December 2011, Pages 40, 48

Canada Calling

Canadian War-Crimes Profiteering

By Sean F. McMahon

Canada's unconditional diplomatic support and enabling of Israeli belligerence and intransigence vis-à-vis Palestinians is increasingly garnering critical attention. Largely escaping scrutiny, however, has been Ottawa's economic relationship with Israel. Canadian economic policy plays at least as large a role as foreign policy in the oppression and exploitation of Palestinians, as it encourages Canadian companies to build the infrastructure of Israeli apartheid and to profit from Israel's occupation industry. It promotes war crimes profiteering.

Economic relations between Canada and Israel are structured by the Canada-Israel Free Trade Agreement (CIFTA). As intended, CIFTA has increased economic exchanges between the two countries. "Canada's bilateral trade with Israel more than doubled since implementation of CIFTA, from $567 million in 1997 to a record high of $1.4 billion in 2007 (an increase of 219 percent)," according to a March 2009 report by the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada (DFAIT), "Economic Profile-Israel." But at least part of this increased trade is produced in the occupied West Bank. CIFTA defines the territory of Israel as "the territory where its customs laws are applied"—in other words, pre-1967 Israel as well as the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Through this agreement Canada implicitly legalizes Israel's occupation of the Palestinians and allows it to exploit Palestinian labor and resources in its production processes. This is in stark contrast to the European Union's free trade agreement with Israel, which does not recognize Israeli control of the occupied Palestinian territories.

CIFTA, on the other hand, structures economic relations in such a way that Canadian corporations are encouraged to provide succor to Israel's system of apartheid and commission of war crimes and profit from the suffering and exploitation of Palestinians. Canadian construction companies, including the Canadian Highway Infrastructure Corporation (CHIC) and Green Park International Inc., are building the infrastructure of Israeli apartheid, namely roads and settlements.

CHIC and Canadian finance helped to build the Trans-Israel Highway, the major electronic toll road in Israel. Its technology is modeled on the 407 toll highway north of Toronto, which Canadian Highway Infrastructure Corporation also built. Microscopically and immediately, construction of the Trans-Israel Highway meant that "[a]pproximately 75 mostly poor communities [had] their land taken by the highway, including over 6,000 Arab families within Israel who [were] uprooted," according to an article by David Block, "Fighting the Trans-Israeli Highway," in the May/June 2000 issue of Tikkun magazine. Macroscopically-and this is the salient point made by Jeff Halper of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions—the Trans-Israel Highway is the "central spine" of the matrix of control and dispossession Israel is laying over Palestine. This means that CHIC built a technology which ensures ongoing Israeli control of the occupied West Bank and the imprisonment of Palestinians living there.

Roads do not lead to nowhere, of course. They connect places. Israel's matrix of control connects illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, including Jerusalem, with each other and with pre-1967 Israel. Green Park International Inc., along with Green Mount International Inc. are involved in the construction of the nodes in the matrix: Israel's illegal settlements. These two Canadian corporations are constructing, marketing and selling units in the colony of Modi'in Illit on land stolen from the Palestinian village of Bil'in, and hence are deeply implicated in Israel's illegal colonization enterprise.

Ottawa has long encouraged Canadian corporations to serve as builders of Israeli apartheid. In 1998, after completion of a portion of the Trans-Israel Highway, Ontario's then-Premier Mike Harris visited Israel to "ensure that Ontario would be considered for the designing and building of Israel's mass transit system, which might include an underground complex in Tel Aviv." Even now, Canada's Trade Commissioner advertises that "[t]here are also a growing number of initiatives for major infrastructure programs (rail and urban transit, water, ports) [in space over which Israel exercises sovereignty] which are open to foreign companies in the tendering process" (DFAIT). Not content with violating the Geneva Conventions by facilitating the building of Israel's matrix of control, the Canadian government wants Canadian corporations to help construct, presumably, the Jerusalem light rail system intended to further the de facto annexation of that occupied city.

Profiting From Occupation

CIFTA's reduction and elimination of tariffs encourages Canadian corporations to participate profitably in what Israel's Coalition of Women for Peace calls the occupation industry. At the forefront of this war crimes profiteering is Canada's military-industrial complex, many of whose members export directly to Israel. Ottawa's Allen-Vanguard Corporation provides "counter-terrorist" equipment and training. iMPath Networks Ltd. of Ottawa and Halifax designs solutions for real-time video surveillance and intrusion detection technology. Mecachrome Technologies, based in Montreal and Toronto, provides components for military aircraft. And MPB Technologies Ltd. of Point Claire, Edmonton, Airdrie and Calgary manufactures, among other things, communications equipment and robotics for military use.

Also profiting from Israel's occupation industry are Canadian subsidiaries of Israeli corporations. One of these is Nes Pan Ltd., which builds on expropriated Palestinian land and provides engineering, technology and construction services to residential real estate projects in, among other places, Toronto. Like CHIC and Green Park International, Nes Pan also builds the infrastructure of Israel's occupation, including a section of the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem fast train line and a bridge that connects an illegal Israeli settlement to Israel behind the Green Line. Senstar, a company headquartered in Carp, Ontario, is a subsidiary of Magal Security Services, which profits by selling equipment to maintain Israel's apartheid wall and checkpoints in the West Bank. Senstar's participation in the occupation industry is encouraged by the Canadian government, which lists the corporation in Industry Canada's company directory. Similarly, Amphitech Systems Inc. of Laval Quebec, Canada and the Victoria, British Columbia-based company 360 Surveillance sell technology for Israel's apartheid wall and checkpoints, and the latter is similarly supported by a listing in Industry Canada's company directory. Both are subsidiaries of ICx Technologies, a company that sells surveillance technology to the Israeli state and illegal Israeli settlements throughout the West Bank.

Finally, Canadian economic policy also enables Canadian companies not directly implicated in the military-industrial complex to profit from and/or support the occupation industry. Mountain Equipment Co-op, for example, sources a number of products from Israeli companies, including its house brand. Some of these products are developed by a contractor to Israel's army of occupation. RCR International, headquartered in Boucherville, Quebec, sells products, ranging from weather stripping to squeegees, to Unikowsky Maoz, an Israeli company located in an illegal settlement that imports, markets and distributes home building supplies to, among other places, illegal Israeli settlements throughout the occupied West Bank.

Finally, the majority shareholders of Indigo-Chapters, Heather Reisman and Gerry Schwartz established and support Heseg-Foundation for Lone Soldiers. Not only does its board include officers retired from Israel's occupation army but, according to the Global BDS Movement, Heseg "has no charitable function. In fact, its sole purpose is to provide financial support to mercenaries [foreign-born Jews] who wish to settle in Israel after serving in occupied Palestine."

Israel, of course, is deeply embedded in the global political economy. So, too, is its occupation of Palestinians. The globalized nature of Israel's occupation means that it has connections and supports political and economic interests that reach far beyond the borders of Israel/Palestine. Some of these interests are—unsurprisingly, given the country's long and close relationship with Israel—Canadian.

Canadian economic interests have profited from Israel's occupation industry. Some have built the infrastructure of the occupation, namely roads and settlements, and others have sold Israel's occupying army knowledge, technology and products designed to perpetuate the occupation. They have done so because Canadian economic policy promotes war crimes profiteering. This policy encourages Canadian corporations to be complicit in the oppression and hyper-exploitation of Palestinians; it enables Canadians to get rich off the dispossession, suffering and immiseration of Palestinians.

Sean F. McMahon is assistant professor of political science at the American University in Cairo. He is the author of The Discourse of Palestinian-Israeli Relations (London: Routledge Press, 2010).