VotePalestine.ca offers necessary demands for Palestinian rights, but its cautious strategy risks reinforcing the very systems it seeks to challenge.

This article is written with the highest respect for those organizing the VotePalestine.ca campaign. The work of advocating for Palestinian rights within hostile political environments is both necessary and courageous. This piece offers a critique of the project’s strategic framework, not a dismissal of its importance or of the efforts of those involved. It is offered in solidarity, with the hope of pushing the conversation toward even deeper forms of resistance.

At first glance, VotePalestine.ca seems like a breath of fresh air in the suffocating world of Canadian politics. It’s polite, well-intentioned, and strategically framed around achievable goals: a two-way arms embargo on Israel, ending Canadian complicity with illegal settlements, recognizing Palestinian statehood, addressing anti-Palestinian racism, and funding relief for Gaza. These demands, rooted in international law, offer a blueprint for those seeking to support Palestine within Canada’s mainstream political system.

But there’s a deeper, more uncomfortable truth at work. By packaging the Palestinian cause into manageable electoral talking points—and carefully avoiding any explicit confrontation with Zionism, settler colonialism, or apartheid—VotePalestine risks reinforcing the very structures it claims to oppose. Its sanitized messaging, channeled into the dead-end of strategic voting, transforms what should be a struggle for liberation into yet another exercise in maintaining liberal respectability.

VotePalestine’s Platform: Good, But Incomplete

There’s no denying that the five pillars of the VotePalestine campaign are, on their own, morally and legally sound. Ending arms sales to an apartheid state should be the bare minimum for any serious government. Cutting ties with illegal settlements, funding humanitarian relief, recognizing Palestinian statehood, and combating anti-Palestinian racism are all necessary steps for any society that claims to respect human rights.

Yet necessary is not the same as sufficient. Noticeably absent from VotePalestine’s language is any reference to Israel’s foundational structures: apartheid, settler colonialism, and systemic ethnic cleansing. These are not fringe terms. They are the language used by Palestinian activists, human rights organizations, and even, increasingly, international legal scholars. Refusing to name these realities doesn’t depoliticize the issue—it defangs it. It shifts the conversation from one of liberation to one of cautious reform.

By advocating for a two-state solution without directly confronting the violent roots of Israeli statehood, VotePalestine effectively accepts the legitimacy of a state built on ethnic cleansing and ongoing displacement. It frames the issue as a tragic misunderstanding between two equal sides, rather than a brutal system of domination. And in doing so, it plays into the same liberal fantasy that has shielded Israel from real accountability for decades.

The Danger of Sanitized Solidarity

Language is not ornamental. It defines the boundaries of political possibility. By avoiding terms like “apartheid” and “genocide,” VotePalestine signals to politicians and media figures alike that support for Palestine can be safely tucked within the existing structures of Canadian politics—no need for uncomfortable truths or structural reckonings.

This isn’t abstract. We’ve seen how sanitized solidarity plays out in practice. Take the case of former Green Party MP Jenica Atwin. When Atwin rightly called Israeli practices apartheid, she was attacked by her own party leadership. Rather than standing with Atwin, the Green Party leadership—embodying the same cautious liberalism that VotePalestine appeals to—capitulated to pressure and undermined her position. Atwin eventually defected to the Liberals, an outcome that perfectly illustrates how polite dissent is absorbed and neutralized within the Canadian political system.

True solidarity with Palestinians requires naming the reality they endure. It requires understanding that settler colonialism is not an aberration—it is the system. Any strategy that refuses to confront this reality head-on will not only fail to liberate Palestine; it will actively help maintain the structures of oppression.

Strategic Voting and the Death Spiral of Liberalism

This pattern of defanged solidarity is part of a broader sickness in Canadian politics: the death spiral of strategic voting. Every election, voters are told they must back the Liberals to prevent something worse. Every election, the Liberals betray progressive voters once in power. And every election, the cycle repeats itself, a little more hollowed out, a little more hopeless than before.

VotePalestine, consciously or not, feeds into this dynamic. By encouraging voters to support any politician who ticks their five policy boxes—without demanding a deeper reckoning with the system itself—they funnel genuine outrage into safe, predictable electoral channels. They reinforce the idea that small policy tweaks by slightly better politicians are the best we can hope for.

The myth of vote-splitting is one of the main tools used to maintain this rigged game. In most urban ridings—Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver—the Conservatives aren’t even close to winning. The real race is between different shades of centrist parties. Strategic voting, far from preventing disaster, simply ensures that no structural change can ever occur. It asks voters to lower their expectations, abandon their values, and participate in a system designed to extinguish meaningful dissent.

If the goal is to challenge settler colonialism—whether at home or abroad—then participating in this cycle without demands, without clear red lines, is a guarantee of failure.

What Real Change Would Require

Real solidarity demands more than polite demands. It demands confronting the structures of Zionism, of settler colonialism, of liberalism itself. It demands language that unsettles, that disrupts, that refuses to allow genocide to be sanitized into policy disputes.

Electoralism alone will never deliver Palestinian liberation. The Canadian political system—built on its own foundation of Indigenous dispossession—is designed to absorb and neutralize resistance. Strategic voting only perpetuates this dynamic, allowing parties like the Liberals to continue backing Israeli apartheid while hiding behind the specter of Conservative boogeymen.

If Palestinians can resist armed occupation with courage and clarity, the least we can do is resist moral cowardice here at home. If genocide isn’t affecting us directly, the very least we owe is honesty—not pragmatic surrender.

We must demand better than VotePalestine’s cautious liberalism. We must demand a politics that names apartheid, colonialism, and genocide without hesitation—and fights to dismantle them. Anything less is complicity, dressed up in polite words and safe campaigns.

Because the Liberals aren’t afraid of Poilievre.

They’re afraid we might stop being afraid—and start demanding justice without compromise.