Incident Reports

In the early 2020s, the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association (ACLA) invited Palestine solidarity activists and movements across Canada to be involved in consultations on how anti-Palestinian racism (APR) manifests itself.  Ultimately, these invitations and consultations were widely embraced by the Palestine solidarity community, and the resulting discussions highly fruitful.  “There is broad agreement among those consulted,” concluded the ACLA, “for the need to name anti-Palestinian racism as a distinct form of oppression faced by Palestinians and those advocating for Palestinian rights.”^[1] By April 2022, the ACLA had developed and published a solid and defensible description of anti-Palestinian racism.

The ACLA’s description of APR reads in full:

“Anti-Palestinian racism is a form of anti-Arab racism that silences, excludes, erases, stereotypes, defames or dehumanizes Palestinians or their narratives. Anti-Palestinian racism takes various forms including: denying the Nakba and justifying violence against Palestinians; failing to acknowledge Palestinians as an Indigenous people with a collective identity, belonging and rights in relation to occupied and historic Palestine; erasing the human rights and equal dignity and worth of Palestinians; excluding or pressuring others to exclude Palestinian perspectives, Palestinians and their allies; defaming Palestinians and their allies with slander such as being inherently antisemitic, a terrorist threat/sympathizer or opposed to democratic values..”^[2]

Nevertheless, the onus now falls on Canadian civil society 1) to capture incidents of APR, and then 2) to pressure institutions to reject APR in all its forms. This page of incidents of APR in Canada is an attempt to tackle the first challenge. The second challenge must be addressed by painstakingly working with government institutions, corporations and civil institutions to incorporate APR into their equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) frameworks. The APR incident reports published below represent the ARPCF’s contribution to this effort.