94% Problem: When ‘No Zionists’ Means ‘No Jews

Jew-hatred changes its vocabulary with the moral language of the age. The Nazi era racialized the Jew. Today, exclusionary antizionism  recast the Jew as the “Zionist.” Canada’s escalating data suggest that the distinction is becoming dangerously thin.

There is a mistake Jews have made repeatedly throughout history: believing that because the accusation against us has changed, the hatred itself has disappeared.

It has not disappeared. It has adapted.

Jew-hatred is among the world’s oldest persistent hatreds precisely because, as Dr. Naya Lekht explains, it possesses an extraordinary ability to present itself in the moral language of its time. The accusation changes. The mechanism survives.

In a religious society, the Jew was condemned as the enemy of the sacred.

In the racial nationalism of Nazi Europe, the Jew became the contaminating race.

And in an era whose highest moral vocabulary revolves around human rights, antiracism, decolonization and social justice, the Jewish collective is increasingly accused of embodying their opposites: racism, colonialism, apartheid and genocide.

This is the insight I take from the work of Dr. Naya Lekht, the Three-Era framework: Jew-hatred never introduces itself as hatred, it presents itself as the defense of something sacred. It becomes virtuous hatred.

That distinction matters enormously because the most dangerous hatred is the hatred its practitioners believe makes them good.

And Canada is providing us with a disturbing case study of what happens next.

Canada case comparison with Nazi Germany

Comparisons with Nazism must be made with precision.

Canada in 2026 is not yet a Nazi Germany. To equate the two societies would trivialize the Holocaust.

What deserves comparison is the mechanism by which a society transforms Jews from individuals into members of a collectively culpable category and then makes that category grounds for exclusion.

Consider first what the Nazis actually did.

The Nuremberg Laws did not simply ask whether someone practiced Judaism. Nazi racial classification reached into ancestry. Under the 1935 system, a person with three or four Jewish grandparents was generally classified as a Jew. A person with two Jewish grandparents was generally classified as a first-degree Mischling, while someone with one Jewish grandparent, what we might colloquially call “one-quarter Jewish,” was classified as a second-degree Mischling.

25% Jewish meant that it was sufficient for the Nazi state to classify a person according to Jewish ancestry, and the rights of Mischlinge were subsequently curtailed. The Nazis transformed ancestry into destiny. 

Even if a Jew converted to Christianity, was an atheist, or insisted that he/she felt entirely German, it did not matter as it could not change his grandparents and the hate was racially based. 

That mechanism — libel, exclusion, violence, and denial — is what is called the Cycle of Libels, and it is what deserves scrutiny when its target is renamed.

From Jewish race to Jewish peoplehood

Modern exclusionary antizionism does not usually say:

“Your grandparents are Jewish, therefore you are unwelcome.”

It says: “Zionists are unwelcome.”

At first glance the two statements look completely different — one racial, the other apparently political.

Canada presents us with 94% reality.  A peer-reviewed study by University of Toronto sociologist Robert Brym found that 94% of Canadian Jews surveyed support the existence of a Jewish state in Israel. Only 1% identify themselves as antizionists.

When 94% of Canadian Jews support the existence of a Jewish state, excluding ‘Zionists’ functions in practice as a proxy for excluding Jews. And, that is racist.

If Zionist means nothing more radical than someone who believes the Jewish people are entitled to national self-determination and that Israel should continue to exist rather than be eliminated, then declaring “Zionists are not welcome” establishes an exclusionary criterion encompassing almost the entire Canadian Jewish community.

This is proxy discrimination.

“No Jews allowed” becomes socially unacceptable.

“Zionists not welcome” can produce substantially overlapping results.

The criterion has changed: Then, Jewish ancestry. Now, Jewish peoplehood.

The Nazi racial test effectively asked: Who are your grandparents?

The contemporary exclusionary antizionist test instead becomes: Will you repudiate Jewish national self-determination?

Both tests establish a boundary between acceptable Jews  (“The Good Jew”) and unacceptable Jews.

That is why the phrase “We don’t hate Jews; we hate Zionists” deserves much greater scrutiny than it receives.

Canada is giving us the data

This is no longer an abstract philosophical argument.

Canada recorded 6,800 anti-Jewish incidents in 2025, according to B’nai Brith Canada’s Annual Audit, which is the highest number since the organization began its systematic audit in 1982. That is 18.6 incidents every day. It represents a 145.6% increase over 2022, the last full year before October 7.

