Features
Decision to invite former member of Nazi-aligned Ukrainian military unit to House of Commons raises questions about why he was allowed into Canada in the first place
By BERNIE BELLAN (Originally published Sept. 25 in The Jewish Post & News)
The storm that erupted over the revelation that a former member of a Ukrainian unit that fought with the Nazis during the Second World War was invited to attend the appearance by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky when he spoke to the House of Commons on Friday, September 22, has led to a whole series of questions:
- Who is Yaroslav Hunka, the 98-year-old Ukrainian-Canadian who received a standing ovation from members of all four parties in the House of Commons on Friday, September 22, when he was introduced by House of Commons Speaker Anthony Rota prior to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s speech in the House of Commons?
- What was the Wafen-SS Galicia Division (also known as the SS 14th Wafer Division)?
- How is it that many former members of the Wafen-SS Galicia Division were allowed entry into Canada following World War II?
- Why was there no vetting of Hunka by anyone prior to his having been invited to attend the House of Commons on September 22?
The fierce reaction from various Jewish Canadian groups, including the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre for Holocaust Studies, B’nai Brith Canada, and the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, was unrelentingly critical of the decision to invite Hunka to attend Zelensky’s appearance in the House of Commons.
Hunka’s past participation in the Wafen-SS Galicia Division was well known. As an article that appeared on Wikipedia on September 24 noted: “Yaroslav Hunka (Ukrainian: Ярослав Гунька; born c. 1925) is a veteran of the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician), a Nazi Germany military formation. Hunka was born in Urman, then in Poland, and volunteered for SS Galizien in 1943. He emigrated to Canada after the conclusion of World War II. In 2023, Hunka made international headlines after he received a standing ovation from the House of Commons of Canada, and was recognized by Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Later, it was revealed Hunka was affiliated with Nazis, and Canadian government officials apologized to the worldwide Jewish community. Hunka is retired and lives in North Bay, Ontario.
Biography
“Yaroslav Hunka was born in
“Yaroslav Hunka was born in Urman, Second Polish Republic (now Ukraine) c. 1925. In 1944, Hunka was deployed into combat against Red Army forces on the Eastern Front of World War II. Following the conclusion of World War II in Europe, Hunka immigrated to Canada and joined the Ukrainian-Canadian community.] As of 2022, Hunka lived in North Bay, Ontario, and travelled to Greater Sudbury to protest against that year’s Russian invasion of Ukraine.”
The question why so many former members of a Ukrainian military unit that fought for the Nazis were allowed into Canada following WWII is laced with controversy. A website that is very sympathetic to Russia lists a number of very serious allegations about Canadian complicity in allowing those individuals into the country:
“In the immediate postwar period, Canada’s then Liberal government, working in close cahoots with US and British intelligence, opened Canada’s doors to Ukrainian Nazi collaborators. These included members of the infamous 14th Grenadier Division of the Waffen SS, also known as the Galicia Division.
“The scale of the influx of Nazi collaborators only became public knowledge in the 1980s. A comprehensive study carried out by Alti Rodal on behalf of the federal government-appointed Deschênes Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals in Canada uncovered records proving that US intelligence agents in Europe had funneled Nazi collaborators from Eastern Europe through the Canadian immigration system using false papers. Rodal revealed that large numbers of identically typed applications were received by Canada’s immigration department from one address in West Germany. On closer inspection, this address turned out to be a US military base.
“The Progressive Conservative government of Brian Mulroney established the Deschênes Commission in 1985, in response to a mounting public outcry over exposures of Nazis and Nazi accomplices who had found a safe haven in Canada and tasked the inquiry with identifying Nazi war criminals residing in Canada.
“Around the same time, the Simon Wiesenthal Center estimated that upwards of 2,000 Nazis and Nazi collaborators emigrated to Canada in the years after the war. A quarter-century later, in 2011, it would give Canada an “F minus” in its annual report ranking countries on their efforts to prosecute war criminals. This placed Canada on a par with Ukraine and the former Baltic republics, i.e. countries where the right-wing, nationalist regimes that have emerged since the Stalinist bureaucracy’s dissolution of the Soviet Union openly venerate the ultranationalists who aligned with the Nazis when they invaded the USSR.
“War criminals in Canada
“A significant number of those who made their way to Canada were members of the Nazi SS’s Galicia Division, which was made up of Ukrainian nationalist volunteers who fought on the side of the Wehrmacht against the Red Army during the Nazis’ war of annihilation against the Soviet Union. This preplanned onslaught—launched in June 1941 when a 3 million-strong force comprised of German troops, their Axis allies and fascist volunteers invaded the Soviet Union—led to the deaths of 27 million Soviet citizens and the Holocaust.
