Keller: Yes, Canada should (mostly) end our temporary foreign worker programs 

2025/09/11 Leave a comment

Nice reminder of previous comments (Trudeau did the same in 2014):

…Prime Minister Mark Carney used to get this. Back in 2013, when he was governor of the Bank of Canada, he told a parliamentary committee that “one doesn’t want an overreliance on temporary foreign workers for lower-skill jobs, which prevent the wage adjustment mechanism from making sure that Canadians are paid higher wages but also that firms improve their productivity.”

He added that temporary foreign workers should be for “those higher-skilled gaps that do exist.” 

In plain English, he said that bringing in highly skilled people to fill high-wage jobs was good for Canada, but allowing business easy access to lots of temporary foreign workers for entry-level jobs was a recipe for suppressing the wages of low-wage Canadians, and discouraging companies from raising productivity through labour-saving technologies. 

That was the right answer. It was also a good foundation for future immigration policy.

But last week, Mr. Carney said the opposite. Pushing back against Conservative criticism, he said that “when I talk to businesses around the country … their number one issue is tariffs, and their number two issue is access to temporary foreign workers.”

Mr. Carney, please rediscover your 2013 answer. Aside from being economically sound, it is immeasurably more politically saleable. Just ask British Columbia Premier David Eby.…

Source: Yes, Canada should (mostly) end our temporary foreign worker programs

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Most Canadians favour scaling back immigration and temporary resident numbers, poll shows 

2025/09/11 Leave a comment

Not surprising given coverage over some of the issues:

…Almost three-quarters of Canadians favour reducing the number of new immigrants coming here, while two-thirds support the government’s plan to cut the number of temporary residents, a new poll shows.

The Nanos poll for The Globe and Mail found that Canadians are more than twice as likely to support reducing the number of new immigrants coming to Canada, compared with those who oppose a cut.

More than three in five Canadians support or somewhat support the government reducing its targets for temporary residents until 2027, as set out in its levels plan last year, the poll also found. 

The new survey demonstrates a steady hardening of views on immigration in the past few years. In 2023, 53 per cent of Canadians surveyed in a Nanos poll for The Globe said they wanted the federal government to accept fewer immigrants than it was planning that year. 

The 2023 poll found a rise of almost 20 percentage points over six months earlier in the number of Canadians who thought this country should accept fewer immigrants than Ottawa’s 2023 target of 465,000 permanent residents. 

The most recent survey of 1,028 Canadians, conducted between Aug. 30 and Sept. 3, showed support for cuts in numbers of newcomers across all age groups and regions of Canada. 

“What is clear from the research is that a comfortable majority of Canadians are good with reducing the number of new immigrants and new temporary residents,” said Nik Nanos, chief data scientist and founder of Nanos Research….

Source: Most Canadians favour scaling back immigration and temporary resident numbers, poll shows

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Top US immigration official defends rule targeting ‘anti-American’ views in green card, visa process

2025/09/11 Leave a comment

Somehow, “trust us” not that credible given various initiatives by the Trump administration:

A new rule allowing a U.S. immigration agency to scrutinize a person’s “anti-American” viewswhen applying for a green card or other benefits isn’t designed to target political beliefs, but to identify support for terrorist activity, the organization’s director told The Associated Press.

In a wide-ranging interview on Monday, the director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Joseph Edlow, delved into the agency’s contentious policy — announced last month — which allows officers to decide whether a foreigner applying for a certain benefit has endorsed what they believe are anti-American views. 

Edlow also detailed problems he sees with a training program that’s popular with international students, but hated by some Trump supporters. He described how and why he’s thinking of changing the process by which hundreds of thousands of people become American citizens every year.

Edlow is overseeing the pivotal immigration agency at a time when President Donald Trump is upending traditional immigration policyand charging ahead with an aggressive agenda that restricts who gets to come into the U.S. through legal pathways.

Questions over what constitutes anti-Americanism

The new policy by USCIS stipulates that its officers could now consider whether an applicant “endorsed, promoted, supported, or otherwise espoused” anti-American, terrorist or antisemitic views when making their decision about whether to grant the benefit. 

Critics questioned whether it gives officers too much leeway in rejecting foreigners based on a subjective judgment.

Edlow said the agency needs to be aware of what people applying for benefits are saying online and when that speech becomes hateful. He said the agency won’t automatically deny someone a benefit because of what they said, but it’s a factor they take into consideration.

