FitnessWorks

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[Emily Schrader - אמילי שריידר امیلی شریدر @emilykschrader]

At my Oxford Union debate, I challenged one of the most misleading assumptions in the motion itself: “peace with Palestine.” In 1948, Israel was not fighting a Palestinian state. It was fighting surrounding Arab armies. There has never been an independent Arab Palestinian state in all of human history.

[Michael Geller-Gieleta @MGLondinium]

This is SUCH an important voice from a Kurdish doctor.

When was the last time you spared a thought for the plight of the Kurds, the Baluchis, the Alawites, the Amazigh, the Assyrians, the Chaldeans or the Armenians?

There is only one people that matters—the one the world obsesses over. Nothing else matters.

[Sarah Ettedgui @SarahEttedgui]

I rarely appeal directly to my platform, but I am going to do it now.

On August 24, Montréal City Council will vote on a motion asking the City to recognize and denounce an “apartheid regime,” declare that a “genocide” is being perpetrated, and suspend ties with the Israeli government, its institutions and municipalities.

There has been enormous mobilization in support of it.

I have spent a considerable amount of my own time over the past few weeks reading the motion, the relevant laws and case law, and the international law decisions it invokes, on top of a Big Law practice that currently has me working close to 80 hours a week.

I don’t say that for sympathy. I say it because I rarely ask the people who follow me to actually do something. I am asking now.

Municipalities exercise delegated powers. Those powers are broad. They are not unlimited.

In Shell Canada v. Vancouver, Vancouver adopted resolutions refusing to do business with Shell until it withdrew from South Africa. The Supreme Court struck them down.

Yes, municipal law evolved after Shell. In Spraytech v. Hudson, the Court emphasized that municipal powers should be interpreted generously. But the bylaw upheld there regulated pesticide use within Hudson, for the health and welfare of its residents. That was an exercise of delegated municipal power, not foreign policy.

But the potential ultra vires nature of the motion is not the only problem. The motion asks City Council to adopt contested international law conclusions as settled fact. The ICJ has made no determination on the merits that Israel committed genocide in Gaza. And in its 2024 advisory opinion, while finding that certain policies of separation violated Article 3 of CERD, the Court did not itself characterize that separation as apartheid.

Yet Montréal is being asked to do both.

And what exactly does an “institutional rupture” mean when imposed by a city?

A municipality acts through contracts, procurement, grants, partnerships, cultural and scientific collaborations and relationships with other public institutions. If “Israeli institutions” is left undefined, how far does that exclusion extend? A university? A researcher? An artist? A supplier?

That is not an abstract concern. If these declarations are later used to exclude people or institutions because of their connection to Israel, that may also engage Quebec’s Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms, including its protections against discrimination based on religion, political convictions and ethnic or national origin.

This is not merely a symbolic resolution. It risks institutionalizing, through the machinery of municipal government, a distinction based on connection to one particular country.

And we need to talk about which foreign state is being singled out.

Montréal’s Jewish community has been particularly vulnerable to the explosion of antisemitism of the last several years. Jewish schools and synagogues in this city have been targeted. In 2025, Jews were the targets of over 70% of police-reported hate crimes motivated by religion in Canada.

And now, against that backdrop, our municipal government is being asked to make the world’s only Jewish state the object of an official institutional rupture.

The motion says Montréal’s Jews cannot be held responsible for Israel while simultaneously asking the City to institutionalize the singling out of Israel.

I cannot separate those two realities.

I am doing my part to the extent that I can. But lawyers cannot manufacture public opposition where people remain silent.

So this is my ask: share this post.

Share it outside the Jewish community. Share it with Montrealers who may have no idea this vote is happening. Share it with people who may disagree with me about Israel but believe that municipal government has limits, and that our public institutions should not single people out because of their connection to one country.

And if you live here, make yourself heard before August 24.

[FitnessWorks @FitnessWorksFW]

@uzhiscam @SafaiDarya Women happily profit to the tune of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars from their own agency on only fans (not that I have any personal experience there) In Iran, women are murdered for inadvertently or deliberately showing an inch of skin. They have no agency.