“In waging war, suppressing the population, and pursuing the annihilation of the Jews, across Eastern Europe and above all in the USSR, Hitler’s Wehrmacht and SS shock troops relied on the loyal collaboration of ultraright-wing, anti-Semitic forces. Among the Ukrainian nationalists, in both occupied Poland and the USSR, the Nazis found eager collaborators. The Galicia Division was formed in 1943 out of a faction of the Stepan Bandera-led Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists Bandera (OUN-B) and fought with the Nazis against the Red Army throughout 1944.
“Massacres perpetrated by the division against Polish and Jewish civilians have been well documented, including at Huta Pieniacka, Podkamien, and Palikrowy. At Podkamien, 100 Polish civilians were massacred in a hilltop monastery, and at least a further 500 in surrounding villages as the Red Army approached the German-occupied area in March 1944.
“Members of the Galicia Division were initially prohibited from entering Canada due to their membership in the SS. But in 1950, Britain made an appeal to the Commonwealth for volunteers to accept a total of 9,000 division members who were at that time residing in the UK after being disarmed by British troops at the war’s end.
“When Canada’s External Affairs Department, prompted by complaints from the Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC), raised concerns about the division’s ties to the Nazis and role in Nazi atrocities, the British government insisted that it had carried out background checks. “While in Italy these men were screened by Soviet and British missions and neither then nor subsequently has any evidence been brought to light which would suggest that any of them fought against the Western Allies or engaged in crimes against humanity,” claimed the British Foreign Office. “‘Their behaviour since they came to this country, added London, ‘has been good and they have never indicated in any way that they are infected with any trace of Nazi ideology.’
“With this letter serving as political cover, Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent and his cabinet declared that Galicia Division members would be permitted to immigrate to Canada unless it could be proved that they had personally committed atrocities against civilian populations based on ‘race, religion or national origins.’ Simply having been a Galicia Division member would not be considered a valid reason to prevent entry, even though after the war all Waffen-SS members had been deemed complicit in war crimes.
“The immigration of Nazi and Nazi-allied war criminals continued for more than a decade after the war and was a significant factor in Canada’s emergence during the Cold War as a political-ideological centre of far-right Ukrainian nationalism.
“Speaking to a CBS “60 Minutes” programme in 1997, Canadian historian Irving Abella, who is currently Professor for Canadian Jewish history at York University, bluntly summed up the political climate of the time. ‘One way of getting into postwar Canada,’ he said ‘was by showing the SS tattoo. This proved that you were an anti-Communist.’
“Ottawa carried out this policy in close collaboration with US authorities, who similarly permitted ex-Nazis to settle in the US and recruited hundreds to act as spies against the Soviet Union and the Soviet-allied regimes in Eastern Europe. According to investigative reporter Eric Lichtblau, up to 1,000 former Nazis were made use of by the CIA in Europe, within the US itself, the Middle East, and in Latin America.
Yet, other historians dispute the notion that Canada became a safe haven for Nazi and Nazi-allied war criminals. In a book titled , written by historian Howard Margolian, and reviewed by Urs Obrist in 2002, Obrist writes the following:
“Even though the debate on the admission of Nazi war criminals to Canada after World War II seemed to have reached its apex in the mid-1980s, with the investigation of the Jules Deschênes Commission and its inquiries on war criminals, the issue has continued to stir historical interest in the 1990s and beyond.[1] This recent publication by Howard Margolian, Unauthorized Entry, revises the widely held view that Canada has been a safe haven for Nazi war criminals. Margolian is a Canadian historian with a special interest in the history of World War II and Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. As the author of Conduct Unbecoming, he has already shed light on the story of the murder of Canadian POWs in Normandy and the trial and fate of the SS-General Kurt Meyer.[2] In Unauthorized Entry, Margolian challenges and refutes accusations stating that the King and St. Laurent governments had been negligent in the admission of Nazi war criminals and collaborators to Canada.
“His study concludes that neither the immigration bureaucracy, nor the immigration lobby in Canada, nor the western intelligence community were as responsible for the influx of about 2000 war criminals and collaborators as has been generally assumed. Instead, he argues, the blame is to be put on the war criminals and collaborators who gained entry to Canada by forged identities or by giving false information about their wartime history. The great majority of Nazi war criminals and collaborators who settled in Canada after the Second World War were admitted not on purpose, but as a result of the absence of, or inaccessibility to, information about their wartime activities. Margolian summarizes that, in view of the benefit drawn from the immigration of the 1.5 million immigrants arriving in Canada between 1945 and 1955, it was worth taking the risk and admitting some 2000 war criminals to Canada.”
