I Solved the Middle East Problem: We’re Moving Israel to Canada
By Michael Kelman Portney
Every few years, someone throws up their hands and says, “The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is just too complicated to solve.” And every few years, the world shrugs, adds another layer of grief to the pile, and moves on to arguing about something easier, like gender-neutral bathrooms or whether AI is going to kill us all or just replace the middle class.
But I’ve had enough. As a Jewish person raised with the full Zionist conditioning package—Hebrew school, birthright Israel trip, the whole diaspora guilt-to-identity pipeline—I’ve done the soul-searching. I’ve spun the dreidel of generational trauma. I’ve cried at Yad Vashem and gotten into uncomfortable arguments with liberal friends about apartheid. And now, I am ready to offer the one solution bold enough, obvious enough, and politely Canadian enough to work:
We’re moving Israel to Canada.
Yes. The entire thing. Pack up the Western Wall. Drain the Dead Sea. Flatten the Negev and ship it north. We’re putting Zion on ice, baby. Because at this point, the real Jewish homeland isn’t a strip of contested desert between Egypt and Syria. It’s anywhere we can live in peace without having to justify a war crime.
Why Move?
The concept of Zionism was born out of necessity. After centuries of being kicked out, slaughtered, scapegoated, and systemically excluded, Jews said, “We’d like one (1) safe country, please.” And the world, in its infinite generosity, responded with a haunted shrug and said, “Sure, here’s some British-controlled desert that already belongs to other people. Good luck.”
What could go wrong?
Fast-forward to today: over 70 years of war, occupation, international condemnation, and the kind of geopolitical trauma that makes most Americans switch the channel. And at the core of it all remains this one impossible contradiction: How do you maintain a Jewish ethnostate in a region that’s majority Arab, while still pretending it’s a liberal democracy?
Answer: You don’t. You can’t. You lie. Or you kill. Or you both-sides the shit out of it. Or you collapse morally. Or you check out entirely and pretend that “it’s complicated” is a valid response to genocide.
Unless.
Unless you stop trying to jam a 20th-century trauma response into a 21st-century powder keg and just relocate the whole damn thing to a place where war isn’t inevitable and nationhood doesn’t require military supremacy over an occupied population.
And that place, my friends, is Canada.
Why Canada?
Let’s break it down.
Size: Canada is huge. Absurdly huge. There are towns in Saskatchewan where the most pressing local issue is moose traffic. There is more undeveloped land than the entire state of Texas times ten. You could fit three Israels between Calgary and nowhere.
Population Density: Entire provinces have fewer people than a Jerusalem apartment building. We’re not even displacing anyone—we’re just filling in the blank spots.
Political Culture: Canadians are famously tolerant, passive-aggressive, and conflict-avoidant. It’s literally perfect for Jews. We’re already fluent in passive-aggression and have centuries of practice navigating hostile majorities. In Canada, they apologize when they exclude you.
Healthcare: Self-explanatory.
Bagel Compatibility: Montreal bagels are already a thing. We’re not even introducing new cuisine—we’re just scaling.
Now, some skeptics might object. “You can’t just move an entire country,” they’ll say, as if we haven’t done exactly that every 300 years since Pharaoh.
To which I respond: We’re Jews. Moving is the one thing we’ve proven historically capable of doing with legendary efficiency. You think Operation Solomon was impressive? Wait until you see Operation Snowman.
Logistics
Let’s lay out the plan in simple, manageable steps:
Phase One: Scouting the Land
The Canadian government already maintains vast tracts of federal land—Crown Land, they call it. We’ll select an area somewhere between Manitoba and Alberta. Cold, yes. But we’ve done desert. Let’s try frostbite. Keeps the settlers humble.
We name this area Nouvel Israël, both for branding purposes and to keep Quebec from pitching a fit. All official documents will be printed in Hebrew, English, and French, which is still fewer languages than Israeli birth certificates have now.
Phase Two: The Great Migration
The Israeli population is around 9 million. Canada takes in 500,000 immigrants per year. All we need is a 20-year plan, a couple of dedicated charter flights, and an executive order from Justin Trudeau declaring “Aliyah 2.0” a national project.
Remember: We’re not talking forced relocation. It’s a sovereign choice. The premise is: “If you want to live in a functioning, non-violent Jewish democracy where your biggest existential threat is a bear and not a rocket, get on the plane.”
It’s birthright with snow boots.
Phase Three: Infrastructure
You think Israelis can’t build cities from scratch? They already did it once on desert sand using the sweat of Holocaust survivors and socialist idealism. Give them snowplows, and they’ll have a functioning high-speed rail system before Toronto finishes its next subway extension.
