Yves Engler raises his fist after being released from jail, February 24, 2025. Photo by Alex Tyrrell/X.

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

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........

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