However, in his review of Margolin’s book Obrist notes that the Canadian government made exceptions for three categories of immigrants – who were not denied entry even if they might have had Nazi connections: “German scientists, Estonian refugees from Sweden and former members of the Ukrainian SS-Division ‘Galicia’.”
As for how the Speaker of the House of Commons could have completely overlooked Hunka’s past membership in a Nazi-affiliated unit during WWII, Rota released a statement late Sunday afternoon saying he recognized an individual in the gallery on Friday, and that he has “subsequently become aware of more information which causes me to regret my decision to do so.”
“I wish to make clear that no one, including fellow parliamentarians and the Ukraine delegation, was aware of my intention or of my remarks before I delivered them,” he wrote.
“I particularly want to extend my deepest apologies to Jewish communities in Canada and around the world.”
The statement does not make clear what Rota is apologizing for, and it does not name Hunka or give any details about what information Rota learned about him since Friday.
Features
Musings from Dizengoff Street – by Bruce Brown (updated Sept. 18)
(Posted Sept. 18) Just wonderin’. When a tree falls in a forest and no one’s there to hear it, does it make a sound? And if Iran says it’s not enriching uranium and no one’s there to verify it, do they develop fissile material?
Now Iran just obtained a seat on the General Committee of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s General Conference – how crazy is that. Like letting the cat guard the milk.
(Posted Sept. 15) Apparently some superheroes are against us. But not really. Whewww!!! Fortunately it’s just the progressive actors who play them in movies. Such as Benedict Cumberbatch (Dr. Strange) and Mark Ruffalo (the Hulk) as well as other minor actors not worth mentioning. What are these misinformed thespians aligning themselves with. Not sure they really know. Well. It’s with The Freedom for Marwan campaign, which pushes for the release of convicted, arch-terrorist mastermind Marwan Barghouti. Convicted in 2004 and sentenced to five life sentences plus 40 years for orchestrating various heinous shooting sprees in Israel during the Second Intifada (2000-2005). Killing and wounding too many innocent Israeli civilians including a Greek Orthodox monk outside Jerusalem. As a comic book fan, and closet Batman and Aquaman (when I swim), it saddens me that these guardians of the universe can be associated with defending evil. But then I remind myself it’s only the actors -what do they know anyway- and not really the superheroes. Unlike our own Gal Gadot (Wonder Woman), Natalie Portman (the Mighty Thor), Shira Haas (Sabra) and Liev Schreiber (Sabretooth). All firmly on the side of good.
(Posted Sept 10) Honey cakes. Honey cakes. Honey cakes. It’s that time of year. Yummy! Here comes Rosh HaShana 5787. And its…. You guessed it. Honey cake season. That light brown loaf our baba used to make. Starting a few weeks before Rosh HaShana and extending through Yom Kippur – a first bite to break the fast and usher in a sweet year- honey cakes are found throughout the country. The familiar sight of the ready-made, pre-packaged, ‘assembly-line’ honey cakes wrapped in cheap cellophane found in Grocery stores. The freshly baked honey cakes adorning window displays at local bakeries. The exorbitantly priced, gourmet honey cake desserts offered at fancy Tel Aviv restaurants. And of course, honey cakes festooning the festive, colorful, Rosh Hashana dinner tables across Israel. I bake my own honey cake which is pretty good. My wife and kids would beg to differ. But these slightly glazed honey cakes -of my own culinary, shtetl inspired creation- are heartedly enjoyed by me as I gain several honey cake induced pounds. Shana tova!
(Posted Sept. 8) Hoarding. A combination of my own little wartime PTSD and some recent headlines about Iran trying to coordinate a multifront attack (is that capability still there?!) and October 7 like rumblings from the West Bank (or Judea & Samaria, depending if you wear a kippa and if its knitted and if it tilts to this side or that side -that’s a shtetl insider joke). I digress and Yikes! And we just had a nation-wide drill of the IDF’s top-level headquarters preparedness for such scenarios. Double Yikes! So ya. I’m always checking and rechecking that we have way more than enough of some things. The thought of entering another prolonged war and some stuff no longer available, even for a short time, scares the bejeebers out of me. Just writing about it triggers the ‘go and buy’ dopamine hit. Medications. Toilet paper. Bottled water. Canned goods. Also worried about the country running out of bullets. But I can’t hoard those.
