In October 2023, Hamas launched the deadliest assault on Jews since the Holocaust, slaughtering 1,200 civilians, raping women, torching families alive, and abducting over 250 people into Gaza — some of whom are still being held hostage.
Among the dead and injured were Canadian citizens. And yet, in recent weeks, the Canadian government has responded not with moral clarity but with legal persecution, targeting the very people who rose in defense of their homeland.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), with the backing of Canada’s Department of Justice, has now opened a “structural investigation” — a designation typically reserved for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity — into Israeli-Canadian reservists who served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) during the war in Gaza. They are targeting IDF lone soldiers.
Let’s be clear: this is not neutrality. It’s appeasement disguised as impartiality. And it sends a chilling message — not just to Israel, but to every democracy on the front lines of a fight against terrorism.
While the RCMP insists that its investigation covers alleged offenses by “both sides,” the emphasis is unmistakably on Israeli soldiers. These are young men and women, many of whom volunteered to defend the only democracy in the Middle East after seeing their friends and families slaughtered by Hamas death squads. For their service, they now face the threat of international arrest and criminal prosecution by a government that calls itself their own.
A first for Western democracy
This is unprecedented. No other Western democracy is criminally investigating its citizens for fighting alongside an ally, let alone one defending itself from a genocidal terror organization. The move is not only insulting; it’s dangerous.
Canada’s investigation will embolden Hamas and its patrons. It legitimizes their propaganda war, which depends on the false equivalency between terrorism and counterterrorism.
It paints Hamas, which openly declares its goal to annihilate Israel and routinely uses civilians as human shields, as somehow morally symmetrical to the IDF, which issues warnings before strikes, operates under a strict code of conduct, and loses soldiers in efforts to protect noncombatants.
Worse, it rewards terror. Hamas murdered Canadian citizens on October 7. And now Canada’s response is to pursue the very people trying to dismantle the machine responsible. This is justice turned upside down — a policy that says to terrorists: attack democracies, draw them into conflict, and then watch as their allies prosecute them for defending themselves.
The real-world consequences are already visible. Young Israeli-Canadians, who grew up in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver, now fear traveling abroad.
They risk arrest in third countries based on politically motivated charges — charges driven by the same NGOs and legal activists who routinely ignore Hamas’s war crimes while obsessively documenting every move of a Western military.
Shurat HaDin, an Israeli legal NGO, is stepping in to offer defense and advocacy for these reservists. But they shouldn’t have to. Canada should defend its citizens from lawfare, not facilitate it.
And make no mistake: this is lawfare — the weaponization of international law to delegitimize democracies. We’ve seen it before at the International Criminal Court, and we’re seeing it again now.
The “neutrality” claimed by Ottawa is a mirage. In practice, it isolates Israel while exonerating the architects of October 7. We expect this wildly biased conduct from a corrupt regime like South Africa, which has been bought by Iran, not from Ottawa.
What should Canada be doing instead?
First, it should publicly affirm the right of democracies to defend themselves against terrorism. That doesn’t mean ignoring civilian harm — it means contextualizing it. No military is perfect, but the IDF’s efforts to avoid harm to civilians are unmatched in the region. Contrast that with Hamas, which glorifies martyrdom, targets kindergartens, and uses hospitals as command centers.
Second, Canada should be standing up for its citizens, not targeting them. Dual nationals who serve in the IDF should be treated no differently than Canadians who join the U.S. military, or those who fought in Europe during World War II. To criminalize their service is to criminalize the defense of democracy itself.
Third, Canada should hold Hamas accountable. That means sanctions, pressure on Qatar and Iran, and full-throated support for Israel’s effort to dismantle the terror infrastructure in Gaza — not moral hedging or hollow statements about “both sides.”
Canadians claim it’s a standard-bearer of international justice. But justice is not the same as false equivalency. Pretending that Israel and Hamas are morally interchangeable is not just inaccurate — it’s immoral. It undermines the international order, betrays Western allies, and sends a message that terrorism pays.
If Canada wants to be a force for peace, it must begin by recognizing the difference between those who commit atrocities and those who try to stop them. October 7 made that difference painfully clear.
It’s not too late for Ottawa to reverse course. But until it does, Canadians should know: their government’s “neutrality” isn’t neutral. It’s a reward for Islamic terror — and a betrayal of the values it falsely claims to uphold.
Nitsana Darshan-Leitner is the president of the Shurat HaDin Law Center and the best-selling co-author of “Harpoon”.