The Anti-Israel Movement in Québec in the 1970s: At the Ideological Crossroads of the New Left and Liberation-Nationalism

Authors

  • Daniel Rickenbacher

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25071/1916-0925.40170

Keywords:

Parti Québécois, Michel Chartrand, Arab Lobby, Israel, Palestine, FLQ, New Left, Anti-Semitism, Anti-Zionism

Abstract

Since the late 1950s, Third World nationalism in Algeria, Vietnam, and the Middle East had fascinated radical Quebec nationalists. Quebec nationalism’s militant arm, the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ), styled itself as a national-liberation movement fighting against Anglo-Canadian exploitation and oppression. After the Six-Day-War, the PLO became a significant source of inspiration for these elements. Quebec was their Palestine, as one prominent Quebec Nationalist asserted. This militant Quebec nationalism coincided and often overlapped with the rise of the New Left at Quebec’s universities and in its unions. Like its European and American counterparts, the Quebec New Left adopted the ideologies of anti-imperialism and anti-Zionism, and in 1972, the Quebec-Palestine Association was established in this milieu. Anti-imperialism combined the Marxist analysis of class struggle with a nationalistic worldview, which saw the world divided between oppressor and oppressed nations. For the New Left, Israel became the epitome of an oppressor nation. It was associated with all the supposed vices of the West: Racism, capitalism, inauthenticity, and militarism. This paper sheds light on the founding years of the Quebec anti-Zionist movement in the early 1970 and discusses the themes and images it used to describe Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Furthermore, the paper investigates whether these articulations a genuine critique of Zionism and Israeli policies or whether they were, instead, a reflection of antisemitic stereotypes. Moreover, the paper compares Quebec anti-Zionism to parallel manifestations of New Left anti-Zionism in Germany, asking whether the cultural context in Quebec affected the message of anti-Zionism. 

References

May Abdallah-Sinno, Le rôle de l'information de la Ligue des États Arabes (Uni-versité Stendhal (Grenoble), 1986). http://www.theses.fr/1986GRE39036.

Theodor W. Adorno, "Erziehung nach Ausch-witz," in Handbuch Bildungs- und Erziehungs-soziologie, Bildung und Gesellscha! (VS Verlag für Sozialwissenscha!en, Wiesbaden, 2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-531-18944-4_7 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-531-18944-4_7

Jean Améry, "Der Ehrbare Antisemitismus," Die Zeit, July 25, 1969, sec. Kultur, http://www.zeit.de/1969/30/der-ehrbare-antisemi-tismus/komplettansicht.

Pierre Anctil, "René Lévesque et la commu-nauté juive de Montréal," Le Devoir, November 24, 2007, https://www.ledevoir.com/opinion/idees/165790/rene-levesque-et-la-commu-naute-juive-de-montreal.

Houda Asal, Se dire Arabe au Canada: Un siècle d'histoire migratoire (Les Presses de l'Université de Montréal, 2016). https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pum.3199 DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pum.3199

Hani J. Bawardi, The Making of Arab Americans: From Syrian Nationalism to U.S. Citizenship (Univer-sity of Texas Press, 2014).

Jean-François Beaudet, "René Lévesque et la communauté juive du Québec (1960-1976): La Fragilité d'un Dialogue" (UQAM, 2014).

Jean-François Beaudet, "René Lévesque. La haine du préjugé racial et de l'antisémitisme," Globe: Revue internationale d'études québé-coises 18, no. 1 (2015). https://doi.org/10.7202/1037881ar DOI: https://doi.org/10.7202/1037881ar

Muḥammad Jamil Beyhum, Filasṭīn: Andalus Aš-Šarq (Beirut, 1946).

Patrick Bourgeois, "Michel Chartrand: L'évolu-tion idéologique d'un contestataire Québé-cois: 1936-2000: Un parcours intellectuel marginal?" (Master Thesis, Université Laval, 2001).