Police statistics measure a narrower category but independently demonstrate the extraordinary disproportionality. Statistics Canada recorded 943 police-reported hate crimes targeting Jews in 2024, falling to 788 in 2025, even as B’nai Brith’s total climbed to a record 6,800. That divergence is not a contradiction; it is the denial stage in miniature. Statistics Canada itself estimates that only about one in five hate-motivated incidents is ever reported to police. Notably, Statistics Canada classifies all anti-Jewish hate crimes under ‘religion,’ the only category available to it, even though the animus this paper documents is overwhelmingly directed at Jewish peoplehood and nationhood, not religious practice. The label undercounts the phenomenon by mischaracterizing it. Jews were still the targets of roughly 70% of all police-reported “religion-motivated” hate crimes in both years. 

And Jews constitute less than 1% of Canada’s population by religion. The evidence compiled in our research therefore shows an extraordinary disparity between the size of Canada’s Jewish population and the volume of hate directed toward it.

But the national numbers tell us only that Jew-hatred is surging. They don’t tell us how it operates. For that we need to examine the Cycle of Libels.

Stage One: The libel becomes respectable

The first stage is demonization.

The Jew, or today the “Zionist,” must first be transformed from neighbour into moral contaminant. 

This is why language matters. Racist. Colonizer. Apartheid. Genocidal.

Criticizing an Israeli government is not inherently Jew-hatred. Advocating for Palestinian rights is not inherently Jew-hatred. But calling for the annihilation of Israel, or for the elimination of Jews as a people, is Jew-hatred. Applying obsessive scrutiny to one country, demanding standards not applied to others, and turning that double standard into collective blame against Jews is also Jew-hatred. Political criticism should never result in Jews being threatened, excluded, harassed, or held responsible for the actions of a foreign government, and yet increasingly, that is exactly what is happening. 

That distinction is essential.

The Cycle of Libels begins when accusations migrate from criticism of a state or government into collective attribution to Jews and “Zionists.”

The reasoning becomes: Israel is accused of X ⇒ Zionists support Israel ⇒ this Jew is a Zionist ⇒ therefore this Jew is implicated in X.

A Canadian Jewish medical student did not formulate Israeli military policy.

A Toronto Jewish lawyer does not command an IDF battalion.

A Jewish Grade 8 student in Ottawa is not a member of Israel’s cabinet.

Yet Canadian evidence increasingly shows Jews being made to answer for Israel.

The Ontario government’s K-12 study is particularly revealing. Of 781 antisemitic incidents reported by Jewish parents, 60% were antizionists, while 40% included classical Nazi references such as Hitler or Nazi salutes, but the Nazi references were as a result of antizionist propaganda. Nearly one in six incidents was initiated or approved by a teacher or involved a school-sanctioned activity.

That combination is significant.

Stage Two: demonization becomes exclusion

Once a population has been morally contaminated, excluding it becomes easier to justify. 

This is where Canada’s numbers become especially troubling. A report on Antisemitism in Ontario K-12 Schools by Robert Brym, University of Toronto, in 2025, among Jewish children affected by antisemitic incidents in Ontario schools, more than 27% were worried about losing non-Jewish friends or becoming socially isolated.

Many removed Jewish jewelry and clothing containing Hebrew so that classmates would not identify them as Jewish. And 16% of affected families moved their children to another school or were considering doing so.

Read that again. Jewish children in Canada are removing visible signs of Jewishness.

The phenomenon extends into medicine. Evidence submitted by the Jewish Medical Association of Ontario to the Senate reports that 64% of Ontario respondents experienced Jew-hatred in hospitals after October 7. Among Jewish medical students and residents, reported exposure to Jew-hatred rose from 28% before October 7 to 63% afterward. More than 94% of Jewish doctors surveyed nationally said Jew-hatred had affected the educational environment. Nearly one-third of Ontario Jewish medical professionals surveyed were considering leaving Canada.

Think about what that means. A country desperate for physicians has Jewish doctors contemplating emigration because they increasingly question whether they belong here.

Public-sector unions provide another warning. Twenty-seven Jewish OPSEU members filed individual human-rights complaints alleging that anti-Jewish and anti-Israel propaganda created an environment in which Jewish members were singled out and marginalized and their concerns downplayed or ignored.

Another 14 Jewish members of the Public Service Alliance of Canada filed complaints alleging that the union’s antizionist advocacy produced discrimination and harassment.

That is 41 individual human-rights complaints across two major Canadian unions. They remain allegations unless adjudicated, and should be described as such. But they are measurable evidence of Jewish workers saying that the Israel/Zionism boundary has migrated directly into Canadian workplaces.

CUPE, Canada’s largest union, saw a parallel action: more than 70 Jewish members initiated proceedings at the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal after union leadership publicly celebrated the October 7 attack, describing themselves as ‘isolated, unwelcome, scared, silenced, discriminated against, threatened and harassed’ by their own union’s response (Newsweek, Dec 2023).

This is the transition from stigmatization to exclusion.

