1st Edition
What Lies Ahead? Canada’s Engagement with the Middle East Peace Process and the Palestinians
This edited volume explores Canada’s foreign policy relationship with the Palestinians and broader Middle East Peace Process (MEPP). Canada was intensively involved from 1992 to 2000 in peacebuilding as a mediator in the multilateral part of the MEPP, as chair of the Refugee Working Group, and sponsor of Track II negotiations. This all changed after a significant mid-2000s discursive and policy shift when Canada withdrew from the politics of Israel-Palestine peacebuilding and took a strong partisan stance in favour of Israel.
Through 10 chapters by current and former government insiders and academics with extensive field experience, this unique edited volume offers insight into decades of evolution in Canadian policy toward the Palestinians, MEPP and the Middle East. It arrives at an important time when the international community is reconsidering how it views Israel’s entrenched occupation of the Palestinians, after three failed decades of United States-led efforts to find peace through a negotiated two-state model. Today, peace may never have appeared further away after the Trump Administration adopted policies directly contradictory to the MEPP. This proved a test to Canada’s own official policy toward Israel and Palestine, its longest running and most important region of engagement in the Middle East.
The chapters were originally published as a special issue of the Canadian Foreign Policy Journal, guest edited by Jeremy Wildeman and Emma Swan.
1. Talking with the PLO: Overcoming political challenges
Andrew N. Robinson
2. False start: the 1956 Palestinian refugee movement to Canada
Michael Molloy
3. Has President Trump killed the Middle East Peace Process?
David Viveash
4. Assessing Canada’s foreign policy approach to the Palestinians and Israeli-Palestinian peacebuilding, 1979–2019
Jeremy Wildeman
5. The international community's role and impact on the Middle East Peace Process
Michael Atallah
6. Canada, the United Nations, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
Amelia C. Arsenault and Costanza Musu
7. "The personal is political!": exploring the limits of Canada’s feminist international assistance policy under occupation and blockade
Emma Swan
8. Canada’s economic assistance to the OPT: ideology, politics, and flawed responses
Ruby Dagher
9. Normative Canadian foreign policy towards consensus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
Timea Spitka
Biography
Jeremy Wildeman, PhD (Exon), is Fellow at the Human Rights Research and Education Centre, University of Ottawa, and adjunct Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Studies, Queens University. At the universities of Exeter, Bath and Ottawa, he has carried out major research projects on foreign aid in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, human rights in the Middle East, and Canada’s relationship to the Middle East.
Emma Swan is Pierre Elliott Trudeau Scholar and doctoral candidate at the University of Ottawa. Emma has consulted for several organizations in the Middle East and is interested in contributing to conversations seeking to articulate gendered power dynamics and exploring the role they play in shaping policy/practice.