[FitnessWorks @FitnessWorksFW]

I signed the petition: Remove Vanessa Frazier from the UN for supporting antisemitic content online. https://t.co/pQEFKrO0ie

[Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib @afalkhatib]

The UN really does seem hopeless: Under pressure from the Trump administration, the UN Human Rights Office finally issued a statement condemning Hamas’s extrajudicial killing of a Palestinian man in Gaza accused of “collaborating” with Israel, warning of a growing pattern that threatens Gazans’ safety and due process. The statement even notes that Gazans have been “receiving threats” ahead of the June 26 anti-Hamas protests. However, it avoids mentioning torture, the use of Gaza’s hospitals, and, embarrassingly, mislabels the date of the suppressed demonstrations as July 26.

But even in condemning Hamas, the UN tiptoes around naming the group directly, uses kid‑glove language to avoid acknowledging that Hamas’s police forces are inseparable from its terror apparatus, and then drags Israel into the statement, claiming that Israeli strikes on Hamas police have worsened “lawlessness.” In other words: the UN human rights condemns these mysterious, ‘maybe Hamas cops and terrorists’ for executions and threats, while simultaneously describing the same Hamas militias as “law enforcement and administrative personnel” and criticizing Israel for targeting them.

If anything is clear, it’s that the UN remains unwilling, and seemingly uninterested, in forcefully calling out a jihadi, fascistic, ISIS‑like terror group with even a fraction of the vigor it applies to Israel around the clock. And contrary to its self‑image, that’s not a “pro‑Palestine” stance at all; this actually actively harms Palestinians in Gaza.

[Emily Schrader - אמילי שריידר امیلی شریدر @emilykschrader]

Memo to Angelina Jolie, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Cori Bush and the Hadids:

Where were you when Palestinians were persecuted by their own rulers? By other Arab states? Your selective outage reeks of hypocrisy. You aren't pro-Palestinian, you're simply anti-Israel.

@ILTVNews

[Emily Schrader - אמילי שריידר امیلی شریدر @emilykschrader]

This is not an argument about Palestinian rights or statehood, rather it is an argument against historical revisionism.

Because there is simply no basis for the claim that Jews are uniquely foreign to the land while modern Arab Palestinian identity somehow represents an unchanged ancient sovereignty. It’s simply not true, and unfortunately, we increasingly see outright historical inventions replacing factual history altogether.

The truth is that the ideology of Zionism doesn’t negate the right of self determination of any other people…but the traditional Palestinian position does deny the self determination of the Jewish people to the land that they are actually from.

We are told Palestinian identity stretches back thousands of years in its modern nationalist form.

We hear claims that Palestinians are direct descendants of the Canaanites while Jews are supposedly European interlopers.

Palestinian leaders have repeatedly denied or minimized Jewish historical ties to Jerusalem and the Temple Mount which predates Islam itself.

But the historical and archaeological record is overwhelming, and even when it comes to the Torah, the Bible and yes, the Quran — the Jewish people originated in this land.

Their language originated in this land. Their civilization, religion, holidays, literature, and collective memory are rooted in this land.
Jews maintained a continuous presence there for thousands of years despite conquest, exile, massacres, forced conversions, expulsions, and imperial occupation by Arab colonizers…And the reason so many Jews were dispersed around the world was only because invading empires repeatedly drove them out of their indigenous homeland.

Instead of recognizing that the Jewish people are indigenous people to the land and negotiating in good faith for the betterment of both peoples and the establishment of a Palestinian state — decades of Palestinian leadership have opted instead to craft a self destructive, ahistorical, and delusional narrative of replacement, teaching generation after generation a story that they in fact are “indigenous” and the Jews are not...condemning generation after generation to a never ending conflict that they feel is their duty to continue because they have been indoctrinated with a sense of perpetual victimhood where everything is always someone else’s fault, and imbued with the ideology of Palestinian rejectionism.

Despite all of this, Israel repeatedly demonstrated willingness to compromise.

The proposition’s argument collapses under its own historical contradictions. It denies every Israeli concession, negotiation, and peace treaty. Most of all, it denies the repeated refusals by Palestinian and broader Arab leadership to accept Jewish self determination.