He said they’re not looking for people who’ve posted anti-Trump speech. He said criticism of any administration was “one of the most American activities you can engage in.”

“This goes beyond that. This is actual espousing (of) the beliefs and the ideology of terrorist, of terrorist organizations and those who wish to destroy the American way of life.” 

In examples of speech that might raise a red flag, Edlow noted students who post pro-Hamas beliefs or are taking part in campus protests where Jewish students are blocked from entering buildings.

The Trump administration has made cracking down on student protests a high priority. The government has said noncitizens who participate in such demonstrations should be expelled from the U.S. for expressing views the administration considers to be antisemitic and “pro-Hamas,” referring to the Palestinian militant group that attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. 

In one of the most high-profile examples, federal immigration authorities in March arrested Palestinian activist and green card holder, Mahmoud Khalil, who as a student played a prominent role in Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian protests. 

USCIS agents now carry weapons and could make arrests

USCIS recently announced that it could now hire law enforcement agents who could make arrests, execute search warrants and carry weapons. That’s a change for the agency that historically investigates immigration fraud but hands cases over to other agencies to prosecute.

Edlow said their focus would be on “large scale criminal activity” such as large-scale asylum fraud or marriage fraud.

“They’re not a police force. This is going to be a highly trained and very small section of this agency dealing specifically with rooting out immigration fraud,” said Edlow. He said previously the agency was stymied by how far it could take cases because they eventually had to turn them over to another agency for prosecution. 

Edlow said there would be a “couple hundred” of the officers to start, but put it in the context of the “thousands upon thousands” of other staff that the agency has to adjudicate benefits.

The agency’s role in verifying voter rolls

The Systemic Alien Verification for Entitlements program was created in 1987 as a way for various government agencies to check whether someone is eligible for public benefits.

Edlow said his agency has been working with the Social Security Administration to make it easier for states and local governments to access. They can now access the system using a Social Security number or the last four digits of one, instead of needing a specific Homeland Security identifying number that most of them didn’t have. And they can submit a number of requests at the same time as opposed to one at a time.

Edlow also said USCIS is also entering into agreements with secretaries of state so they can use the system to verify their voter rolls in what he said was a bid to counter voter fraud.

Critics have questioned the reliability of the data and whether people will be erroneously dropped from voter rolls as well as whether their privacy is being protected.

Edlow says the agency has a “huge team” to verify the information is accurate….

Source: Top US immigration official defends rule targeting ‘anti-American’ views in green card, visa process

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33 million voters have been run through a Trump administration citizenship check

2025/09/11 Leave a comment

Valid concerns:

Tens of millions of voters have had their citizenship status and other information checked using a revamped tool offered by the Trump administration, even as many states — led by both Democrats and Republicans — are refusing or hesitating to use it because of outstanding questions about the system.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) says election officials have used the tool to check the information of more than 33 million voters — a striking portion of the American public, considering little information has been made public about the tool’s accuracy or data security.

The latest update to the system, known as SAVE, took effect Aug. 15 and allows election officials to use just the last four digits of voters’ Social Security numbers — along with names and dates of birth — to check if the voters are U.S. citizens, or if they have died.

Source: 33 million voters have been run through a Trump administration citizenship check

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New report outlines the biggest reasons immigrants stay in Canada, and it’s not just financial

2025/09/10 Leave a comment

From my friends at ICC. Courage and optimism are characteristic of immigrants:

As Canada risks losing more immigrants amid a rising cost of living, a new report finds the biggest factors in whether newcomers stay aren’t just financial.

While housing and affordability remain top concerns, a new survey of nearly 5,000 immigrants finds newcomers are far more likely to stay in Canada if they feel hopeful about their future and connected to the country, according to a report from the Institute for Canadian Citizenship on Tuesday.

Optimism about the future – measured by immigrants’ confidence in their personal and family prospects, plans for long-term life in Canada and belief that friends and family can succeed here – is the strongest driver of immigrant retention, with just a one per cent increase in optimism boosting the likelihood of staying by 28 per cent.

A one per cent increase in a sense of belonging – measured by identifying as Canadian, feeling accepted in Canada, trusting other Canadians and believing that the country provides good opportunities for one’s family – increases the likelihood to stay by 25 per cent.

