Are Palestinian students and staff safe in the TDSB?
Both families and educators deserve straight answers.
Correction: The original version of this piece claimed my great-grandfather arrived in Mandatory Palestine in 1946, and left in 1952. These were the dates cited in his memoirs, however additional information shows the correct dates are 1948 and 1953. The piece has been updated accordingly.
On February 12th, the Toronto District School Board held a meeting to vote on the receipt of a report to inform the board’s antisemitism policy. A policy to fight antisemitism is not just a good thing, it is a necessary thing; one Jewish girls school in North York was shot at by criminals three separate times in 2024.
But the report was fundamentally flawed, and the meeting quickly became contentious, as Jewish and Palestinian families alike contested the definition of anti-Zionism as fundamentally antisemitic in nature.
To put it bluntly, I disagree with this. While anti-Zionism is perhaps not the mainstream view among Jews, it is certainly a valid one. And I’m the direct descendant of a clear example.
My great-grandfather Abraham, who I get my middle name from, associated with Israel’s communists, although he did not formally join Maki. Avram came to Mandatory Palestine with his wife and two children in 1948 shortly before the founding of Israel, able to leave the Soviet Union due to his loyal service as an officer on the Eastern Front.
He had never supported ethnic partition, and while he was not especially close to the Palestinians, he opposed the violence against them and desired a single binational state. After several years of labour, he found a way to move his family to Canada in 1953, so that his children, including my grandmother, would not be drafted into military service.
My critique of the State of Israel is clear and simple: millions of Palestinians, whose families have resided there for generations, live under violent military occupation, disenfranchised from electoral representation.
In the combined Israel-Palestine region, consisting of Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, the year 2022 showed a population of about 7.5 million Jews and 7.5 million Palestinians, a roughly fifty/fifty split.
Yet only a third of those Palestinians have Israeli citizenship, and thus the right to elect representatives for the Knesset. The distinction between ‘48 Palestinians, whose families managed to avoid expulsion during the Nakba, and ‘67 Palestinians, whose families were forcibly displaced and are denied citizenship, is fundamentally arbitrary.
And yet this arbitrary line is an essential firewall, to maintain the electoral control of the current demographic. There may be elections, and there may be representatives and courts, but this cannot be called a democratic system.
Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson understood this, when he led the Commonwealth in 1964 to force British Prime Minister Harold Wilson to require that Rhodesia, governed by a white minority of only 5%, transition to majority rule before receiving independence.
Instead, Rhodesia unilaterally declared independence, and became a global pariah, facing fifteen years of violent struggle before the black majority of Zimbabwe would successfully restore control over their home in 1980.
You are not a democracy if voting rights and citizenship are restricted by race, or by sex, or by any other inherent characteristic. And while you may find it controversial, this means that Canada did not become a democracy until a century after confederation.
So in many regards, I could be called an “anti-Zionist”, because I believe in a single binational state with equal representation for all the people who live there, and who are going to keep living there. This is not in spite of my Jewish identity, which I have proudly written about, it is because of my Jewishness.
It is the very morals of that Jewish upbringing which have taught me to stand up to injustice, even when the perpetrator is a member of my own community. Bigotry must never be tolerated, and we cannot allow a false pretense of anti-bigotry to paradoxically be used as a shield for bigotry itself.
This policy would explicitly silence criticism of Israeli policy, claiming that “the use of Settler-Colonial narratives about the State of Israel and the Jewish people as colonisers [sic] leads to significant harm”.
But this is a distortion of history. The founding fathers of the Zionist movement explicitly defined their mission as a colonial one. Ze’ev Jabotinsky, founder of the Revisionist Zionist ideology which spawned the Irgun terrorist group and then Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, said the following regarding Zionism in 1923:
Except for those who were born blind, they realised long ago that it is utterly impossible to obtain the voluntary consent of the Palestine Arabs for converting "Palestine" from an Arab country into a country with a Jewish majority…
…The native populations, civilised or uncivilised, have always stubbornly resisted the colonists, irrespective of whether they were civilised or savage…
…Colonisation [sic] can have only one aim, and Palestine Arabs cannot accept this aim. It lies in the very nature of things, and in this particular regard nature cannot be changed.
The largest bank in Israel, Bank Leumi, was founded in 1898 by the Second Zionist Congress as the Jewish Colonial Trust, only renamed in 1950 after ethnic partition. The Jewish Colonisation Association acquired large tracts of land for Jewish-exclusive settlement for nearly six decades, before transferring deed to the Jewish National Fund in 1957.
