The Toronto District School Board controversially embraced “anti-Palestinian racism” policies in 2024, a move that Jewish activists say puts the country’s largest school board on a collision course with its own antisemitism policy — and offers a case study of a broader, divisive discussion unfolding across Canada.
At a time when tensions are growing in Canada over the Gaza war, and against a backdrop of record-breaking antisemitism in Toronto public schools, it has sparked a debate about the degree to which advocating for Palestinians crosses into hate speech and justifies violence against Israel, or the extent to which support for Israel and accusations of antisemitism are targeting Palestinians.
“Jewish children are being victimized in our schools at unprecedented rates, and the TDSB response has been to actively work towards the exclusion of Jewish identity in schools,” TDSB parent Aaron Kucharczuk told National Post. Kucharczuk is part of a growing coalition of community groups worried about the TDSB’s support for a term they say advocates removing guardrails protecting Jewish students.
The most popular definition of anti-Palestinian racism (APR) — created by the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association (ACLA) in 2022 — defines the term as “a form of anti-Arab racism that silences, excludes, erases, stereotypes or dehumanizes Palestinians.” Examples of such discrimination include failing to acknowledge Palestinians as an indigenous group to the region and “defaming” activists with accusations of antisemitism or being “a terrorist threat/sympathizer.”
The neighbouring Peel District School Board has used the ACLA’s precise definition, as have the Thames Valley District School Board and the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board, according to documents shared with the Post.
While the debate is one over politics in the Middle East and one of domestic and school board politics, it’s also a conflict of definitions.
Drafters of APR and its leading advocates explicitly oppose the district’s existing definition of antisemitism, created by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) and adopted by the board in 2018. That definition includes Holocaust inversion (comparing Jews or Israelis to Nazis), accusing Jews of dual loyalty or parroting traditional antisemitic tropes about control of media, government or finance.
Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME), a leading proponent of anti-Palestinian racism policies, denounced the IHRA definition of antisemitism as “one of the most significant mechanisms of APR today” in December 2023.
The ACLA and its leadership have also repeatedly taken aim at the antisemitism definition. In March 2022, the organization’s founder, Dania Majid, headlined a panel titled “Resisting IHRA.” One month later, in its landmark report defining the term, the ACLA accused IHRA of conflating “criticisms of Israel as antisemitic” and said “false charges of antisemitism both prioritizes Jewish suffering in the discussion and debases Palestinian narratives.” Two months later, Majid spoke on another panel, “How the IHRA Harm Us,” arguing it constitutes “weaponized antisemitism.”
Majid told listeners during the June 2022 panel that APR “is not the Palestinian version of IHRA, you know, we’re not looking for this to be weaponized like IHRA,” arguing that the intent of the antisemitism definition “is to silence us and to shield Israel from criticism.”
Deborah Lyons, the Liberal government’s Special Envoy Combatting Antisemitism, said that attempts to dismantle IHRA at a time of skyrocketing antisemitism are deeply alarming, given the exceptional level of harassment Jews have experienced since the October 7 attacks.
Moving forward with this definition will … threaten the rights of Jewish Canadians to express their history, faith, and identity openly
“Claims that Jews are overreacting to or politicizing the anti-Jewish hatred could come from a lack of understanding of the definition of antisemitism itself,” Lyons told the Post in a written statement. “It is needed now, more than ever, given that Canadian Jews — who make up only one per cent of the population — are the target of 70 per cent of all reported religiously motivated hate crimes.”
To successfully combat antisemitism, the special envoy said, Canadians must first understand what it is. Lyons insists the IHRA definition remains “an extremely valuable tool in that effort,” embraced by more than three dozen countries — including the federal government in 2019 — and provinces such as Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia.
In late October, Lyons published an IHRA handbook with a detailed list of illustrative examples deemed antisemitic. Its release prompted the federal New Democratic Party to issue a statement denouncing it, citing the opposition of activists, including Independent Jewish Voices Canada (IJV), an offshoot of a British anti-Zionist organization founded in 2007.
However, the group has courted controversy: IJV Canada’s leadership has denied Hamas sexually assaulted women during its invasion of Israel and has connections to Samidoun, an anti-Israel group.