Stage Three: exclusion becomes intimidation and violence

Stigma creates permission. Once a population has been demonized and excluded, intimidation becomes easier to excuse, and excusing it is only a short step from enabling it.

B’nai Brith documented only 10 incidents classified as violent during all of 2025. By July 15, 2026, it had already recorded 27 violent anti-Jewish incidents. Less than seven months into this year, Canada had reached 2.7 times the entire 2025 total. These incidents include shootings at the synagogues, Jewish bakeries, vandalizing Jewish businesses, burning down restaurants, and more.  

In August 2024, a coordinated bomb threat was emailed to more than 100 Jewish institutions across Canada, including physicians and hospitals, among them Ottawa’s Montfort Hospital, which treated the threat seriously enough to call in police and conduct a full security inspection. Healthcare itself, a space meant to be neutral ground, has not been spared.

The 2026 figure had already exceeded the totals for 2022, 2024 and 2025. These are not offensive tweets. They include physical assaults on visibly Jewish men.

Such violence would rightly be considered intolerable if directed systematically at any minority. Yet when Jews are the targets, violence is too often rationalized, minimized, or absorbed into the normalization of antizionist hatred.  

The escalation matters because the Cycle of Libels is not a circle. It is a spiral.

Every rotation can return at a higher intensity: More libels ⇒ Broader exclusion ⇒ More intimidation and violence ⇒ Deeper denial ⇒ New and stronger libels.

And around it goes again.  

The mistake is waiting for catastrophic violence before acknowledging the process that normalizes it.

Stage Four: Denial completes the Cycle

The final stage may be the most important because it allows the first three to begin again.

“Nothing happened.”

“It wasn’t antisemitism.”

“They are exaggerating.”

“It was not antisemitism, it was merely antizionism.”

“The Jews are weaponizing antisemitism.”

Ontario’s K-12 data provides an extraordinary quantitative example.

Of antisemitic incidents reported to school authorities, 49% were not investigated. In another nearly 9%, school authorities either denied that the incident was antisemitic or recommended removing the victim from the physical school.

Put differently, in approximately six out of ten reported cases, the result was no investigation, denial of Jew-hatred, or displacement of the Jewish victim.

The cycle closes. Libel → exclusion → harassment → denial.

And denial clears the ground for another rotation.

This is why the trajectory matters more than any single incident. Societies are not radicalized by one incident. They are radicalized through normalization.

The analytical question is: What happens when a society normalizes a political category that encompasses 94% of its Jewish minority, repeatedly associates that category with humanity’s greatest crimes, permits members of that category to be ostracized, observes rapidly escalating antisemitic incidents and violence, and then routinely disputes whether the resulting hostility is antisemitic at all?

That is the pattern Canada needs to confront.

The mutation of Jew-hatred

This is where the historical comparison becomes useful.

As Dr. Lekht’s Three-Era Framework suggests, Jew-hatred has moved from antijudaism to antisemitism to antizionism — always adopting whatever vocabulary a society treats as sacred.

The Nazi did not believe he was persecuting innocent people. Nazi propaganda constructed Jews as the threat from which society had to be protected.

The contemporary antizionist who excludes a Jewish student may likewise believe the exclusion represents antiracism.

That demonstrates something more fundamental that Hatred becomes socially powerful when it convinces ordinary people that exclusion is righteousness.

Antizionism is also a Canadian problem

There is another mistake we must stop making. Antizionism is not merely a Jewish issue.  Canada has a problem when:

• Canadian schools teach children that classmates can be collectively blamed for wars thousands of kilometres away.
• Physicians fear expressing Jewish identity.
• University students hide Stars of David.
• Public servants say their unions have marginalized them because of Jewish identity and their relationship to Israel.
• Synagogues require extraordinary security simply to operate. 
• And when political extremism imported from ideological movements hostile to liberal democracy turns Canadians against one another.

That is why I would describe eliminationist antizionism not only as anti-Jewish but as anti-Canadian when it manifests through intimidation, collective blame, exclusion, glorification of terrorism or rejection of equal citizenship.

Canada’s answer must be the defense of liberal democracy: equal citizenship, individual rights, freedom of religion and expression, and the right to national and collective identity. No Canadian should be discriminated against because of their religion, ethnicity, nationality, or peoplehood, including Jews because of their identification with Jewish peoplehood or support for Israel’s existence.

Canada’s silent majority has a responsibility as well. Democracy depends not only on laws, but on citizens willing to defend those laws and the minorities they protect. Silence in the face of normalized Jew-hatred does not preserve social peace; it allows intolerance to become socially acceptable.

A democracy that cannot protect its Jewish minority, or any minority, from intimidation, discrimination and violence is failing one of democracy’s foundational tests: equal citizenship under the law. When leaders tolerate hatred because confronting it is politically inconvenient, they do not protect democracy; they weaken it.

