Harry LaForme: I stood on my ancestral land and said what Carney would not

Anti-Zionism is a libel-driven hate movement that incites violence and targets Jews with the goal of wiping Israel off the map

On June 6, I stood before Toronto’s Jewish community on the treaty lands of my ancestors. Days earlier, Prime Minister Mark Carney had stood at Toronto’s Holy Blossom Temple and acknowledged a painful truth: Canada is failing its Jewish citizens. He recognized that antisemitism has reached levels unseen in generations. He acknowledged that Jewish Canadians are disproportionately targeted by hate. He acknowledged the fear felt by families whose schools, synagogues, businesses and communities have become targets. He named the statistics. He named the suffering. But he did not name the ideology driving it.

So, I will. I stand before you on the land of my ancestors to say what the prime minister should have said: “Anti-Zionism is a libel-driven hate movement that incites violence and the targeting, exclusion, and marginalization of Jews in the diaspora and has as its ultimate goal wiping Israel off the face of Mother Earth and the death of all beings within it.”

There. That is what should have been said, and now it has.

For Indigenous peoples, this moment feels painfully familiar. We know what happens when governments speak of reconciliation while avoiding uncomfortable truths. We know what happens when institutions choose carefully crafted language instead of moral courage.

Canada’s Jewish community does not need another expression of concern. It needs honesty. And honesty begins by confronting the lie at the centre of this moment: the claim that Israel is a colonial project and Zionism is a movement of oppression.

As an Anishinaabe man, a member of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, and someone who spent almost 25 years as a judge interpreting the laws of this country, let me be clear — Canada is a colonial country. Israel is not.

Indigenous peoples know colonialism because we lived it. Colonialism means language suppression. It means forced religious conversion. It means population displacement, foreign governance, economic exploitation, imposed legal hierarchies and cultural erasure. Canada’s Indigenous peoples experienced these things. The Jewish people experienced these things. They do not describe Israel.

For thousands of years, Jewish identity has been tied to the land of Israel through language, culture, law, religion, traditions and collective memory. The Jewish connection to Jerusalem did not begin in 1948. It survived despite conquest, exile, persecution and genocide.

Indigeneity is demonstrated through historical continuity: a distinct people with a connection to ancestral land, identity, language, culture, rituals, legal traditions and spiritual life. By that measure, Jews are Indigenous to Israel.

Zionism is not colonialism. Zionism is self-determination. The Indigenous people of Israel achieved what Indigenous peoples around the world have sought: self-governance in their ancestral homeland.