A coalition of organizations led by the Palestinian Youth Movement has launched a new campaign called “Vote Palestine”. Their stated aim is to “make Palestinian human rights an election issue.”
On the campaign website, they say: “We are organizing people across the country to speak up to pressure MPs, political parties, and candidates to endorse the Palestine Platform.” Can such a strategy of “political pressure” work?
It obviously won’t work on the Conservatives. Party Leader Pierre Poilievre has praised Israel’s efforts to “annihilate” its opponents in Gaza and he is, on the whole, a vicious supporter of Zionist terror.
Vote Palestine is focused instead on the Liberals and NDP. The PYM is appealing directly to Liberal leader Mark Carney stating “We have a new Prime Minister who has not yet heard from us,” and that “he and his ministers have the power to do something.” All while three incumbent Liberal candidates are listed on the Vote Palestine website as “endorsers.” What this is, is an endorsement of the Liberals!
This is rather astounding. After all, it is the Liberals who have played the most active role in helping Israel subjugate the Palestinian people—not just since 2023, but for the past 75 years. The Liberals “stand with Israel” (to quote Trudeau) and send them weapons not because they “haven’t heard” from the Palestine solidarity movement. Israel is a steadfast ally of the western imperialist bloc whose interests the Liberals (including the three MPs who endorsed the campaign) represent.
As for the NDP, Vote Palestine touts over 60 NDP candidates as Palestine supporters, including leader Jagmeet Singh.
But the NDP has propped up the Liberals since 2019—while they armed Israel increasingly every year. Meanwhile, Singh himself has echoed Zionist slanders against our movement, even calling an early pro-Palestine protest a pro-Hamas “celebration.”
The NDP has demonstrated in practice that keeping the Liberals in power was more important to them than standing with the Palestinian people.
We have no faith in the Liberals and Conservatives who will never break their support for Israel, or the NDP’s professional politicians who have proven too weak to stand up for what is right.
Canada is a key ally of Israel. But the only way we can stop this, is not through appealing nicely to imperialist politicians but fighting against them. The effect of the Vote Palestine campaign is in essence to endorse people who have long sold out the Palestinian people and provide them with a way of saving face.
This is why the Revolutionary Communist Party fights to build a revolutionary movement against imperialism. Mass demonstrations, student strikes and workers strikes can paralyze the imperialist machine and spread across borders. Only a mass class struggle of such a nature can interrupt the plans of the imperialists and deprive the Israeli war machine of the support they get from the west.
