This Week in Canada: This Is What We Get for Recognizing Palestine

Welcome back to This Week in Canada, where our sanctions reach all the way to Israel, what a Jewish journalist saw on Yom Kippur gets him in trouble, and more. Let’s jump right in!

At the United Nations last week, prime minister Mark Carney announced $100 million in aid for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, including $20 million for peace and security efforts. Canada has contributed more than $600 million since October 2023, while sanctioning two Israeli cabinet ministers last year for allegedly offering “political cover” to perpetrators of settler violence.

In case you still have any doubts about where Canada stands, let me tell you about Regavim, an NGO in Israel. Regavim was one of seven targets of Canadian sanctions in June, accused of “directly or indirectly facilitating, supporting, providing funding for, or contributing to the use of violence by Israeli extremist settlers against Palestinian civilians or their property,” according to the government.

Meir Deutsch is the director general of Regavim. He described Regavim as essentially a legal and policy organization. “We are more of a think tank,” he told me. “We work mostly with members of Parliament, we work with the media, we work by researching and filing court cases.”