How “What Is Happening Here?” Prioritizes Zionist Narratives
Brown takes pains to disregard any interpretation that contradicts his worldview
This article is Part Two of a three-part series critically evaluating the CANADALAND investigative series "What Is Happening Here?" View Part One here. Part Three will be released tomorrow.
As explained previously, Brown had final editorial control over the CANADALAND series "What is Happening Here?" (WIHH), leading to some serious editorial failures. In general, Brown uses poorly-sourced arguments and engages in self-indulgent interviews that intentionally neglect context to further his view of the anti-Zionist movement as “eliminationist.”
In all, WIHH is less of an explanation of the causes of antisemitism in Canada and more of an opportunity for Jesse to argue in favour of Zionism (the belief that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state) without ever having to say he is a Zionist himself. WIHH is nothing more than Zionist arguments in CANADALAND socks.
White-Washing Institutional Zionism
In the second episode, focus shifts from Jewish people themselves to Jewish Canadians who are active supporters of Zionism. Brown attempts to show interviewees are targeted because of their Jewishness and in spite of their Zionism. This, in turn, reinforces the position that Zionism and Israel’s genocide play no role in their public shaming. Brown has failed to do this; his own increased interest in antisemitism in Canada can be directly linked to the October 7th Hamas attacks in Israel.
Brown begins by interviewing Heather Reisman, CEO of Indigo-Chapters Books and Music. Reisman is Jewish and, according to Brown, the Canadian most associated with the genocide of Palestinians. Reisman says that there have been 30-40 incidents in her stores since October 7. She mentions fires lit in stores and people shouting obscenities of an undisclosed nature. Reisman maintains that she and her charity are being falsely accused of financially supporting the Israeli military. This charity, The HESEG Foundation, was established by Reisman and her husband in 2005.
Reisman says HESEG does not give money to the Israeli military and has no influence over it. What HESEG does do is give scholarships to ‘lone soldiers,’ people who have served in the Israeli military but don’t live in Israel or have family there. Reisman believes those lone soldiers deserve tuition support for their military service.
Reisman is correct that HESEG does not give money directly to the Israeli military. However, it has been accused by critics of providing a financial incentive for foreign nationals to join the Israeli military. According to the Canada Revenue Agency, if substantiated, this would most likely not be considered a charitable activity. Critics also claim HESEG sends approximately $5 million annually to support foreign nationals who enlist in the IDF. Since these emigrants are not required to enlist in the Israeli military, their decision to join could be influenced by the promise of free tuition. Further, HESEG’s board of directors has included Israeli veterans accused of violating international law while on duty, such as former heads of the IDF and Mossad. At time of writing, there is no indication HESEG is under investigation by government agencies.
As a result, Indigo has been a longstanding target of the Boycott, Divest, Sanction (BDS) movement. Protests against Reisman and HESEG made international news following an incident on November 10th, 2023. On that day, anti-Zionist activists targeted Indigo’s flagship store in downtown Toronto by putting up posters with Reisman’s face, accusing her of ‘funding genocide’ and splashing these and store windows with red paint.
Reisman argues that accusations against her are lies. For Brown, Indigo-Chapters is a Jewish-owned bookstore targeted by anti-Zionist activists on the basis of the ‘lie’ that Reisman, through HESEG, directly supports the Israeli military financially. Despite supporting Israeli military volunteers, Brown agrees Reisman is targeted because she's Jewish.
It’s easy for Reisman to deny directly funding the Israeli military as this isn’t the accusation being made. The accusation is that HESEG provides a financial incentive for foreign nationals to join the Israeli military, an army currently engaged in repeatedly confirmed acts of child killing, including over 100 children killed by Israel during the so-called ceasefire alone. Brown completely ignores this.
Soon after, the episode details experiences of Jewish teachers being fired for incidents related to Israel and Zionism. In one case, a teacher was fired for violating her school’s privacy policy, yet Brown frames the firing as antisemitic. This bridges into Brown arguing that Canadian workers like this teacher are supposed to be represented through the New Democratic Party (NDP).
Through this clumsy connection, focus shifts to the BC NDP, which generated a variety of headlines related to West Asia since October 7th. The most infamous of these is the case of Selina Robinson, former BC NDP minister of post-secondary education, who appears in the episode. While on a panel discussing antisemitism in January 2024, Robinson remarked pro-Palestinian protesters are ignorant of history and should know that, before the arrival of European Jews, Palestine was:
“A crappy piece of land with nothing on it, you know, there were several hundreds of thousands of people, but other than that, it didn’t produce an economy … it couldn’t grow things, it didn’t have anything on it.”
Robinson admits these words were “inelegant,” and reiterates she apologized several times, but claims they were ignored. She was let go from her cabinet role and the office was targeted with death threats. Brown asks: Did this happen because she is Jewish? Unsurprisingly, Robinson believes so.
Death threats aside, which are indeed reprehensible, Robinson downplays her statement, which went beyond ‘inelegance.’ The irony isn’t lost that, while trying to ‘educate’ pro-Palestinian activists on the ‘history’ of the region, Robinson repeated well-trodden propaganda from early Israeli leaders: Palestine was ‘a land without a people for a people without a land.’ If Robinson’s comments were inelegant wording, it stands to reason a more elegant version remains something Robinson believes.
Dr. Muhunnad Ayyash, author and decolonial scholar, stressed that Robinson is factually wrong. Palestinians have always been “productive” through a variety of forms of trade and agriculture. But more importantly, Ayyash said Robinson’s comments show “the central colonial worldview of the Zionist movement and those who support it.” Land, therefore, is designated as empty unless it meets colonial metrics of productivity. Territory only becomes ‘valuable’ when people “instrumentalize all the resources of the land to generate the greatest amount of capital as possible.”
This, Ayyash said, is contrary to Indigenous worldviews which include a variety of “meaningful, productive and generative forms of social, political, economic and legal life.”
Reisman and Robinson are presented as being targeted because they are Jewish, with no exploration of their position of support for Israel. This, in turn, supports his presupposition that the anti-Zionist movement aims to eliminate Jews from Canadian society.
An interview with Dr. Ted Rosenberg, (former) faculty member at UBC’s Department of Medicine, rounds out the episode. Following October 7th, Rosenberg says some colleagues began making antisemitic comments on social media. After searching for ‘Jews’ and ‘antisemitism’ on the department’s DEI resources, Dr. Rosenberg says there was nothing in the search engine that had the words antisemitism, Jew, or Jewish. He then resigned from his position at UBC in protest.
Dr. Rosenberg’s concern that his department-specific committee on inclusion and diversity may not have any documents specifically about the Jewish experience is valid. However, the website does not appear to have a public search function that able to discern that. Comparatively, UBC’s Equity and Inclusion Office does have a search function that yields 22 results for ‘Jewish,’ 24 results for ‘Jew’ and 11 for ‘antisemitism." A search for ‘Israel’ only brings up mentions of the so-called “Israel-Palestine” conflict.
When Brown was asked to clarify if he knew how Dr. Rosenberg searched UBC’s DEI resources, he replied, “I don’t know.”
Scott Martin
A Community Divide
Reisman and Robinson's behaviour provides clear reasons as to why anti-Zionist action has targeted them. Reisman distorts criticism against her, while Robinson’s view of Palestinians remains clear.
Here, the series shifts from Jewish Canadians who are critical of Israel and Zionism. Brown grounds this in protests that have targeted Canadian Jewish institutions. In March, 2024, a demonstration was held outside of a synagogue in downtown Toronto. Brown says synagogues used to be ‘off limits’ for political protests but were designated as legitimate targets by anti-Zionists after October 7.
The synagogue mentioned was protested for hosting the Great Israeli Real Estate Event, which appears to have been illegally selling properties in the occupied West Bank. This act involves possible onion-esque layers of criminality: the buying and selling of occupied territory alone violates International Law of occupation and constitutes a war crime under the Rome Statute.
How did a synagogue become the site of political protest? Brown posits it's because protesters were invited there by Jews. The protest was organized by Independent Jewish Voices, an organization of anti-Zionist Jews. They promote their protests as ‘Jewish-led’, Brown says, in order to provide cover for more sinister, anti-Jewish actions taking place at them.
This brings us to the title of the episode: “As a Jew.” Since October 7th, ‘as a Jew’ has often become a derogatory short-hand used by pro-Israel supporters to dismiss claims made by anti-Zionist Jews. This term is comparable to the term "self-hating Jew;" One that Eli Valley, a Jewish-American graphic artist and cartoonist, considers a slur as it works to equate Zionist extremism with Judaism.
“The claim embedded in that is that we aren’t really Jewish… If you’re a real Jew, you’d be a Zionist,” Sheryl Nestel, Jewish activist, scholar and co-founder of Independent Jewish Voices (IJV) said in an interview. “It can be disingenuous to push that particular argument.”
Brown recognizes there is a sensitive divide among the Jewish community in Canada, but attempts to frame it in context:
“An overwhelming number of Jews, 94 per cent, support Israel, even if they do not support its current government … [while only] 3 per cent of Canadian Jews … do not believe Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state.”
