Ottawa is blurring the line between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism
text_fields
Public Safety Minister, Gary Anandasangaree and Justice Minister and Attorney General Sean Fraser released the federal government’s first progress report on its National Commitments to Combat Anti-Semitism, on Sept. 24, 2026. Buried in the report is a significant assertion: “Antisemitism, which includes anti-Zionism, is not always obvious.” Elsewhere, it calls for institutions to recognize “contemporary manifestations of antisemitism, including anti-Zionism.”
The government is right to take antisemitism seriously. Jewish Canadians should not face threats, harassment or violence because they are Jewish. Anti-Zionism can also become a vehicle for antisemitism. “Zionist” can be used as a substitute for “Jew.” Jews can be blamed collectively for Israel’s actions, and old anti-Semitic conspiracies can be repackaged as commentary about Israel.
But saying anti-Zionism can be antisemitic is different from saying antisemitism includes anti-Zionism.
For many Jews, Zionism is closely connected to Jewish history, identity and self-determination. It is also a political and nationalist movement involving sovereignty, territory and competing claims to the same land. Jews themselves have disagreed about Zionism since its emergence. For Palestinians, it is inseparable from their history of displacement, dispossession and the Nakba. Most importantly, opposition to Zionism, by itself, does not establish hostility toward Jews.
The wording matters because this is not simply an academic debate. Public Safety Canada says the report was developed together with governments, law enforcement and community stakeholders and discusses training for police, prosecutors, educators and public servants. It says the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition and Canadian handbook will serve as a foundation for federal efforts to combat antisemitism. Although the government also stresses that IHRA defintion is not legally binding and does not criminalize expression, definitions can have consequences when institutions use them to identify and respond to speech and conduct.
The contrast with a major report released in Washington, DC four days later is striking. On Sept. 28, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights released the results of a bipartisan investigation into anti-Semitism on U.S. university campuses. The commission unanimously concluded that campus anti-Semitism is a serious civil-rights problem, documenting accounts of harassment, threats, vandalism and exclusion.
But the commission also drew a line Ottawa is blurring. It distinguished discrimination based on Jewish ancestry or national origin from opposition to Israel or Zionism and stressed the difficulty of separating protected political expression from discriminatory conduct. Even offensive anti-Israel or anti-Zionist rhetoric, it recognized, can remain protected speech.
Kenneth Stern, who led the drafting of the predecessor text that eventually became the IHRA definition, has warned about precisely this problem. In material recently submitted to the Canadian Senate Standing Committee on Human Rights, he criticized the binary proposition that “anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism,” as well as its mirror image, “Zionism is racism.” He also raised concerns about governments treating Zionism as an essential part of Judaism.
Stern argues that using IHRA in this way encourages institutions to take a contested phrase, put it on the “bad side of a line” and condemn whoever uses it. Anti-Semitism, he says, is too complicated to address by consulting a glossary and parsing politically contested words.
Courts in several countries have encountered versions of the same problem. In Students for Justice in Palestine v. Abbott, a federal court in Texas found that pro-Palestinian students were likely to succeed in showing that university policies incorporating IHRA imposed unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination and chilled protected speech. The court did not invalidate IHRA. Its concern was the connection between particular political viewpoints identified in the definition and university disciplinary rules. Stern himself pointed the Canadian Senate committee to Abbott and other American litigation involving IHRA and political speech.
In Britain, former University of Bristol professor David Miller successfully argued that his anti-Zionism constituted a philosophical belief protected under the Equality Act. That finding survived the university’s appeal in 2026. The Miller v. University of Bristol ruling did not endorse Miller’s politics or protect everything said in the name of anti-Zionism. It recognized that protecting the right to hold a political belief is not the same as endorsing it.
The Supreme Court of New South Wales in Australia confronted a related question in State of New South Wales v. Farhat. Justice Desmond Fagan rejected the proposition that hostility toward Israel could simply be equated with hostility toward Jews. His treatment of IHRA has been criticized, especially by Jewish organizations, but the underlying question remains: when does hostility toward a state or political movement establish hostility toward a people?
The same disagreement exists among scholars who study anti-Semitism. The Jerusalem Declaration on Anti-Semitism and the Nexus Document recognize that discourse about Israel and Zionism can become anti-Semitic without treating opposition to Zionism as inherently anti-Semitic. A peer-reviewed comparison by Jonah Bogle published in Nordisk Judaistik/Scandinavian Jewish Studies found substantial agreement between IHRA, the Jerusalem Declaration and Nexus on conventional forms of anti-Semitism. The harder disagreements arise when Israel and Zionism enter the picture.
Itamar Mann and Lihi Yona, law professors at the University of Haifa, raise another concern in their UCLA Law Review article, “Defending Jews From the Definition of Anti-Semitism.” They argue that definitions tying Jewish identity too closely to Zionism can marginalize anti-Zionist and non-Zionist Jewish traditions. They do not deny that anti-Zionism can be anti-Semitic. Their formulation is more careful: the fact that anti-Zionism is potentially anti-Semitic “is not proof in itself that it is necessarily so.”
There is also a problem with government defining Jewish identity in this way. One familiar form of anti-Semitism is treating Jews as collectively responsible for Israel or assuming that Jews necessarily identify with the Israeli state. Government should be careful not to reinforce that association by treating opposition to Zionism as hostility toward Jews. Stern himself has raised the related concern about governments being asked to treat Zionism as an essential part of Judaism.
The debate has already reached Canadian universities. Justice Mary Lou Benotto’s recent external review of Toronto Metropolitan University recommended IHRA as an educational and policy framework and recognized that discrimination against Jews can manifest through opposition to Zionism. Yet she declined to recommend formal adoption of the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association’s definition of anti-Palestinian racism, partly because it incorporates what she regarded as contested historical and political propositions.
There is an asymmetry there. If universities should hesitate before incorporating contested propositions about the Nakba, Palestinian indigeneity and historical Palestine into institutional policy, the same caution should apply when the contested subject is Zionism.
Canadian law already provides tools for expression that crosses legal boundaries. The Criminal Code prohibits specified forms of hate propaganda, and human-rights legislation addresses discrimination and harassment. In Saskatchewan (Human Rights Commission) v. Whatcott, the Supreme Court of Canada distinguished expression exposing a protected group to the extreme emotions associated with “detestation” and “vilification” from expression that is merely offensive or repugnant.
None of this gives anti-Zionism a free pass. If a synagogue is attacked, a Jewish student is threatened, Jews are blamed collectively for Israel’s actions, or “Zionist” is being used as a substitute for “Jew,” it should be called anti-Semitism. The same applies when familiar anti-Semitic stereotypes and conspiracies are repackaged as criticism of Israel.
But that conclusion requires looking at what was said, who was targeted, the circumstances and the evidence. An accusation of anti-Semitism should not be treated as proof of anti-Semitism, particularly where protected political expression is at stake. It should not follow simply because someone opposes Zionism.
Public Safety Canada could avoid much of the problem by changing a few words. Instead of saying anti-Semitism “includes anti-Zionism,” it could say that anti-Zionism can manifest as anti-Semitism.
That would allow Canada to confront anti-Jewish hatred without having the government decide that opposition to a contested political ideology is itself a form of bigotry.
(Courtesy: Washington Report on Middle East Affairs)
[Faisal Kutty is a lawyer and professor of law at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles, an associate professor of law emeritus at Valparaiso University, and an affiliate faculty member at Rutgers University’s Center for Security, Race and Rights. He is a contributing writer for the Toronto Star and Newsweek and a contributing editor at the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs]