B’nai Brith Canada, a pro-Israel lobby group, has invented “a national crisis” of antisemitism by defining opposition to Zionism and criticism of Israel’s conduct as Judeophobia in order to press Canadian governments at the federal, provincial, and municipal levels to implement legal measures to criminalize pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist political positions.

30 April 2026

By Stephen Gowans

On April 27 B’nai Brith Canada issued its Annual Audit of Antisemitic Incidents, arguing that “Canada is in the throes of a national crisis of antisemitism.” The report documented 6,800 incidents of antisemitism” in 2025, the “highest volume recorded” since the group began its tracking in 1982.

What is B’nai Brith, how does it define antisemitic incidents, and what actions does it want governments to take to address the crisis it has identified?

B’nai Brith is a pro-Israel lobby group which “works tirelessly to support and defend Israel” and whose mission is to “stand unequivocally with the State of Israel,” according to its website. The group does not represent Canadian Jews as a whole. Not all Canadian Jews are Zionists or supporters of Israel. Instead, the outfit represents Israel and Jews in Canada who stand firmly with the Jewish state.

Significantly, B’nai Brith describes its support for Israel as “unequivocal.” It backs Israel, right or wrong. In 1988, a US warship, the USS Vincennes, shot down an Iranian civilian airliner, killing 290 people. Then US president George H.W. Bush refused to apologize for the incident, saying that “I will never apologize for America.” B’nai Brith is the George W. Bush of Israel. It will never apologize for what it calls “the only Jewish state in the world.”

The group’s commitment to defending Israel is evidenced in its definition of antisemitism. The organization uses the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism, prepared by an outfit that is as ardently pro-Israel as the B’nai Brith.  The IHRA definition has been widely criticized for 1) not being a definition at all, but a list of examples of what the group calls antisemitism, with no explanation of the principles than undergird the examples; and 2) for including anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel in three of its 11 examples.

The IHRA cites the following as an example of Jew hatred: “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination.” While anti-Zionists do not deny Jews the right to establish a state per se, they do deny Jews (and anyone else for that matter) the right to establish a national state on the country of another people. Israel’s existence depends on the non-existence of Palestine. In practice, Jewish self-determination is equivalent to the denial of Palestinian self-determination.

A careful and precise interpretation of the IHRA example above would exclude anti-Zionism as an example of antisemitism were an anti-Zionist willing to accept the creation of a Jewish state on a genuine terra nullius (unoccupied, unclaimed land). Indeed, I would argue that virtually all anti-Zionists fall into this category, since their opposition to Jewish nationalism lies not in Jews creating a state, but in the cancelation of one people’s right of self-determination (the Palestinians’) to assert another’s (that of Jews).

However, it is clear from the B’nai Brith report that the organization has interpreted the IHRA example to mean that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. The report describes criticism of Zionism, (e.g., that “Zionism is analogous to “settler colonialism”) as “demonization of Jews who believe in the right of the Jewish people to practice self-determination in their ancestral homeland,” and that this criticism, or “demonization”, creates “a moral justification for attacks that target the Jewish community.”

I would make a few points in reply:

• Jews, to be sure, did have a state in Palestine in antiquity. But the Palestinians’ ancestral claim to the same land is equally strong. Indeed, it seems likely that today’s Palestinians are the descendants of Jews who lived in Palestine in antiquity, and were converted to Islam during the Muslim Expansion of the seventh century.

• Palestine was the ancestral homeland of many peoples. That Jews once had a state there does not negate the rights of other peoples who have also had a presence in the same territory. The Palestinians, significantly, have an unbroken, multi-millennial presence in the land.

• Criticism of Zionism does not create a moral justification for attacks that target the Jewish community. The categories Zionist and Jew are no more coterminous than are the categories Zionism and Judaism. There are more Christian Zionists in Canada than there are Jews, let alone Jewish Zionists. And not all Jews are Zionists; some are ardently anti-Zionist. Zionist and Jew are not the same. Criticism of Zionists is not equal to criticism of Jews. Likewise, criticism of Zionism is different from criticism of Judaism; one is a nationalist ideology, the other a religion.

It is likely that a majority of Jews in Canada support Israel and hold Zionist views. Based on this reality, B’nai Brith advances the sophistical argument that criticism of Zionism and Israel amounts to criticism of Jews (again, illegitimately conflating Jew and Zionist), and that, therefore, this criticism amounts to antisemitism. The argument is tantamount to claiming that anti-Nazism, at the height of the Nazi’s popularity, was an expression of hatred of Germans as a people. Only if one conflates Nazism with German ethnicity can this sleight of hand be pulled off.

