Retired Canadian judge Harry LaForme stood at a podium in Tel Aviv and began his remarks with a familiar ritual, but one rarely heard in Israel: a land acknowledgement.

“We are gathered here today,” he said. “In the homeland of the Indigenous Jewish people.”

In Canada, land acknowledgments are a common way to begin public addresses — a formal recognition of the Indigenous peoples on whose traditional territories an event is taking place. But this time, LaForme was far from home, delivering his words not in Ontario, but as part of the keynote address at Tel Aviv University’s Annual Democracy Forum in May, hosted by the Irwin Cotler Institute.

For LaForme, a member of the Anishinaabe Nation and the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, and a self-described “Indigenous Zionist,” the connection was instinctive: “I don’t know of anyone who can claim indigeneity more than the Jewish people in Israel,” he said.

The jurist was on his first visit to Israel, a trip he described as “a dream come true.”

“We learned all about this impossible country,” he said. “Our love for it grew.”

As the first Indigenous judge appointed to an appellate court in Canada, LaForme’s life and legal career have been shaped by “the shadow of settler colonialism,” which he says contributed to the deep kinship that he feels to Jewish people and their “ancestral homeland.”

The notion of an “Indigenous Zionist,” let alone a First Nations justice, finding deep common cause with Jewish Israelis, may seem to some counterintuitive or even provocative, particularly in Canada, where parallels between Palestinians and Indigenous peoples have become a powerful talking point among pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel activists, many of whom frame Israel as a settler-colonial project.

Today, rhetoric surrounding Israel often morphs to adopt the dominant moral vocabulary of the society in which it appears. In the United States, it’s framed through the lens of systemic racism; in South Africa, apartheid; in Europe, Nazism.

In Canada, where colonialism and policies to erase First Nations’ cultures are widely acknowledged as foundational national sins, Israel is cast as a stand-in for colonial guilt, a way to absolve and redirect collective shame over Indigenous suffering.

For LaForme, whose culture, history and identity are often invoked as political talking points, it is deeply offensive.

“The [Jewish people’s] history is obvious — it goes back at least 4,000 years, and I don’t understand Canada’s reluctance to recognize this,” he said. “But people aren’t interested in history.”

The activists making arguments against this history, he noted, are rarely Indigenous themselves and see no irony in appropriating the grievances of First Nations to agitate for a foreign conflict.

“My people are too........

© The Times of Israel