Indigenous scholar Veldon Coburn introduced a panel discussion on the similarities between Canada and Israel on Friday with a blunt observation.
“Nobody’s slaughtering my people anymore,” he said. “They’ve taken everything.”
Coburn, whose mother is a status Indian and whose father’s side descended from white settlers, is Anishinaabe, a citizen of the Algonquins of Pikwàkanagàn whose reserve at Golden Lake, Ontario is a mere 6.9 square kilometres.
“That’s what was left for us out of about 145,000 square kilometres,” he told an audience of about 30 in the Windsor Grand Room at Mount Allison University.
He noted that while Indigenous dispossession is all-but complete in Canada, Israel is currently inflicting extreme violence on Indigenous Palestinians in the occupied territories of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem because it is determined to take their land.
Coburn, who is a professor of Indigenous studies at the University of Ottawa, said that although mainstream media do not show it, the “horrors and atrocities” committed by Israel in Gaza during the past week would turn anyone’s stomach.
“More Palestinian children were killed this past week. It’s incomprehensible and it’s difficult to avoid words like butchered, massacred, slaughtered,” he said as he introduced Jeremy Wildeman and Muhannad Ayyash, co-editors of the 2023 book Canada as a Settler Colony on the Question of Palestine.
Canada’s settler-colonial history
The book argues that in spite of many Canadians’ belief that their country champions democracy, human rights and peace around the world, Canada’s steadfast support for Israel’s dispossession of Palestinians is rooted in its history as a settler colony whose white European settlers violently displaced Indigenous peoples from their ancestral lands.
“Settler colonialism is, first and foremost, defined by the elimination of Indigenous peoples from the land and their replacement with settlers from elsewhere,” the book’s introduction says.
“You can make sense of Canada’s position on Palestine on the very basis of its settler-colonial nature, not just its foundation, but its continuing existing structure today,” said Muhannad Ayyash who was born and raised in Silwan, Al-Quds (Jerusalem) before emigrating to Canada where he is professor of sociology at Mount Royal University in Calgary.
“Canada is completely uninterested in decolonizing this settler colony,” Ayyash said. “It is uninterested in decolonizing Palestine. It is completely uninterested in decolonizing the world imperial order in which Canada plays a supporting role to U.S. imperialism.”
He added that neither Canada nor Israel will ever accept the sovereignty of their Indigenous peoples.
In Canada’s case, he said, it’s safe to talk about truth and reconciliation because its Indigenous inhabitants have been dispossessed of their lands and their sovereign powers.
In Israel’s case, there is continuing fierce political, military and judicial resistance to Palestinian sovereignty.
“They’ve never said Palestinians can have self-determination,” Ayyash said.
“They’ve never officially finalized their borders. Why do you think that is? Because, like, we’re not done. We’re going to take the whole thing.”
Canadian hypocrisy
Jeremy Wildeman, who is a Fellow at the Human Rights Research and Education Centre at the University of Ottawa and who was raised in Treaty 6, in central Saskatchewan, suggested that Canada’s failure to stand up for human rights in Palestine and parts of the world where Canadian mining companies operate, may now be coming back to haunt us as the U.S. threatens to annex Canada as its 51st state.
“Anybody who thought we can just ignore human rights and justice because it’s not going to affect us…[and who said] ‘Look, we’re such loyal allies to the United States. We’re such good subcontractors in the American empire’…and now the United States is saying, ‘Actually, you know what? You’re part of us, right?’” Wildeman said, adding that Canadians now feel a strong sense of injustice when Americans talk about tearing up our free trade treaties.
“This is the world we’re entering now,” he said, pointing to a world in which Donald Trump threatens to expel Palestinians and turn Gaza into ocean-front beach resorts or take over resource-rich Greenland.
Media biases
Both Ayyash and Wildeman agreed with Veldon Coburn that the Canadian media do not tell the truth about what Israel is doing to Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
They referred to a chapter in their book by Rachad Antonius, an Egyptian-born adjunct professor of sociology at the Université du Québec à Montréal, which analyzes Radio-Canada coverage of Israel’s seven week war on Gaza in July-August 2014.
Among his conclusions, Antonius finds that the coverage from the French-language CBC was framed as a symmetrical contest between equals even though Israel was using one of the world’s most powerful militaries to attack a tiny, densely-populated territory that has primitive defences with no air power at all.
“Israel is in a position of self-defence, and Hamas is to blame,” he writes, adding that Israeli justifications are given prominence while Palestinian perspectives are ignored or downplayed and that coverage explains military violence as a response to earlier military violence, not as a response to Israel’s occupation and its ongoing naval, air and ground blockade of Gaza.
And while “Palestinian suffering is amply represented,” coverage again follows the Israeli narrative of blaming Hamas for it.
Finally, Antonius argues that Radio-Canada coverage reflected Canada’s official position on Israel/Palestine and that any change “would put the CBC and its journalists on a collision course with its funders, the Canadian government, and with the Canadian political elite.”
During the panel discussion, Muhannad Ayyash said it is not bad journalism that is to blame for biased coverage, it is a structural bias arising from the mindset of settler colonialism.
“Canadian mainstream media, like American mainstream media, UK, any Western European onwards, they know that they’re not telling the truth on Palestine. Let me just be very clear about that. They’re not stupid. They know they’re not telling the truth,” Ayyash said pointing out that hundreds of Canadian journalists, including those working for CBC, have complained publicly about the lack of honesty and objectivity in reporting on Palestine/Israel.
“If you really don’t want to know what’s going on in the Middle East, watch the CBC or the BBC,” Wildeman said as the audience laughed.
To read an extensive report on the journalists complaining about biased Middle East coverage from The Review of Journalism at Toronto’s Metropolitan University, click here.
For a transcript and analysis of a recent CBC Radio story on coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza, click here.
To order a copy of Canada as a Settler Colony on the Question of Palestine from Tidewater Books, click here.
Bruce Wark worked in broadcasting and journalism education for more than 35 years. He was at CBC Radio for nearly 20 years as senior editor of network programs such as The World at Six and World Report. He currently writes for The New Wark Times, where a version of this story first appeared on March 23, 2025.
