An Honest Terrorist List Would Include Israel Military
The Canadian government needs to put the Israeli military on its terrorist list. And no Canadian should assist that organization in any way.
Over the past year the IDF has committed a holocaust in Gaza. The IDF has destroyed most of the occupied coastal strip’s buildings, water sources and agricultural land. According to the UN Satellite Centre (UNOSAT), 66% of buildings in Gaza have been damaged and “68% of the permanent crop fields in the Gaza Strip exhibited a significant decline in health and density in September 2024.”
The Israeli military has killed over 50,000 Palestinians directly (42,000 named and nearly 20,000 unidentified or disappeared). According to Oxfam, more women and children have been killed in Gaza than during the same period than any conflict over the past two decades. If you include excess mortality the full Gaza death toll is likely 200,000.
At the same time the Israeli military has brutalized Palestinians in the West Bank. The IDF has killed more than 700 there over the past year while enforcing an illegal occupation. They’ve also detained 10,000 in the West Bank.
Unsatisfied with slaughtering Palestinians, the IDF has killed nearly 2,000 Lebanese since last week. They’ve also injured thousands more and displaced almost a quarter of the country.
Last week the IDF bombed the port of Hodeidah in Yemen as they did in July. In April the Israeli military bombed Iran and Iran’s diplomatic compound in Syria. The IDF has been bombing Syria weekly for nearly a decade. During that time, they’ve blown-up hundreds of targets and people in Syria.
While its recent actions are extreme, IDF violence is not new. Over the decades the Israeli military has also bombed Jordan, Iraq, Sudan, Tunisia and Egypt (and other countries’ properties). The Israeli military has launched many invasions of its neighbours. Nearly seventy years ago the IDF invaded Egypt in a bid to reverse decolonization and weaken progressive Arab nationalism. As Zeev Maoz notes in Defending The Holy Land: A Critical Analysis of Israel’s Security & Foreign Policy the IDF has engaged in the “threat, display, or limited use of force with its neighbors” every year since the country’s founding. The IDF was the outgrowth of the Haganah and Irgun paramilitary forces, which attacked the British and ethnically cleansed the Palestinians.
No organization on Canada’s terrorist list is responsible for nearly as much death and destruction as the IDF. It is responsible for dozens of times more deaths than any listed Palestinian or Lebanese organization. One of the groups listed, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, is a sizeable secular leftist political organization that has engaged in little armed struggle for decades. The Toronto-based International Relief Fund for the Afflicted and Needy (IRFAN) is also on the list even though no one claims it has ever committed violence (the former registered charity supported orphans and a hospital in Gaza through official Hamas controlled channels).
While it is true that Canada’s terrorist list overwhelmingly consists of non-state actors, in June the Trudeau government listed part of Iran’s military, the 100,000 strong Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, as a terrorist entity. Its smaller Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Qods Force was listed in 2012. Again, the IDF is responsible for far more death and destruction than either. It has also flouted international law for the majority of its existence.
If a terrorism list is to have any legitimacy, it should be about saving lives and infrastructure that human societies need rather than pro-US geopolitics. As a country that claims to believe in an international rules-based order, Canada should add the Israeli military to its terrorism list.
If it does not, the stench of hypocrisy will grow stronger and stronger.
Please take a minute to ask the Canadian government to list the IDF as a terrorist organization.
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