Ladies and gentlemen,

The motion before this house claims that Israel never truly wanted peace with Palestine…but the historical evidence simply does not support that claim.

The motion is historically reductive, intellectually maximalist, and fundamentally disconnected from the regional reality.

And for that reason, I urge this house to reject it.

3/3

[Emily Schrader - אמילי שריידר امیلی شریدر @emilykschrader]

Because despite all the rhetoric you’ll hear tonight from the Proposition, Israel has repeatedly shown willingness to accept Palestinian national aspirations and coexistence..even if the trend is downwards in public opinion, even if there are individuals in government who have made distasteful or inappropriate comments.

What has consistently characterized Israel’s decision making from left to right, is an effort to make peace.

In contrast, however, the Palestinian national movement has often defined peace not as coexistence with Israel, but as a world without Israel entirely… and not as offhand inappropriate comments like you see from Israeli extremists, but as a matter of written policy such as the original 1968 Palestinian National Charter, which, even after the Oslo Accords supposedly saw the cancellation of clauses rejecting Israel’s right to exist, a new charter was never published!

The reality is that a state which repeatedly offers negotiations, territorial concessions, withdrawals, and recognition clearly wanted to achieve some form of peace, even if imperfectly or unsuccessfully.
Now let me address another deeply misleading element of the motion itself: the phrase “peace with Palestine.”

In 1948, there was no sovereign state called Palestine. In fact, there has never been an independent Arab Palestinian state in human history.

The war in 1948 was not fought between Israel and a state called Palestine.

It was fought between the newly declared Jewish state and surrounding Arab armies.
Even the term “Palestine” itself did not originate as an Arab national identity. After crushing the Bar Kokhba revolt in the second century, the Roman Empire renamed Judea as “Syria Palaestina,” widely understood by historians as an attempt to sever the Jewish connection to the land following repeated Jewish revolts against Roman rule.

There was no Arab Palestinian civilization there at the time, and there was no Arab or Muslim sovereign power. In other words, the very name “Palestine” entered imperial usage as part of the erasure of Jewish sovereignty.

Much later, the modern Arab Palestinian national movement emerged, primarily through the PLO under Yasser Arafat in the 1960s. Now that doesn’t mean that Palestinians are not a real people today – after all, every national identity evolves over time…But it does expose how much modern rhetoric attempts to invert the historical record by portraying Jews as foreign colonial intruders while depicting modern day Arab Palestinian nationalism as somehow indigenous.

In the early 1900s, the term “Palestinian” referred to inhabitants of the British Mandate, including Jews. The Palestine Post, which later became The Jerusalem Post, was Jewish. The Palestine Symphony Orchestra, which later became the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, was Jewish.

The Palestinian football team during the Mandate period was Jewish.

Palestine Airways? A Zionist Jewish airline.

Palestinian passports were carried by Jews, and former prime minister Golda Meir held a Palestinian passport.

Even the coins issued under the British Mandate featured Hebrew saying “Eretz Yisrael” — the land of Israel.

Contrary to modern activist claims, the demographic history of the region is far more complex than a story of colonialist European Jews displacing a static indigenous Arab population.

In fact, you may be surprised to learn that Arabic is not even a native language to the Levant

The largest influx of Arabs into the Levant came with the Islamic conquests of the Levant in the 7th century…and while a limited presence of Arabs existed sporadically prior to that, there was by no means a substantial or a sovereign Arab civilization encompassing the land of Israel before that.

2/3

[Emily Schrader - אמילי שריידר امیلی شریدر @emilykschrader]

My full remarks at the Oxford Union debate over the motion: “This house believes Israel never truly wanted peace with Palestine”

Ladies and gentlemen,

Tonight’s motion is not merely wrong. It is intellectually unserious.

“This house believes that Israel never truly wanted peace with Palestine.”

Never.

That single word should immediately alarm anyone who values historical accuracy, nuance, or basic intellectual honesty.

Because “never” is not a casual word. It is absolute, total, and maximalist. To vote for this motion, you are not being asked to believe Israel sometimes undermined peace, or that Israel made mistakes.

