Pro-Palestinian supporters on the Avenue Road bridge, Toronto, on January 6, 2024
My morning routine was to read the news and look for the most egregious antisemitic incident from that day, not the only one but the worst one in the country and then think, how can I find a reporter to cover this? The CJN operates with a small staff and even though we worked weekends and evenings, it was frustrating that we couldn’t cover every story. It was, however, a relief to work for a news organization where we could call the Hamas attackers what they were—terrorists. Many media outlets, including the CBC, have shied away from the term and those responsible for the Oct. 7 massacre are simply called attackers. I think it would have crushed my soul a little to abide by that newsroom policy. Not long after Oct. 7, I ran into a senior educator, who was distraught. Jewish stu- dents and teachers were harassed and vul- nerable while their classmates participated in mass walkouts, yelling, “Free Palestine” and, “From the river to the sea.” The educator had spent much of her career teaching tolerance and cultural sensitivity but at that moment questioned whether she had done enough. “People don’t know how bad it is,” she said. Perhaps, but many of us would learn.
Every city in Canada saw pro-Palestine (or anti-Israel, depending on your viewpoint) marches that blocked downtown streets week after week. These were not calls for a two-state solution or decrying the rule of Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right ministers. They were, point-blank, a call for the end of the Jewish state, with Zionists labelled white colonial settlers , who were ordered to return to wherever they came from (as long as it wasn’t Israel). Even more disturbing were the ways the anger and hatred for Israel mutated into frank antisemitism, especially against children. There were shots fired at two Montreal schools and a call from Hamas leaders for a global “day of violence” that led parents to keep their kids home, fearful of what could happen. I stood in the rain as the principal of Toronto’s largest Jewish high school described the bomb threat the school received and the decision to evacuate the building and a nearby daycare. Fortunately, no one was injured in any of these inci- dents, but they succeeded in their object- ive: evoking fear. A bridge not far from my home became briefly infamous when it was blocked by raucous Palestinian protests every week-
the empty strollers and empty Shabbat tables symbolizing the missing hostages that are temporarily installed in public spaces. I interviewed people who prepared care packages containing teddy bears and hand cream that were delivered to the Can- adian Red Cross, in an effort to highlight the International Red Cross Committee’s refusal to aid the hostages. The only thing we didn’t do, as a publi- cation, was view the 45-minute video of the horrors of the attack, filmed by Hamas terrorists themselves, that the Israeli consulate in Toronto showed to Canadian reporters. Both Ellin and I declined—we had no doubts about the gruesome details and the veracity of the reports and we didn’t think our readers did either. Writing about the victims of Hamas and a Canadian-Israeli soldier who was killed in battle was tragic, but the parallel story of protests and violence against Jews and Jewish institutions in Canada has proven more challenging in some ways. The word unprecedented is used so often in reference to antisemitism that it has lost much of its meaning. But in truth, the eruption of antisemitism across the country is greater both in numbers of incidents and ferocity than we have ever seen.
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