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I n July 2006, the Middle East took violent and unprecedented centre stage for Canadians as war unexpectedly broke out between Israel and Hizbullah. This was no ordinary, remote crisis. Relatives and loved ones of Canadians in both Lebanon and Israel were at mortal risk as the fighting raged and bombs and rockets rained down. Some 40,000 Canadian citizens were trapped in the fighting and nine Canadians died, including a Canadian peacekeeper. On the day before help began to arrive in the port of Beirut, officials in the “war room” of the Canadian embassy in Lebanon received 8,400 phone calls and 5,600 emails from frantic Canadians seeking help.1 At the cost of nearly $62 million, the Canadian government leased vessels and aircraft and mobilized hundreds of officials to evacuate the desperate citizens, in what was to become the biggest evacuation in Canadian history. Canadians, including their government , learned first hand just how quickly this volatile corner of the world could ignite and engulf them. The Middle East, particularly the violence in Iraq and the ongoing grind in the West Bank and Gaza, had tended to be seen and understood in most Canadian family homes through television’s often antiseptic images of rubble and twisted metal, devoid of the gruesome evidence of the charnel house that modern war has become. These conflicts were seen as intractable and thankfully distant, of little immediate consequence to most Canadians or their government . Not this time. The 2006 conflict in Lebanon brought home to all of us the complexities of the Middle East in ways that were urgent and impossible to ignore and, more importantly, to dismiss. As the situation in Lebanon evolved, analysts started to question the nature and relevance of Canadian involvement in Middle East affairs. What was Canada’s Middle East foreign policy? What were Canadian interests in the Middle East? To what extent were Canadian values engaged? What role had Paul Heinbecker and Bessma Momani 1 Canada and the Middle East: Ambivalence or Engagement? 1 Canada played historically in the region? Those seeking to develop informed answers to these questions, however, were hindered by serious gaps in the academic literature and an absence of documented institutional memory among Canadian practitioners involved in the region. While a number of scholars had tackled the subject of Canada and the Middle East throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and sparingly in the early 1990s, the Middle East Discussion Group of the Centre for International Governance and Innovation (cigi) was surprised to discover that the issue had not been adequately examined post-September 11. While libraries of books, studies, and analyses had been written about the Middle East since September 11, mostly by Americans, there was a near void of expert Canadian analysis of our country’s role in the region and our government ’s related policies. Our motivation in producing this book was to fill this gap. With support from cigi, a group of practitioners and academics from Canada and the region met to discuss the Canadian relationship with the Middle East, guided by their own practical experience and their academic research. This edited collection is unique on this subject: practitioners with extensive first-hand experience reflect on Canada’s role and opportunities in the region and academics speak from their expertise on the Middle East. Canadian foreign policy experts have shied away from in-depth studies of the Middle East due to the sheer complexity of the topics involved and the great sensitivity of the subject matter to diaspora communities. We hope that our approach, which marries academic and practitioner insights, will help Canadians understand Canada’s role in the region better and not tread on their sensibilities. Today’s Middle East is in great turmoil and its issues cannot be resolved or contained even by the most powerful country in the world acting alone. Why bother examining the role of Canada in the Middle East then? Canada is not a superpower and has rarely played a decisive role in the politics of the region. While we doubt that this volume will settle this issue, there is a near consensus among our practitioners and academics alike that Canada has mattered in the Middle East in the not-so-distant past, that there remain deep wells of respect for Canada among the peoples of the Middle East that can be leveraged by our diplomacy, and, in short, that we can make a positive difference. Assuming Canadian impotence in...

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