Toronto Star: This election, I’m voting for Gaza. But please don’t call me a single-issue voter

Original Publications: The Toronto Star

April 24, 2025

By Beisan Zubi Contributor
Beisan Zubi is a Palestinian Canadian equity consultant and antiracism trainer located in the Waterloo Region.

I am prioritizing parties’ and politicians’ stances on Gaza when I vote in the federal election on April 28 — but please, don’t call me a single-issue voter.

As a Palestinian Canadian, Gaza feels like the best test I can use to gauge a politician’s actual commitment to human rights. The core principle behind human rights is that they are universal (apply to everyone) and inalienable (cannot be taken away). Over the past 18 months, I have watched Israel violate just about every human right that I learned about in school, while so many Canadian politicians stayed silent. If a politician isn’t willing to fight for the human rights of Palestinians, how can we trust they’ll defend Canadian rights? You might think our existing laws safeguard your rights against those who would take them away, but I’m sure many Americans thought the same thing about due process, too. Things can change fast.

Supporting politicians who defend Palestinian human rights doesn’t mean I don’t still care deeply about domestic issues. In fact, I would argue a politician’s stance on Gaza says volumes about their commitment to a range of domestic issues, and not just Canada’s responsibility to uphold international law.

How can I trust a politician will defend women’s rights in Canada if they haven’t said anything about the fact that there are an estimated 48,000 pregnant women in Gaza facing famine? Israel’s ongoing blockade of essential medical supplies means that unmedicated C-sections are no longer the plot of horror movies, miscarriage rates in Gaza are up an estimated 300 per cent, and menstruating girls and women are forced to use scraps of cloth from clothes and tents in lieu of pads.

How can I trust a politician will protect Canada’s health care system if they aren’t outraged that Israel has decimated a health care system serving over two million people, by conducting a reported 136 strikes on at least 27 hospitals, destroying the main IVF clinic in Gaza along with an estimated 4,000 embryos, and killing over a thousand Palestinian health care workers, including 15 ambulance drivers (who were then buried in a shallow grave)?

How can I trust a politician will fight for disability justice in Canada if they haven’t condemned the mass disabling event still underway in Gaza, where the disabled, elderly, and injured are bombed in tents, forced to flee hospitals under attack in wheelchairs or carried by siblings, the cruel killing of a young man with Down syndrome by an Israeli military dog, that 15,000 deaf Gazans can’t hear evacuation warnings before bombs drop around them, or even that Gaza now has the largest per capita population of child amputees in the world, many of whom are also orphaned.

How can I trust a politician will treat infrastructure and adequate housing as a human right when they haven’t said a thing about the UN reporting that 92 per cent of all homes in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed, or that vital infrastructure like water desalination plants and waste management sites have been forced to shutter, leading to infectious diseases spreading and a looming environmental catastrophe?

Speaking of the environment, how can I believe a politician actually cares about this planet if they don’t speak out about ecocide in Gaza? A Yale School of the Environment report published in February warned us that more than two thirds of Gaza’s farmland has been destroyed, 80 per cent of the tree cover in Gaza is gone, up to 3.5 million cubic feet of raw sewage are leaking into groundwater and the Mediterranean Sea every day, and the massive destruction of civilian infrastructure has created more than 40 million tonnes of rubble containing “human remains, asbestos … and unexploded ordnance” that will take years to clean up.

And of course, how can we believe a politician actually cares about Canada’s territorial integrity amidst threats from Donald Trump to annex our country if they haven’t spoken out about Israel’s ongoing dispossession and theft of Palestinian land in Gaza and the West Bank? The illegal annexation of land is wrong, no matter who does it. If Canadian politicians won’t defend Palestinian land and sovereignty, why should we believe they would defend ours?

This federal election is an important one, and I take my vote very seriously. Canada’s place in the world — and in fact our global system of human rights and international law — is being threatened on several fronts. It is vital that we reaffirm and defend exactly who we are and what we stand for.

In this election, at this moment in history, I will be voting for a candidate who actually cares about Palestinian human rights (both in Canada and the Holy Land). I know many Canadians feel the same way as me, and I’m comforted by the fact that more federal candidates have been vocal about their commitment to justice and peace in this election than I’ve ever seen.

So no, I won’t be called a single-issue voter when to me this election isn’t about any one issue, it’s about all our human rights.