Paul Thomas Chamberlin, The Global Offensive: The United States, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the Making of the Post-Cold War Order, Oxford Studies in Inter-national History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

Alain Chartrand, Chartrand et Simonne Série Épisode 12, Dernier Combats (Radio Canada, 2003), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cs-2fK4ILTBk.

"Michel Chartrand participe à une réunion hou-leuse à Toronto," Le Devoir, November 18, 1972.

Michael J. Cohen, "William A. Eddy, the Oil Lobby and the Palestine Problem," Middle Eastern Studies 30, no. 1 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1080/00263209408700989 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00263209408700989

Werner Cohn, "From Victim to Shylock and Oppressor: The New Image of the Jew in the Trotskyist Movement," The Journal of Com-munist Studies and Transition Politics 7, no. 1 (1991). https://doi.org/10.1080/13523279108415071 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/13523279108415071

Robert Comeau, Daniel Cooper, and Pierre Vallières, FLQ: un projet révolution-naire: lettres et écrits felquistes (Outremont (Québec): VLB éditeur, 1990).

Kevin Coogan, Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International, 1998.

John K. Cooley, Green March, Black Sep-tember (RLE Israel and Palestine): The Story of the Palestinian Arabs (Routledge, 2015). https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315695969 DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315695969

Émilie Corriveau, "De tous les combats - «Il ne faut pas l'oublier»," Le Devoir, April 17, 2010, https://www.ledevoir.com/societe/287094/de-tous-les-combats-il-ne-faut-pas-l-oublier.

Irwin Cotler and Ruth Wisse, "Quebec's Jews: Caught in the Middle," Commentary Magazine, September 1, 1977, https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/quebecs-jews-caught-in-the-middle/.

Jonathan Cummings, Israel's Public Diplo-macy: The Problems of Hasbara, 1966-1975(Rowman & Littlefield, 2016).

Esther Delisle, Essais sur l'imprégnation fasciste au Québec (Montréal: Éditions Varia, 2002); Martin Masse, "L'imprégnation fasciste au Québec," Le Québécois Libre, January 18, 2003, http://www.quebecoislibre.org/030118-2.htm.

Rezeq Faraj, "Le Temps Du Choix Est Arrivé," Fedayin, April 1973.

Rezeq Faraj, "Munich...Un an Après," Fedayin, April 1973.

Fernand Foisy, Michel Chartrand. La colère du juste (1968-2003).

Louis Fournier, FLQ: Histoire d'un Mouvement Clandestin (Lanctot Editeur, 1998).

Abdallah Frangi, Der Gesandte: Mein Leben für Palästina. Hinter den Kulissen der Nahost-Politik (München, 2012).

Charles Gagnon and Pierre Vallières, "Pour un front commun multinational de libération," February 1970.

Xavier Gélinas, La droite intellectuelle qué-bécoise et la Révolution tranquille (Presses Université Laval, 2007).

Manfred Gerstenfeld, "Holocaust Inversion: The Portraying of Israel and Jews as Nazis," Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs 55 (2007).

Fatima Ghandour, "Biography of the lawyer Abdullah Sharaf al-Din," Al Mostakbal, April 10, 2015, http://archive2.libya-al-mostakbal.org/news/clicked/81592.

Rami Ginat and Uri Bar-Noi, "Tacit Support for Terrorism: The Rapprochement between the USSR and Palestinian Guerrilla Organizations Following the 1967 War," Journal of Strategic Studies 30, no. 2 (April 2007) https://doi.org/10.1080/01402390701248756 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/01402390701248756

Claudia Globisch, Radikaler Antisemitismus (Wiesbaden: Springer Fach-medien Wiesbaden, 2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-531-93156-2 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-531-93156-2

Über Grenzen hinweg - Transnationale politische Gewalt im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Ad-rian Hänni, Daniel Rickenbacher, and Thomas Schmutz (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2019), https://www.campus.de/buecher-cam-pus-verlag/wissenscha!/geschichte/ueber_grenzen_hinweg-15590.html.

Thomas Haury, Antisemitismus von Links: Kommunistische Ideologie, Nationalismus Und Antizionismus in Der Frühen DDR (Hamburger Edition, 2002).

