April 7 was the sixth month anniversary of the October 7 Hamas pogrom and the beginning of the war between Israel and Hamas. For those who have been watching this war closely it was particularly disconcerting. It was on that day that the Netanyahu government announced that it was pulling most of its troops out of southern Gaza, a move that left a number of questions unanswered. Was this a harbinger of Bibi’s coalition succumbing to pressure from the Biden administration to end the war giving Hamas a victory? Was it a response to the recent violent demonstrations by the Israeli left in the guise of a demand to bring the hostages home but, like the prewar demonstrations against judicial reform, was actually meant to bring down the government?

In any case the troop drawdown was a shock to commentators such as myself who have been advocating for the commencement of the operation in Rafah to finish off the remaining four Hamas battalions. But on April 7 a number of demonstrations were held in the Jewish diaspora organized for the sole purpose of emphasizing the plight of the 130 hostages still being held by Hamas. The particular rally I attended in Toronto was called “Six Months in Hell.” (READ MORE from Max Dublin: Biden Pulls a Bait and Switch on Israel)

One of the speakers was Goldie Ghamari, an Iranian human rights lawyer who is a Conservative Party member of the Ontario Legislature. She noted that Iran is the only country in the Middle East that has not held any pro-Hamas rallies, which is remarkable since Hamas is a proxy of the Iranian regime. She stated emphatically that the huge Iranian diaspora community stands squarely behind Israel, that Persians and Jews have a three-thousand-year history going all the way back to Cyrus the Great. And it is true that before the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Iran and Israel enjoyed excellent, mutually beneficial relations.

A number of speakers excoriated Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party for giving aid and comfort to Hamas. This impetus for this criticism is the unprecedented reversal of Canadian Foreign Policy which has seen the Trudeau regime give support for Hamas in the United Nations General Assembly, for which Hamas leaders have publicly thanked him. Trudeau has also restored funding to UNRWA and stopped selling military equipment to Israel, a bit of laughable virtue-signaling considering Canada sells only non-essential accessories, not military hardware, to Israel (though most of the Canadian electorate is probably unaware of this.)

Like the Biden administration’s election-year pandering to Muslims in Michigan, Trudeau’s government has long pandered to the Canadian Muslim population, which is much larger than the country’s Jewish population. Whenever Trudeau was mentioned, the Toronto audience booed loudly.

As I have previously written in these pages, Canada does have its share of Jewish leftist radicals who support Hamas, but all and all the Canadian Jewish population is more conservative than its American counterpart. This is due in part to the fact that a good number of Holocaust survivors immigrated to Canada and landed in Toronto after World War II.

I recall that after the Six Day War broke out my father took me to a synagogue where an emergency fundraiser was taking place to support Israel during that war. It was a synagogue attended mainly by Holocaust survivors many of whom had by then become successful businessmen and within minutes of the call for contributions, the sum of the donations had grown enormously. In the end, Toronto Jews on a per capita basis contributed more to that war effort than did any other Jewish diaspora community in the world.

The main speaker at the Toronto rally was Pierre Poilievre, leader of the federal Canadian Conservative Party which is the only Canadian political party that has strongly and unequivocally supported Israel in its just war against Hamas. In contrast to Trudeau, Poilievre was given a resounding welcome by the huge crowd gathered in the square. He was wearing the symbolic dog tags which have become the widespread Jewish emblem for the release of the hostages. The Canadian Conservative Party has for some time been far ahead of the Liberal Party due to destructive Liberal Party policies, and this war has seen large numbers of Jewish voters who have traditionally voted Liberal switch their affiliation to the Conservatives. We won’t know how this will play out until the general election about a year from now, but it appears likely that it will have a significant impact since Jews have also been important donors to the Liberal Party.

As expected, there was a pro-Hamas counter-demonstration behind barricades on the other side of the plaza. They had a sound system and were blaring Arabic music and chanting pro-Hamas chants but were initially ignored. Eventually some participants from the demonstration to free the hostages, including myself, moved toward them and formed a counter-counter-protest to confront them. The pro-Hamas counter-protesters were a rather scraggly group compared to others that I have seen on occasions when they are not so massively outnumbered by Israel supporters.

By the time I got there they had stopped chanting, ostensibly because given their small numbers that part of their demonstration was rather pathetic compared to the booming cries that were coming from the rally to free the hostages. Most of their group were young men in keffiyehs who, perhaps conscious of the puniness of their group had sheepish looks on their faces. One of them who appeared rather older than the average carried a little bundle that looked like something wrapped in a shroud with a sign proclaiming that this was one of the 1,200 Palestinian babies that had been murdered by the IDF in Gaza. There was also a woman who carried a Ukrainian flag and sign proclaiming that she was Ukrainian and pro-Hamas. Go figure. (READ MORE: Israel: Unifying Around the Center) 

Our group was composed mainly of young people. All of the pro-Israel rallies that I have attended since the beginning of the war have had large contingents of young people who look to be in their late teens or in their twenties and thirties. There were no hot-heads among us and there was no rushing of the barricades behind which the Pro-Hamas demonstrators were standing. In fact, there were marshals from our group who positioned themselves between us and the counter-demonstrators to discourage this. There was a small police presence but they stood passively to the side.

At one point some members of my group of counter-counter-demonstrators formed a line and then a partial circle and started dancing the hora, the most traditional of all Israeli circle dances. At first, I was taken aback by this wondering if it was appropriate to be dancing during such a solemn anniversary. But then I found myself joining the circle of dancers because somehow or other, in all the circumstances, it seemed the right thing to do. The dancing reminded me of the Yiddish song sung by the Jewish partisans during World War II. It begins Zog nit kein mol az du geyst dem letstn veg (Don’t ever say that you’re on the final road) and ends with, Mir zaynen do (We are still here!). That, I think, is why we danced the hora.