In the wake of its Oscar win, No Other Land has been criticized for normalizing the Occupation and violating BDS guidelines. Yet, for a community that has fought so hard for the very right to exist, this film and the accompanying global discussion, opens up possibilities. The movie is important because it tells their story to the world.

I was recently arrested for social media posts critical of Israel and spent five days in jail to win the right to respond to Dahlia Kurtz, the Zionist influencer who pursued harassment charges against me. My experience fits in with a long history of Canadian police and intelligence services targeting critics of Israel—and includes close ties to their Israeli counterparts.

Donald Trump’s failed 2020 Abraham Accords led directly to the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel. This agreement, initially signed by Israel, the US, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, was ostensibly designed to “recognize the importance of maintaining and strengthening peace in the Middle East and around the world based on mutual understanding and coexistence.”

Peter Beinart’s new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, says the maudlin story we Jews tell ourselves of our virtue and heroic endurance inoculates us from seeing Israel’s agency in creating the resistance it faces: “We must now tell a new story to answer the horror that a Jewish country has perpetrated… We are not history’s permanent virtuous victims.”

Canadians deserve an Afghanistan Papers of their own. We deserve to know how the occupation functioned internally, what Canadian officials truly thought of events on the ground, and how much they knew about the torture and disappearance of Afghan prisoners. Getting this information, however, has proven more difficult that wringing truths out of Washington.

This Via Dolorosa leads to a global death spiral, especially as the climate crisis reconfigures the planet and international bodies, such as the United Nations and the International Criminal Court, become hollow appendages. We are sowing the Middle East with dragon’s teeth and, as in the ancient Greek myth, these teeth are rising from the soil as enraged warriors determined to destroy us.

When news broke over the weekend that President Biden just approved an $8 billion deal for shipping weapons to Israel, a nameless official vowed that “we will continue to provide the capabilities necessary for Israel’s defense.” Following reports last month concluding that Israeli actions in Gaza are genocide, Biden’s decision was a new low for his presidency.

For over a year now, the West has been tearing up the legal and institutional fabric on which the post-war international order and its increasingly threadbare claims to moral authority rest—in much the same way as Biden has overridden the US judicial system to grant his son a pardon and Trump promises to weaponize the same system to settle scores with his political enemies.

The Canadian establishment doggedly enables Israel and finds it advantageous for supporters of the Palestinian struggle to be contained. However, the lobby’s role in equating Jewish identity with Zionism and labelling opposition to this colonialist ideology as antisemitic is a potent factor that we should not underestimate.

Like our Palestinian allies in this struggle, we refuse to be patronized by Canadian policymakers. We refuse to be told that we are making a mountain out of a molehill. And we refuse to be told that we lack understanding by politicians who are in fact contradicting themselves. Our demands are simple and we will not stop pressing for them until they are realized.