Brown doesn’t cite his source in the episode, but he confirmed in an email that he drew this from a Canadian Jewish News article detailing a November 2024 survey by sociologist Dr. Robert Brym. The accompanying report was issued by the New Israel Fund Canada, JSpace Canada, and Canadian Friends of Peace Now, each an explicitly pro-Zionist organization. Even with this bias in mind, the report states that:
“The Canadian Jewish community is deeply divided … In many cases, we see no majority opinion … Therefore, not only are claims of monolithic support misrepresentations of Canadian Jewish diversity, they also erase the spirited nature of Jewish life in Canada.” [Emphasis added by author]
The report finds 94 per cent of Canadian Jews support Israel’s right to exist but only 51 per cent of Jews in Canada call themselves Zionists. Perhaps more surprisingly, 27 per cent of Jewish Canadians say they are not Zionists. This reveals a deep and widening divide among the Jewish community, specifically between Israeli and Canadian Jews. According to Dr. Brym, only 30 per cent of Canadian Jews favoured the Israeli annexation of Gaza. By contrast, 82 per cent of Israelis support it.
Jewish scholar and journalist Blake Lambert explained this discrepancy simply. “The meaning of Zionism has changed over time.”
For most Jewish Canadians, Blake explains that, whether it was ever true or not, Zionism meant simply the “Jewish endeavour … [for] a democratic state." Behind this change is a “narrative drift” where Zionism is increasingly associated with Benjamin Netanyahu’s fascist and genocidal mode of rule.
Dr. Brym warns against something Brown implies throughout the series: near-monolithic claims of Jewish support for Israel. Brown even argued for this in his response to questions, stating there is broad consensus “within the community about support for Israel and opposition to racism.”
Lambert said that in Judaism there is an ethical text called Pirkei Avot, or “Ethics of Our Fathers." He said it argues that constructive arguments “are for the sake of heaven.” Dr. Brym’s survey and accompanying report are titled: “Arguments for the Sake of Heaven.” Lambert said one of the criticisms he heard of WIHH came from within the Jewish community, specifically from so-called Liberal Zionists. Put simply, they felt left out.
Shifting Interview Tactics
Brown ploughs forward from the Zionist position that the majority of Jews in Canada support Israel, minimizing views of the anti-Zionist Jew he interviews. It quickly becomes obvious that Brown is not engaging honestly.
Instead of interviewing a leader of this protest, Brown interviews Dave Meslin, a self-described Jewish pro-Palestinian activist. Meslin says he has spent the last three years working with progressive Jewish groups, such as Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and Independent Jewish Voices (IJV).
Brown asks if Jews are being blamed for Israel’s actions. If yes, Brown argues anti-Israel rhetoric may cause people to target Jews and, in turn, the hateful rhetoric is being normalized by anti-Zionist protests. Therefore, in order to prevent people from targeting Jews because of Israel’s actions, we should stop the protests (rather than, say, stopping the equivocating of Judaism and Zionism). Things break down when Brown concludes that, if protests don’t stop on their own, they should be stopped forcibly.
Meslin stands firm in his belief that Canadians, regardless of ethnicity, should be targeted by protest movements if they express support for Israel. Brown asks Meslin whether it's okay to protest a synagogue flying an Israeli flag. Meslin says yes: waving the Israeli flag while Israel commits genocide in Gaza makes the flag-bearer a legitimate target for protest. Brown is shocked by this and ends the interview.
The issue with Brown’s behaviour since October 7th, which he acknowledges in the CANADALAND interview with Noor Azrieh, is that it has severely limited the pool of people he could draw on to discuss this issue. I credit Meslin for taking the interview; he did his best to stand up against Brown’s leading questions and stay consistent with his principles.
Yet there are numerous anti-Zionist Jews who talk publicly about the issue. Brown could have engaged with the anti-Zionist position by interviewing Jewish academic scholars such as Norman Finkelstein or Illan Pappe. In a less academic setting, he could have reached out to hosts Matt Lieb and Daniel Maté of the prominent anti-Zionist Jewish podcast, Bad Hasbara.
On one hand, Brown interviews two guests with institutional credibility and softens questions to arrive at the pre-determined conclusion of antisemitism. On the other hand, Brown invites a guest with no institutional or organizational power to engage in a contentious and confrontational debate with the goal of trying to trap them in an accusation of antisemitism or discrimination by proxy.
It should then come as no surprise that Brown didn’t interview any leaders of the anti-Zionist movement. Apparently, most anti-Zionist leaders know better than to engage in debate with bad-faith actors.
While presented as a cohesive case, Brown’s series thus far has been nothing more than a reiteration of the Zionist framing of antisemitism since October 7th 2023. It pushes the idea that the rise in antisemitism in Canada is both somehow directly caused by Hamas’ attacks (and Israel’s response) yet simultaneously has nothing to do with Israel’s genocidal actions, instead landing on an irrational hatred of Jewish people. This view is perfectly distilled when Brown stubbornly clings to the Zionist belief that the majority of Jews support Israel’s right to exist… while ignoring the fact that just over a quarter of all Canadian Jews do not identify as Zionist.