(Posted Sept. 5) An open letter to the zany and zealous mouthpieces of those delightful, anti-Israel protests held regularly in Toronto. In the heavily Jewish Bathurst & Sheppard area no less. Fear and harassment in the community? Not by the hairs of our chinny chin chins.
Dear Friends.
Are you serious.
Sincerely,
Bruce Brown, a Zionist who does not rape children. Who does not murder children. Who does not eat children. And, get this, who lives in Israel.
(Ed. note: To better understand what Bruce is talking about, go to this story on our website: Police open hate-crime investigation)
(Posted Sept. 1) Can you be more of an international embarrassment and liability? Yes talking about Israeli’s antagonist extraordinaire and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir.
Declaring that Israel should kill ’30-40 Gazans a day’. Seriously?!?! His actual statement may have been more refined and qualified. But it doesn’t really make a difference. That’s the takeaway. Like whose side is he on anyway. Talk about giving our detractors ammunition to delegitimize our little shtetl. Hello?!?!
And a few days later. Showing off in front of a gallows site under construction at a high security prison. Seriously?!?! The death penalty for terrorists. Right or not – I think the former. But like can you give us reason to be compared to an extremist state. That’s the takeaway. Like whose side is he on anyway. Talk about giving our detractors ammunition to delegitimize our little shtetl. Hello?!?!
Serenity now!
(Posted August 28) Kites. Color. Childhood. Hamas and friends should watch Mary Poppins with the final kite flying scene. Remember that song, Let’s Go Fly A Kite. Ya, I know. Somewhat ethnocentric. But still…. I have fond memories of flying kites with my kids. Down the Mediterranean shoreline in Tel Aviv. At the Ness Tziona kite flying festival. Along the green grounds of the Weizmann Institute. Laughing and running. Looking to the sky with awe. Multi-shades and fancy. Kites.
With your fist ‘olding tight
To the string of your kite
…oh, oh, oh!
Lets go fly a kite
Kites. Fun. Laughter. Innocence.
Kites. Not an instrument of war.
(Posted August 25) How principled can you be! Ireland -one of the most anti-Israel and foggiest countries in the EU- insisted that its government’s new, 60$M executive jet NOT be equipped with Elbit’s FalconEye navigation system, which helps pilots navigate in fog -how ironic- and other difficult weather conditions. Without this unique system the plane must be diverted to alternative airports. This a part of the government’s official boycott of Israeli goods. So good luck to Prime Minister Michael Martin in landing his aircraft in Dublin.
And despite some negative sentiment towards everything Israel, Elbit achieved over 32$B in backorders with Europe driving much of its export growth. On a more personal muse. The morning after Iran’s first attack on Israel (April 13 2024), I woke up not with fear and panic. Well. Okay. Some of that. But also great excitement regarding an investment opportunity which developed overnight. Actually it was the wife’s suggestion. After Israel successfully intercepted over three hundred missiles and drones – showcasing the strength of Israel’s defense industry- my wife had a eureka moment. What better public relations for Israel’s defense industry. Let’s buy stock in Elbit, a key player in that ecosystem. We did. And about eighteen months later we cashed in. With about 150% profit. This is not an endorsement to buy… blah, blah, blah….
Again. Good luck to Prime Minister Martin.
(Posted August 21) Sometimes musings are terribly sad. But should be shared.
Happy belated birthday beautiful Ariel. Turned seven on August 5th. Thought about him and his younger brother Kfir and mother Shiri. All murdered by Hamas shortly after their unbelievable and surreal abduction on Oct 7 2023.
As I was driving home today. “I Thank You Child” by Zakk Wylde shuffled onto my Spotify. Always kills me, this song. It was played by Yarden, the father who himself was held hostage, at the funeral of his family. For Ariel and Kfir. The lyrics chilling. The frequent drum rolls haunting.
It was you who made living all worth the while
Oh, I thank you, my child
Comfort in your eyes
For the warmth inside your smile
Faith’s done gone astray
It was you who made living all the while
All my fears repressed
Oh lovin’ you child it’s the best
This song. Written almost thirty years ago. Finds its devastating meaning today. With the Bibas family tragedy.
How.
Listen to the song here:
(Posted August 18, 2026) And the beat goes on in the strait. A bit quieter lately although may be heating up again with the 60day ‘ceasefire’ officially expired. And while Iran occasionally lashed out over the last two months, they did not attack Israel. How do you spell deterrence. According to my Yiddisha mama, its spelled ‘Pftt. Pftt. Pftt‘.