You are not even being asked to believe Israel bears major responsibility for the conflict. No, you are being asked to believe that across nearly 80 years of modern history, across every Israeli government, negotiation, territorial concession, treaty, withdrawal, every diplomatic initiative – Israel, as a state, never really wanted peace. Not once.

Clearly, such a claim does not stand under the weight of history.

From the modern state’s inception – Israel accepted the 1947 UN Partition Plan despite receiving non-arable land with almost no resources.

The Arab leadership rejected it and launched a war instead. In 1993 and 1995, Israel signed the Oslo Accords, and received an intifada in response.

At Camp David in 2000, Israel offered 94-96% of the West Bank, 100% of Gaza, and a divided Jerusalem.

In 2008, Prime Minister Olmert made another proposal for 94% of the West Bank plus an additional 5.8% more territory in the form of land swaps.

The Palestinian leadership said no to all of these offers.

In 2005, Israel withdrew every soldier and civilian from Gaza. The response?

Gazans elected Hamas, and Israel received over 25,000 missiles over the next two decades — plus multiple wars and the October 7th massacre.

You may argue that Israel’s offers were imperfect, or insufficient… but you cannot honestly argue that these are the actions of a state that never wanted peace.

The problem with this motion however goes even deeper. What exactly is meant by “peace”? Peace is not simply the absence of war, it requires two peoples accepting each other’s right to self determination and national existence.

For much of the conflict, major Palestinian factions and surrounding Arab states have and still do reject Jewish self determination outright. In fact, some if not all of the proposition debaters tonight are on record opposing a two state solution…and yet we as Israelis are being asked to prove that it is us who are serious about peace?

On the question of the partition plan, the Secretary-General of the Arab League at the time, Azzam Pasha, warned that the establishment of a Jewish state would lead to what he called “a war of extermination and momentous massacre” of the Jews.

Other Arab leaders and factions openly spoke about driving the Jews into the sea, including Haj Amin Al Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, who stated in 1948, “Arabs, rise as one and fight for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history, and religion.”

This was never a dispute over borders… rather it was a rejection of Jewish sovereignty itself, even when their rejection ends up harming Palestinian society.

Today, we routinely hear slogans from the Palestinian movement globally, including this week at Oxford — such as “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” a phrase which by definition involves replacing Israel entirely with a Palestinian state stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

At protests around the world, including outside Jewish institutions and synagogues, activists have openly declared “We don’t want two states, we want all of it.”

So again I ask: what exactly does “peace” mean when one side refuses to accept that the other has any legitimate right to exist at all?

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[Warren Kinsella @kinsellawarren]

#topoli

[FitnessWorks @FitnessWorksFW]

@HenMazzig @PreislerKa Mazel Tov!

[Warren Kinsella @kinsellawarren]

You want sleaze? Here's sleaze.

1. Despite a $120,000 family income, @oliviachow lived in the publicly-subsidized Hazelburn co-op in Toronto and paid $800 a month for a three bedroom + den unit.

2. According to the co-op, she should have been paying hundreds more.

3. Thousands of people were on the waiting lists for the kinds of units Chow occupied. She moved out shortly after getting caught by the media.

4. All of that is verifiably true. And it is considered so damaging, Chow's campaign has done secret focus group research on what to say about it.

5. That's sleazy, Tom. #topoli

[FitnessWorks @FitnessWorksFW]

https://t.co/h75P3i9o1A

[Hen Mazzig @HenMazzig]

The reason Israel keeps doing well at Eurovision is not that the Israeli government is good at marketing. The Israeli government is, on most days, one of the worst-marketed states on earth. The reason Israel keeps doing well at Eurovision is that millions of people across Europe are watching the same news that other Europeans watch, reading the same op-eds, watching the same celebrities pose in keffiyehs, and have decided, quietly, that they disagree.

https://t.co/WgTPXjMbvZ

[Melanie Bennet @MelanieBennet_]

CUPE Local 3906 created a Palestine solidarity sub-committee in March with honorarium funding. Weeks later the sub committee marked May Day with Marxist Jihadi propaganda from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a designated terrorist entity in Canada.