Canada’s Position on Arresting Israeli Politicians Mired in Equivocation and Misinformation

According to Blacklock’s Reporter, a Liberal-appointed senator has refused to comment after misrepresenting a news story so he could question whether Canadian Jews have committed war crimes and genocide against the Palestinians.

Records show Senator Yuen Pau Woo (B.C.) garbled facts in his X (formerly Twitter) account in support of a provocative message.

Woo posted his comment after The Maple, a self-described “alternative” news site, published names of 49 Canadians who volunteered for service with the Israeli Defence Forces. Names were drawn from publicly available sources, including Israeli military records, LinkedIn posts, and articles in the Jerusalem Post and Canadian Jewish News.

The Maple cautioned readers against drawing any adverse conclusions from its report.

“Not all of these soldiers may have served in Gaza,” it wrote. “The Maple is not accusing any of them of having committed any sort of crime. It is legal for Canadian citizens to join the Israeli military.”

Senator Woo seems to have willfully dismissed this advisory by raising the possibility that the 49 volunteers were war criminals while implying that the federal government supported their presumed criminality. “The question of complicity in war crimes is not just for those individuals,” he wrote. “It also implicates the Government of Canada for not enforcing the law against recruitment of a foreign military.”

Factual evidence disputes Woo’s allegations.

The Foreign Enlistment Act was introduced in 1937 to dissuade Canadians from volunteering to fight in the Spanish Civil War. “The vast majority of the people in Canada are resolutely opposed to Communism,” then-Justice Minister Ernest Lapointe said at the time.

Although the Foreign Enlistment Act prohibits Canadians from joining “the armed forces of any foreign state at war with any friendly or foreign state,” Gaza is not a state.

Loose cannon Senator Woo, who has always expressed skepticism about claims of foreign interference in Canada by China has repeatedly accused Israelis of genocide and related crimes. For example, he sponsored a June 25 motion asking the Senate to examine “complicity in violations of international humanitarian law including war crimes” by Canadians.

Meanwhile, eight Canadians were among Jews killed and kidnapped in Israel by Hamas terrorists on October 7, 2023, a fact ignored by Woo.

Instead, he asked, “Why do we proscribe and punish Canadians for trying to do what they could to raise the alarm? Why is there a double standard in the way we have responded to the situation in Gaza compared to, say, Ukraine? These are just some of the questions that my [Senate] motion seeks answers to.”

He also asked, “Why has the media been so one-sided in its reporting on the situation in Palestine, and what role did that play in allowing the genocide to unfold? What amount of foreign interference and disinformation on behalf of Israel and its allies did our security and intelligence agencies allow in Canada in service of war crimes?”

South Africa launched proceedings against Israel at the ICJ in December 2024, accusing the Israeli government of engaging in “genocidal acts” against Gazans, including “killing them, causing them serious mental and bodily harm and deliberately inflicting on them conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction as a group.”

None of this reflects the official Canadian position on claims of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. In January 2024, for example, former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said his government’s support for the United Nations International Court of Justice (ICJ) as a key institution of international law does not mean it backs the charges brought by South Africa against Israel.

Neither did Trudeau ever threaten to arrest visiting Israeli officials.

Political aides would not comment after current Prime Minister Mark Carney told a podcaster he’d have police arrest Benjamin Netanyahu if he visited Canada.

Carney’s statement came in an October 16 Bloomberg News podcast, The Mishal Husain Show.

“Another one of your foreign policy priorities has been the recognition of a Palestinian State on which the United States fundamentally disagrees,” said the host:

Host: “What is your next step on that issue?”

Carney: “I would say the foreign policy priority was, the recognition is not the end. The end is a free and viable Palestinian State…”

Host: “Justin Trudeau said Canada would honour the International Criminal Court arrest warrants, i.e. Benjamin Netanyahu would be arrested if he came to Canada. Does that stand under your leadership?”Carney: “Yes.”

Host: “You’d be prepared to do that?”

Carney: “Yes.”

Still, Carney has made no statement about the credibility of the criminal charges against Netanyahu.

Stefanie McCollum, director general of the Middle East Bureau of the Department of Foreign Affairs, as recently as October 8 denied Canada had any intention of prosecuting Israelis. “In terms of the actual legal framework and specifics, I would have to defer to my colleagues at the Department of Justice,” she told the Senate foreign affairs committee.

“If we are not allowing impunity, do I take it that we will pursue the prosecution of individuals in states that are found guilty of violations of international law?” asked Senator Woo. “Senator, apologies, I think that’s a matter for the courts to decide on prosecution,” replied McCollum.

When then-New Democrat leader Jagmeet Singh on May 21, 2024 pressed for a statement in the House of Commons, Cabinet members denied any intention of arresting Israelis.

“Will the Prime Minister and the Liberal government state clearly that Canada supports the International Criminal Court’s work to hold all those responsible for crimes accountable?” asked Singh.

“Canada believes it is absolutely wrong to equate the terrorist leaders of Hamas with Israel,” replied then-Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland.

Benjamin Netanyahu visited Canada in 2012 as a guest of then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Successive Israeli leaders have made similar visits since David Ben-Gurion, in 1961.

Earlier this month, the International Criminal Court rejected Israel’s bid to appeal against arrest warrants issued by the ICC for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant over the war with Hamas in Gaza. This followed a 2024 ruling in which the ICC found “reasonable grounds” to believe Netanyahu and Gallant bore “criminal responsibility” for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.

Netanyahu has repeatedly condemned South Africa’s allegations as “hypocrisy and lies.”

As for the charge of genocide, Netanyahu’s perennial response has been, “Israel is accused of genocide while it is fighting against genocide,” referencing Hamas’s stated intent to destroy Israel.

Hamas’s founding document, The Covenant of Islamic Resistance Movement, states that “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.”

The 1988 document also explicitly rejects peace negotiations and processes to settle Jewish and Palestinian land claims. “There is no solution to the Palestinian question except through Jihad,” the document states.

In November, Ghazi Hamad, a senior member of Hamas’s political bureau, reportedly said in an interview with a Lebanese TV channel that Hamas aims to repeat the October 7, 2023 attack many times in an effort to annihilate Israel.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has flatly dismissed South Africa’s genocide allegations against Israel, calling them a shameless and dishonest attack on Jewish people and the Jewish state.

Hymie Rubenstein, a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba, is editor of —REAL Indigenous Report.