The Astonishing Rise of Antisemitism in Canada

  By Henry Srebrnik, [Winnipeg] Jewish Post

Anyone reading the Jewish Post knows full well the extent of antisemitism raging across Canada now. Not a day goes by when some horrific event isn’t reported, be it at a school, a university, outside a Jewish centre or synagogue, or on a sidewalk in front of a Jewish-owned business. Protestors in many cases openly call for the elimination of the state of Israel.

This is now commonplace and shows no signs of abating, with federal, provincial and municipal governments, as well as civil society organizations, including school boards, seemingly unwilling or unable to stop it.

Statistics show an unprecedented spike in Jew-hatred in Canada. A March 18 report from the police in Toronto, for example, indicated that of the 84 registered hate crimes in 2024, a startling 56 per were animated by antisemitism. The Vancouver Police January 16 revealed that the Jewish community experienced a 62 per cent increase in police-reported antisemitic hate incidents in 2023 compared to 2022. Most occurred after the October 7 terrorist attacks perpetrated by Hamas.

The Jewish community in this country has been under siege, “confronting levels of antisemitism unseen since the Holocaust,” reported Richard Marceau, Vice President, External Affairs and General Counsel, Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs. This has included, he noted, “fire bombings of synagogues, community centers and Jewish-owned businesses; shootings and bomb scares at Jewish schools; harassment of community members; intimidation of Jewish students and faculty on campus; cheerleading of Hamas by unions; and many other hateful iterations.”

And it’s not just outright criminality on the part of hooligans that should worry us. There are other, more subtle, ways of making Jews feel they’re not really welcome. Plays are cancelled, speakers disinvited, and artists fired.

Vancouver photographer Dina Goldstein’s “In the Dollhouse” photo series was due to be exhibited at a toy-centred exhibition at the Vancouver Centre of International Contemporary Art. But Goldstein was born in Tel Aviv – so she was told by the organizer that she had got a complaint “from a group of Vancouver artists who didn’t think I should be showing because of the war in Israel and Gaza.” She feared vandalism.

Hamilton’s Playhouse Cinema agreed to be the venue for the three-day Hamilton Jewish Film Festival. But with only weeks to go, it abruptly told the festival they were no longer welcome due to “safety and security concerns at this particularly sensitive time.” They also cited “numerous security and safety related emails, phone calls, and social media messages.”

Sadly and ironically, the only connection to the Gaza war that they were screening was “The Boy,” the last film by Israeli filmmaker Yahav Winner, who was murdered by Hamas on October 7.

Cyclist Leah Goldstein had been invited to address a March 8 International Women’s Day event in Peterborough, Ont. The first woman to win the solo category of the Race Across America, a gruelling endurance race, she was scheduled to speak about overcoming “bullies, sexism, terrorism.” But they “discovered” she was raised in Israel, so was dropped “in recognition of the current situation and the sensitivity of the conflict in the Middle East.”

An obstetrics professor at McMaster University in Hamilton was removed from the editorial board of an academic journal after publicly criticizing his professional association for failing to condemn the sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas on October 7. “I was waiting for the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists as soon as the stories of rape and sexual violence came out,” Jon Barrett told National Post.

Barrett saw political bias in Society President Amanda Black’s December 2023 public letter applauding the reporting of sexual assault perpetrated by Russian soldiers in Ukraine, and highlighting the organization’s work advocating for women, alongside the association’s silence on Hamas’s atrocities against Israeli women.

I could provide all too many similar stories, but most of us already know this our new reality.

We know all about the university encampments, but worst of all is the effect this hatred is having in our primary and secondary educational institutions, where very young minds are being informed that Israel – and by implication Canadian Jews? -- are evil.

In the official multifaith calendar for the York Region District School Board in Ontario, Jewish holidays this year were denoted with a small menorah, while the holidays of other religions had their usual representative symbols (a cross for Christians, the star and crescent for Muslims, and so forth). Why? A leaked e-mail revealed that administrators deliberately avoided using the Star of David, the traditional symbol of Judaism, lest it remind students of Israel.

On April 30, Shaked Tsurkan, a 14-year-old Israeli girl attending Leo Hayes High School, in Fredericton, New Brunswick, was followed and beaten up by an older student. It happened off school grounds during the lunch hour and other classmates gathered to watch. Someone even filmed the whole thing on their phone, later posted to social media. It was just one of many incidents, and her parents felt authorities were ignoring the antisemitic overtones to their daughter’s beating.

More recently, a Burlington, Ont. mother pulled her Jewish daughter out of high school, saying the school is allowing and encouraging pro-Palestinian activists to display and promote threatening antisemitic messages. “My child is not in school because she’s Jewish. That’s insane,” Anissa Hersh stated, after withdrawing her daughter from Burlington Central High School recently.

