Despite the small turnout on April 25 at her “San Remo Day” rally, organizer Renanah Gemeiner said she hopes awareness of the cause grows and that the event comes to be marked worldwide.
A handful of demonstrators gathered beneath an Israeli flag outside the Israeli Consulate in Toronto to spread the message that Palestine was established as a national home for the Jewish People under an official resolution adopted by the Allied powers during the San Remo Conference of April 24-25, 1920, held in Italy.
“Under international law, the world recognized God’s gift of the land of Israel to the Jewish people,” Gemeiner said.
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“We were there for over 3,000 years, we are the indigenous people there and under the British Mandate, it was committed by law to facilitate the return of the Jewish People to Palestine…from the Jordan [River] to the Mediterranean [Sea].”
She noted that she co-ordinated the demonstration with support from Canadians for Israel’s Legal Rights (CILR), a volunteer-run group she’s involved with that’s dedicated to promoting what it calls the “legal rights of Israel,” as well as the Toronto Zionist Council and the Jewish Heritage Project, a group Gemeiner said “seeks to educate people about Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria.”
Gemeiner attributed the small number of people at the event to the fact it was local supporters’ first time publicly commemorating the San Remo conference and that she planned the rally on short notice.
Earlier this month, Salomon Benzimra, CILR’s co-founder and a staunch advocate for what supporters of the group refer to as Israel’s rightful land title, died of a heart attack on a flight from Israel back to Toronto.
He and CILR co-founder Goldi Steiner were on their way back from a trip where they’d met with Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister Tzipi Hotovely and Education Minister Naftali Bennett to discuss Israel’s land rights.
“I had asked Salomon, right before he died, to print out some of his materials [on the subject] to help people know the truth,” Gemeiner said, referring to several handouts she was handing out to passersby on Bloor Street.
On the 96th anniversary of the conference, Gemeiner said she hopes to expose “justice and truth” to everyone, but especially other Jews.
She argued that large numbers of Arabs entered Palestine illegally from surrounding countries, making false claims that “they are the indigenous people there.”
“One reason the British didn’t honour their legal commitment [to the Jewish people] was because Arabs flooded in and committed all kinds of violence, and the British decided it was expedient to betray their legal commitment to the Jews,” she said.
When asked where she envisions the current Arab populations of the West Bank and Gaza living, Gemeiner said, “Well, I call it Judea and Samaria, because the names Gaza and the West Bank have connotations of not being part of the Jewish homeland. My goal, in the name of justice, is to expose the truth. If people are guided by truth and righteousness, we’ll have our best chance at making decisions [in the region].”
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Donna Holbrook, national executive director of the International Christian Embassy of Jerusalem in Canada, was also at the event. She said she was there to support Israel.
“It’s the right thing to do. We’ve been standing with Israel since 1980 as the Christian Embassy in Jerusalem. We bring comfort to the people of Israel on an ongoing basis. This is part of giving comfort, to proclaim that there’s a legal right to the Land of Israel and to reconstitute the Jewish People to their homeland,” she said.