Canada’s shame

Kamal Tabaja and his two younger brothers and three sisters meet online every day to comfort one another.

Together, they are grieving the sudden, violent deaths on September 23 of their parents, 74-year-old Hussein and 69-year-old Daad Tabaja, who celebrated their 48th wedding anniversary this past April.

“They were always together,” Kamal says. “They were good people who lived by their values – generosity, humility and charity.”

Hussein and Daad Tabaja are among the thousands of civilians Israel has killed in Lebanon during the past few weeks as it turns its lethal sights on another target.

The Canadian family’s pain is still raw. During my interview with him, Kamal, a Bahrain-based reinsurance broker, had to pause from time to time to compose himself as he answered questions about who his parents were and how they died.

There is a palpable anger, too, aimed at the Canadian government for failing to hold Israel to any tangible measure of account for the killing of two of its citizens.

Beyond a 20-minute phone call from Foreign Minister Melanie Joly and two tweets posted on the minister’s X account addressing the killings, the family has been forgotten and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has, it appears, allowed Israel, yet again, to get away with it.

At the least, Kamal says, Canadian officials should have gathered evidence to establish Israel’s responsibility for the killing of his parents as they headed by car to his younger brother Jalal’s home in Aaramoun – 21km (13 miles) south of Beirut – for what, at that time, seemed to be safe haven.

That evidence could then have been used, he believes, to sue Israel and, if necessary, the Israeli pilot who fired the missile that instantly obliterated his parents.

“The foreign minister did reach out to me,” Kamal says. “[But] you just can’t call a family and offer your condolences and say: ‘Sorry for your loss’ and life moves on.”

That is what the Canadian government has done. It has moved on. It has moved on because when it comes to Israel’s crimes, Prime Minister Trudeau and company have always chosen empty, performative acts of supposed solidarity with its victims rather than real, concrete acts of accountability.

Hence, Joly’s two tweets.

Her first carefully calibrated tweet was posted on September 25. Joly employed the usual bromides. She was “deeply saddened by the killing of Hussein & Daad Tabaja in airstrikes.” Joly added: “My thoughts are with their family … Civilians must be protected.”

There was no mention, of course, of who was behind the “airstrikes”.

The second tweet, which appeared a day later, was the product of Kamal’s insistence – on behalf of his brothers and sisters – that the minister “condemn” Israel’s fatal actions.

“I condemn the killing of these two innocent people who were fleeing violence in an IDF strike,” Joly wrote. “We refuse to let civilians bear the cost of this conflict.”

And that, as far as I can gather, was the end of the matter for Joly and her boss. Case satisfactorily closed.

Too bad. So sad. Time to move on.

In a late September interview with CBC, Joly said she had tried to reach Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz presumably to raise the killing of the Canadian couple. Joly told the CBC that, in effect, Katz was too busy to return her call.

So, I sent the minister a list of questions asking whether she was able to speak finally to Katz and what Joly and the Canadian government intended to do about the killings outside of having a chat with her Israeli opposite.

Joly’s response: Silence.

It is a shameful, bordering on obscene, dereliction of duty that Joly and the servile government that she is a part of, owe to the Tabaja family.

Apparently, the minister needs reminding of the dreadful details of what of what happened to two Canadian citizens whose interests she took an oath to defend and protect.

On the morning of September 23, Israel began bombing the southern Lebanese town of Kfartibnite where Hussein and Daad spent much of their retirement – although they continued to travel to Canada every year to visit their children and grandchildren.

Kamal told his parents that they had to leave. They agreed.

The couple packed some of their belongings and got into a small silver BMW SUV. They tried to make their way to Beirut – only 70km (43.5 miles) away – along a coastal highway jammed with as many as 500,000 other civilians fleeing the bombing.

Throughout their parents’ slow, grinding journey, Kamal, as well as his brothers and sisters, remained in contact with them via phone calls and text messages.