Settlements become neighborhoods. Kibbutzim become CSA co-ops. The IDF gets rebranded as the Maple Shield™, which patrols borders and breaks up hockey riots.
We retrofit some of the old missile-defense architecture to work as avalanche-prevention systems. Dual purpose. Very sustainable.
Phase Four: Land Transfer
Here’s the beautiful part: We give the land back.
All of it.
Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem—everything. No catches. No annexation. No walls. No checkpoints. Just a clean break and a sincere apology.
Palestinians get their land, their autonomy, and the right to build their own future without surveillance towers or settler violence. And we, the traumatized Jewish diaspora, get to reboot the Zionist project somewhere that doesn’t require moral contortionism or permanent war.
It’s the ultimate two-state solution: one state stays, one state goes. Problem solved.
But What About Jewish History?
Ah yes. The land of our forefathers. The land promised by God. The sacred soil where every grain contains the memory of exile and redemption.
Cool story.
We’ll move it.
No, seriously. Jews have been schlepping our cultural and spiritual identity across continents for millennia. We’ve done Babylon. We’ve done Spain. We’ve done Poland, Germany, Morocco, Brooklyn, Boca Raton. You think we can’t pack up some artifacts and relics and start a new Jerusalem somewhere a little icier?
The Temple Mount? Rebuild it. Third time’s the charm. Western Wall? Portable. Ark of the Covenant? Probably already in a Canadian museum anyway.
History isn’t static. It’s transportable. If Home Depot can move a 300-year-old oak tree, we can move the Torah.
We’re not erasing the past—we’re recontextualizing it. Like any good rebrand, we keep the core values, drop the violence, and update the messaging.
And the Palestinians?
They win.
No more occupation. No more apartheid. No more being second-class citizens in their own homeland. No more surveillance, displacement, or ethnonationalist military rule.
They get a real chance at sovereignty—without the burden of carrying someone else’s trauma.
And for the first time in living memory, they don’t have to justify their humanity to the same international bodies that have been shrugging since 1948.
We leave. We take our flag, our trauma, our nationalism, our falafel, and our Iron Dome. We say, “Thanks for the memories. Sorry about the tanks.”
And we let them breathe.
A Word From the Synagogue
Here’s the hard part for Jews to talk about, even among ourselves: Zionism feels like a lifeboat we’re no longer sure we’re allowed to criticize.
When I was a kid, Israel was sacred. You didn’t question it. You prayed for it. You sang about it. You were told it was the one place in the world that would take you in, no questions asked, if everything else went to shit.
But now?
Now we watch in horror as that same place becomes a symbol of oppression. As the state built by survivors uses that legacy to justify bombings. As the dream of safety metastasizes into a global PR crisis.
We’re told, “It’s complicated.” But it’s not. It’s a trauma cycle wrapped in exceptionalism.
And if we don’t find a way to evolve, we’re going to be defending this nightmare forever.
Zionism 2.0
So here’s my pitch: Let’s treat Zionism like software. The first version was buggy. The architecture was shaky. It crashed constantly and required constant emergency patches. It was built with the tools of the 1940s and never fully upgraded.
Zionism 2.0 is cloud-based. Scalable. Built on open-source trauma recovery and community-supported accountability. It’s hosted on Canadian infrastructure and powered by universal healthcare.
It doesn’t require war. It doesn’t require occupation. It doesn’t even require a desert.
Just a people, a language, a memory—and some good thermal socks.
Objections and Rebuttals
“But Israel is the ancestral homeland!”
So is Mesopotamia. You don’t see Assyrians carpet-bombing Baghdad.
“It’s not practical.”
Neither is trying to govern 2 million people under permanent blockade and expecting peace.
“You’re abandoning Israel.”
No. I’m saving Judaism.
Final Thoughts
This is satire. Sort of.
I’m not actually suggesting the Israeli government relocate to Winnipeg (though they’d love the real estate prices). I’m suggesting that maybe—just maybe—it’s time we stopped tethering our Jewish identity to a state built on unresolved trauma and ongoing violence.
What if we let ourselves imagine new possibilities?
What if we stopped insisting that safety must come at someone else’s expense?
What if we acknowledged that the only way to end the cycle is to get out of the centrifuge?
Zionism doesn’t have to mean bloodshed. It can mean resilience. Reinvention. Rebirth.
We’ve wandered before. We’ll wander again.
Only this time, we’re bringing snow tires.