Clemens Heni, "Secondary Antisemitism: From Hard-Core to So!-Core Denial of the Shoah," Jewish Political Studies Review 20, no. 3/4 (2008).

Jeffrey Herf, Undeclared Wars with Israel: East Germany and the West German Far Le!, 1967-1989 (Cambridge, 2016). https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316105900 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316105900

Dave Himmelstein, "Rezeq Faraj: The Legacy of a Man without a Childhood," June 3, 2010, http://rabble.ca/news/2010/06/rezeq-faraj-le-gacy-man-without-childhood.

Samuel J. Hirst, "Transnational Anti-Im-perialism and the National Forces: Soviet Diplomacy and Turkey, 1920-23," Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 33, no. 2 (August 28, 2013). https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-2322498 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-2322498

Martin Jander, "German Le!ist Terrorism and Israel: Ethno-Nationalist, Religious-Fundamentalist, or Social-Revolutionary?," Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 38, no. 6 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1080/1057610X.2015.1006451 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/1057610X.2015.1006451

Elias Karatchy, "Why Jews?," Fedayin, April 1973.

Thomas A. Kolsky, Jews against Zionism: The American Council for Judaism, 1942-1948 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990).

Wolfgang Kraushaar, " Wann endlich beginnt bei Euch der Kampf gegen die heilige Kuh Israel?": München 1970: über die antise-mitischen Wurzeln des deutschen Terrorismus(München, 2013).

Walter Laqueur, A History of Terrorism, 1 edi-tion (New Brunswick, N.J: Routledge, 2001).

Gilbert Lemieux, "Lettre circulaire aux Membres de l'Association Québec- Israël," April 5, 1976, ZA/1978 1/14, CIJA Archive.

Wladimir I. Lenin, "Das revolutionäre Proleta-riat und das Selbstbestimmungsrecht der Na-tionen," October 1915, http://www.mlwerke.de/le/le21/le21_412.htm.

Sean William Mills, "The Empire Within: Montreal, the Sixties, and the Forging of a Radical Imagination" (Queen's University, 2007).

Jean-Francois Nadeau, The Canadian Fuhrer: The Life of Adrien Arcand (James Lorimer & Company, 2011).

Ghislaine Raymond, "Au congrès de la Fédé-ration des Sociétés Canado-Arabes," Fedayin, June 1973.

Daniel Rickenbacher, "Der jüdisch-westliche "Krieg gegen den Islam" - Genealogie und Aktualität einer islamistischen Verschwö-rungstheorie," in Antisemitismus im 21. Jahrhundert, Virulenz einer alten Feindscha!in Zeiten von Islamismus und Terror, ed. Marc Grimm and Bodo Kahmann (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2019).

Daniel Rickenbacher, "Wenn Hass auf Juden verbindet: Querfront-Phänomene in der Schweiz," Antisemitismusbericht des SIG und der GRA 2016, 2017, http://www.antisemitis-mus.ch/content/wenn-hass-auf-juden-verbin-det-querfront-phaenomene-der-schweiz.

Ira Robinson, A History of Antisemitism in Canada (Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press, 2015).

Luc Rufiange, "Le chef de La CEQ déclare la guerre au racisme et au sionisme," Journal de Montréal, August 13, 1976.

Fayez A. Sayegh, "A Proposal for the Planning of Arab Information in America (Unpublished Report)" (Washington, D.C., 1970).

Zohar Segev, "Struggle for Coop-eration and Integration: American Zionists and Arab Oil, 1940s," Middle Eastern Studies 42, no. 5 (September 1, 2006). https://doi.org/10.1080/00263200600828089 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00263200600828089

Jonathan Sperber, Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life, 1 edition (Liveright, 2014).

