Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – New York Governor Kathleen Courtney Hochul, a sixth-generation Irish-American, spoke on Thursday to a Jewish philanthropy in her state. In the course of her remarks, she referred to Israel’s right to defend itself from Hamas.
She went on to say, “If Canada someday ever attacked Buffalo, I’m sorry my friends, there would be no Canada the next day, right, right? But think about that, that is a natural reaction. You have a right to defend yourself and to make sure it never happens again, and that is Israel’s right.”
She has since apologized for a “poor choice of words,” not in her full-throated advocacy of genocide but for making Canada the scenario for it. She momentarily forgot that it is only allowed to advocate ethnic cleansing of non-white people. The Gaza conflict is like a UV black light for detecting sociopaths.
There are many things wrong with Hochul’s remark. First, Gaza is recognized by the UN and most countries in the world as an occupied territory over which Israel is the occupying power. It isn’t an independent country. It has no port, airport, or heavy armaments. It is almost completely surrounded by Israel, including from the sea and the skies, and even the Egyptian checkpoint of Gaza is de facto controlled by Israeli policy. Israel has the basic right of self-defense, as do all United Nations member states under its charter. But it doesn’t have the right to wage a total war, to wipe out 30,000 people in Gaza, the bulk of them innocent non-combatants, or to ethnically cleanse 1.9 million people. It has a right to defend itself from the Hamas organization, but not to destroy Gaza. As an occupying power it has a special responsibility to ensure the welfare of the Palestinian non-combatants of Gaza, a responsibility it has abandoned with glee.
NBC News Video: “Humanitarian crisis growing in Gaza”
Second, who in the world says things like “there would be no Canada the next day’? It is never all right to wipe out a whole people. The technical term for that sort of thing is genocide. As an Irish-American, Hochul should be more sympathetic to people being starved by impersonal colonial policy. The British rulers of Ireland during the potato famine believed that distributing food would backfire by making the locals forever dependent on this state largesse, setting them up for more deaths in the future. Nobelist in economics Amartya Sen debunked this theory, versions of which we hear from Republicans today. The only way to stop a famine is for the government to intervene to distribute food. The British also exported food from Ireland while a million were dying of hunger. There were 8 million Irish in 1840. A million died in the famine and a million left, many for the United States and Canada, leaving 5.8 million by 1860 or so.
Israel’s position in Gaza is no less colonial than Britain’s was in Ireland. Today, the Israeli authorities are imposing widespread hunger and thirst on millions of noncombatants, including small children. These policies are not necessary to combat Hamas, they are clearly undertaken for their own sake, as a form of collective punish. One physician who recently volunteered there wrote in the LA Times, “it wasn’t war, it was annihilation.”
The final thing that is wrong with what Hochul said is that we already had a war with Canada, when it was still part of the British Empire, in 1812-1814. The British provoked US ire by trying to restrict its trade with the Napoleonic Empire. American Gen. George McClure burned a Canadian town, and the British forces came down from Canada with First Nations auxiliaries and destroyed a number of American hamlets and towns, and then burned Buffalo, New York (Hochul’s home town) to the ground.
The US Constitution Museum explains,
- “American armies invaded Canada in 1812 at three points, but all three campaigns ended in failure. One army surrendered at Detroit at the western end of Lake Erie, a second army surrendered at Queenston Heights at the other end of the lake, and a third army withdrew after little more than a skirmish north of New York. A similar multi-pronged invasion went better in 1813, but only in the West.”
So the 500,000 Canadians weren’t wiped out by the much more populous Americans, and except in the west they fought the U.S. forces to a standstill.
In the aftermath, the British forces invaded Washington, D.C. and burned the White House, the Capitol and the navy shipyard.
So Hochul’s genocidal fantasy doesn’t even accord with history.
Just as it wasn’t possible for the US to polish off British Canada in 1812-1814, it likewise isn’t possible for Israel to polish off the world’s 14.3 million Palestinians, however much its Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, might like to do so.
Politicians who glory in a whole nation abruptly “not existing” should be understood as disturbingly abnormal, and people should stop inviting them to dinner, much less electing them to high office.
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