Israeli soldiers should not be talking to kids in Canadian schools
It happened in my own childhood, and I didn't like it.
Despite a so-called “ceasefire”, the Gaza Genocide continues. On an almost daily basis, Israeli soldiers continue to kill Palestinians directly, while also blocking the flow of aid workers and supplies, and attempting to remove Palestinians while preventing them from getting back in.
There is no question that Israel is perpetuating a genocide, both through direct military violence against individuals, and also through their transformation of Gaza into the world’s largest concentration camp, an open-air prison designed to kill Palestinians slowly if an Israeli soldier doesn’t get them quickly.
Truly, Israel has become a global pariah, with Israelis debating whether they should even mention where they’re from when they vacation. Surely, the Israeli soldiers who actively perform these crimes against humanity must be prime targets for this animosity?
So why are the people who murder Palestinian children, going into schools in Montréal to talk to our children?
On Thursday morning, French-language publication La Presse released a report by Thomas Emmanuel Côté and Thomas Dussault, detailing the activities of members of the Israeli military in private Jewish day schools in Montréal, for both younger students and also teenagers. The first prong of this report deals with visits from actual soldiers, many of whom recently participated in the Gaza Genocide according to their own social media posts.
The children at these schools were told by Israeli veterans that there is no genocide, and the famine we all witnessed with our own eyes was somehow not real. One was an alumnus visiting his sister’s class to talk about why he willingly moved to Israel to volunteer for the military. At one point, children were given VR headsets and put into a “simulation” of October 7th, through a program run by a group with the stated aim of restoring Israel’s public reputation.
The second prong of the La Presse report deals with the ShinShinim, a group of Israeli 18-year-olds who are permitted to delay their military draft for a year in order to go abroad and propagandize the virtues of military service. Sent to various places by the Jewish Agency for Israel, La Presse discovered that the ShinShinim were having students at these schools perform mock military drills, including training in hand-to-hand combat.
Needless to say, this is insane. Foreign nations should not be sending soldiers and recruiters into any Canadian schools to propagandize to our kids, and indeed, it appears to violate the ban on recruitment to foreign militaries under the Foreign Enlistment Act.
And the vast majority of politicians in Québec agree, with provincial Education Minister Sonia LeBel of the CAQ government saying she has launched an investigation into these schools, as even private schools must still maintain political neutrality with students, and cannot use public funding for non-educational activities.
They were joined in this perspective by Québec solidare, who used this incident to argue that private religious schools should not receive any public funds, and by the Parti Québécois, whom are neck-and-neck with the Quebec Liberals to take government away from the CAQ in the next election.
It is the Liberals, however, who broke from the rest of the Québec parties and sought to cool the flames, claiming we need “verifications” in regard to this story. Pro-Israel lobbying group CIJA and tax-deductible charity Federation CJA co-issued a joint statement casting aspersions over the La Presse report, claiming it was a “sensationalist dossier that resembles a witch hunt.”
And Federal Liberal MP Anthony Housefather, a noted advocate of Zionism in Canada, responded to the article by claiming he would work with CIJA and Federation CJA to have Jewish schools and camps protected, randomly asserting that these schools were now under a safety threat. There are powerful political forces that wish to brush away what we’ve seen reported.
But for all the doubts trying to be spread, I can confirm as a Canadian Jew that I have experienced very similar propaganda during my primary and middle school education, which I spent at a Zionist day school before my 13-year-old self got fed up and insisted on public school for secondary.
During that time, ShinShinim would come to our school, doing similar mock military drills—although we just had jumping jacks, not hand-to-hand sparring—and at the end of every year, they told us how excited they were to join the Israeli military.
We had Israeli soldiers that do their equivalent of USO shows come and perform a concert, hoping to create strong memories with positive emotions. And we were told in 2008 during that Gaza crisis that what we saw on TV when our parents turned on the 11-o-clock news wasn’t true, that none of those kids were dying or if they did, they somehow deserved it.
So rather than minimize the problem, I would actually say it’s rather understated, considering the same dynamics are repeating themselves nearly twenty years later, in a different province. There is indeed a systematic campaign to smother Canadian Jewish kids in Zionist propaganda, to convince us we should move to Israel and join the military and make ourselves complicit in colonialism and genocide.
And while I was smart enough as a kid not to fall for all of that horseshit, I’m worried about how many kids will fall for the emotional appeals, for the IDF Orchestra concerts and the Jerusalem Day parades and all the things designed to lure us in while we’re young.
We need to protect this kids from the foreign power trying to take advantage of them. And the only way to do that is to rip out their propaganda network, root and stem.
Mr Landau is absolutely correct. And anybody that thinks Mr. Housefeather’s judgement on this issue is reflective of some kind of evidence-based rationale is nuts. He is a Zionist. He was brainwashed as a kid exactly as he proposes should happen with Canada’s young Jewish kids.