"Canada is Technically Part of the United States, Right?"
Gregory Levey, Globe and Mail - May 10, 2008

Israel's big 60th-anniversary party on Thursday sparked vivid memories of my years there as a foreign transplant in the Israeli government.

I was employed to write speeches, an experience that was rewarding - and very illuminating. For one thing, it taught me that most Israelis just don't get the Great White North.

Consider the response I got from the official I ran into one day en route to the Prime Minister's Office in Jerusalem. After I greeted him, he replied, for no apparent reason: "I like Canada. I just don't respect it."

Respect it? I wasn't quite sure what to make of this comment at the time - and I suppose I still don't.

Of course, at that point, I had been on the job for about two years, so odd reactions to my Canadian citizenship didn't really come as much of a surprise.

To many of my colleagues, I seemed American - "Canada is technically part of the United States, right?" one once asked me - but even those who realize that Canada is different from the U.S. struggled to make sense of our country.

Although they knew that the United States was, by reflex, supportive of Israel, Canada was harder to read. Israelis often see the world in simple terms: Either you're with them or against them. Canada, however, can be perceived as somewhere in between.

On the political level, I often witnessed real friendship between Israel and Canada, but I also saw friction - times when Canadian diplomats would act in a way that Israelis felt favoured their adversaries and times when the Israeli military would do things that Canada just couldn't support.

And in personal terms, I was frequently reminded that I didn't quite fit in.

Once, for example, I was in an important meeting chaired by the cabinet secretary of then prime minister Ariel Sharon and someone asked me to pass a bottle opener. Unable to reach all the way across the table, I got up and walked around to deliver it.

This earned me a lot of laughter plus a rebuke for being "too Canadian." North American etiquette, I was learning, was out of place. It would have been a lot better if I had simply tossed the opener to the man. A trivial thing, perhaps, but it seemed emblematic of something deeper.

In the past few years, I have been pleased to watch Canada forge closer ties with Israel.

During the war with Hezbollah two summers ago, for example, the Stephen Harper government took an unequivocally pro-Israel position. More recently, Canada was the first country - before even Israel or the United States - to announce a boycott of Durban II, the United Nations' Second World Conference Against Racism, because it seemed, like the first, destined to turn into an anti-Semitic and anti-Israel circus.

But it might be wise to remember that Canada's ambiguity on the Middle East has an upside. It has produced a measure of trust among the countries surrounding Israel that could be of help in the pursuit of that ever-elusive thing called peace. In a region where everything is cast in black and white, maybe there is something to be said for a touch of grey.