“IJV is a fringe group that provides a fig leaf used to defend Samidoun against accusations of antisemitism and of justifying Hamas atrocities,” Gerald Steinberg, president of NGO Monitor, a Jerusalem-based research institute, told the Post by email.
Steinberg said IJV co-sponsored a demonstration in April featuring Samidoun leader Charlotte Kates, where she called Hamas fighters the “beautiful, brave and heroic resistance of the Palestinian people, which did not begin on October 7, which has continued for over 75 years, which has continued over 120 years.”
Samidoun was designated a terror organization by Canada in October.
In December, digital sleuths revealed IJV’s federal incorporation paperwork listed CJPME as its mailing address.
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Toronto educators were apparently unaware of this central tension when the board first began discussing APR in late 2021 during an earlier round of violence between Israel and Hamas. Then-education director Colleen Russell-Rawlins sought to reassure Jewish and Palestinian community members, telling the latter at a board meeting, “I recognize for many, you do not yet feel safe in acknowledging your identity and commit to learning to eliminating anti-Palestinian racism.”
The board slowly moved the ball forward over the coming years, holding a two-day professional seminar for educators on the topic in February 2022. A March 2023 update to the board’s anti-racism strategy explained that they were developing a “curriculum resource” for Grades 3-12 on the subject.
The process continued following the October 7 attacks as TDSB sought to balance the concerns of Jewish and Muslim community members, even as surging antisemitism in Toronto, and allegedly within the board itself, became a political faultline.
In June, citing growing interest among “community voices,” TDSB trustees voted to enshrine APR within its broader anti-discrimination strategy. The district is now seeking guidance from the provincial Ministry of Education and the Ontario College of Teachers on how best to incorporate the term.
At the meeting, TDSB leaders heard from a number of speakers, including several IJV leaders and ACLA founding director Ameena Sultan, who noted she has three children in the district.
“Since October of last year, our family has watched in horror as children in Gaza who look like our children are displaced, starved, maimed, orphaned and killed,” Sultan said during her delegation, condemning the TDSB for its alleged silence. “But worse, (it) has contributed to a climate where our grieving and traumatized families are dehumanized and experiences erased.”
Sultan shared stories exemplifying the alleged demonization of Palestinian voices, including the Simon Wiesenthal Center conducting anti-racism and antisemitism training and opposition at her son’s public school from including a morning announcement about the “Nakba,” referring to the expulsion or flight of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1948 following five Arab nations invading Israel seeking its destruction.
Despite the years-long acknowledgment of APR, the Toronto board still contends that no official definition exists. “It’s important to note that while trustees voted to create a plan to address anti-Palestinian racism, no definition has been created and/or approved,” school board spokesman Ryan Bird told the Post.
The board did not address whether APR is in tension with TDSB’s antisemitism definition. “As the plan to address anti-Palestinian racism is still in development, we are not able to speculate on what it will include,” Bird said.
However, these precise fears were echoed by Jewish groups in November when Canada’s special representative combatting Islamophobia suggested the federal government might adopt the term. B’nai Brith Canada argued that adopting a definition of anti-Palestinian racism would directly “undermine Canada’s commitment” to the IHRA antisemitism definition.
“Moving forward with this definition will … threaten the rights of Jewish Canadians to express their history, faith, and identity openly,” the group said in a statement.
In December, a report released by the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights in the House of Commons by Liberal chair Lena Diab recommended the federal government “formally recognize discrimination towards Palestinians as a distinct group” and specifically cited the ACLA’s definition.
Lacking a definition makes gauging the level of anti-Palestinian racism at the TDSB difficult. A freedom-of-information request shared with the Post from a concerned parent in the board showed no reported incidents of APR between September 2023 and July 2024. Bird explained that was a consequence of TDSB’s “operations portal” lacking the selection given the undefined term.
However, TDSB told the Toronto Star in October that it “has seen a rise in antisemitism, Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism.” When asked how it can have no definition of APR yet report incidents to the press, Bird responded, “Anecdotally, staff have heard an increasing number of reports of anti-Palestinian racism.”
What cases they heard were not disclosed to the Post when asked in a follow-up request to share details of such incidents. A request for comment to Toronto Palestinian Families, another local group supporting the definition, to provide examples of APR went unanswered.
