Jewish and Palestinian Montrealers break bread, talk peace and debate solutions

It was Friday Shabbat, the time of rest when adherents of the Jewish faith traditionally share a meal to celebrate the creation of heaven and earth. Earlier this month, people of different faiths gathered over challah, pita and hummus in the Mile End neighbourhood of Montreal.

But it wasn't your ordinary Shabbat dinner. It was "Shabbat for Gaza." People made placards with their children of hearts in the colours of the Palestinian flag.

They called for a ceasefire, an end to the blockade on Gaza and the release of all Israeli and Palestinians held captive.

Corey Balsam, the national co-ordinator of Independent Jewish Voices — an organization that advocates for the rights of Palestinians, helped organize the event. His grandfather survived the Holocaust but much of his family was killed in the Nazi genocide.

Balsam feels "crushed" by the violence Hamas inflicted upon civilians in Israel in its Oct. 7 cross-border attack. As a father, he says he understands the fear that Montreal's Jewish community is feeling after a synagogue and two Jewish schools were attacked in recent weeks.

At the same time, Balsam, who has lived in the West Bank and has family in Israel, is "heartbroken" by the thousands of civilians — many children — killed in Israeli strikes on Gaza.

"This idea that there can be a military resolution to this issue is rather incomprehensible," he said.

The pause in fighting gives him hope, he says, but he wishes Canada would do more to push for a long-term ceasefire.

Israelis and Palestinians need to find a way to live side by side — whether it's a two-state, one-state or other form of solution — without trying to subjugate each other, Balsam said.

Although the conflict is thousands of kilometres away, the streets of Montreal have become host to a debate in which narratives, dreams of statehood and even the interpretation of slogans clash.

Amid a surge of hate crimes in the city, Jewish Montrealers like Balsam are extending a hand to Palestinians to find common ground.

But how peace is achieved — and what that peace looks like — reflects a diversity of views within his community. Meanwhile, others in the Palestinian diaspora are looking for common cause with their Jewish neighbours to bring the bloodshed to an end.

'This is not Muslims versus Jews'

Every day Ayman Oweida tries to call his aunts and uncles in Gaza. He says he finds himself acting like their therapist, though he is having trouble coping himself. Gaza is where his parents — now living in Montreal — were born.

In 1948, the year Israel was founded, his grandparents were forced to flee their homes. He says his family there, like other Gaza residents, is the victim of "collective punishment."

As a medical researcher at the Université de Sherbrooke, Oweida spends his days trying to add six months or a year to the lives of cancer patients. He says it pains him to see a lack of collective action in preventing such massive death and destruction in Gaza.

"This war has caused just incomprehensible atrocities and loss of human life, and so calling for a ceasefire has become the least that I could ask my leaders to do," said Oweida, adding that the temporary pause in fighting has given him cause for cautious optimism.

In Sherbrooke, Oweida has helped organize protests in support of Palestinians and says the purpose of the events is bring the violence to an end, not to pit one side against another.

"This is not Muslims versus Jews," he said. "We're all in this together, regardless of race, ethnicity or religion. That's a message that's reinforced every time we meet as a group or every time we organize a protest."

It hasn't been difficult to build bridges with Jewish Quebecers and many have joined the protests, Oweida said, rejecting assertions that protest organizers are calling for hatred or support for Hamas, even if he says there might be a handful of cases where hate is expressed across the country.

"We're not making any pro-hate, pro-Hamas calls here," he said.

As for what peace looks like to him, Oweida says he still believes in the imperfect solution that is two states, one Palestinian and one Israeli, living side by side.

Peace with Palestinians — not Hamas

Yair Szlak, president of Federation CJA — a Jewish advocacy group based in Montreal, also says he wants a peaceful coexistence. For Szlak, peace means two independent states living side by side, but the peace he envisions depends on the release of the hostages and the destruction of Hamas in Gaza.

"Israel can no longer live with a barbaric terrorist living on its border," said Szlak.

"A peaceful solution is that the Palestinian people are free of Hamas and are allowed to live a free life and have a process that will rebuild their area in Gaza and allow them to create their own independent statehood there, so that they can live and thrive," he said.

While Szlak says Montrealers should be free to protest against the Israeli government, they should not target people of Jewish faith for a conflict happening on the other side of the globe.

He also describes slogans like "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free," a slogan often repeated at pro-Palestinian demonstrations, as a call for ethnic cleansing.

"'From the river to the sea,' which is within the Hamas charter, says Jews should not live anywhere in the state of Israel [and] means that they're looking to kill Jews," he said.

A democratic state for all

To Dyala Hamzah, an associate history professor at the Université de Montréal, the slogan "from the river to the sea" isn't about violence. She says it's a call for self-determination for displaced Palestinians and their return to the lands they formerly inhabited.

Hamzah says that peace cannot be achieved without addressing the grievances of Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem — all of which predate Oct.7.

The failure to resolve ongoing policies of occupation, discrimination and dispossession over the years have left openings for violence, and with each bomb dropped more Hamas fighters are created, she says.

"Israel is not at war with Hamas. Israel is at war with the whole of Palestine," Hamzah said.

"Every time peaceful resistance fails, armed resistance comes more into play, but one does not exclude the other and both have always been features of Palestinian resistance," said Hamzah, who is calling for Canada to boycott Israel the way South Africa was boycotted over apartheid.

In her view, a two-state solution is not viable because the Oslo agreements of the 1990s have left Palestinian territories without common borders and therefore geographically divided. In its place, she wants to see a single democratic state that grants equal rights and protections to all of its inhabitants, Palestinians and Israelis alike.

The less-than-human 'other'

Montreal is experiencing an "unparalleled" level of polarization and fear, especially within Jewish- and Palestinian-Canadian communities, said McGill University political science professor Rex Brynen.

When you stop seeing the humanity of people who belong to groups different from your own, Brynen says civilians become enemies that are less than human — a recipe for war crimes.

According to Brynen, some argue that "all Israelis are legitimate targets because they serve in the military or they voted for Netenyahu or all Palestinians are legitimate targets because they didn't stop Hamas."

He said that kind of thinking "contributes to the views that are being pitched by hardliners on both sides of the conflict that violence is the only way of solving this."

In Canada's backyard, the dehumanization of Japanese during the Second World War paved the way for treating Japanese-Canadians as the enemy and forcing thousands of them — entire families — into internment camps, he said, adding that his grandparents might have cheered on the firebombing of Dresden as the allies fought the Axis powers.

Montrealers need to take the temperature down before tragedy strikes here, he said, citing examples of a radicalized Quebecer shooting up a Quebec City mosque in 2017 — killing six — and another man running over a Muslim family in London, Ont., in 2021 — killing four.

Despite tensions brewing in the city, including on university campuses, Brynen says his students have proven that constructive discourse is possible with thoughtful and sensitive discussions in the classroom — even with differences of opinion.

"If we ever get peace in the Middle East it's going to be from talking to each other, not from people shouting at each other," he said.