Zionists see Israel’s fight in Gaza as an existential battle for Jewish existence. And if you don’t support this fight, you’re against the Jews. That makes you irredeemable and not a Jew, even if you are legally Jewish by Israel’s maternal bloodline obsessed rabbinical court. That’s what I mean when I say Zionists want to act in the name of all Jews.

The great Palestinian poet and author Mahmoud Darwish once wrote “to be human is to love, to create, and to resist.” Darwish’s thought carries an important message for Canada: foster a culture of love and humanism, and strive to build a just and peaceful world by opposing all manifestations of structural and physical violence.

The savagery of the air strikes and indiscriminate attacks, the cutting off of food, water and medicine, the genocidal rhetoric of the Israeli government, make this a war whose sole objective is revenge. This will not be good for Israel or the Palestinians. It will fuel a conflagration throughout the Middle East. This war is not over. It has not even begun.

Over these last weeks, as Israel’s military machine has mounted an industrialized killing operation against hundreds of thousands of trapped people in Gaza, I have echoed the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” I don’t agree for a moment that this is an expression of antisemitic hatred or an incitement to genocide.

I stand before Guernica, the familiar canvas of dismembered bodies, dead babies and soldiers; a weeping mother, a shrieking horse; once remembered for its chronicle of carnage, warnings of mass murder to come, enough to move the dial from tragedy to statistic, now forgotten. Silence has settled upon the world, snuffed out by apologists for the sacred State’s need for human sacrifice.

What does “From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free” actually mean? And when it comes to political slogans, should impact matter more than intent? As Carleton University professor Mira Sucharov explains, the controversy the chant generates suggests there is work to be done in better communicating with and understanding one another.

As those of us in Toronto watch the devastation occurring in Gaza, where Israel’s bombing campaign this month is estimated to have killed over 8,000 Palestinians, including over 3,000 children, and displaced 1.4 million residents, we are also witnessing Mayor Olivia Chow and other politicians condemning Palestinian activism here as antisemitic.

A call for an immediate ceasefire is a call to stop this massacre. Nothing more, nothing less. Several states, non-governmental organizations, and international legal experts support this call, and global civil society is mobilizing to urge all governments to demand a ceasefire. So, we ask: where is Canada?

The global ruling class will counter the destabilizing forces of inequality, curtailment of civil liberties, collapsing infrastructure, failing health systems and increasing shortages caused by an accelerating climate crisis, by branding all who resist as “human animals.” As Chris Hedges writes, this new world order began in Gaza. It ends at home.

My greatest wish—as a student and a human being—is to live in a world where all peoples, regardless of race, creed, or faith, can live in peace and dignity. A world where children can grow up free from the horrors of war. We must fight, when all seems dim, so that the world of our dreams can be born. We must fight on, for hope.