Majid, responding on behalf of herself, Sultan and the ACLA, told the Post by email that issues of anti-Palestinian racism in the district “have become public and covered in the media” without referring to any specific incident. A review of news reports about the subject yielded few results, with most recent coverage mentioning the definition but providing no concrete examples of in-school harassment.
“There are other issues that have not been made public because people fear reprisals if they report,” Majid added. “Students and educators describe incidents of being doxed, smeared, disciplined or cancelled over expression related to Palestine.”
The TDSB, meanwhile, has seen a spike in antisemitism, which represents 15 per cent of all recorded racist incidents, though Jews account for just three per cent of students.
The tense school years since October 7 have found high schoolers giving Nazi salutes and threatening Jewish peers because of the conflict. In February, a TDSB bathroom was graffitied with a swastika, “Hitler was right” and “#KillTheJews.” Two months later, a “community walk” was held to publicly support a young Israeli boy bullied by classmates because of his nationality.
An update provided by TDSB in February covering September to December 2023 gave statistical teeth to these stories. Antisemitic incidents have jumped 50 per cent compared with the same period in 2022. Moreover, those numbers reflect a relative increase. Reviewing the data in absolute terms – 25 antisemitic incidents during the 2022 reporting period versus 69 a year later – reveals antisemitic harassment has tripled.
Many cases of anti-Palestinian racism flagged by proponents appear outside of classrooms. They include, for example, the ban on Sara Jama, then an Ontario New Democrat, wearing her keffiyeh within Queen’s Park.
On Oct. 8, 2023, Premier Doug Ford condemned demonstrations celebrating the October 7 Hamas attack as “hate rallies.” Leading APR activists denounced Ford’s statement as a textbook example of bigotry showcasing the “widespread demonization of pro-Palestine demonstrations.”
The TDSB adopted IHRA in 2018 and has effectively ignored it
Another instance of anti-Palestinian racism highlighted by the ACLA is the case of Javier Davila, a Toronto school board equity consultant placed on leave in 2021 after sharing materials with fellow teachers, which included links to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine’s (PFLP) website and resources about Leila Khaled, a terrorist known for pioneering airplane hijackings.
The PFLP is designated by Canadian authorities as a terrorist organization.
Another link Davila shared included a statement that Palestinians have resisted violence for a century “by any means necessary: general strikes, demonstrations, armed struggle, and martyrdom operations (called ‘suicide bombing’ by Zionists).”
“He shared resources on Palestinian human rights with TDSB educators to help students understand the events taking place in Palestine at the time,” is how the ACLA rendered the controversy, making no reference to the controversial links.
“The problem with the concept is that it incorrectly applies the concept of racism to conduct which is not racist and does not constitute any breach of human rights,” said Richard Marceau, general counsel for the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA). Marceau affirmed the right of Palestinians to live “free from discrimination and harassment under human rights law” and demanded Canadians “unequivocally condemn” any discrimination or harassment targeting the Palestinian community.
The National Post is deemed by CJPME activists to be among the “major Canadian purveyors of APR,” notably its reporting on incoming Human Rights Commission head Birju Dattani revealing he lectured alongside an Islamic fundamentalist who advocated for the re-establishment of an Islamic Caliphate, or his argument that terrorism is “a rational and well-calculated strategy … pursued with surprisingly high success rates.” Investigating Dattani’s past, IJV noted, “smacks of anti-Palestinian racism.”
Other stories deemed discriminatory include the Post’s investigation of Hassan Husseini, a union leader who compared Hamas fighters to the “Warsaw Ghetto Uprising,” a revolt by Jewish prisoners against Nazi Germany, and tweeted on Oct. 8, “It is called liberation of stolen land, stupid!!!”
Majid did not respond to questions on whether she or the ACLA wished to repeal the IHRA working definition of antisemitism.
Andria Spindel, executive director of the Canadian Antisemitism Education Foundation, said demolishing the TDSB’s existing antisemitism definition would expose Jewish students to more hate. Spindel called on the board to live up to its prior commitments at a time when doing so is urgently needed.
“The TDSB adopted IHRA in 2018 and has effectively ignored it. Implementation requires education of all responsible bodies – educators and administrators, then monitoring, and reporting and consequences for bad behaviour,” Spindel told National Post in an email.
“Tragically, our educational system has been politicized and truth doesn’t prevail.”
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