Her daughter had artwork included in a school exhibit but the event seemed like a Gaza protest. “They had a huge booth, and it was labeled Palestine. There was a map: the state of Israel was relabeled as Palestine with the Palestinian colours on it.” The school permitted students to wear T-shirts and jewelry depicting the eradication of Israel. The school’s solution to her complaint? “The only thing they did was, they sent me information on how my daughter could finish school at home.”

Just sitting down at the computer every day, reading all these articles can make your head spin.  One year ago at this time, we would have been scoffed at, called fearmongers, and delusional, had we said we felt uneasy about antisemitism in this country. Yet clearly it was all “out there,” ready to go, so to speak. Does this not in some way demonstrate how tenuous civil peace is, that it can turn so incredibly ugly so fast? Was this what it felt like in Berlin in, say, 1931 or so?

 

In fact a colleague who teaches European history answered by pointing out that antisemitism lurks often unnoticed within larger social movements, obscured by other issues, until an event comes along to trigger it, like the Gaza war, and then those of us look back and ask where did that come from? Call it the “Greta Thunberg Syndrome?” Even climate change activism has become tinged by Jew-hatred.

 I think that since October 7 Canadian Jews are suffering from political vertigo. It’s as if a rug was suddenly pulled out from under us on an apartment balcony we assumed was safe, and we were tipped over and fell 12 stories to the ground below.

 

Where Do Israel’s Arabs Stand in the Midst of War?

  By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

They go by different names. They are citizens and have full constitutional and legal rights.  They are the descendants of the 150,000 Palestinian Arabs who didn’t leave the British Palestine mandate when Israel was created, and so they live within Israel’s 1949 borders.

They are the kith and kin of the hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians displaced into neighboring areas in 1948. They share history, culture, and family ties with those living in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, as well as with Palestinian diaspora populations in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and other countries.

They are Israel’s population of mostly Sunni Muslim Arabs, called, variously, Israeli Arabs, Palestinian citizens of Israel, and so on. Granted citizenship in the new state of Israel, today they constitute more than one-fifth of Israel’s population – around 2,080,000 people -- and they are a growing percentage of its inhabitants.

They mostly inhabit Arab villages, many in the so-called Little Triangle, along the 1949 Armistice Line that delineated Israel’s border with the West Bank, but some eight per cent live in cities like Acre, Haifa, Jerusalem, Lod, and Nazareth.

Palestinians in the West Bank live under quasi-military rule and enjoy no rights within Israel. But the Arab citizens of Israel have equal voting rights. They can vote for any party they wish but many support Arab political parties, which have existed since the state was established.

The 2021 election was notable for a radical change in Israeli politics, with the Ra’am Party becoming the first Arab grouping to join a governing coalition. Arab parties today hold 10 of the 120 seats in the current 25th Knesset, elected in 2022. Five are members of Ra’am, the other five with the Hadash-Ta’al Joint list. Together, these parties won 8.2 per cent of the total Israeli vote.

The reasons these numbers are lower than the overall Arab share of the population, in a proportional representation system, is due to the lower Arab turnout. In the 2022 election, the Arab turnout was 53.2 per cent, as opposed to overall turnout of 70.6 per cent. Also, not all Arabs vote for Arab lists.

Arab Palestinians in Israel speak Hebrew and are generally acquainted with Jewish and Israeli culture. They attend Israeli universities and are in civil service positions. They have worked in the foreign service and served in Israeli embassies abroad, with a handful appointed ambassadors and consuls since 1995. They have served on the Supreme Court and as judges in lower courts.

Israel’s health-care system has long employed Arab and Jewish medical professionals side by side. Their cooperation was especially visible when the country confronted the COVID-19 pandemic, as health workers treated patients from each other’s communities.

Even so, given Israel’s self-definition as the national state of the Jewish people, Israeli Palestinians, not surprisingly, feel less a part of Israeli society than the majority Jewish population.

Though Arab citizens have the same legal rights as Jewish Israelis -- the sole legal distinction between Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel is that the latter are not required to serve in the Israeli army -- they tend to live in poorer cities, have less formal education, and face other challenges attributed to structural discrimination.

Tensions boiled over into a surge of sectarian violence in May 2021 that began with efforts to evict Palestinians in East Jerusalem, police raids at Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa Mosque during Ramadan, the outbreak of a days-long war between Hamas and Israel, and violent mob attacks against both communities.

The discord quickly reverberated across Israel, particularly in Acre, Lod, and other mixed cities. Residents closed roads, threw Molotov cocktails and rocks at Israeli forces, set fire to police cars, broke Israeli surveillance cameras, and removed Israeli flags from lampposts.

Extremists on both sides engaged in arson, looting and rioting. Jewish and Arab-owned businesses and vehicles were targeted and damaged. Synagogues came under attack as well.