(August 14, 2026) Despite three years of varying degrees of warfare. Moody’s biannual report of the Israeli economy was quite positive. Basically, the report saw no pressures on Israel’s credit rating. While the macro data remains strong, Israel still faces a complex geopolitical situation further complicated by upcoming elections (we pondered about how crazy that is in an earlier muse). And Israeli’s inflation rate for the first half of 2026 fell to a historic five year low of 1.2% (vs Canada’s 2.6%). As for my own pocketbook. Haven’t had an infamous Israeli bank overdraft in years. So all is fine.
If that’s not enough economic voodoo talk for one musing. According to one famous barometer. Israel moved to second place in the Economist’s Big Mac Index. Introduced in 1986, this tasty indicator compares the purchasing power parity across countries by measuring the price of a McDonald’s Big Mac -which most can relate to- against the benchmark U.S. burger. So while a Big Mac in the U.S. costs $6.22. In Israel it costs $7.67, the second most expensive place to buy the hamburger in the world, Switzerland being the most pricey at a whopping (no reference to Wendy’s) $9.04. While the cheapest Big Mac can be enjoyed in Indonesia at only $2.38. Canada ranked 22nd of the fifty-four countries considered, at $5.85. Parity. Smarity. I’m going for my Big Mac fix. Just after I finish writing this muse….
(August 11, 2026) Bravo Boy George. We certainly will dance again! And what better way than with his new reggae tune. Now Boy George is dealing with a hostile backlash against his just stand for Israel. Having to withdraw from London’s East End production of Jesus Christ Superstar where he was going to play – guess it. King Herod. Never a big Culture Club fan, but I am anyway -as a sign of support- going to download his greatest hits to my Spotify library. And hoping to have a chance to buy a concert ticket should Boy George perform in Israel. Kind of reminds me of Bob Dylan’s 1983 song Neighborhood Bully. Also in defense of Israel. I’m going to download that song as well. Although don’t think he was hounded the way Boy George is now. Sign of the times I guess.
+++++
Coming clean. I sometimes find myself chanting, to no one in particular, that snappy little ditty ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.’ Now why can’t we come up with something as catchy. With such an impressive gene pool of great Jewish songwriters. George Gershwin. Irving Berlin. Burt Bacharach. Carole King. Neil Diamond. Leanard Choen. Paul Simon. Gene Simmons, Amy Winehouse. Bob Dylan. And yes, even the Buddhist Boy George. And still… gurnish! No wonder we’re losing the global PR battle
(August 8, 2026) Outside Basimta Café in Central Jerusalem. Love the red shirt against a tiny sea of black. Not sure I am shrugging because of the ultra-orthodox uproar over a Jerusalem café operating on Shabbat or the lack of an ultra-orthodox uproar over a Jerusalem café operating on Shabbat. For the last six weeks Israeli headlines shouted about the cafe chaos. With the ultra-religious blocking entrances and storming the café. While shouting ‘Shabbos! Shabbos!’ Upsetting the secular amongst us just wanting to enjoy our Saturday iced matchas. So the wife and I thought we would check it out. And. Yes. Buy something to support the business. Uproar. Not. Blocked entrances. Not. Storming the café. Not. Albeit there were police barriers separating the devout protesters from the coffee drinkers. The protesters being just a few dozen black clad, pious Jews. Mostly teenagers. And yes. Shouting ‘Shabbos! Shabbos!’ Certainly underwhelming in its reported mayhem. Reminds me of the famous saying misattributed to Mark Twain – “If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you do, you’re misinformed.” But I did enjoy my iced matcha.
(August 6, 2026) Here we go again. Another round of forever negotiations. As someone who negotiates for a living. The way things are going in the straits. If I had to recommend a book on the subject to a new hire. Between The Art of the Deal, A Presidential Edition by Donald J. Trump or The Real Art of the Deal by the Mullahs of Iran with a special forward by the IRGC. Well. I would choose the latter.
(August 3) Bravo Yoav Segalovitz, Liberal Yesh Atid MK and Monsour Abbas, United Arab Ra’am MK and party head. For breaking a glass ceiling where a Jewish lawmaker joins an Arab political party. No less a political earthquake in my little shtetl. Which can significantly impact coalition block arithmetic and posturing and strategy in the upcoming elections. Now Ra’am can be considered a legitimate ‘Zionist’ partner when forming coalition blocks and potentially pushing the ‘center left/right’ party over the 60 seat majority threshold. In our crazy parliamentary democracy defined by a multi-party (about fourteen!!), proportional representation system. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, Israel’s proportional representation model of governance is the best parliamentary democracy system except for all other forms of working democracies. Stay tuned for more amateurish political musings as we move towards Israel’s 26th national election – five of them held since 2019.