And Theodore Herzl, who founded the World Zionist Organization, negotiated directly with British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain in aborted attempts to give Jews a colonial charter in Egypt and Uganda. On one occasion, he even drafted a letter to the Cecil Rhodes, founder of Rhodesia, claiming they both shared a commonality in their support for colonization.
Zionism was explicitly broadcast as a colonial movement, in partnership with British sponsors. To bar teachers and students from discussing this is to place restrictions on the numerous world politics and history courses that the TDSB offers, preventing them from discussing basic facts, including analysis of Prime Minister Pearson’s involvement in the Suez Crisis.
TDSB employee Jemila Pirbhai voiced her frustration at last week’s meeting with the trustees:
“Why is it that even though the Palestinian genocide has been confirmed by reputable international human rights organizations, there is still a deep-rooted fear in me to voice any connection between Israel and settler colonialism?”
And she is not wrong; I have written repeatedly about the material evidence of genocidal acts committed by Israeli forces. Indeed, Donald Trump has recently proposed to forcibly and permanently remove Gaza’s entire population of roughly two million people, stating he will never allow them to return.
What is this, if not ethnic cleansing? Trump and Netanyahu discuss placing millions of Palestinians on a death march, and I am told that to draw comparisons is more offensive than the actual crime we are witnessing?
When students discuss Art Spiegelman’s Holocaust novel Maus, will they be banned from discussing his view of the Israeli campaign as “genocideish”? Will every Jew who sees ourselves in the Palestinians be treated as a category traitor?
Opposing sides of the debate at the trustee meeting selectively quoted two different statistics from the same December 2024 survey by the New Israel Fund of Canada.
The Pro-Palestine delegates mentioned that, according to the survey, 51% of Canadian Jews do not identify as Zionists. The Pro-Israel delegates, on the other hand, point out that the same survey claims 94% of Canadian Jews support Israel’s right to exist.
Clearly, Zionism is viewed by Jews in Canada as something more particular than “Israel existing”, a specific political ideology. There is ambiguity in how to read these results, but what can be concluded is that the Jewish identity and the Zionist identity are not one and the same.
Multiple parents stated their opposition to this policy. Jewish parent Ben Losman disowned the idea that criticism of Israel or its citizens is inherently antisemitic, while Susan Ferguson claimed that the policy is “not only contradictory, it is also likely to silence and exclude the perspectives of Jewish students.”
And yet, stoking further controversy, Trustee Shelley Laskin spoke at the end of the meeting to attack the Pro-Palestine delegates:
True harm was spoken tonight. There was antisemitism. There was Jew-hatred, this is not acceptable…no form of hate within deputations is acceptable, and I feel compelled to say that this has caused great harm to many of us who have listened for hours.
The following day, the report would be accepted…but then immediately deferred, as a new motion was passed to consolidate all anti-hate strategies into one comprehensive plan, rather than the original plan which would have seen policies for Queer, Black, Asian, Indigenous, and Palestinian youth released on a delay of several years following this one.
I reached out to Trustee Laskin the afternoon of February 18th, to ask four questions regarding this issue:
Do you believe that anti-Palestinian racism exists within the TDSB? Do you believe that the TDSB has a responsibility to protect Palestinian students and faculty from racist attacks?
Will criticism of Israeli settlements beyond the Green Line, an enterprise which Canada deems to violate international law, constitute antisemitism in your interpretation of the policy you wish to adopt?
You have taken concrete steps to ensure that Jewish children feel safe in TDSB schools. What concrete actions are you taking to make Palestinian children feel safe in TDSB schools?
What concrete actions are you taking to foster the growth of positive relationships between Jewish and Palestinian children in TDSB schools?
At 10h04 Eastern Time the following morning, Laskin replied with the following short statement:
Thanks Jake. All TDSB students and staff deserve to be in a public school system where all human rights are protected, and I have, and will continue to support that.
Regards,
Shelley
The first question is vaguely addressed, in an “all lives matter” fashion; I wonder if she would accept an answer to a question about antisemitism that does not mention Jews.
The second question regarding policy interpretation is pointedly ignored, which is concerning as it was the core argument of substance raised by the delegates she criticized.
And on the final two questions, where I ask what concrete steps she is taking to make Palestinian children feel safe, and to foster good relationships between our children and theirs?
Crickets.
I do not believe that the TDSB is taking anti-Palestinian racism seriously. Indeed, I am concerned that the TDSB is targeting Palestinian students, rather than working to support them.
And as part of doing so, they are pressuring teachers to suppress history and facts in their classrooms. Do you believe that a teacher afraid to discuss facts can properly teach our children?
I don’t. And I don’t think you do, either.