On February 20, Canadian journalist and activist Yves Engler was arrested by Montreal police for social media posts criticising Israel.

The posts were reported to police by pro-Israel commentator Dahlia Kurtz, whose anti-Palestinian writings, including calls for the deportation of Palestine solidarity activists, had previously drawn criticism from Engler on X.

As a result, Kurtz accused Engler of harassment, leading to his jailing by Montreal police.

After Montreal police informed Engler of their plans to arrest him, he refuted the accusations of harassment and affirmed that he had simply responded to Kurtz’s “violent, racist, anti-Palestinian posts.”

That day, he wrote on his website, “I’m being charged for responding to anti-Palestinian hate on X.” Engler stated: “I’ve never met Kurtz. Nor have I messaged or emailed her. Nor have I threatened her. I don’t even follow her on X (Twitter’s algorithm puts her posts in my feed).”

Engler also launched an action campaign, which at the time of writing has garnered over 3,600 signatures from people urging Montreal police to drop the charges.

In a subsequent post titled “Police angry at my writing about ridiculous charges, so add more,” Engler revealed that police had levelled new charges against him because he had written about his impending arrest.

“You can’t make this up,” wrote Engler. “Initially the Montreal police accused me of harassing an anti-Palestinian media personality because I posted about Israel’s genocide. Now they are charging me for harassing the police for writing about the charges levelled against me… The police investigator also announced that they will be holding me overnight out of fear that I may ‘recidive’ (relapse). In other words, I might once again write about the absurd charges levelled against me. Guilty as charged.”

The next day, Montreal police arrested Engler in what Alex Tyrell, leader of the Green Party of Quebec, described as “a shocking attack on free expression and democratic rights and criticism of Israel in Canada – a country that’s supposed to be a free, democratic society.”

Not an isolated incident

The targeting of an individual for their involvement in Palestine solidarity is not unusual in Canada, though the arrest of such a prominent activist and scholar – Engler has written 13 books on Canadian history and foreign policy and travelled the country on speaking tours – shows the state’s willingness to prosecute prominent figures in the movement against Israeli apartheid and genocide.

Engler is not the first prominent advocate for Palestinian rights to be targeted by Canadian police. In November 2024, Vancouver police launched a militarised raid on the home of Charlotte Kates, a leader of the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network (the previous month, the Canadian government had declared Samidoun a terrorist entity).

Global News reported: “Neighbours awoke to the sound of a ‘bang’ around 9am, and were surprised to see an armoured police vehicle and heavily-armed members of the Vancouver Police Department’s Emergency Response Team outside the home near 1st Avenue and Victoria Drive.”

Kates’s neighbours described a “heavy police presence,” “smoke from a flashbang grenade,” and the smashing of windows by the Vancouver Police Department. They characterised the show of force as more suited to a “hostage situation” or “a gunfight or something, some high level of violence” as opposed to the arrest of a leader of a grassroots charity organisation.

That same month, Canadian police also executed militarised raids on the homes of the “Indigo 11,” a group of activists who had postered Indigo bookstores and painted their windows red to draw attention to owner Heather Reisman running a foundation to recruit foreigners into Israel’s military.

During nighttime raids on the activists’ homes, “[police] broke doors, ordered suspects out of their beds, and went on to completely ransack every single room and confiscate computers, cars and other private property, in some cases in the presence of terrified children and the elderly.”

The operation is estimated to have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Irina Ceric, a law professor at the University of Windsor, said, “It appears to be an attempt to intimidate and terrorise these activists.”

Canadian police have specifically targeted the Palestine solidarity movement, including through a secretive team in the Toronto Police Service called Project Resolute.

Under Project Resolute, officers have executed night-time raids of numerous activists’ homes. The ransacking of one Palestinian Canadian family’s home was so violent that a family member stated, “It took us back to our life in the West Bank, when Israeli soldiers raided our home.”