So when you see antizionism normalized on Canadian campuses, within professional institutions, in political discourse, or in public life, do not ask only what it means for Jews. Ask what it reveals about Canadian institutions, Canadian leadership, and the health of Canadian democracy itself.

The rise of Jew-hatred is not only a Jewish alarm. It is a Canadian alarm.

Intellectual clarity about antizionism’s genealogy

Modern antizionism draws on multiple ideological streams — Soviet propaganda, Islamist movements, and post-colonial theory among them — that increasingly converge into what might be called a Marxist-Islamist alliance. They don’t need a shared vision; they need only a shared enemy.

Canada is becoming a critical North American battleground in the confrontation between this alliance and the values of Western liberal democracy. What happens in Canada does not remain in Canada — ideologies, activist networks, narratives, and methods cross borders. A Western democracy bordering the United States that grows hospitable to movements hostile to liberal-democratic values presents a challenge not only to Canada, but to the United States and the broader free world.

Exposing that alliance and understanding how it operates is therefore essential to confronting antizionism. That means tracing which ideas came from where, how they migrated, and how they were repackaged in the language of contemporary social justice.

StopAntizionism’s LEARN · LEAD · ACT program provides the education and critical-thinking framework needed to understand this ideological threat, recognize how it operates, and turn knowledge into effective action.

That history needs to be taught. Because without understanding the machine, we will spend our time arguing with its slogans.

Canada does not need more denial. It needs RECLAIM.

The answer cannot be Jewish retreat — asking doctors to hide, students to remove their Stars of David, or the majority of Canadian Jews to amputate part of their peoplehood for admission to supposedly inclusive spaces. The answer must be organized, democratic, and unapologetically pluralistic. I call that response RECLAIM, building on the framework developed in Stop Antizionism‘s PIE4ALL materials.

R — Recognize antizionism. Learn about demonization, collective blame, and eliminationism. Study the ideological playbook.

E — Expose the Cycle of Libels. Document how demonization becomes exclusion, exclusion becomes permission, and denial lets it repeat.

C — Call Antizionism a Jew-hatred. Say ANTIZIONISM as one word — drop the hyphen — expose it as a unified hate ideology, not a “policy debate.”

L — Learn its history, from Soviet, Nazi, and Islamist propaganda — not from justice. LEARN. LEAD. ACT.

A — Amplify the evidence — in classrooms, hospitals, unions, newsrooms, legislatures. Awareness is the antidote to erasure.

I — Inoculate through unity — coordinated alliances between Jews and non-Jews across law, medicine, labour, and civil society.

M — Move with moral clarity. Jews have the same right to collective identity, memory, and existence as every other people. Declare Antizionism is Jew-Hatred.

Break the Cycle of Libels and RECLAIM the truth with a Cycle of Integrity.

The warning is the spiral

History repeats itself in different ways.

Canada 2026 is not exactly Germany in 1935. But many elements of similarity indicate that Antizionists’ Cycle of Libels using the same mechanism as the Nazis Cycle of Libels. And, historical seriousness demands us to look deeper as history teaches us to recognize patterns and mechanisms.

Demonize a population ⇒ Make its collective identity morally suspect ⇒ Exclude members who refuse to repudiate that identity ⇒ Normalize intimidation ⇒ Minimize the consequences ⇒ Return with a stronger accusation

That mechanism should frighten us regardless of which political movement employs it.

Canadian Jews should therefore stop asking whether antizionism will simply burn itself out.

The evidence does not justify that confidence: B’nai Brith’s incident count rose from 2,769 in 2022 to 6,800 in 2025, and violent incidents have already accelerated further in 2026. Jewish children are concealing Jewish symbols. Jewish medical learners report far higher exposure to antisemitism. Jewish workers are filing human-rights complaints. The cycle is not repeating; it is spiraling.

And every unchallenged rotation risks making the next one easier.

There is still time to break it. But first we must be willing to name what is happening:

• The accusation has changed.

• The object of exclusion has changed.

• The language of virtue has changed.

• The mechanism of collective hatred has not.

And this time, Jews should not wait for everyone else to recognize the pattern before we do.

Re’eh: The Command to See

This week’s parasha begins with a single command: Re’eh — See. “See, I set before you today a blessing and a curse.” Moses does not merely ask the people of Israel to listen or understand. He commands them to see what is in front of them—to recognize the path they are on before its consequences become irreversible.

That command speaks directly to our moment. Re’eh. See the libels before they become exclusion. See the exclusion before it becomes violence. See the denial before it allows the cycle to begin again. Jewish history does not tell us that the future must repeat the past, but it does obligate us to recognize patterns we have seen before. Seeing creates responsibility. Once we see the Cycle of Libels, we must choose to break it.