According to Mossawa, a Palestinian rights group, police had arrested more than 2,150 Israeli Palestinians by June 10. In response, to address disparities in the so-called Arab sector, the government that October also approved a nine-billion-dollar, five-year plan to boost employment, improve education, health-care services and housing, and develop infrastructure, among other goals.

A report by the Bank of Israel published this year called the continued integration of Arab society in Israel “essential to promoting the welfare of the Arab residents” and enabling “the potential growth of the Israeli economy in the long term.”

It might help explain why, even though the current Gaza war has already lasted more than half a year and has resulted in many thousands of deaths and massive destruction, there has been no recurrence of the internal communal troubles of three years ago.

Arab-majority East Jerusalem, for example, has been relatively quiet since Oct. 7. East Jerusalem Palestinians are highly enmeshed in the fabric of the city, working and studying in the city’s businesses, schools, and universities.

A survey of public opinion in Arab society on the war in Gaza, conducted in December by the Center for Democratic Values and Institutions at the Israel Democracy Institute, found that more than half agreed with a statement by Mansour Abbas, the leader of Ra’am, that the Hamas attack does not reflect Arab society and Islamic values.

 

After Modi’s Return to Office

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

How will India relate to its Asian neighbours following its recent general election?

Although the election results saw a downturn in support for his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Narendra Modi has been returned to office as India’s prime minister for a third term. His National Democratic Alliance (NDA) coalition won the general election with 293 seats.

The BJP won 240 seats on its own in the election, several seats short of the 272 required to get a majority in India's 543-member parliament. However, two key BJP allies, the Telugu Desam Party and the Janata Dal (United), won 16 and 12 seats each in their respective states, pushing the NDA comfortably over the half-way mark.

First and foremost, India faces an ever more powerful China. As its economy soared, China began flexing its muscles, investing heavily in its Belt and Road infrastructure initiative, which India saw as threatening its security and spheres of influence, and moving more aggressively on its borders and in the Indian Ocean.

Ever since 1962, China has occupied Indian territory in the Himalayan region. Continued border incursions that threatened to lead to all-out war flared into a border clash in 2020 in the disputed Eastern Ladakh region, which lies along the disputed 3,440-kilometre-long de facto border along the Himalayas and is poorly demarcated.

Beijing didn’t recognise the creation of Ladakh as a federally-governed Indian territory in 2019. Nearly two dozen rounds of negotiations have failed to bring disengagement.

Over the past five years, more than 3,500 kilometres of roads have been built along the border. In the Kashmir region, over 2,000 workers have been digging a high-altitude tunnel that will improve connectivity to Ladakh.

China also claims all of India’s northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh, which it considers to be part of Tibet and calls Zangnan. New Delhi has rejected the renaming of places in the state, in response to a statement by the Chinese Civil Affairs Ministry that gave new official names to geographical features in the territory.

Without any Chinese concessions on the border issue, New Delhi is unlikely to improve relations.

Meanwhile, China is strengthening its friendship with Pakistan, pumping billions of dollars into the country via the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) to build roads and ports. India, understandably, is wary of Beijing’s growing influence there.

After all, India’s most tense relationship remains with its archrival and neighbour to the west. The two countries have been in a permanent state of semi-hostility, punctuated by wars and border skirmishes, particularly over Kashmir, since 1947.

Relations between the two nuclear-armed neighbours have remained tense over the past few years. Modi’s government has refused to engage with Pakistan since accusing Islamabad of cross-border terrorism.

The recent Indian election didn’t help, with Modi engaging in attacks on India’s large Muslim minority. “From Pakistan’s perspective, one question will be whether Modi, who engaged in anti-Pakistan rhetoric in the election campaign, doubles down on it or backs away from it,” according to Madiha Afzal, a foreign policy expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

Maleeha Lodhi, Pakistan’s former representative to the United Nations, feels that it’s not a “favourable climate” for India-Pakistan re-engagement. “Pakistan expects little change, if any, from Modi’s third term in power. Prospects for any normalisation of ties between India and Pakistan are at best uncertain,” she said.

In recent years, Sri Lanka has become an arena of geopolitical rivalry and maritime competition between India and China. The country is strategically located at the crossroads of busy shipping routes. But India and Sri Lanka share ethnic and religious ties as well as close trade relations.

Under Sri Lankan President Ranil Wickremesinghe, these have strengthened over the past couple of years. India has emerged as the foremost partner for Sri Lanka in the endeavor to revitalize its economy and reform its bureaucracy. Trade between the two countries have grown particularly rapidly after the signing of the India-Sri Lanka Free Trade Agreement in March 2000. 

In Bangladesh, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s pro-Indian Awami League secured a fourth consecutive term in power in January. “We are committed to further strengthen our enduring and people-centric partnership with Bangladesh,” Modi stated, after the result was announced. After all, Bengalis live on both sides of the border, with the Indian state of West Bengal next to Bangladesh, so this will likely continue.