(August 1) Although both sides say they are open to diplomacy. Neither really trusts the other. And American military action, or its threat, continues. I read headlines in the middle of the night -it’s a nervous habit lately– that the Dynamic Duo of Trump and Netanyahu may again strike in unison. Possibly this weekend. Yikes! Prompting me, at 2:30 AM, to dash around the house stocking my safe room. Bottled water. Canned food. Medicines. Documents. The beat goes on….
If it’s crazy here. It’s insane in Italy. With a recent online ‘Jew Hunt’ in the Milan area. Before being removed, the digital forms urged reportings of Israelis and Italian Jews staying in local hotels. The infamous Global Sumud Movement -yes, the one coordinating ‘peace and humanitarian’ flotillas to Gaza- was somehow connected. Although they deny involvement?! This deranged decree was looking to identify Zionist tourism and Zionist neo-colonization in Italy. I’ll stick with stocking the saferoom.
Then there’s New York Mayor Mamdani, a Global Sumud Movement supporter, threatening to arrest Prime Minister Netanyahu if he comes to New York. But since discovered he has no legal right for such a grandstanding, antisemitic, anti-Israel, anti-Western, anti-democratic antic. Maybe Mandami should be arrested! Or at least impeached. For being a grandstanding, antisemitic, anti-Israel, anti-Western, anti-democratic mayor.
Here’s a post Bruce sent us Friday, July 31:
WARTIME MUSINGS
Should credible threats against FLOTUS and ‘FSOTUS’ (first son..) not be justification to attack first.
As for yesterday’s summit. Netanyahu really can’t win. Explainer. If Trump now attacks without victory its ’cause of Netanyahu. If Trump now attacks with victory its ’cause of Trump. And, in Israel, if Trump doesn’t attack -victory or not- Netanyahu failed in his eighth meeting with Trump. And if Trump does attack -victory or not- half the country will vilify Bibi anyway. Missing a permutation?
Ya. I know. Kinda’ need a definition of victory for that musing to work.
And here in my little shtetle. We go to sleep unsure if there will be a code red in the middle of the night. And if not. We wake up thinking it will be tonight. How do you define stress?
Seemed like an appropriate way to end this musing.
Bruce Brown is a former Winnipegger who made aliyah to Israel over 35 years ago. Bruce first began writing for us – in his own inimitable style, in 2012, during what was known as “Operation Pillar of Defense.” His occasional musings on aspects of life in Israel that were far from what you’d typically read in other reports from Israel were hugely popular – both in the print Jewish Post & News and on this website.
We’re now glad to report that Bruce is back writing for us – this time on a regular basis. We will post Bruce’s reports as they arrive – with the date of each post at the beginning of that post.
Here’s some information about Bruce – and awards he’s received for his writing:
Bruce Brown. Canadian born. Now living in Israel (for a long time). Bruce works in Israel’s hi-tech sector by day and, in spurts, is a somewhat inspired writer by night. He received the American Jewish Press Association’s award for writing excellence in 2019 and 2025. And wrote the1998 satire, “An Israeli is….”. Bruce’s visuals are AI-assisted and created with ChatGPT under his inimitable visual concept and creative direction. Bruce’s musings are political, social, economic and personal. With lots of biting, contrarian, sardonic, irreverent and mischievous insights.
Uncategorized
Why NBA Teams Start Defending Before Half Court
An NBA defender who meets a ball handler near the opposite baseline is trying to interfere with the possession before the offense gets organized. The immediate reward need not be a steal. Making a guard change direction, protect the ball, or find another receiver can interrupt the route into a play. But pressure has several possible results, and slowing that first journey does not necessarily slow the whole game.
In Logan Murdock’s November 2025 report on full-court defense, Phoenix Suns guard Jordan Goodwin described his aim: “Try to make them take at least six seconds off the clock.” That was his target, not a measured average. Indiana Pacers coach Rick Carlisle described another purpose: getting opponents to play faster than they prefer. Both approaches interfere with timing, though one delays the setup while the other hurries decisions.
The shot clock helps explain the difference. In a normal NBA possession following a made basket, the offense has 24 seconds, with the countdown starting when the inbound pass is legally touched on the court. It must also advance out of the backcourt within eight seconds. Crossing half court does not start a fresh shot clock. Time spent getting there leaves less time to create a shot. A defensive deflection that stays inbounds does not restart the countdown.
