EDITOR’S NOTE: This article originally appeared on The Trillium, a Village Media website devoted exclusively to covering provincial politics at Queen’s Park.
As the Ontario NDP was facing accusations of antisemitism over an MPP's social media post on the Israel-Hamas war, one of its staffers received devastating news: she had lost 18 members of her family in Gaza.
Those deaths had a part in shaping how the party responded to the domestic politics of the war, MPPs, including leader Marit Stiles, told The Trillium.
The staffer's loss — and other personal connections the party has with the conflict on both sides — "absolutely informs" the party's response to the political debate, Stiles said, adding that it demonstrates how diverse representation in politics matters.
"There's no question we have to, and we will unequivocally condemn the attack by Hamas on Israeli civilians," she said. "But we have to end the siege on Gaza and our party will remain committed to this.
"Having that impacting us, and hearing from members of our communities and staff and their families — you have to find some humanity in this moment and call for peace."
Stiles said she believes that personal connections to the war in the Middle East are changing how the conflict is discussed at the federal level as well.
That was echoed by sources who spoke to the Globe and Mail, which later reported that the federal Liberal caucus is divided over the war in part because "some parliamentarians had friends and relatives in the region which affected the tenor of the debate."
The prime minister's caucus is reportedly split on whether or not to call for a ceasefire, as the NDP has, or champion the Israeli government’s right to defend itself, as Ontario's Liberals and governing Progressive Conservatives have.
The Ontario NDP staffer whose relatives were killed is Farah El-Hajj, the executive assistant to Windsor West MPP Lisa Gretzky. She told Gretzky what happened, who told her caucus colleagues, and El-Hajj gave permission for them to share in the house as they debated a government motion on Israel's right to defend itself, MPPs said.
"Last week, Farah received a call with unimaginably devastating news, news that she had lost 18 members of her family in Khan Younis, Gaza, and 10 members of her family are still under rubble. That’s 18 members of her family, the Samour family, gone in minutes: grandparents, children, moms and dads gone, and 10 of them are still under rubble," said Doly Begum, who is both a friend of El-Hajj and a co-deputy leader of the Ontario NDP, in her speech to the house.
"Farah’s family are not Hamas members; they’re not soldiers; they’re not terrorists," said Ottawa Centre MPP Joel Harden later on in the debate. "They’re Palestinians and their lives have to matter."
NDP MPP and co-deputy leader Sol Mamakwa told The Trillium that when Gretzky told them about the airstrike, it drove home what they already knew: lives were being lost.
"When she shared that, it was kind of — where do we go on this?" he said, adding it was "the humanity of it" that affected the MPPs' internal debate on the domestic politics.
The party's position, both provincially and federally, is to condemn the terrorist attack by Hamas unequivocally but also to call for a ceasefire.
Ontario Progressive Conservatives spoke in opposition to the latter part and blocked an amendment from the NDP that would have called for both a ceasefire and the release of hostages.
Instead, the motion affirming Israel's "inalienable right" to defend itself passed with the NDP abstaining.
"Israel does have a right to defend itself," said PC MPP Robin Martin in the house debate. "It can’t have a ceasefire before it has secured its own safety and the safety of its citizens, especially in light of what has happened."
Veteran Tory John Yakabuski took issue with the idea that Israel shouldn’t be "attacking back" after the "inhuman attack from the terrorists that make up Hamas."
"But Hamas is a terrorist group that doesn’t care about human life, be it Jewish or Palestinian, so they set up their headquarters in apartment buildings, in hospitals, in schools," he said in the debate.
"They have missile launchers among the people. They use their citizens. You see, Gaza is ruled by Hamas. Let’s be clear. They use their citizens as human shields and find them completely dispensable from the point of view of human life. They don’t care how many Palestinians are killed; they only care how many Jews they can kill. That’s the difference. The Jews, the Israelites don’t rush into the other countries and attack, but they’re constantly in a mode of defence. But when they are attacked, they must respond. They must respond."
The war became a political problem for the Ontario NDP the day before the airstrike in Khan Younis.
On Oct. 10, NDP MPP Sarah Jama, whose husband is Palestinian, issued a statement on X that called for a ceasefire, blamed the violence on "settler colonialism," and called Israel an "apartheid" state. It failed to condemn Hamas.
That afternoon, Stiles issued her own statement, asking Jama to retract her statement and apologize.
For more than 24 hours, she did not. The following afternoon, she added posts on X apologizing and condemning the terrorism by Hamas, but kept the statement up, later pinning it to her X profile.
Since then, Stiles has been criticized from all sides.
Respected Jewish groups B'nai Brith Canada, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs and Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center have all called for her to remove Jama from caucus. At the same time, some on the left have harshly criticized Stiles for initially calling on Jama to retract the statement. At Queen's Park, Progressive Conservatives have accused her of tolerating antisemitism in her party and of losing control over her caucus.
And facing the media on Thursday, Stiles did not deny that Jama had engaged a lawyer and sent a libel notice to the premier over his statement that she'd "publicly supported the rape and murder of innocent Jewish people" without her knowledge.
There have been some signs of dissatisfaction within the caucus: an NDP source told columnist Steve Paikin that one MPP had considered quitting over the Jama issue and had to be "talked off the ledge" by senior party officials.
But several members of the caucus have since said that what they see as the Conservatives' attacks on them — a motion to formally censure Jama and the motion on Israel's right to defend itself, which they see as an attempt by the government to distract from its problems and drive a wedge through the NDP — has had the effect of uniting them.
Begum, the NDP deputy co-leader who first spoke in the house about the killing of El-Hajj's relatives, said she'd spent the week at Queen's Park talking with people who've been "shaken to their core" by the political debate at Queen's Park because they're personally connected to the war in some way, on either side.
"I think what it does is it makes the more human part of it more immediate, rather than something away from us," she said. "There are a lot of people, even in this building, who are very, very impacted."
