Three years ago today, Israel began its genocidal assault on Gaza.
Three years later, Palestinians are still being killed, displaced, starved, imprisoned, and denied the most basic conditions of life. Entire families have been wiped out. Universities, schools, hospitals, homes, mosques, churches, archives, farms, and neighbourhoods have been destroyed. And through it all, the Canadian government has remained complicit – allowing arms, capital, and donations to flow to Israel, virtually unhindered.
We will not treat this anniversary as a moment for passive mourning, but as a moment to remember, to reckon with what has happened, and to commit to action.
On October 7, 2023, Palestinian armed groups launched a deadly attack that killed hundreds of Israelis and took others hostage. Some of those killed were friends and loved ones of the people in our own communities. We do not ignore that loss. We mourn those lives.
October 7 did not emerge from nowhere, and it cannot be treated as the beginning of this history. It, and the genocide in Gaza that ensued, cannot be separated from the Nakba, decades of dispossession and military occupation, the siege of Gaza, apartheid, and a Zionist project built on the dispossession of Palestinians from their land.
For three years, we have watched politicians insist that Israel has a right to “defend itself” while Palestinians are denied the right to live and breathe freely in their own homeland. We have watched universities punish students and faculty for speaking out. We have watched Jewish institutions and synagogues claim to speak in our name while defending mass violence. And we have watched the language of Jewish safety and antisemitism repeatedly weaponized to justify Palestinian suffering.
We reject this completely.
Our safety cannot be built through occupation, ethnic cleansing, siege, or supremacy. Judaism does not require Zionism, and Jewish life does not depend on the domination of Palestinians. We refuse the claim that opposing Zionism is a rejection of Jewish people or Jewish history. And we definitely reject the government’s recent claim that anti-Zionism is antisemitic. Anti-Zionism is part of a long-standing commitment to equality, collective liberation, and a future rooted in freedom and dignity, instead of one secured through walls, bombs, checkpoints, prisons, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.
Today, we remember the people Gaza has lost. We stand with those who have survived, those searching for loved ones, those trying to rebuild, and the millions of Palestinians who continue to demand freedom despite everything that has been done to deny it to them.
But remembrance means very little without action.
We are calling on our members and supporters to continue organizing: demand an immediate end to Canadian military and political support for Israel through targeted sanctions; challenge Zionism within our own communities; defend people facing repression for Palestine solidarity; and keep showing up wherever Palestinians are fighting for freedom.
Three years is three years too many.
There can be no return to “normal” while Palestinians remain under occupation and apartheid. There can be no meaningful peace without justice, accountability, return, and freedom.
We will continue to organize for all of it.