Tuesday, December 16, 2025

there are not more than two people in canada that want to suffer through jenny kwan's analysis of israel's settlement activity in historical judaea, and the canadian parliament has no jurisdiction over the region and can do nothing but play politics with the situation, which should be seen as unwelcome by both sides. it is not clear to me that anybody in palestine wants to talk to jenny kwan, and i wouldn't be surprised if she found nobody to talk to there. on that level, israel was correct to deny entry; these people were in the region solely to cause problems. they have no mandate, as canadian representatives, to comment on domestic issues in other countries; it's a performative behaviour directed at a subset of their voting coalition that has no relevance to their job description.

the recent history in canada is pretty clear: politicians that publicly side with palestine are constantly punished for it. don't be surprised if a majority of those six mps lose re-election as a consequence of this botched pr stunt, which has no valid purpose in the context of the canadian parliament. canadian voters are correct to ask why their representatives are flying around the world and meddling in foreign states instead of representing their constituents in canada.

that said, my understanding is that they would be surprised by what they found. the people that live in the west bank have deeper ties to israel than gazans do; a large percentage of them know their ancestors were hebrew and jews, and many families only converted to islam in recent memory, partly as a part of the arab revolt in world war two. gazans are less hebrew in ancestry, and have a lot of african slave admixture, due to the region being a part of egypt and being on the coast, where more slave trading happened during arab and ottomon occupation periods. that is the reason that so many gazans are dark-skinned; indigenous jews should be light-skinned to olive-skinned, but gaza is mostly african in ancestry, and so it is much darker than the west bank, israel proper, lebanon or syria. the violent resistance movement in gaza is almost entirely absent in the west bank, where many people see israeli annexation as a way out of exclusion and segregation, and are more interested in integration than "resistance". hamas is not popular in the west bank and the general position is that fighting the jews is stupid and self-defeating. they want jobs in israeli cities, they don't want more bombs and violence.

if you speak the language, you can converse with these people online, if you are interested in them in a non-professional capacity,  which should be the level of interest broadcast by the canadian mps. the west bank is not cut off from the world the way that iran is. if they were to talk to people over facebook, they might get a different perspective than what state-controlled media in the unfree dictatorships in the gulf countries are trying to manufacture.

they may have found that a surprising number of inhabitants in the west bank, which i will reiterate largely have hebrew ancestry, are actually in favour of annexation by israel. because how else can they improve their material conditions? bombing israel is stupid, and the west bank seems to have figured that out, while gaza is still struggling with it.