Canada's arms exports to Israel, with Michael Bueckert & Tarek Loubani

On episode 56 of The Electronic Intifada Podcast, we discuss Canada’s arms exports to Israel with researcher Michael Bueckert, and Dr. Tarek Loubani talks about making medical equipment for Gaza’s medics amid 15 years of Israel’s blockade and a constant, looming threat of war.
Bueckert is the vice president of Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME).
CJPME recently released a report, “Arming Apartheid: Canada’s Arms Exports to Israel,” which lays out the acceleration of Canada’s exports of military goods to Israel in recent years.
Last December, Robin Wettlaufer, Canada’s envoy to the occupied West Bank and Gaza, claimed that “we neither fund nor arm Israel.” Wettlaufer’s statement was a response to The Electronic Intifada’s Ali Abunimah, who asserted – correctly – that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is an accomplice in Israel’s crimes against Palestinians.
“It was really embarrassing to see that response from Canada’s diplomat,” Bueckert tells us.
Although Canada does not directly provide arms sales to the Israeli government, he explains, “Canada does approve the exports of private sales of military equipment … millions of dollars worth of military goods in 2020, which has been accelerating for years.”
Wettlaufer’s claim was “a very narrow approach to try to avoid any accountability or responsibility for Canadian policy, but everyone can see right through it,” Bueckert says.
“And I think the results of this report show just how ridiculous those kinds of claims are.”
“We’re selling weapons to a country that is actively engaged in a military occupation, whose maintenance requires daily violence, and is engaged in military offensives and abusive practices that amount to apartheid, according to Amnesty International and a growing consensus in civil society,” Bueckert notes.
“So any amount of value to this context presents a human rights risk.”
For years, Bueckert had also monitored the Act.IL app, an Israeli government-funded app meant to “influence foreign publics” and “battle BDS.”
The app was recently deactivated, Bueckert explains.
“I think we can take it as a positive development that they’ve decided that it’s a failure, and they’re shutting it down.”
Later on in the program, we speak with Dr. Tarek Loubani, an emergency room physician based in London, Ontario, who works closely with physicians and medical personnel inside Gaza.
Loubani is the co-founder of the Glia Project, which works to provide communities with low-cost medical devices using open source technology and 3D printing.
With a new initiative, Stop the Bleed Gaza, he and his colleagues are working to get 3D-printed medical supplies into the hands of doctors in Gaza.
The initiative, Loubani says, “is a response to a problem that we saw in the 2014 war.”
Of the more than 2,000 people killed, Loubani explains, “about a quarter died from bleeding out in a way that should have been treatable. Now, if those people had been in hospital, obviously we’d have been able to treat them with tourniquets and with our expertise, but also these kinds of injuries are salvageable if people outside or paramedics are well trained and have the gear that they need.”
As a result, “the [Gaza] Ministry of Health asked us to start developing a tourniquet, having heard about some of the work that Glia was doing on 3D-printed medical devices and local production,” he says.
Despite the blockade and occupation, Loubani says, “Palestinians have risen to the challenge in a really incredible way. And so they weren’t just sitting there, lamenting and saying, ‘Oh, well, I guess we just have to die now because we don’t have tourniquets.’ They were asking, ‘How can we make these? How can we take control of the situation?'"
FULL TRANSCRIPT: https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/nora-barrows-friedman/podcast-ep-56-canadas-arms-exports-israel
Source: Electronic Intifada

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