Letter from D. S., Vancouver, on July 27, 2025, to Jenny Kwan, MP, a member of the NDP, offering facts in response to her publicized letter
- CAEF
- Aug 1
- 2 min read
Dear Ms. Kwan,
Your auto-reply below was just sent to pro-Palestinians… and not to Jews in your constituency who object to the way that Israel is being treated. My email to you was part of a petition that objects to the Canadian government unilaterally recognizing a Palestinian state that never existed and still doesn’t exist and whose borders, if any, have yet to be established.
I’m a 59 year old Jew in your constituency, and I voted NPD for many of the years I have lived in Vancouver - until your party voted to accept BDS as part of it’s party platform.
You are on the wrong side of history and your position on Israel is antisemitic.
Antizionism is antisemitism, and your opposition to the Jewish state defending itself against terrorists will go down in history as a huge error in moral judgement and justice.
I’m ashamed that Canadians like you are not first and foremost asking for the hostages to be released and for hostilities against Israel to stop. If those two things happened, if Hamas surrendered, the war would stop and ordinary Palestinians would be free from being terrorized by Hamas and used as human shields.
I invite you to read this excellent article about the current situation by Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, a scholar of international law:
I’m also including a graphic of the article.
Of note, I will highlight these paragraphs:
“Under the Geneva and Hague Conventions, armed forces are required to wear insignia, distinguish themselves from civilians, avoid using civilians as shields, and operate from legitimate military positions.
Hamas violates every one of these principles. It fights from schools, hospitals, mosques, and densely populated neighborhoods. It stores rockets in UN facilities and clinics. Its fighters wear no uniforms.
Under these laws, when a terrorist organization embeds itself within civilian populations, the responsibility for ensuing civilian casualties does not rest solely – or even primarily – on the state responding.”
If you truly researched international law and appreciated that this struggle is not about land or Palestinian identity, you would understand it’s about protecting the one small sliver of land where Jews should be free from fear from the world. This is about an existential threat to the Jewish people, and about their rights as indigenous people to their homeland.
Again, I encourage you to oppose any federal proposal to unilaterally recognize a Palestinian state that has never had any official borders and still does not. You can’t recognize a state that never existed and whose boundaries have not been recognized or approved by any official international organization.
I’m copying the Canadian Antisemitism Education Foundation and also B’nai Brith Canada on this as the NDP’s position does not represent the Jews that are in the constituencies that it represents.
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