rachel 🛸

We are alarmed about a recent document published by Public Safety Canada which describes anti-Zionism wholly as a form of antisemitism. We reject this claim as a dangerous attack on legitimate political speech, and urge the Canadian government to immediately retract it. This latest conflation does not come out of nowhere. For years, we have warned that the controversial IHRA definition of antisemitism, adopted by the federal government in 2019, effectively targets speech that is critical of Israel and Zionism. Canada’s IHRA handbook, issued by Canadian Heritage in 2024, identified speech about Zionism as alleged examples of antisemitism. The new document from Public Safety is the most explicit conflation of these concepts yet from the federal government. By regarding anti-Zionism entirely as a form of antisemitism, Canada is creeping towards the censorship of speech and activism in support of Palestinian human rights. This is the intended result of the relentless pressure from pro-Israel lobby groups, which have been lobbying for anti-Zionism to be treated as synonymous with antisemitism in order to shut down debate about Israel’s escalating crimes against the Palestinian people. To be clear, Zionism is the political ideology behind the creation of the state of Israel. Like all nationalist ideologies rooted in colonialism, it is not simply benign. Zionism is experienced by Palestinians as dispossession and oppression, due both to the historic planned mass ethnic cleansing of historic Palestine by Zionist forces and the continued violence throughout the occupied territories. Zionism continues to be the ideology that justifies Israel’s system of apartheid that oppresses and dominates the Palestinian people as a whole, as recognized by a virtual consensus of major human rights organizations We affirm that anti-Zionism is a legitimate form of political, philosophical, and academic expression against concrete injustices, both historical and contemporary. By defining opposition to Zionism as inherently antisemitic, Public Safety Canada is itself engaged in systemic racism against Palestinians and attempting to silence legitimate debate about apartheid and genocide. This perpetuates a climate of political persecution and erodes the ability of Canadians to engage with urgent matters of human rights. This is the very opposite of public safety. We echo the demands of @IndJewishVoices, the United Jewish People’s Order, and @FacultyJewish, who want the federal government to: 1) clarify that anti-Zionism is not a form of antisemitism; 2) acknowledge the harm that conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism does to Palestinian and Jewish communities; and 3) affirm the legitimacy of anti-Zionism as part of political debate and criticism concerning Palestine and Israel.