popular culture, the political sphere, the media, in sports, entertainment and particularly in the campus culture.

It was influenced by and feeds off the legitimation and absence of outrage in all the other contexts. It’s that intersectional idea that Jews and Israel are on the wrong side of history. In the oppressed-oppressor binary view, we are the oppressors.

Are you optimistic about the future of the Jewish people?

A: I’m an optimist by nature. I believe as Martin Luther King would say that ultimately the arc of history will bend towards justice but there will be a lot of obstacles and pain along the way.

I also believe in a Jewish sense in the notion of Netzach Yisroel Lo Yishaker. At the end of the day, truth and justice will prevail. We have to do that which has to be done and in the end we will prevail.

The Israeli people have demonstrated that they are a resilient people. This is a people that not only engages in existential conflict but it’s not the first existential conflict of its kind and it’s engaged in daily defense against terrorist attacks from various fronts.

 Iran is always behind this axis of evil through what it calls this ring of fire that it wants to organize but yes, I am optimistic in the long run for all the reasons I mentioned.

What do you think Israel needs to do to secure itself for generations to come and so that it continues to be a safe haven for Jewish people?

A: Israel has to avoid Sinat Chinam (groundless hatred). The First and Second Temples were destroyed because of Sinat Chinam, and we are reaching the time frame within which those temples were destroyed as we approach Israel’s 80th birthday.

We must avoid Sinat Chinam and learn from the lessons of history. Israel must guard against polarizing politics. There can be divisions and there can be critics, but there cannot be polarization where the opposition is seen as the enemy.

Israel can also not have only a military strategy when it engages in an existential conflict. It must have a diplomatic and a communication strategy as well. It must understand the importance of the alliance of democracies.

Israel always said that it defends itself by itself alone. When Hamas launched its Oct. 7 massacre and Israel responded, I thought then and believe now that it should have sought to organize a consortium of democracies.

After the abduction of hostages who were not only Israelis but held over 20 nationalities, we should have set up an international consortium of the community of democracies with respect to combating Hamas and have had a comprehensive, integrated political, communication and diplomatic strategy.

We should have held up a mirror to Hamas’s atrocities, saying it is a genocidal statelet. Under international law, state parties to the Genocide Convention have an obligation to prevent and punish genocide.

Israel should have pointed out that it is fighting a genocidal antisemitic statelet which not only abducts Israelis but holds its own Palestinians hostage and which seeks to maximize casualties while Israel seeks to minimize casualties.

The abduction of hostages is a standing breach of international law. Every day that they are being held in Hamas’s captivity is a standing crime against humanity. Both for the crime of genocide and its standing crime against humanity, fighting Hamas is an international responsibility.

Do you have a message for the Israeli people?

A: They are not alone. The United States, on a bipartisan level, affirmed Israel’s right to defend itself, affirmed the need to provide all the necessary military assistance for that purpose, and affirmed that it has Israel’s back and that American commitment to Israel is ironclad.

Israel has the support of many from the community of democracies. It has, in the aftermath of Oct. 7, enhanced support from the Jewish communities in the diaspora and from world Jewry.

They are not alone, we are with them, we will continue to stand with them and we will not relent until Israel is secure and until the Israeli people can live free from threats or acts of force as U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 states.

I hope the international community will implement its obligation to protect Israel so that it can be free from threats and acts of force, so that the resilience of the Israeli people can be allowed to fully prosper and for us to enhance the arc of peace in the Middle East, work towards normalization of relations with Saudi Arabia and get to a two-state solution.

I find those words to be somewhat of a lazy slogan. For me, a two-state solution is the mutual acknowledgement of each other’s legitimacy and existence.

We don’t get half that from the Palestinian Authority, let alone Hamas. One has to recognize the legitimacy of the Jewish people’s right to self-determination and the legitimacy of Israel as the indigenous homeland of the Jewish people.

 A two-states-for-two-peoples solution must mean two democratic states living side by side. We don’t need another authoritarian tyranny in the Middle East, not for Israel, not for the Middle East, and not for the Palestinian people.