When criticism becomes hate, who draws the line
By conflating anti-Zionism with anti-semitism, Canada becomes a dangerous place for both Jews and Palestinians.

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On September 24, Public Safety Canada published the National Commitments to Combat Antisemitism, a summer progress report which explicitly and officially recognizes anti-Zionism as an expression of anti-semitism, as defined by the Canadian Handbook on the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). 

Although IHRA definitions cannot be legally binding nor can they criminalize free speech, according to the report, the Canadian government states that this update is necessary to address the modern manifestations of anti-semitic discrimination, which apparently includes any and all criticism of the Israeli administration as Zionist. 

Canada wants to fight antisemitism—and it should. According to a research report released by Jewish human rights organization B’Nai Brith Canada, from 2024 to 2025, there was a 9.3 per cent increase of reported anti-semitic incidents. Canada needs to take antisemitism seriously; Jewish Canadians have faced harassment, threats, and attacks, including in schools, places of worship, and universities. Jewish students should not have to accept hostility toward their identity as the price of participating in campus life.

But the summary report released by Public Safety Canada not only fails to address anti-semitic, anti-Palestinian, and anti-Muslim discrimination—by blurring the line between Jewish identity and Zionism, it only makes the fight against hate even harder. A Jewish student on our campus or community should not have to answer for the Israeli government. A Palestinian student should not have to prove they do not hate Jewish people before condemning it. 

Both statements should not be controversial. Increasingly, they do not feel that way.

But Canada is having this conversation at the same time that Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank are experiencing what the International Criminal Court (ICC) referred to as “crimes against humanity and war crimes.” Following an investigation in 2024, the ICC has also issued arrest warrants for Hamas leaders and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But beyond this, Israel’s war crimes continue to be documented by Palestinian journalists from within Gaza, who face displacement and death for simply doing their job. 

That makes one distinction especially important. Judaism is not Zionism. Jewish people are not the Israeli government. And opposition to Zionism is not hatred of Jewish people. Zionism is a political movement with a complex, violent history. Like any political ideology, people can support it, question it, or reject it entirely. Jewish people do all three.

Therefore, Public Safety Canada’s report is utterly insensitive towards the Jewish and Palestinian communities. It is a definitional change that serves not the people, but those with a vested interest in amplifying confusion and hate—even as Jewish people and Palestinians face real threat on our streets and the hands of a genocidal government abroad. 

At the University of Toronto (U of T), Independent Jewish Voices (IJV) has participated in Palestinian solidarity activism and openly criticized Israeli policies. In March 2025, IJV U of T hosted a panel discussion titled Refusal then and now: Refusing complicity, resisting oppression, and reframing solidarity, involving two young Israelis—Tal Mitnick and Einat Gerlitz—who had been imprisoned after refusing to serve in the Israeli military.

Mitnick and Gerlitz shared their experiences: their very existence and moral position affirming the fact that Jewish and Zionist identities are not the same. That is what becomes lost when antisemitism and anti-Zionism are treated as interchangeable, even if this interchangeability is not legally binding. Who is to say it won’t be in the future? 

There are, of course, cases where “Zionist” is simply used as a more socially acceptable replacement for “Jewish.” An antisemitic conspiracy theory does not stop being antisemitic because one word is changed. Holding a Jewish student responsible for Israel because they are Jewish is not activism. Neither is threatening Jewish people, vandalizing Jewish institutions, or using centuries-old stereotypes under the cover of criticizing Israel.

That is antisemitism, and calling it political criticism does not make it less so. The problem is what happens on the other side of that boundary. Can a student say that they fundamentally oppose Zionism? Can they condemn the Israeli government? Can they argue that their university should cut ties with Israeli institutions? Can they protest Israel’s actions in Gaza without having their position treated as evidence of prejudice?

At U of T, students have already been asking these questions.

The 2024 Palestine solidarity encampment called on the university to disclose its investments, divest from assets protesters had linked to Israel, and cut ties with Israeli academic institutions. At the University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM), students later walked out of classes and marched through campus in solidarity with Palestinians.

These were not comfortable protests; political protests rarely are.

Jewish students have also described feeling unsafe and argued that some rhetoric surrounding campus demonstrations crossed from criticism of Israel into antisemitism. Those experiences should not be dismissed. But neither should Palestinian advocacy become suspect simply because it challenges Zionism.

U of T confronted this problem directly in 2025 when it drafted guidance addressing antisemitism and anti-Israeli discrimination. The university made an important point: replacing “Jewish” with “Zionist” does not make discriminatory conduct acceptable. IJV U of T, however, raised concerns that the guidance could blur Jewish identity, Israeli nationality, and Zionism. The disagreement exposes how difficult the boundary becomes once institutions are responsible for enforcing it.

And this is where freedom of expression enters the conversation.

The threat is not necessarily that a student criticizing Israel will suddenly be arrested. It can be much quieter than that: a student deciding not to attend a protest; an organizer reconsidering the wording on a poster. 

Somewhere in all our commotion about definitions, ideologies, and acceptable speech are Palestinians themselves. People have watched families in Gaza lose their homes, parents bury their children, children lose their parents, and entire neighbourhoods disappear. Palestinians should not have to become a political argument before their suffering is allowed to matter. Grief and rage over one’s community being murdered does not need an ideological qualification.

Yet, conversations about Palestine are repeatedly redirected towards a test: “do you condemn Hamas?” A Palestinian student grieving should not have to pass a political purity test before saying that Palestinian lives—that their lives—matter.

There is something surreal about witnessing what human-rights organizations have described as genocide and apartheid through a screen. We watch families torn apart, parents carrying their children, neighbourhoods turned to rubble, and people displaced again and again, all while sitting safely in our bedrooms, classrooms, and homes. The distance almost makes the helplessness worse. You refresh your phone, watch another family lose everything, put it down, and realize there is almost nothing you can personally do to stop it.

For many students, protesting, speaking, writing, and demanding action from the institutions and corporations in our lives are some of the few things that do not feel completely helpless. So, when criticism of Israel or Zionism is too easily folded into accusations of antisemitism, the consequences are not abstract—they make people hesitate before speaking about suffering they are watching unfold in real time. Condemning that suffering is not hatred of Jewish people. Sometimes, it is simply the most human response to witnessing it.

One should not have to defend Hamas to condemn Israel’s conduct in Gaza. Those are separate questions, and collapsing them makes Palestinian people answer for a militant Palestinian movement, in much the same way that Jewish people should never be made to answer for the Israeli government.

No student should have to begin by proving whose violence they condemn before they are allowed to mourn.

So let students protest. Let them question Zionism. Let them condemn Israel. Let Jewish students challenge antisemitism without being made representatives of a state. Let disagreement be uncomfortable, angry, and difficult without immediately turning political criticism into hatred. Because the moment we begin protecting governments from criticism in the name of protecting people from discrimination, we are confused who actually needs protecting.

People do. Genocidal governments do not.

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