Who Are You to Threaten Israel?

International Warnings and Demands

This past week, the United Kingdom, France, and Canada issued stern warnings to Israel, threatening “concrete actions”—including potential sanctions—should Israel not halt its military operations in Gaza and restore humanitarian aid. These demands come despite the ongoing refusal of Hamas to release the 58 hostages still held since the horrific terrorist attacks of October 7, 2023, and the continued launching of rockets into Israeli civilian areas as recently as this week.

The Hypocrisy of Former Colonial Powers

What is most striking about the positions taken by the UK, France, and Canada is not simply their apparent disregard for the reality that Israel is fighting a defensive war on multiple fronts against a wave of Iranian-backed terrorism from Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and others. Nor is it the persistence of a bias that has, at times, marginalized Jewish concerns, as seen in historical episodes ranging from the French Dreyfus Affair to the British blockade of Jewish refugees during the Holocaust, and Canada’s own refusal to admit Jews fleeing genocide.

What truly stands out is the profound hypocrisy of these nations’ criticisms, given their own extensive and troubling legacies of imperialism and colonialism. The British and French empires, spanning from the late 1500s and 1600s through the 1960s, left a trail of occupation and repression across North America, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. Their actions resulted in the suffering of tens—if not hundreds—of millions of people through enslavement, famine, displacement, violence, segregation, cultural erasure, and economic exploitation. Canada’s own colonial history, from the 1600s to the present, has deeply impacted hundreds of Indigenous nations—First Nations, Inuit, and Métis—through displacement, loss of land and resources, forced assimilation, cultural suppression, marginalization, poverty, and intergenerational trauma.

Offensive Colonialism vs. Defensive Survival

These imperial and colonial endeavors were, by and large, offensive in nature, motivated by the pursuit of economic and military advantage, and have rarely been fully acknowledged or atoned for by the countries involved. In stark contrast, Israel has never initiated a war but has continually fought defensively to protect its sovereignty and its people from existential threats, including those posed by hostile neighbors and terrorist organizations.

A Call for Self-Reflection

Given this context, it is especially troubling to see the UK, France, and Canada—nations whose own histories are marred by unaddressed injustices—so quick to condemn the world’s only Jewish state as it struggles for survival in a region and a world that has too often been inhospitable, if not outright hostile, to Jews. These countries, whose own “glass houses” were built on the suffering of others, would do well to reflect on their own histories before casting stones at Israel, which continues to fight for its very existence.