Welcome back to This Week in Canada, where discussion about Zionism and indigenous self-determination became a debate about Canada’s future, the “new world order” arrives in a different part of the world, and Justin Trudeau goes on boyfriend duty at the World Cup. Let’s get to it!
It sounded like an extremely wonky academic event. The discussion was titled “Antizionist Colonization of Indigenous Movements—and Our Response.” Its speakers’ goal was to challenge a narrative that has increasingly taken hold in Canada since October 7, 2023: Israel is a colonial project, so indigenous groups should identify with the Palestinian cause.
This intellectual framework dominates much of academia and activism. Settler colonialism, identity politics, the division of society into the oppressors and the oppressed, and related ideas are used to cast Israel as a colonial enterprise and Jews as privileged settlers. While many Jews in Canada have become deeply skeptical of this view, it is just as deeply rooted throughout Canada.
Last week’s event at the University of Ottawa was organized by members of the city’s Jewish community and featured Harry LaForme, Canada’s first indigenous appeals court judge, and New Zealand historian Sheree Trotter, who is Māori. “People are forced into categories of colonizer and colonized, and the actual histories are often much more complicated than that,” Trotter told me. “It’s become a lens through which everything is interpreted.”
LaForme approached the subject through the vantage point of indigenous experience. He laid out what he described as the defining characteristics of colonization: language suppression, religious imposition, population displacement, settler colonization, economic exploitation, legal hierarchies favoring the colonizer, and cultural erasure. “We have experienced all that,” the retired judge told the audience. “In fact, Israel has experienced that. The Jews of Israel have experienced that.”