The same increase in safety and stability raises the likelihood of a newcomer staying permanently by 16 per cent, and an uptick in economic optimism adds 15 per cent.

As Ottawa plans to slash the number of immigrants over the next three years, resulting in a 1.7 per cent drop in the country’s gross domestic product by 2027, it is crucial to retain talented immigrants who are already here, said Daniel Bernhard, CEO of the Institute for Canadian Citizenship.

New immigration targets are expected to cut Canada’s population growth by 1.4 million over the next three years, with permanent resident admissions dropping from 464,265 in 2024 to 365,000 in 2027, leading to 1.3 billion fewer hours worked, according to Canada’s parliamentary budget officer.

“Immigrants are hand-selected to address Canada’s most pressing needs and so each one that leaves is a great loss,” Bernhard said. “The needs they were brought here to fill do not leave with them.”

One in five immigrants who come to Canada ultimately leave the country within 25 years, with about one-third of those people moving on within the first five years, according to a November report from the ICC.

The report found that economic immigrants and francophones are the most likely to leave – the two categories of immigrants Canada prioritizes most.

The ICC is calling on policymakers to increase immigrant retention through targeted investments in domains that help build connection and optimism, including “initiatives that support newcomer skills development and labour market integration” and “activities that connect immigrant families and friends to each other and to other Canadians, building community, inclusion and belonging.”

“We know immigrants are leaving Canada, but until today, policymakers had very little evidence to guide investments in retention,” Bernhard said.

The survey shows that “making people feel at home, feel welcome, feel Canadian, feel attached to this place and to these people is more than just a nice thing we do for our newest neighbours,” he added.

“It’s a key growth and success strategy for the community.”

Source: New report outlines the biggest reasons immigrants stay in Canada, and it’s not just financial

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Multiculturalism has lost its meaning: Michael Bonner for Inside Policy

2025/09/10 2 Comments

Sort of a repeat of the criticisms of the 1990s. I think he underplays the importance of groups like Ukrainian Canadians who didn’t see recognition of their role in settling the West in the English/French narratives and that the original thinking in the Bi&Bi report, reflected in the policy and the 1988 Act, reflected a largely white, Christian Canada.

Most of the accommodation issues pertain to religion which were largely undiscussed at that time. Since then, of course, immigration has resulted in much greater religious diversity.

I think Bonner understates the integrative role of multiculturalism. Objectives like “full and equitable participation,” “equal treatment and equal protection,” “interaction between individuals and communities,” and “strengthening the status and use of the official languages” are fundamentally about integration.  

So yes, back to its roots would be helpful as would correction of the excesses of the Trudeau government (which the expected cutbacks will likely impact).

But citing first millennial Britain as an example, where mobility, communications and transportation were limited, not to mention no internet or social media, is odd to say the least:

…We might conclude that multicultural policy has been pushed to an illogical extreme, or that an originally good and well-intentioned policy has been perverted. There is, however, a sense in which any official policy of multiculturalism is inherently superfluous and bound to fail. It is superfluous because all societies everywhere are multicultural in one sense or another. There is no country without local and regional diversity in culture, food, language, accent, dialect, and so on; and these differences tend to be robust over time. It is bound to fail because, in the long run, the general culture of a place will tend to become more and more homogenous.

Those two observations are not contradictory. A demonstrative example is Great Britain: a place repeatedly invaded and settled by various peoples over the first millennium AD, which nevertheless developed a common British identity as well as multiple, subsidiary national and regional cultures long before 20th century mass immigration. Given enough time, a place like Canada would surely turn out much the same: rich in cultural and linguistic diversity, with a blended population of many Indigenous peoples and others distantly descended from immigrants, all united by a common Canadian identity centuries in the making: John Ralston Saul’s “Métis nation” at last. Many would applaud this outcome, but it would hardly resemble the contemporary ideal of multiculturalism.

So it seems that, if we no longer understand the original meaning and purpose of multiculturalism – and if most Canadians object to the outcome of diversity for its own sake – then the concept itself is no longer useful. At the very least, the meaning and purpose of it should be redefined. If multiculturalism is to be of any further use it must be able to tell us both where we came from and where we are now; both who we are in particular and who we are in general. And if multiculturalism cannot do that, then it will not survive.

