or, How Legitimate Criticism Becomes Discriminatory Policy
You probably don’t know NUPGE — the National Union of Public and General Employees — but you might be interested to know that they receive 2 cents of every dollar that OPSEU/SEFPO (and about 12 other public sector Unions from every province except Quebec) gathers in dues. It calls itself a “union of unions” and it ostensibly advocates nationally on behalf of public sector unions and public services, I suppose.
In fact, according to the proposed budget, OPSEU/SEFPO will be paying NUPGE $3,013,100 in 2024. (Exchanged into a different currency, I think that equates to about 33 Dodge Hellcats, annually.)
What does NUPGE accomplish with that $3 million each year? Well, I’m not positive, so I’ll just assume that issuing press releases costs more than I had previously realized.
But NUPGE’s press releases and public positions are of some importance, because, as OPSEU/SEFPO President JP Hornick and 1st VP/Treasurer Laurie Nancekivell assured us,
NUPGE speaks not just with the weight of OPSEU/SEFPO’s 180,000 members but for all 425,000 plus NUPGE members across Canada. As OPSEU/SEFPO leaders we sit on the NUPGE National Executive Board and we share NUPGE’s statements with members because they are our positions too. (emphasis added)
So, if I understand correctly, OPSEU/SEFPO has positions — positions that might not have been approved by Convention or even by its Executive Board, but positions that now belong to OPSEU/SEFPO and speak on behalf of its 180,000 members because they have been approved by NUPGE, and we as members add “weight” to NUPGE’s positions, as surely as we add money to its accounts.
One apparent NUPGE position is from 2021, and is found in a press release entitled “Solidarity with Palestinian People“. It reads, “NUPGE condemns the Israeli forces’ violent repression of Palestinian demonstrators, including the attacks at al-Aqsa Mosque” and goes on to state, “We call for respect for international law, and respect for the human rights and self-determination of Palestinians, as a fundamental precondition for an end to hostilities.”
Now, let’s just hold that up to the light for a moment… violence committed by Israeli forces is condemned outright, but “an end to hostilities” on the other hand has a precondition. So… who is it that’s permitted to maintain hostilities until NUPGE’s demands met? Seemingly not the Israel army, given that their violence is condemned.
I interpret this 2021 position to mean that violence committed by Palestinians against Israelis is legitimate, and violence committed by Israelis against Palestinians is illegitimate. Because, again, NUPGE is conditioning “an end to hostilities” upon specific preconditions.
That’s an interesting position for OPSEU/SEFPO to maintain. I find its implications for my friends and family in Israel a bit disturbing, but let me move on to a different section of that press release:
“Let us be frank,” said [NUPGE President Larry] Brown. “There are some who would equate every criticism of the Israeli government as being based on anti-Semitism.”
Permit me to respectfully ask NUPGE — or OPSEU/SEFPO, whose position this apparently is by proxy — to kindly name one person living in Canada who “equate[s] every criticism of the Israeli government as being based on anti-Semitism”.
No, seriously — you’re welcome to crowdsource this one at ontariocollegeprof@yahoo.com.
But what’s interesting about that assertion is that it pre-emptively disregards every accusation of anti-Semitism, by pre-emptively casting it as an unreasonable, reflexive reaction to any criticism of Israel. “Disregard the Jews who call our criticism of Israel as antisemitic”, the reasoning says, “They just do that all the time.”
I remember a quotation — I had thought that it was Toni Morrison — that said, “A stereotype is an already-read book”. You don’t need to read it, because you know what it says; and you know what it says because you’ve already read it.
And NUPGE’s position relies upon and reinforces a stereotype about Jews, and about their claims of antisemitism. The implication of that position for the Progressive Left is that — unlike if your policy is accused of being sexist or racist or anti-Indigenous or ableist or discriminatory — if your policy is accused of being antisemitic, you don’t need to weigh critically whether the accusation has merit. You don’t need to investigate your position. Because (according to that reasoning) Jews’ calling any specific criticism of Israel antisemitic has absolutely no relationship to whether or not it is. (And that means that only non-Jews can offer an authoritative opinion about what’s antisemitic, but that’s the topic of a different post.)
That’s an unfortunate policy for a union to hold. I’m not thrilled about funding it, to be honest. Nor am I thrilled that my presence as an OPSEU/SEFPO member should give “weight” to NUPGE’s (dis)positions.