Richard Stöss, Parteien-Handbuch (Opladen: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenscha!en, 1986). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-663-14349-9 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-663-14349-9

Eliezer Tauber, "The Palestine Question in the 1940s and the Emergence of the Arab Lobby in Canada," American Review of Canadian Studies40, no. 4 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1080/02722011.2010.519393 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/02722011.2010.519393

Kurt P. Tauber, Beyond Eagle and Swastika: German Nationalism since 1945, vol. 2 (Wes-leyan University Press, 1967).

Gil Troy, Moynihan's Moment: America's Fight Against Zionism as Racism (Oxford; New York: Oxford Univ Pr, 2012).

Gerald Tulchinsky, Canada's Jews: A People's Journey (Toronto: Buffalo: University of Toron-to Press, Scholarly Publishing Division, 2008).

Yad vaShem, "The Jews of Libya," accessed March 1, 2019, the-jews-of-libya.html.

Robert Verdussen, Naïm Khader. Prophète foudroyé du peuple palestinien (Bruxelles: Le Cri Edition, 2001).

Robert S. Wistrich, "Zionism and Its Jewish 'assimilationist' Critics (1897-1948)," Jewish Social Studies 4, no. 2 (1998). https://doi.org/10.2979/JSS.1998.4.2.59 DOI: https://doi.org/10.2979/JSS.1998.4.2.59

Abdulrahman Abdulla Zamil, "The Effective-ness and Credibility of Arab Propaganda in the United States" (Ph.D., 1973).

"Chartrand de retour du Moyen-Orient: 'Tout un peuple entassé dans des camps de réfu-giés, ça fait fur en maudit,'" Québec-Presse, September 3, 1972.

Comité québécois de liaison contre le racisme, "Compte-Rendu colloque contre le racisme," 1978.

EAFORD, ed., Zionism and Racism - Proceedings of an International Symposium (New Brunswick (N.J.), 1979).

"Équipe du journal: Fedayin," Fedayin, April 1973.

"Espionnage électronique des bureaux de La CSN," Fedayin, March 1975.

"Essais québécois: Esther et les fascistes," Le Devoir, accessed February 19, 2019, https://www.ledevoir.com/lire/17134/essais-quebe-cois-esther-et-les-fascistes.

"Gespräche mit Arabern in Genf," NZZ, Sep-tember 25, 1970.

"L'Homme de l'Année," Fedayin, June 1973

"L'importance de la communauté juive américaine (Le Devoir, 5 Novembre 74)," Fedayin, December 1974.

"L'opération de Tel-Aviv," Fedayin, March 1975.

Last Stop, Paris: The Assassination of Mario Bachand and the Death of the FLQ (Michael McLoughlin, 1998).

"Les Canadiens d'origine arabe se sentent visés," Le Soleil, March 2, 1976.

"Les communautés arabes manifestent devant les consulats d'lsraël et des USA, à Montréal," La Presse, October 10, 1973.

"Les pays arabes décidés de daire libérer les territoires occupés par l'État d'Israël," La Presse, January 26, 1974.

P. G. D., "Conferenza Dei Ministri Arabi Dell'Informazioni," Oriente Moderno 49, no. 1/3 (1969).

RCMP, "Secret Report on the Arab Information Center" (1973), LAC RG25-A-3-c Vol. 11027 File 22-10-ARAB-LEAGUE.

R. R., "Conferenza Dei Ministri Dell'Informazio-ni Arabi," Oriente Moderno 47, no. 8/12 (1967): 615

"Une semaine de la Palestine," La Presse, January 18, 1974.

United Nations General Assembly, "3379 (XXX). Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimina-tion" (1975), https://unispal.un.org/DPA/DPR/unispal.nsf/0/761C1063530766A7052566A2005B74D1. United Nations General Assembly.

Downloads

Published

2020-06-13 — Updated on 2021-05-13

Versions

How to Cite

Rickenbacher, D. (2021). The Anti-Israel Movement in Québec in the 1970s: At the Ideological Crossroads of the New Left and Liberation-Nationalism. Canadian Jewish Studies Études Juives Canadiennes, 29, 81–111. https://doi.org/10.25071/1916-0925.40170 (Original work published June 13, 2020)

Issue

Section

Articles / Articles