Dr. Michael Bonner is a former Government of Ontario policy director, a historian of ancient Iran, and author of In Defense of Civilization: How Our Past Can Renew Our Present. He is a contributor for the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

Source: Multiculturalism has lost its meaning: Michael Bonner for Inside Policy

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Century Initiative “Pulling Back” report

2025/09/10 Leave a comment

The latest report by CI, still overly focussed on nominal rather than per capita GDP and aiming at different stakeholders to justify their overall call for increased immigration.

My expectation is that the government is unlikely to make major changes to current and planned cuts and restrictions despite calls from CI and others. Also noteworthy is of course the Conservatives highlighting of immigration, most recently Temporary Foreign Workers, as a line of attack.

List of CI issues and approach below (sorry for the poor quality):

Source: CI2100 Pulling Back report 2025

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Coletto: Is the Temporary Foreign Worker Program Canada’s Next Big Political Wedge?

2025/09/09 Leave a comment

Well, the Conservatives certainly intend it to be, even if their approach is overly simplistic:

…What does this mean politically?

  1. A potent wedge issue: The TFWP is shaping up as a powerful wedge for Conservatives: it stirs young economic anxiety and the populist thread of “Canadian jobs for Canadians.” It’s a clarion call that resonates with those feeling sidelined or squeezed.
  2. A potentially perilous balancing act for Liberals: With their own supporters deeply split, Carney’s Liberals must navigate between addressing economic vulnerabilities and maintaining labour market stability. Any move risks alienating one half of their fractured base.
  3. A broader narrative of precarity: Beyond the TFWP, Canadians are demanding security on jobs, housing, crime, and employment. Immigration is now at the centre of that conversation, reflecting a country where precarity shapes nearly every political debate.

At its core, the TFWP debate isn’t a technical economic tweak, it may become a battle for the narrative of Canada’s economic future. Those who support for scrapping it demand immediate protection; those who defend it warn of cascading supply shocks. 

Source: Is the Temporary Foreign Worker Program Canada’s Next Big Political Wedge?

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Federal agencies fumble privacy safeguards on asylum system revamp, risking refugee data

2025/09/09 Leave a comment

Sigh….:

Three government agencies that partnered on a $68-million project to revamp Canada’s asylum system failed to complete mandatory privacy safeguard tests for years while the project was being implemented, CBC News has learned. 

The lack of privacy protections raises “red flags,” lawyers say, and may have put refugee claimants’ data and applications at risk.

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) and the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) worked together on the “asylum interoperability project,” which would transform the asylum system into a more efficient digital one and address the ever-growing backlog of pending asylum applications, which currently sits at more than 290,000.

Earlier this year, CBC reported that the project, which launched in 2019, had been prematurely shut down in 2024 in what CBSA called an “unexpected” move.

Now, documents obtained through access-to-information legislation show there were “outstanding” privacy impact assessments (PIA) for the project, which was quietly scrapped when it was only 64 per cent complete.

According to a government digital privacy playbook, a PIA is a “policy process to identify, assess, and mitigate potential privacy risks before they happen.”

“All these steps need to be completed before the launch of the initiative,” that guide says.

Even though the interoperability project has now been scrapped, it implemented changes to how data is collected digitally and used — meaning that the completion of PIAs remains an essential part of that risk identification process, said  Andrew Koltun, an immigration and refugee lawyer who also practices privacy law.

The departments told CBC over email, however, that the privacy assessments are still incomplete. IRCC said it’s currently drafting its portion of the PIA and expects it to be done by the end of 2025.

The fact they still aren’t finished, Koltun said,  raises “a lot of red flags.”

Source: Federal agencies fumble privacy safeguards on asylum system revamp, risking refugee data

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Genocide resolution reveals conflicts between scholars over Israel’s war in Gaza

2025/09/08 2 Comments

Of interest:

There was the allure of certainty in the headline: that an international association of genocide scholars had resolved that Israel was carrying out a genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

More precisely, “that Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide” set out in the United Nations’ 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

That is the verdict adopted by the International Association of Genocide Scholars, a non-partisan group of about 500 academics, educators, activists, psychologists, lawyers and artists dedicated to research and teaching about genocide and genocide prevention.

The association’s Aug. 31 resolution was adopted overwhelmingly by those who voted, with 109 for the resolution and 20 against, said Onur Uraz, the chair of the association’s resolution committee and an assistant professor of law at Turkey’s Hacettepe University. About 30 per cent of the association’s membership cast a ballot, he said.