Other indications that B’nai Brith defines anti-Zionism and pro-Palestinian positions as antisemitism:

1. The pro-Zionist organization objects to pro-Palestinian student clubs at Canadian universities celebrating Palestinian resistance, decrying armed Palestinian resistance as “terrorism.” As an organization that stands unequivocally with Israel, we can be sure that the B’nai Brith regards the Irgun and Stern Gang—Jewish insurgent groups which, from 1931 to 1948, practiced terrorism in Palestine—as groups that resisted British colonialism.  Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, and the British preferred to call them terrorists, even fascists. Of course, one can be a resistance fighter and use terrorist methods, as much as a state can be a state and practice terrorism, Israel being an emblematic case. The categories are not mutually exclusive.

• The pro-Israel group objects to the use of the terms “massacre” and “genocide” by Canadian journalists reporting on Israel’s conduct in Gaza and deplores the Canadian media’s “focus on civilian casualties and humanitarian imagery” along with the “presentation of casualty figures.” Moreover, it defines the following headlines as examples of anti-Israel media bias linked to antisemitism:

• “Israel killing journalists and getting away with it, say advocates.”
• “More than 400 dead in Gaza as Israel makes ‘extensive’ strikes ending ceasefire, standoff.”
• “Winnipeggers rally to condemn Israel’s attacks on Iran, humanitarian crisis in Gaza.”

The points above make clear that the B’nai Brith is little more than a pro-Israel public relations outfit that objects to any and all criticism of Israel, and seeks to neutralize opposition to the state it tirelessly defends and stands by unequivocally by smearing the state’s opponents as Jew haters.  In the organization’s view, pro-Palestinian, anti-Zionist, and Israel-critical positions are antisemitic by definition. Political positions are cast as expressions of irrational hatred. When it reports that there is a crisis of antisemitism in Canada, what the Israel lobby group really means is that there is a growing tide of opposition to Zionism, hostility to Israel’s conduct toward the Palestinians, and intolerance of Israel’s character as an ethno-supremacist, apartheid, state.

Name-calling critics of Israel and anti-Zionists as anti-Semites is fairly harmless.  But B’nai Brith has no intention of stopping at traducing Israel’s opposition. Its real intention is to pressure Canadian governments at all levels to criminalize pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist positions by portraying them as hate-speech.

The pro-Israel lobby group calls on the:

• Federal government to designate the Lebanese, Egyptian, and Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist organizations;

• Provincial and territorial governments to prosecute antisemitic hate crimes, which, given the organization’s broad definition of antisemitic hate, includes any expression of opposition to Jewish nationalist ideology and ethno-supremacism and all support for pro-Palestinian positions;

• Municipal authorities to ban “events that promote hatred”, by which it means pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist events, including Al Quds Day.

To understand how dishonest both the B’nai Brith and its report are, consider what a pro-Palestinian report would look like if it mimicked the pro-Israeli lobby group’s approach. It would define denial of a Palestinian right of self-determination on the Palestinians’ ancestral homeland as anti-Palestinian hatred. Denouncing Hamas as a terrorist organization; denying the Nakba as a genocide; disputing the stamp of Israel’s conduct in Gaza as genocidal; dismissing as false or exaggerated reports of torture and sexual assault in Israeli prisons; denouncing the October 7 attacks as acts of terrorism rather a campaign of national liberation; rejecting the reality of Israeli apartheid; all of these–in other words, adopting the B’nai Brith’s own political positions—would be defined as hate speech rather than political speech. The media would be censured for describing October 7 as a massacre and focusing on Jewish casualties, as well as for failing to place Palestinian atrocities within the appropriate context. Media “bias” would be blamed for an avalanche of anti-Palestinian hate incidents. Finally, the report would call on governments at all levels to criminalize political speech that is critical of the Palestinian cause.

Canadians might think of the B’nai Brith as a Jewish advocacy group that works to overcome antisemitism. In reality, it is a pro-Israel lobby group that uses antisemitism as a weapon to smear people and organizations that oppose its pro-Israel political positions. The outfit poses as a representative of all Jews in Canada, but is, on the contrary, only a champion of Israel and Zionists, not Jews and Judaism. Its self-avowed mission is to work “tirelessly to support and defend Israel”, which it does, in part, by attacking opponents of Israel as antisemites, using a definition of Jew-hatred that includes opposition to Israel and the nationalist ideology on which the state is founded.

There is no crisis of antisemitism in Canada. The “crisis” is a myth invented by the Zionist outfit to pressure Canadian governments, at all levels, to criminalize pro-Palestinian positions and anti-Zionist advocacy—that is political speech—as hate speech. B’nai Brith must be resisted, exposed for the pro-Israel lobby group it truly is, and contained as a menace to the right of political advocacy.