On January 30, 2024, British Columbia’s now-former Minister of Post-Secondary Education and Future Skills Selina Robinson added her name to the long list of anti-Palestinian racists. At a B’nai Brith Canada event she flippantly stated that the land historically known as Palestine was “a crappy piece of land with nothing on it” and reduced the long Palestinian presence on the land to “several hundred thousand people but, other than that, it didn’t produce an economy. It couldn’t grow things. It didn’t have anything on it.”
While her remarks are offensive to anyone with a basic grasp of history, what is shocking is the level of denialism Robinson engaged in at a time when the revisionist history peddled by Zionism is being dismantled across the world. The Zionist movement did not find an empty land when its first settlers founded Rishon LeZion in the 1880s. And while much attention has been paid to her offensive remarks, the media has paid little attention to the room she spoke in when she delivered those ignorant comments. So who was Selina Robinson speaking to? It surely was not a roomful of Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims or their allies. And what is the actual history of the region in which Palestine sits? Was Palestine truly “a crappy piece of land”?
Robinson and B’nai Brith Canada
The first issue this incident brings up, and one that has not been touched by the Canadian press, is a simple one: who was Selina Robinson talking to when she called Palestine “A crappy piece of land”? One gets an inkling of who the audience was by who organized the call in which she made those ignorant remarks: B’nai Brith.
As reported by CBC, Robinson was speaking at a panel of Jewish public officials, hosted by B’nai Brith. Per our public broadcaster’s reporting, B’nai Brith is merely “an independent Jewish human rights organization” and not a leading pro-Israel and Zionist lobby group in Canada. In reality, B’nai Brith has been working overtime to get people fired from their jobs, get students suspended (or better yet expelled) from their programs, and file injunctions to suppress the Charter rights of Canadians for expressing support of the Palestinian struggle. The organization even went out of its way to get four waitresses at Moxie’s fired for cheering on a Palestine march in Toronto.
So while the mainstream press would prefer to not spill much ink over how someone could say such a horrible thing, the reason Robinson felt emboldened enough to make these remarks is a very simple one: she was talking to an audience that holds racist, anti-Palestinian views. Ironically, Robinson’s sole mistake was that she spoke about Palestinians in public the way they are spoken about privately in Zionist circles.
While the media and commentariat across Canada have devoted thousands of words to non-issues, like bad faith interpretations of what Palestinian supporters really mean when they say “from the river to the sea”, anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism is so commonplace that it doesn’t even register as offensive, and certainly doesn’t requires a column condemning this open display of racial hatred against a people who are currently facing genocide in Gaza, in addition to 75 years of Western-backed oppression.
Indeed, alongside Islamophobia, anti-Palestinian racism is one of the most acceptable forms of bigotry and racial hatred in Canada and the Western world today. Perhaps this is why Robinson felt comfortable uttering such historically illiterate opinions so openly.
Racist tropes about Arabs and Palestinians
The second issue with Robinson’s ignorant remarks is that they are simply a colonizer’s version of history. Hallmark lines of Zionist propaganda used to justify the occupation of Palestine is that it was uninhabited (“land without a people”) or that they were negligent in caring for their land (“Zionists made the desert bloom”), hence why it was OK to steal their lands, their homes, and their country from them. The historical record shows this to be wholly untrue.
Since the first Arab and Muslim armies spread out of the Arabian peninsula—and with brief interludes during the Crusades—the past 1,300 years of Palestine’s history has been marked by an Arab presence that was inclusive of the three religions that predominated amongst the Arabs: Christianity, Judaism and Islam. It was only after the capture of Jerusalem by the armies of the Caliph Umar that Jews were allowed to return to the city and worship for the first time in six centuries. Jerusalem was initially the first qibla (or direction of prayer) of Islam, not Mecca. To this day, the Masjid Al-Aqsa is considered the third holiest mosque in the world. The Palestinian Christians who still reside in the city can trace their lineage back to the founding of Christianity itself, forming some of the oldest Christian communities in the world. Geographically, Palestine sat at the crossroads of African, Asian and European trade routes. Contrary to Western imperialist and Zionist historical revisionism, the region has always been important and economically significant to the region.
Given the brief history summarized above, are we to believe that the Arabs, for whom this land was holy, for whom any traveller wishing to cross between Africa and Asia would have to pass through, would let such a spiritually and strategically important part of the world to just languish for 1,300 years? Or is this the language of the colonizer whose frame of reference is Biblical texts that have been weaponized in the modern era to justify the seizure of Palestine from its original inhabitants? Who shows their true respect for the land? The Arabs, for whom the word Jerusalem in Arabic (Al Quds) translates to “The Holy”? Or the European settlers and their allies who repeatedly refer to Palestine as “a crappy piece of land” until the arrival of the European settlers?
Anti-Palestinian racism
For decades, and even today as a genocide unfolds in Gaza, the Palestinians are treated as unreliable narrators of their own story. When a Palestinian family in Jerusalem or Safad or Akka or Gaza points to the presence of their family ten generations back or more, it is treated with a level of skepticism usually reserved for a pathological liar. It has to be cross-referenced to the revisionist history of the Zionist movement, which has never been able to explain what was going on in Eretz Yisrael between 638 CE and 1948 – a period of 1,310 years.
Instead, it is the Palestinians, the people who were made to pay the price of Europe’s genocidal antisemitism, who get chastised for just not letting things go. The entire subtext of Robinson’s remarks reeks of typical colonizer arrogance: Why can’t those whiny Arabs just get over their “crappy piece of land” that they didn’t even take care of when they had it and become Egyptians, Jordanians or whatever other variety of Arab? After all, a Frenchman and a Swede are both Europeans with the same history, culture, religion and traditions, right?
It should be noted that the B.C. NDP has only taken away Robinson’s cabinet position, and not ejected her from caucus entirely. In making that decision, one cannot forget the way in which Ontario NDP MPP Sarah Jama was kicked out of her caucus as a result of her principled stance in support of the Palestinian people. Allowing Robinson to remain in caucus stands in opposition to the NDP’s purported commitment to anti-racism and equality among peoples, and will be an electoral liability for the party if stronger action is not taken.
As it has become harder to deny the existence of a Palestinian people, Zionists and their sympathizers have come to rely more on racist and colonial tropes to justify the crime of the Nakba, and they are becoming increasingly careless with their words. For that, we should thank them for continuing to lose control of the plot and saying things out loud that they typically only said behind closed doors. Maybe that’s why even B’nai Brith had to publicly state that Robinson’s comments “do not reflect the opinion of our organization”.
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