At protests across the country, Palestine solidarity activists have faced aggressive police action. In May 2024, police in riot gear used tear gas and batons to repress a street protest in Montreal. That same month, Vancouver police violently dispersed a rail blockade; one of the officers involved in the suppression wore an Israeli flag patch.

Many students, journalists, and activists in Canada have faced disciplinary action for publicly supporting Palestinian rights. Dr Yipeng Ge, a student at the University of Ottawa, was suspended for a pro-Palestine social media post.

The same thing happened to a culinary instructor at George Brown College named Bashir Munye, a nursing student at the University of Manitoba, and a nephrologist at Mackenzie Richmond Hill Hospital.

The censorship campaign led 650 lawyers, law students, and professors across Canada to release an open letter noting the “chilling effect” on freedom of speech in the nation’s legal community.

A December 2023 article in CBC, Canada’s national broadcaster, noted, “Restaurant staff losing their jobs for cheering on a pro-Palestinian protest. A Palestinian Canadian journalist fired for her social media posts calling for a #freepalestine. Medical residents flagged to potential hiring committees for their support of Palestinians.”

In the winter of 2022, the student body at McGill University in Montreal voted 71 percent in favour of a Palestine solidarity policy put forward by the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU).

The popular policy called for boycott and divestment from “all corporations and institutions complicit in settler-colonial apartheid against Palestinian” and called for McGill to condemn “surveillance or smear campaigns against Palestinian and pro-Palestine students.”

In response, McGill’s administration threatened to withhold funding from the SSMU, an elected body that represents approximately 24,000 undergraduate students. On November 20, 2023, students voted 78 percent in favour of SSMU’s Policy Against Genocide in Palestine; it was also overturned.

During Israel’s genocide in Gaza, student encampments calling for Canadian universities to break commercial and political ties with Israel were met with condemnation from politicians across party lines and violent repression by police.

Participants in the University of Alberta encampment recalled how their protest was dispersed: “…without provocation, the police launched a sudden and violent attack on what remained of our peaceful assembly. They charged towards us, struck us with batons and shields, and fired pepper balls and grenades at us. They threw protesters, including students, to the ground and beat them severely. Several people sustained concussions. A mother of two students had her rib fractured by police.”

At the University of Toronto, the administration allowed a Zionist vigilante group called Defenders of Freedom Canada to mobilise on campus. The group works closely with J-Force, a private security firm that aims to intimidate Palestine solidarity protests.

The Jewish Defence League (JDL), which the Southern Poverty Law Center calls a hate group and the US government classifies as a terrorist organisation, also mobilised on campus. These Zionist counter-protestors waved the fascist Kahane Chai flag and chanted “Let’s make Gaza a parking lot.”

Media bias against Palestine solidarity movement

Canadian media has a distinctly pro-Israel bias. An analysis of thousands of sentences published by The Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, and the National Post found that “[t]he largest Canadian newspapers have given disproportionate attention to the deaths of Israelis, portrayed Israelis in more humanised ways, characterised their deaths as more worthy of indignation, and more often identified who was responsible for killing them.”

In May 2024, independent outlet The Breach published an anonymous essay from a long-time CBC producer. The essay accused Canada’s public broadcaster of “whitewashing the horrors that Israel would visit on Palestinians in Gaza… [W]hile virtually no scrutiny was applied to Israeli officials and experts, an unprecedented level of suspicion was being brought to bear on the family members of those trapped in Gaza.”

Taking these events into account, it is clear that Yves Engler’s arrest is the latest step in a nationwide campaign to intimidate and silence Palestine solidarity activists in Canada – a campaign involving night-time raids on activists’ homes, police-sanctioned intimidation by Zionist groups, demonisation by media and politicians, the suspension of university students, the firing of journalists, and more.

In short, Engler's arrest shows that police and the Zionist movement in Canada have not relaxed their efforts to punish Canadians who organise on behalf of oppressed Palestinians.