Defensive pressure also needs careful interpretation in basketball betting. An NBA matchup on the Bovada website cannot be reduced to whether one team presses: the combined score depends on how often both sides get the ball and what they do with their chances. A defender delaying the first pass into an offense can leave less time for a good attempt. A turnover followed by a quick basket has a different effect.
Those possibilities make defensive intensity an incomplete description of a scoring outlook. A team can force its opponent to work harder while creating quick attacking chances for itself. It can also concede an easy chance when pressure fails. Understanding the tactic means separating its purpose from its outcome, rather than treating an aggressive defender as evidence that the game must produce fewer points.
Pressure does not always mean a trap
One defender following the ball is different from two defenders closing around it. The first can contest the dribbler while teammates remain with their own assignments. A trap commits another player to the ball, so teammates elsewhere must cover the passing options and protect the basket.
A stopped dribble changes the contest. Once a player voluntarily picks up the ball, he cannot simply start dribbling again. He can still pivot, pass, or shoot, but moving away from pressure with another dribble is no longer an option. A defender can therefore restrict movement without taking possession. This is also why a guard’s choice to keep the dribble alive deserves attention: it preserves a way to move while searching for a pass.
Watch where the ball goes next. A trap can succeed by forcing an awkward pass that another defender intercepts. The players surrounding the ball do not have to be the ones who take it away. Reaching for a steal also differs from keeping the ball handler contained; abandoning position can give the guard a route past the pressure.
The offense has answers. In the Murdock report referenced earlier, Golden State guard Brandin Podziemski described using his body to shield the ball against smaller defenders and quickness to get beyond longer opponents. Beating the first defender can leave that player trailing, creating a temporary advantage farther upcourt. The remaining defenders then have to respond to an attack before their teammate has time to recover.
The work before a highlight
Former NBA guard Keith Bogans gives a defender’s perspective in his conversation with Vernon Maxwell. Discussing Jaden McDaniels, Bogans says that seeing a defender pick up a superstar across the court gets him excited in the way a dunk or crossover excites other viewers.
*
His reaction focuses on the challenge being accepted. The scorer has someone to deal with before reaching a preferred attacking position. Bogans also describes the recognition that such defensive work receives from teammates and coaches, even when it attracts little attention elsewhere.
The assignment does not end when the scorer passes. The defender still needs to follow the play and be ready for the ball to return. Early pressure can force a star to give up the ball without removing him from the possession. Watching the next pass shows whether the defense has actually disrupted the attack or merely moved it.
When defense creates offense
Indiana scored 19 points off turnovers in Finals Game 6 against Oklahoma City on June 19, 2025. The figure does not isolate full-court pressure.
A change of possession ends one team’s opportunity and begins another’s. The team winning the ball can attack immediately or organize its offense, depending on the space and defenders ahead. Pressure therefore cannot be assessed only by the time an opponent spends bringing the ball forward.
Look beyond the pickup point. Does the offense arrive late but still organized? Does it make a hurried pass? Does the ball handler escape and make the remaining defenders cover extra ground? The first defender can use up time without winning the ball. If the guard gets past him, watch whether the other defenders can stop the drive without leaving someone open.
Features
In new ‘Fauda’ season, the aftershocks of Oct. 7, without a thought for Gaza
By PJ Grisar September 8, 2026
This story was originally published in the Forward. Click here to get the Forward’s free email newsletters delivered to your inbox.
When Fauda Season 4 ended an eternity and a devastating war ago, our hero was at death’s door, reciting both the central prayer of Judaism, the Shema, and the Muslim Fatiha.
It was a cliffhanger with monumental implications for Doron Kavillio (Lior Raz), an Israeli Jew who spent his days undercover as a Muslim Arab — an identity crisis long in coming. Zoom out and you can see the doomed duality of Israel and Palestine, Jew and Muslim, connected in a cycle of death and more alike than they may seem.
Season 5 begins bilingually, with Hebrew and Arab definitions of the Arabic word Tha’r, blood revenge, “restoring violated honor or avenging injustice.” This concept is now the point of commonality — not how men pray, but how they seek revenge.
Welcome to a post-Oct. 7 Israel. Doron is in therapy, struggling to recall eight missing hours of his life on the day of Hamas’ attack on the Gaza envelope.
