When I was preparing for this debate, I looked back at a number of historical things. I thought about a lot of different things. Ultimately, what we’re talking about is the Hamas terrorist organization and the attacks that they made on Israel and the Jewish people that they killed. On October 7, it was the most Jews killed since the Holocaust. I thought about that, and I took a step back and started looking at some of the things from the Holocaust moving forward.

Last year, in January when we weren’t sitting, I had a couple of days where I took a little bit of time with my wife and actually read a couple of books. The books I read—my son joked with me that it was some light reading: The Tattooist of Auschwitz and The Holocaust by Bullets were the two books. When you read the atrocities that happened during Nazi Germany and the attacks on Jews from it, and we look at the world today, nobody holds the German people accountable for what the Nazi Party did and the atrocities that they did. I think that is one of the key things we have to remember today with this conflict. No one is saying that Palestinian citizens, those innocent individuals who live in Gaza, are responsible for this. It is the Hamas terrorist organization that has done this.

As I look back at my life and some of the things that have gone on—and I talked to my kids about this—we all live in 2023, yes, but we live in a vastly different world here in Ontario than they do in the Middle East. It’s really difficult to take what would be our standards, our norms, and apply that in Israel.

My daughter asked me about this. She said, “Why can’t we?” I said to her, “You’re 26. Have you ever heard air-raid sirens?” Her answer was no. Air-raid sirens are something that frequently go off in different communities in Israel. On October the 7th at 6:30 in the morning in Jerusalem the air-raid sirens went off.

I’m 53. The only time I’ve heard an air-raid siren go off is when they were doing some work on a building that had an air-raid siren and they made a mistake on the electrical and it went off because they thought they were removing the electricity to that siren, but they actually activated the electricity to the siren. Everyone was confused as to what that noise was. But it’s not an unusual sound to hear in Israel.

My daughter said to me, “There’s a report of the terrorists coming into the kibbutz and going into safe rooms. What’s a safe room?” When you stop and think about that for a minute, if you live in Israel, when you build your home, you build a bomb-resistant room to protect your family from terrorist attacks. We don’t live in the same world that they do, because we don’t have to have that. We don’t have anything in our Ontario building code to define what a safe room should be, or how thick the walls should be to protect you from a rocket attack. And yet, we have people who are saying this is normal. It’s not normal for us. It’s a completely different world that they’re living in. The threat of a terrorist attack is so great in Israel that they hear air-raid sirens frequently, that they have to build a room in their home that is bomb-resistant, because that’s what they face on a daily basis.

We had a number of years of peace in Israel, and when I think back again to my own childhood—I’m 53; I was born in 1970. I was not alive during the Six-Day War and I was not alive during—sorry, I was alive, but I was only three during the conflict in 1973. But I remember, in elementary school, turning on the TV and seeing on CBC, seeing on ABC or NBC—on network television, which 30-year-olds wouldn’t know anything about today because, at the time, we only had about five or six channels. But I remember seeing terrorist attacks; it seemed like it was a daily occurrence. Beirut was under attack. Tehran was under attack. Tel Aviv was under attack. It was a different world, and we got to a point where things were moving forward, where there was some semblance of peace.

The Palestine Liberation Organization was considered a terrorist organization at one point. Yasser Arafat was an enemy of most of the world at one point, and yet Israel was able to negotiate with them and come to a peace agreement. In 2000, there was an offer for a peace agreement that Hamas said no to and broke, and there have been multiple times where there have been negotiations for peace—to lay down arms and not fight—and Hamas has always said no to it. In their charter—it’s been said multiple times—in the charter for Hamas, it is the annihilation of Israel. Their statement, “From the River to the Sea,” is all of Israel.

I think back again to some of the things that I experienced as a young adult, as a teenager. I was listening to some music last night, and I know there have been a couple of times where I’ve had speeches where I’ve quoted some lyrics from songs. I’m going to do it again because I heard this last night again and it really stuck with me.