The couple reassured their children that they were fine. Later, Hussein and Daad texted the family to say they had been diverted onto a side road.

Early that evening, Daad left the family a reassuring voice message saying they were approaching Sidon city and safety.

That was the final time anyone heard from Hussein and Daad. Mobile phone records show that the couple remained online until 7pm.

At midnight, a worried Jalal Tabaja left Aaramoun to try to find his parents. The family remained hopeful that Hussein and Daad were alive.

Kamal knew, however, that there had been a bombing in the area, and he feared the worst.

“I kept my mouth shut,” he says.

Jalal went to the main hospital in Sidon on the morning of September 24. He was told that there had been a bombing nearby and that several cars had been hit, including a silver BMW X5.

He was shown several bodies – or what was left of them.

Jalal called Kamal with the distressing news. Kamal told his brother to retrieve and inspect the vehicle’s licence plate number.

“Sure enough, it was the same car,” Kamal says.

Pictures of the SUV’s remnants show a hollow, burned-out metallic shell. It had been incinerated.

Jalal found the local civil defence officer who had removed his parents’ dismembered bodies from the blackened car and had taken them to a Sidon city hospital.

Daad’s watch had been recovered.

Jalal was told not to try to identify his parents since there was nothing to identify. It was pointless. The only way to confirm that the charred, disfigured bits of body parts were indeed Hussein and Daad Tabaja was through a DNA test.

The results arrived later that week.

The family, particularly the Tabaja daughters, collapsed in grief.

“Our parents would have wanted us to hold on to each other and that’s what we’re doing now,” Kamal says.

The Tabaja siblings arranged for their parents to be taken by ambulance back to the village where they met, fell in love, and were married. There, they were buried side by side.

The only witnesses were the gravedigger and a few villagers who had stayed behind.

Joly’s office contacted Jalal in order to set up a time to talk. Kamal was determined to be on the call.

He told the minister that Israel had urged his parents and others to leave their village only to kill them in what he described to me as a “triple tap”.

The initial strike was meant to kill civilians in the convoy and the following two attacks were designed to annihilate anyone who came to their aid.

Kamal says Joly assured them that Ottawa was attempting to negotiate a 21-day truce between Israel and Hezbollah, but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had refused to cooperate.

Kamal is unconvinced that Canada is committed to peace.

“[Netanyahu] could not have done 1 percent of what he has done if he didn’t have [the West’s] full backing,” he says.

He is right.

In its “killing rage”, Netanyahu and his extremist regime have, with impunity, turned Gaza into Mars – desolate and uninhabitable. I have no doubt that they plan to do the same to Lebanon.

The impunity must end if the killing is to end.

Kamal says, to his knowledge, Joly and the Canadian government have done “nothing” to probe the killing of his parents.

“Nobody has contacted us after the DNA [test] results came back,” Kamal says. “They don’t care. All they cared [about] was to give us condolences so they could say: ‘We’ve pleased them now; we’ve shut them up, we did these tweets. They should be satisfied.’”

Kamal says the killing of his parents is a “war crime” and that the Canadian government should treat it as such. Towards that end, he says Canada must sue Israel in civil court to put the perpetrators in the dock.

He knows it won’t.

“The Canadian government,” Kamal says, “would not dare to stand up to Israeli crimes, just like the rest of the world. None of them. We’ve seen it.”

He is right again.

Here is the truth. The Canadian government considers Hussein and Daad Tabaja to be the expendable casualties of Israel’s absolute “right to defend itself”.

Two tweets and a brief phone call. That is all the response Melanie Joly has decided their long lives and sickening deaths warrant.

It is a stain and a disgrace.

The Tabaja family soldiers on as best it can with the support and love of friends from near and far.

“We haven’t had time to truly grieve,” Kamal says. “I don’t think that I will be able to grieve until I go to visit my parents’ graves. That’s when it will hit me that they are gone.”

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

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