But this is pretty much the terra firma of the Progressive Left: The belief that accusations of antisemitism from mainstream Jews are intended to silence legitimate criticisms of Israel.
I did a quick google search for the phrase “legitimate criticism of Israel” — I was shocked to find only 33,500 results. Let’s take as a single example the Al Jazeera article whose subheading reads, “In a letter to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, 60 organisations say the [International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s] definition [of antisemitism] has been used to wrongly label criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic.”
(That allegation strikes me as a bit counter-intuitive, given that the IHRA itself states, “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic”. But I digress.)
And whenever someone expresses their concern about not being able to express “legitimate criticism of Israel” for fear of being accused of antisemitism, I always wonder what on earth they would consider to be illegitimate criticism of Israel.
It strikes me that members of the Progressive Left passionately oppose antisemitism, but only so long as they get to define what is or isn’t antisemitic. (Hint: the definition never extends to their positions.)
I’m not going to try to explain what criticisms of Israel are or are not legitimate. If only because “Legitimacy” seems like a strange category for criticism, as opposed to say, validity.
But I do think that I can offer some conclusions about when criticism of Israel — even “legitimate”, valid, correct criticism — may be discriminatory and therefore antisemitic.
Criticism of Israel is antisemitic when it is unprincipled.
And by that, I mean, when it is not rooted in a principle that is applied to other countries that share the quality that is being criticized. More simply, it’s antisemitic when it’s holding Israel to a standard to which the other 194 countries on Earth are not held.
Because if one’s principles only manifest themselves exclusively in relation to the actions of Israel, then those principles aren’t principles at all — they’re just rationalizations to criticize Israel.
Offended by Human Rights abuses? Let me hear your resolutions about China.
Horrified by civilian casualties in war? Let me hear your resolutions about Syria.
Espousing principles of self-determination? Let me hear your resolution to boycott, divest, and sanction Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Iran.
And even if NUPGE somehow fixated exclusively on human rights abuses suffered by Palestinians, I can’t help but notice that the human rights violations perpetrated against Palestinians by Jordan, Egypt, and Lebanon seem to escape its interest.
So, that’s apparently OPSEU/SEFPO’s position: Criticism of Israel’s sins. Disregard of literally every other country’s.
And here’s the fundamental category error that the Progressive Left makes: In all of its worry that “legitimate” criticism of Israel might be falsely accused of being antisemitic, they fail to realize that criticism of Israel can be legitimate and antisemitic at the same time. It all depends on what countries you’re not criticizing.
So let me take a quick look at OPSEU/SEFPO Conventions past and future, and which foreign countries have been targeted for criticism, censure, etc., in the resolutions that were approved for debate. Let’s see where the focus has been.
[Note: The chart below is based on information available online. For 2017-24, that’s the Resolutions booklets, which include all proposed resolutions approved for debate at Convention by the Resolutions Committee; for 2015-16, I’m linking to both the Convention minutes, which only record the resolutions that actually got debated on the floor and the following year’s “Executive Board Report”, which includes all resolutions that didn’t make it to the floor; for 2014, I could only find the minutes.]
| Proposed Resolutions Condemning Israel | Proposed Resolutions Condemning Literally Any Other Foreign Country | |
| 2024 (upcoming) | 3 | 0 |
| 2023 | 1 | 0 |
| 2022 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020-21 (no convention) | n/a | n/a |
| 2019 | 0 | 0 |
| 2018 | 0 | 0 |
| 2017 | 1 | 0 |
| 2016 here and here | 0 | 0 |
| 2015 here and here | 0 | 0 |
| 2014 here | 0 | 0 |
| Total | 5 | 0 |
To be clear, this chart reflects positions taken by OPSEU/SEFPO’s submitting bodies (and presented for debate at our Convention) over the last eleven years. My recollection is that one of them made it to the floor for debate, and that it did not pass. And yet, this pattern of submitted resolutions appears to roughly mirror the pattern of the Progressive Left in general:
But hey, maybe I’m missing a resolution against Russia in among all those documents. Feel free to check my work and get back to me at ontariocollegeprof@yahoo.com. Feel free to share your thoughts as well — they’ll stay anonymous if I print them.
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