But interviews with several association members involved in the vote reveal a more cautious and conflicted approach to condemning Israel, a state that was founded after the genocide that killed six million European Jews during the Second World War.

“So many of us got our beginning in Holocaust studies and are very sensitive to the massive scope of that world historical event and its impact,” said Andrew Woolford, a sociology and criminology professor at the University of Manitoba and a former president of the association.

“I don’t think it’s a resolution that anyone goes too easily into and I trust my colleagues reflected on it very seriously.”

‘Anti-Israel agenda’

The passing of the resolution — which cited United Nations estimates (that are based on Palestinian Health Ministry statistics) of the killing of more than 59,000 adults and children, the forced displacement of more than two million Gazans, and the vast destruction of housing, schools, hospitals, archives and agricultural fields and food warehouses — has prompted fierce condemnation.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry called the genocide finding “disgraceful” and “an embarrassment to the legal profession and to any academic standard.”

“For the first time, ‘genocide scholars’ accuse the very victim of genocide, despite Hamas’s attempted genocide against the Jewish people” the ministry wrote on X.

Israeli opposition leader Benny Gantz, a former defence minister and military chief of staff, said Israel’s attempts to avoid civilian casualties, deliver humanitarian aid and create humanitarian zones in Gaza serve as a powerful defence against the charge of genocide.

A military that takes such steps “might be the most ‘incompetent’ perpetrators of genocide in history,” he wrote on X.

“The cheapening and weaponization of the term ‘genocide’ to suit a shameless anti-Israel agenda must stop.”

To denigrate and ridicule the association, one social media user signed himself up as a member using as a photo the image of a muscular man flexing in a skimpy pink bikini.

Someone took out a membership in the name of the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler — the most prominent practitioner of genocide in modern history — with the accompanying image of a masked Hamas militant.

Public opinion war

The intensity of the reaction points to the resolution’s impact in the public-relations battle pitting defenders of Israel against those voicing their support and concern for the plight of Palestinians.

The draft resolution was circulated among association members several weeks before the vote. But the results were announced shortly after a report by a coalition of aid groups confirming the existence of famine conditions in Gaza.

At the United Nations General Assembly meetings next week, Canada, France, Britain and several other countries are expected to formally recognize Palestinian statehood in a diplomatic push to resolve the conflict through a two-state solution.

And while the declaration of 129 scholars may seem small in comparison, some see it as an important step in the campaign to condemn and isolate Israel’s government over its handling of the war.

“Global public opinion is certainly influenced by something like this,” said William Schabas, a Canadian professor of international law at London’s Middlesex University.

A past president of the scholarly association, but no longer a member, Schabas said the resolution will also help broaden the debate over the war in Gaza, allowing discussion of positions that had been taboo and potentially career-ending not so long ago.

“A year and a half ago, it was not a simple thing to talk about genocide being committed by Israel, and there were academics who lost their job for doing that. We were regularly accused of antisemitism,” he said.

“It’s pretty hard to claim that someone’s an antisemite because they criticized Israel when an organization like the International Association of Genocide Scholars — by a very large majority, apparently — voted in favour of this resolution.”

‘Historians don’t act quickly’

Woolford, of the University of Manitoba, voted in favour of the resolution, but his thinking on the matter has evolved over the course of the two-year war.

Just eight days after the attack by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023 that killed 1,200 people in southern Israel and sparked the war, Woolford signed an open letter in which nearly 900 academics and legal scholars warned of “the possibility of the crime of genocide being perpetrated by Israeli forces against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”

In December 2023, he backed another statement by concerned academics saying that “the starvation, mass killing and forced displacement of Palestinian civilians in Gaza is ongoing, raising the question of genocide, especially in view of the intentions expressed by Israeli leaders.”

As a sociologist, he said that his professional approach to genocide is different than that of an expert in international humanitarian law, but his belief that Israel was in fact engaged in a genocidal campaign against Palestinians was shaped by arguments presented before the International Court of Justice, where South Africa has alleged that Israel is in breach of the 1948 genocide convention.

The ICJ, which is the principal legal forum for the United Nations, has not yet ruled on the allegations.

Uraz, the chair of the association’s resolution committee, said that most initiatives are voted on by between 30 and 50 per cent of the membership.

