We often hear the refrain that Israeli politics is very complicated. It’s usually used as an excuse to stop conversation dead. But given the current turmoil among Israel’s Jewish population, it’s imperative to try to step back and simplify. The crisis now roiling the country is a dramatic moment in an ongoing and epoch-making demographic and political shift.

What do Faisal Bhaba, Desmond Cole, Linda Sarsour, Idris Elbakri and Fadi Ennab and countless others have in common? They are racialized people who have been special targets of pro-Israel lobby organizations in Canada because they spoke out on Palestinian rights. And these examples suggest how the defend-Israel-at-all-costs industry has a racism and Islamophobia problem.

It is likely that antisemitism is rising everywhere commensurate with other forms of white supremacism, like anti-Black racism and Islamophobia. While any hate activity on campus is disturbing, are Jews (and Jewish students) more subject to bigotry than those in other groups, like Blacks and Muslims? This is not an easy question to answer.

This is all about a brutal regime attempting to nullify any attempt by its subject population to resist its military occupation and push back against the country’s institutionalized discrimination. Besides the day-to-day humiliations and violent suppression of resistance, one of the most effective weapons in Israel’s arsenal is the application of the label “terrorist” to as many forms of resistance as possible.

The federal government has just introduced an initiative to make “condoning, denying or downplaying the Holocaust” a criminal offence. This is a very bad idea. Denying that the Holocaust ever happened is despicable. But if it is meant to bring hatred upon Jews, that is covered in the already-existing Criminal Code provisions. And non-criminal sanctions exist in all human rights laws.

Proponents of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance insists that its working definition of antisemitism is aspirational, meant only to rally opposition to hatred of Jews, and is not legally binding. But the fallout from an event hosted in Winnipeg several years ago is emblematic of how the definition represents a direct threat to freedom of expression about Israel and Palestine.

If we want to identify the real masters of cancel culture, we need to follow the modus operandi of the institutional pro-Israel lobby and its adherents, like the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs or B’nai Brith Canada. They can teach us a thing or two about how to kill free speech, and how cancel culture works to stop an utterance before it is even spoken.