Comrades have left the country — Steve (Doron Ben-David) is protecting oligarchs in London, Sagi and Nurit are in Australia. Eli (Yaakov Zada-Daniel) is now Orthodox, living in a settlement and reeling from the murder of his wife and stepchildren at his now-torched kibbutz. When a Bedouin friend, Salem (Bian Anteer) who lost his son in the raid on Eli’s home, approaches him with a tip on the Nukhba fighter responsible, they depart for Marseille to answer the call of Tha’r.
It would hardly be Fauda if this act of vengeance didn’t give way to a much larger plot. Marseille is the staging ground for Saeed el Hatib (French-Algerian actor Hakim Djaziri), “the Sinwar of Europe,” who is recruiting sympathetic, white continentals for a fresh massacre in Israel.
Fauda has always made some viewers uncomfortable. Massively entertaining, bingeable to those of us who stream it in the Netflix aftermarket, its existence was premised on ongoing injustices in the West Bank and Gaza and the violence that bursts through their borders. (The BDS movement labelled it a “war-crimes glorifying” series;” Haaretz called it “morally dubious.”)
And yet as late as the last season it contained very real criticism of Israel’s conduct, including its costly campaigns to recover captured soldiers and the torture used to extract information on their whereabouts. The show always alluded to real operations — Cast Lead, Brother’s Keeper — in dialogue. But because it can’t merely mention an attack as raw and monumental as Oct. 7, and because it has no desire to question the response to it, it chooses to recreate its savagery.
Episodes 7 and 8, flashbacks to that day, are front-loaded with a trigger warning and a disclaimer that you can skip them and still be able to follow the main plot.
It’s hard for me to recommend those episodes. If not exactly atrocity porn, their central, race-against-time set piece is too anchored in recent events and constructed too much like an action movie. It feels in a sense exploitative, even if intended as a tribute. (To give them credit, both Lior Raz and his co-creator Avi Issacharoff, who said they “wrote from their trauma,” were on the ground helping the south of the country evacuate in the aftermath.)
The new season starts with the promise of complexity. It opens on a grieving Muslim father and shifts to a milksop accountant who worked for Hamas, seemingly tortured by Eli in a blind rage for a crime he didn’t commit. Could an excessive devotion to Tha’r, a tribal code of retribution, be the diagnosis of the show’s creators of Israeli society at this moment?
If it is, it’s not a critical one. The villains are the villains, and, most revealingly, they now number people with no connection to the conflict.
Hatib’s enlistment of white Europeans for a mass-casualty terror attack services a trite narrative of postcolonial guilt finding an outlet in the pro-Palestinian cause. It works on another level too: This fighting force is squaring off against Doron’s corps of Mizrahi Jews, whose mere presence dismantles the lie that Israelis are themselves all white colonizers, and that Israel and the European empire of yore are in any way analogous.
When, back at mission control, the counterterrorists speak of “suspicious-looking Europeans” who are “in their 30s,” the derision for this type of fellow traveller is palpable. Their standard bearer, Mélanie Laurent, formerly Tarantino’s “face of Jewish vengeance,” plays Anne, a blonde, “high middle-class Catholic French woman” who straps up with C-4, a keffiyeh ever-draped around her neck. Through her, and in a quite literal way, the show suggests the Western love affair with Palestinians — which in this season’s logic means Hamas — is misguided.
All the while, we never see Gaza, where much of Season 3 was set, with some among its population humanized. We never reckon with the destruction there. We hear about it, and a kind of lip service is paid to the crime of collective punishment — the sort that we hear at the end of almost every season — but it’s secondary to storytelling as elegy and justification. One could just have easily placed the Hebrew word Zachor before that first cold open: Remember what they did to us.
At one point, after a shootout with more blood spatter than I ever recall seeing on the show, Doron empties his clip into an enemy with the words “this is for October 7.” Seconds later, in a Shin Bet command room his handler Gabi (Itzik Cohen, whose between-seasons weight gain is a running joke) quips, a la Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon, “I’m too old for this.”
He’s not the only one.
In the past week I’ve chatted with some folks older than me — they don’t know each other and are largely to my right on Israel — who don’t relish the thought of another season. Not just because they don’t want to watch Oct. 7 reenacted, but because following the exploits of Israeli security agents has vastly different optics after the Hamas-Israel war, unprecedented settler violence and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s recently-stated ideal scenario of killing “30 or 40” Palestinians in Gaza each night.
This may well be the privilege of the diaspora, but the fatigue points to a shift in attitude that’s worth paying attention to. If these horrors are out of sight, out of mind this season, they’re top of mind to many who are watching — and many others who might have once tuned in.
PJ Grisar is a Forward culture reporter. Read full bio →
This story was originally published on the Forward.