The Pink Floyd album The Final Cut: There were a lot of political statements that were in that album, but one song in particular, The Gunner’s Dream, is about Roger Waters’s father, who was a gunner in the Second World War. The lyrics—normally I don’t read stuff, I usually go from my memory, but I wanted to make sure I didn’t make a mistake on this one. Think of it from the perspective of someone who was a gunner in an aircraft in the Second World War, and the aircraft has been shot down and he’s parachuting to safety.

Floating down through the clouds

Memories come rushing up to meet me now

In the space between the heavens

And in the corner of some foreign field

I had a dream

I had a dream

Goodbye Max

Goodbye Ma

After the service when you’re walking slowly to the car

And the silver in her hair shines in the cold November air

You hear the tolling bell

And touch the silk in your lapel

And as the tear drops rise to meet the comfort of the band

You take her frail hand

And hold on to the dream

During the Second World War, the fighting was to liberate Europe, but the fighting was also because of the genocide that was being perpetrated against Jews. And the dream was that freedom. The dream was stopping the racism, the hatred and the demonizing of a race of people. The song goes on to say:

A place to stay

Enough to eat

Somewhere old heroes shuffle safely down the street

Where you can speak out loud

About your doubts and fears

And what’s more no one ever disappears

You never hear their standard issue kicking in your door

You can relax on both sides of the tracks

And maniacs don’t blow holes in bandsmen by remote control

And everyone has recourse to the law

And no one kills the children anymore

And no one kills the children anymore

Night after night

Going round and round my brain

His dream is driving me insane

In the corner of some foreign field

The gunner sleeps tonight

What’s done is done

We cannot just write off his final scene

Take heed of the dream....

That was written in 1983, and it was the memories of a musician—what his father went through fighting against an oppressive group who wanted to destroy an entire race of people because they saw those people as the source of all of their problems. When the rest of the world got involved in the war and the rest of the world stepped forward, and they saw the atrocities that were perpetuated on these individuals—we hear the stories of what it looked like in Auschwitz. We’ve seen the photos of how Jews were treated.

Germany—the Nazis—knew what they were doing was wrong, and they hid it. Hamas livestreamed what they were doing and were very proud of the fact that they went into villages and killed people, families, children. There was a peace festival going on.

Think about this. Let’s put it in perspective for North America. Taylor Swift draws how many thousands of people to one of her events? And all of those Taylor Swift fans are there, cheering on, listening to the music, and armed terrorists come in and shoot and kill 260 of them. We don’t live in a part of the world where that happens. Most people in Ontario cannot comprehend that because we’ve never had to experience that.

That’s what happened on October 7. You had thousands of people who were at a peace festival around music who got up that morning thinking they were going to have a great time, thinking they were going to be celebrating something. They were going to be with their friends. They were going to have just these memories that were going to last with them forever, and yes, they have memories now that will last forever, but those are not the memories that they should have.

For anyone to stand up and say that Hamas is justified in what they did is embarrassing. For anyone to stand up and defend Hamas, it is embarrassing.

After the Second World War, the world said, “We will not forget,” but we have people today who are advocating that we forget, who are advocating that Israel should not defend itself. There are people right now on social media from our communities who are standing up and saying Israel does not have the right to defend itself.

I remind you that, at 6:30 a.m., air-raid sirens went off in Jerusalem, not because of anything that the Jewish people in Israel did, but because a terrorist organization wanted to strike fear in an entire country, an organization whose mandate says that they are going to destroy the State of Israel.

A number of people have said that if they just lay down their weapons, it would all be over. You’re right. If Israel laid down their weapons, it would all be over. There would be no Israel. There would be an annihilation of Jews. That cannot happen. Anyone who professes to be anti-racist, anyone who stands up and says that we have to treat everyone equally, and then, in the next breath, defends Hamas is a word that I would be asked to withdraw, so I won’t say it directly, but it starts with an animal, like a hippo, and ends with a crit—