OPINION

Why Canada’s support for Palestine is just for show

Canada’s public gestures on Palestine signal progress, but the realities beneath them tell a different story, warns Zahra Khozema.


Zahra Khozema
16 Dec, 2025
The New Arab 



People attend the City of Toronto's Palestinian flag raising ceremony commemorating the 37th anniversary of the Palestinian Declaration of Independence at Nathan Philips Square on November 17, 2025 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. [GETTY]


Last month, Canada’s largest city raised the Palestinian flag over City Hall for the first time. This gesture, that was years in the making, only took place after a last-minute court bid by a pro-Israel group was dismissed by a judge. Videos on social media showed hundreds of people wrapped in keffiyehs gathering in the courtyard in the cold, watching a moment that felt historic and strangely fragile.

News reports chose clips of activists framing the moment as a step toward recognition and human rights, but the political choreography around it told a different story, one shaped by hesitation, legal hoops, and a municipal government unwilling to defend its own decision with confidence.

The high had barely settled when police began raiding the homes of anti-war organisers who helped expose the data behind Canada’s ongoing weapons transfers. Their alleged crime was nonviolent protest at an arms fair in London, Ontario, an event hosted by Elbit, Lockheed Martin, and other weapons manufacturers supplying Israel’s assault on Gaza.

Within a week of raising a Palestinian flag, Canada was criminalising the very people demanding that the practices match the symbolism.

Continued complicity

It's a perfect snapshot of Canada’s contradictions. On the surface, we get insincere gestures of flag raisings, statements about peace, and diplomatic nods toward “two states.” But behind the curtain, the machinery of complicity keeps running. Canada continues sending weapons to Israel. We continue allowing unprecedented amounts of charitable dollars to flow to organisations that support illegal settlements. And we continue punishing people who speak out against Israel’s actions in Gaza.

Consider the weapons. A report released this summer revealed that Canada quietly sent hundreds of shipments of bullets, military equipment, aircraft components, and communication devices to Israel over the past two years. Despite repeated government claims that exports stopped in January 2024, shipping records revealed a steady flow of military goods since October 2023.

A new report that came out more recently showed how this happens. By routing goods through the United States, Canadian companies avoid direct export controls and the political scrutiny that would accompany openly arming an occupying force. The result is simple: Canadian-made components are still reaching Israel’s military, still strengthening its capacity to commit war crimes.

On some bleak level, inaction in the face of genocide is its own kind of violence. But funnelling weapons into that violence, adding fuel to the fire, demands a different level of moral failure. Canada fits squarely into the second category.

Civil society groups, including Amnesty International, Oxfam, and Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East, have urged Canada to impose an arms embargo. Instead, the government denies the claims and maintains the fiction that its hands are clean.

Sustaining settlements

The same pattern appears in the charitable sector. Canada sends most of its foreign charitable dollars to Israeli organisations, including groups connected to illegal settlements, despite Israel and Canada having nearly identical GDP per capita.

A 2023 access-to-information release obtained by Just Peace Advocates showed that over $10.5 billion in tax-subsidised charitable funds went abroad in the past five years. At an approximate 30% tax rate, Canadian taxpayers effectively subsidised more than $3 billion of this.

In an interview for Ricochet Media's podcast, There is a List, researcher Miles Howe pointed out that in the context of occupation, no charitable dollar sent to Israel can be considered neutral. These funds help sustain institutions directly tied to settlement infrastructure, the same system Canada claims to oppose.

Meanwhile, Muslim charitable organisations in Canada face severe scrutiny and broad suspicion. Howe’s message drilled home the fact that one side receives structural support while the other is treated as a threat.

Silencing

That threat narrative is reinforced through surveillance. While reporting on how pro-Israel organisations target people who speak up for Palestinian rights, this institutional silencing has deepened. Anonymous websites doxxing protesters. Students reporting professors discussing Palestine. Newsrooms issuing public statements distancing themselves from journalists who publish basic facts.

The tactic is always the same: make people afraid to speak, then pretend the silence reflects consensus.


When a student encampment organiser was doxxed last year, her university responded with policy jargon rather than protection. When an Ottawa doctor who served in Gaza posted about Palestine on social media, he was suspended after colleagues complained. When a journalist at a major broadcaster interviewed a man wearing a keffiyeh, editors deleted the story. These aren’t isolated incidents. They are examples of institutional pressure designed to ensure that Canada’s national conversation remains safely symbolic, never material.

Yet public opinion has shifted far beyond the inactions institutions. When the conflict began, only 18% of Canadians expressed greater sympathy for Palestinians. That number has now doubled, while sympathy for Israel has declined to 19%.

Furthermore, three-in-five Canadians now support the recognition of a Palestinian state. This is the outcome of two years of people across the country marching and demanding accountability.

Despite this, Canada’s political and institutional leaders offer only symbolic gestures. This is not the behaviour of a country ready to confront its role in the genocide unfolding in Gaza. It is the behaviour of a country performing concern while maintaining practices that enable the violence.

And the impact of that performance is real. It narrows what Canadians are allowed to understand. It restricts the language journalists, academics, and students feel safe using. It creates a climate where naming apartheid or occupation is considered controversial, but materially supporting them is bureaucratically ordinary. It allows the federal government to claim neutrality while contributing to the very conditions it claims to lament.

Canada wants credit for acknowledging Palestine, for raising a flag, for acknowledging a state most of the world already does. These gestures are presented as evidence that Canada is evolving, stepping closer to the right side of history. But it requires no material change, no risk, no accountability.

A country serious about human rights would pause arms exports, regulate its charitable sector, protect workers and students speaking out, and listen to the communities most harmed by its policies. It would let its practices reflect its performances.

Until that happens, the gestures will remain what they are: props on a stage, displayed for an audience that has long stopped applauding.

Zahra Khozema is a Pakistani Canadian journalist based in Toronto.