Canada has long supported Israel’s violence and apartheid, but targeting the domestic anti-war movement is one of the more insidious aspects of this country’s complicity in Palestinian dispossession.

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.

Over the past year and a half Canadian authorities have responded to the popular uprising against Israel’s genocide in Gaza by escalating their assault on critics of the apartheid state. As I’ve written elsewhere, dozens of activists and anti-war advocates have been jailed or had their residences raided. In the most egregious abuse of state authority, Ottawa listed the grassroots Vancouver-based Samidoun Palestinian Political Prisoners Network a terrorist organization.

NEW: "In today’s Canada, offending Zionist influencers is apparently enough to land you behind bars."

It's time to #FreeYvesEngler and restore free speech. https://t.co/pwpMnig8sj

— Canadian Dimension (@CDN_Dimension) February 23, 2025

While the suppression has escalated in parallel with the upsurge in activism, that has been going on for a long time. In recent decades the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS) has demonized and targeted critics of Israel. In one of the rare cases that was publicized, at least seven friends of community organizer and musician Stefan Christoff were visited by CSIS agents over an eight-month period in 2009 and 2010. They arrived unannounced early in the morning and asked detailed and sometimes menacing questions about the Montréal activist’s work with Artists Against Apartheid and his trips to the Middle East alongside the International Solidarity Movement.

As Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) engaged in negotiations during the 1990s, many Palestinian Canadians accused CSIS of intimidating opponents of the Oslo Accords. The agency allegedly offered cash in exchange for information on those opposed to the PLO’s compromise. A 1994 article published in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs explained, “CSIS is carrying out a political agenda by targeting only those who are aligned with non-Fatah groups of the PLO—those who oppose the accord signed by the PLO. More than 20 PFLP [Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine] supporters have come forward alleging that they have been interrogated by CSIS.”

Through the Five Eyes intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States, Canadian agencies have maintained close ties to their Israeli counterparts. The Communications Security Establishment (CSE) has long gathered intelligence on Palestinians for Israel. For many years many the CSE, notes former officer Mike Frost in his 1994 book, Spyworld: How CSE Spies on Canadians and the World, “Yasser Arafat’s name, for instance, was on every [CSE] key word list.” According to files released by Edward Snowden a decade ago, CSE spied on Israel’s enemies and shared the intelligence with Unit 8200, a specialized signals intelligence group within the Israel Defense Forces. “Palestinians” was a “specific intelligence topic” of a joint Canadian, US and UK project shared with the .

As a number of books on Canada’s intelligence agencies note, Canadian-Israeli intelligence relations date back decades. Canada’s ambassador to Israel in the mid-1990s, Norman Spector, described “very close cooperation” between the Canadian and Israeli spy agencies and admitted there was a CSIS operative working for him at the Canadian embassy in Tel Aviv.

This relationship is also active inside Canada. In his 1990 book, Official Secrets: The Story Behind the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, Richard Cléroux noted, “Mossad agents are located in every major [Canadian] city, working closely with CSIS, to protect El Al aircraft and airline installations and watching PLO political activities, especially those of Arab and Iranian students. Israelis are CSIS’s prime source of information on a number of suspected terrorists and spies.” CSIS also passes information to Mossad.

As reported in Washington Report in 1998, Spector said Mossad’s relationship to CSIS “goes beyond information sharing. There are joint operations.” Although he did not elaborate, it is public knowledge that Mossad agents have used Canadian passports to carry out numerous foreign assassinations. “A member of an Israeli hit squad that mistakenly killed a Moroccan waiter in Norway in 1973 had posed as a Canadian,” reported Canadian Jewish News. In 1974 some 50 blank Canadian passports disappeared from a vault at the Canadian embassy in Vienna. The next year a Mossad team in Cyprus was seized “after a hotel bombing in which a Palestinian guerrilla leader was killed. The passport used by one of the Israeli hitmen had a number that revealed it to be from among the 50 stolen in Vienna.”

Until 1997, the repeated use of Canadian cover by Israeli agents received little attention. That changed when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded to a Hamas offer for a 30-year truce (relayed by Jordan’s King Hussein) by trying to kill Khalid Meshal, then chairman of Hamas’s political bureau. The Israeli agents, who were captured after dropping poison in Meshal’s ear, entered Jordan on Canadian passports.

Spector claimed CSIS and Mossad agents met days before the attempt to assassinate Meshal. He said Ottawa wanted to cover up Israel’s use of fake Canadian passports. “Canadian authorities knew, in general, that passports were being used by Mossad,” Spector noted. “It was known to people at the embassy and they essentially turned a blind eye to it.” According to Spector, CSIS supported Mossad missions in exchange for intelligence. “Israeli operational agents have been given to understand that the use of Canadian passports is the quid pro quo [for information on Arab immigrants].”

While Ottawa officially protested the Meshal incident, it apparently didn’t affect the Mossad-CSIS relationship. A Canadian working for Mossad, Jonathan Ross, explained in his 2008 book, The Volunteer: A Canadian’s Secret Life in the Mossad, that CSIS “was sympathetic, and it was business as usual with them despite the diplomatic flap. During a liaison exchange by our [Mossad] counterterrorism officers to Canada soon after the affair broke, many CSIS members mentioned that their only regret in the whole affair was that we didn’t succeed [in assassinating Meshal].”

Clearly, targeting critics of Israel is but one way Canada assists that country’s multiple crimes. Canadians of conscience must press their government to end all support of this rogue state.

Yves Engler has been dubbed “one of the most important voices on the Canadian Left today” (Briarpatch), “in the mould of I.F. Stone” (Globe and Mail), and “part of that rare but growing group of social critics unafraid to confront Canada’s self-satisfied myths” (Quill & Quire). He has published nine books.