Solidarity With Both Palestinians and Their Persecutors

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Montreal City Council Dodges A- and G-Words

Montreal is even-handed.

This past Monday evening, the City Council of Canada’s second largest city passed a highly amended motion expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people, all the while confirming continued friendship and institutional ties with the apartheid state that’s been subjugating, oppressing, persecuting, and killing Palestinians for almost eighty years.

The original motion, tabled by Projet Montreal and supported by 700 members of Montreal’s arts community, condemned the “apartheid regime imposed in Palestine and the genocide being perpetrated there,” and called on Montreal City Council to cut ties with the self-declared ‘Jewish State’.

“We have a duty to humanity,” said Projet Montréal councillor Nathalie Goulet. “Today, voices are rising around the world. Our voices must rise as well.”

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Predictably, the motion was fiercely opposed by leading Canadian Zionist groups, including B’Nai Brith Canada, the Canadian Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, and the Simon Wiesenthal Centre. The motion tabled at Montreal City Council was “anti-Israelstoked “antisemitism,” they claimed.

Israel’s lobbyists seem to have won the day. Local governance and the provision of services to Montrealers is the city’s mandate, not international diplomacy, said Montreal mayor Soraya Martinez Ferrada, following the 54-6 vote on the amended motion.

“We are not the International Court of Justice, and we are not the International Criminal Court,” she said, all the while assuring Montrealers that the city “is not turning a blind eye to Gaza.”

The official death toll in Israel’s war on Gaza, now approaching the end of its third year, stands at over 73,000, with almost 200,000 injured. Over 64,000 children have been killed or injured in Israel-USA’s onslaught. The actual death toll likely exceeds a hundred thousand, by a wide margin.

The people of Gaza face a plausible risk of genocide, the International Court of Justice ruled in January 2024, in response to a complaint lodged by South Africa. Declarations in support of South Africa’s genocide claim have been filed by Colombia, Libya, Mexico, Spain, Turkey, Chile, the Maldives, Bolivia, Ireland, Cuba, Belize, Brazil, the Comoros, Belgium, Paraguay, and the Netherlands.

The GPM spoke about the Montreal City Council motion with Yves Engler. Yves is a veteran Montreal activist, author, and prolific commentator. Listen to our conversation. Click on the play button above, or go here. Watch our complete conversation here:

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“The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born,” Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci famously wrote, from a Fascist prison, back in the 1930s. “Now is the time of monsters.”

Almost a century later, Antonio Gramsci’s monsters are back, committing unspeakable crimes with absolute impunity; trashing the 20th century’s most fundamental international laws, set forth in the wake of European fascist horror; turning the 21st century into a very dangerous place.

“The world is approaching a dangerous precipice, the front edge of which is in Palestine,” a People’s Tribunal on the Gaza genocide declared, back in the Spring of 2025, and “dangerous forces” are “pushing us toward the abyss.”

Inspired by past People’s Tribunals — most notably the 1966 Russell Tribunal on the US war on Vietnam, and the 2003-2005 World Tribunal on the US’s war on Iraq – the Gaza Tribunal was launched in London in November 2024. It held sessions in Istanbul and Sarajevo throughout 2024 and 2025.

In October 2025, the Gaza Tribunal issued its Final Statement of Findings and Moral Judgement, declaring Israel guilty of forcible starvation, domicide, ecocide, the deliberate destruction of healthcare infrastructure and personnel, the intentional and systematic targeting of Palestinian reproductive care and resulting prevention of births, the systematic destruction of schools and universities, the killing of journalists, torture, sexual and gender-based violence, the targeting of political and cultural leaders, and the destruction of civic institutions – all fully supported by the US and its Western allies, Canada included.

Penny Green was the Gaza Tribunal’s acting chair. Green is Professor of Law and Globalisation at Queen Mary University of London. Listen to one of several presentations by Green in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

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