Alyssa Loggie, a communications instructor at Vancouver’s Columbia College, wrote in response to questions that she hoped the resolution would “add to the voices of those already speaking out” about the war in Gaza.

“We did not need the (association) alone to tell us what is so readily apparent, and has already been spoken by many brave people around the world, and, most importantly, from the cries of Palestinians suffering themselves,” she wrote. 

Some scholars don’t participate in resolution votes because they feel they lack the expertise, Uraz said. Others decline due to a lack of interest or a sense of inevitability, thinking that one additional vote for or against will hardly matter.

Ahead of this resolution, though, some members complained to Uraz that the wording and condemnation was “not … strong enough, which could be another reason for some to be absent.”

Hilary Earl, an assistant professor of history at Nipissing University in North Bay, abstained for a different reason.

“Historians don’t act quickly,” she said, while insisting that it was clear in her mind that war crimes and crimes against humanity had been committed by Israel against the Palestinians.

“I’m just not ready to say that it’s a genocide,” she said. “That doesn’t mean it’s not going to be, and it doesn’t mean that it isn’t.”

Earl said that Raphael Lemkin, the Polish law professor and Holocaust survivor who coined the term “genocide” in 1944, cast it not in terms of the impact on a victimized group, but on the intent of the perpetrator.

“What is their intention? Do they want to destroy the group, or is the continuation of the group OK?” Earl said. “It’s an awful, fraught definition, the result of a compromise.”

She said there was no question in her mind about the horrific suffering and impact upon Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip.

“But outcome is not what genocide is about. It’s about intent. If it’s about outcome, then every war is a genocide, right?”

Scholars or activists?

Every conflict is, thankfully, not a genocide. But the association of genocide scholars has weighed in on numerous conflicts in which, in their opinion, warring parties have crossed that horrible line — even if it is sometimes decades after the fact.

It has issued resolutions accusing the Islamic State of genocidal acts against religious minorities in Syria and Iraq; accusing Myanmar of genocide against its Rohingya minority; and accusing Pakistan of committing genocide against its Bengal minority during Bangladesh’s 1971 war of independence.

The association also condemned the threat by former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005 to wipe Israel off the map and for denying the Holocaust. It called the comments an incitement to genocide and said that the Jewish state would be at “imminent” risk of genocide if ever Iran obtains nuclear weapons.

The risky business of taking political positions has been at the heart of the scholarly association, something that sets it apart and which its members seem to appreciate.

“This has been at the core of the organization for a long time: are we a scholarly organization or are we an activist organization?” said Earl, a member since 1996.

“I think we’re both, and I think the organization is well within its rights, and I think we should have these discussions and debates regularly. The world is full of violence against civilians, so I would never want to silence that.”

No nuance

Shortly before his death in December 2024, Israel Charny, an Israeli psychologist who co-founded the association, wrote a rebuttal to a journal article that accused Israel of engaging in genocide in Gaza.

In it, Charny admitted there had been “excessive” bombing in Gaza and that too many Palestinians had been killed. But he defended Israel’s actions as a legitimate response to Hamas aggression.

Israel should stop the war as soon as possible, Charny insisted, but not before its legitimate war aims — particularly the release of the remaining Israeli hostages — had been achieved.

This is the difficult nuance of the Israel-Hamas conflict that, in the opinion of Hily Moodrick-Even Khen, the genocide resolution failed to consider.

“I don’t think that the association should avoid expressing academic views about what’s going on in the world — definitely it’s part of our mission as genocide scholars,” said Khen, a professor of international law and chair of the Center for the Research and Study of Genocide at Ariel University, which is located in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

“The problem is that I think that our case is much more nuanced … and the very fact that Israel is fighting against the terrorist organization must be recognized.”

Khen, who voted against the resolution, said that it failed to fully acknowledge this fact, while also relying on disputed figures about the injured and dead that are supplied by the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza and circulated by the UN.

“It just speaks against any academic integrity, to my mind.”

But this does not mean that she and many other Israelis unconditionally support the right-wing coalition government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, or that they agree with every aspect of how the war has been prosecuted.

“I have my own criticisms about what’s going on,” she said. “But using the term ‘genocide,’ and using it in such an inaccurate and unprofessional way, is very destructive.”

Source: Genocide resolution reveals conflicts between scholars over Israel’s war in Gaza

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