A feel-good spectacle for genocide, Walk With Israel masks colonial violence as culture, and those who march aren’t neutral.

Every year in late May, in Canada’s biggest cities, tens of thousands of people—mostly from Canada’s Jewish community are joined by politicians, media figures, and centrist identarian liberals, march in what they call the Walk With Israel.

They wave flags, they say it’s about “the Jewish community.” But what they’re really doing is celebrating an illegal annexation and expressing open solidarity with a genocidal settler-colonial state.

That’s not hyperbole. That’s not opinion. That’s what it is. And if you’re at that event, if you’re sponsoring it, endorsing it, or standing shoulder to shoulder with it, you are not neutral. You are complicit.

The Walk With Israel is deliberately timed to align with Jerusalem Day, the Israeli holiday commemorating the 1967 military conquest of East Jerusalem. That conquest is illegal under international law. It has never been recognized by the U.N. or any credible legal authority. 

But every year, Israel marks it with nationalist flag parades through the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City, where young men scream “Death to Arabs,” smash up shops, and chase Palestinians out of their homes under the protection of 3,000 police officers.

Canada’s version of this isn’t violent in the same way. It’s not supposed to be. It’s the liberal arm of the same project. It’s settler colonialism with a face painter and a klezmer band. But the politics are identical. It celebrates the same event, the same military occupation, the same apartheid regime. And this year, they marched more than a year into the Gaza genocide.

We’re now 18 months into a military campaign where over 50,000 Palestinians have been killed, thousands of them children.

Israel has bombed hospitals, flattened refugee camps, targeted journalists, blocked aid, and intentionally starved the population. It has done this openly. With American and Canadian political cover. With diplomatic immunity. And with moral cover from events like this one.

Because Walk With Israel isn’t just a celebration, it’s a shield. It turns apartheid into heritage. It turns ethnic cleansing into “diaspora pride.” And it gives politicians a safe place to endorse genocide and war crimes while posing for photo ops.

This is a Canadian problem. Not just because it happens here, but because it’s funded here. Canada is one of the largest foreign donors to Israeli charities, with Jewish Canadian institutions raising over $100 million for Israel in just the first two weeks of the Gaza assault.

That money helps fund the military. It helps fund the settlements. It helps keep the genocide going. And it’s raised by the same community institutions that organize Walk With Israel.

That’s not an abstract connection. It’s a pipeline. Donations, lobbying, rallies, and public pressure are all part of the infrastructure of support for Israel in this country. These aren’t fringe actors.

These are major community federations, legacy media figures, political parties, and donors with access to power. And when you see that many of the same people and organizations who condemn any protest outside a synagogue as “hate speech” are also organizing this march for a settler-colonial ethnostate, the hypocrisy is impossible to ignore.

There is a double standard in how political expression is policed in Canada. In 2019, Toronto City Council moved to investigate the Al-Quds Day rally for “potential hate speech.”

The motion explicitly asked police to review placards, pamphlets, even clothing, to find possible violations.

The rally was nonviolent. The only “threat” it posed was against the apartheid regime of Israel, and that threat was merely symbolic, a simple Palestinian-led protest against the occupation of Jerusalem – criminalized by the state.

But Walk With Israel? That gets police escorts, funding, corporate sponsorships, and the mayor’s blessing.

Even though it’s timed to celebrate the same military conquest that sparked the Al-Quds protest in the first place. When Palestinians resist, it’s hate. When Israel colonizes, it’s culture.

That’s how colonialism functions in liberal societies. The oppressed are criminalized for speaking out. The occupiers are normalized, even celebrated, for what they do.

This is about power.

And Walk With Israel is a public expression of who has it, and who doesn’t.

It’s also important to say: this isn’t about Jewish identity. It’s about political choices made by individuals, communities, and institutions. Nobody is complicit just for being Jewish.

But if you raise money for the IDF, if you lobby against ceasefires, if you march for a state carrying out genocide—then you’re not a bystander. You’re part of it.

That’s why events like Walk With Israel matter. They’re not just symbolic. They’re how this complicity is made public, accepted, and reaffirmed. They’re how Canadian liberalism reconciles itself to genocide: by turning it into a family affair.

And the people who challenge this, Palestinian organizers, Jewish anti-Zionists, critics, activists and journalists alike are smeared as bigots for pointing out the obvious.

That’s the role of identity politics in liberal democracy: to shield state violence from criticism by making it untouchable. To call out a rally for apartheid becomes antisemitism. To protest outside a building used to sell settlement real estate becomes “hate.” But to publicly celebrate an illegal annexation? That’s just “heritage.”

If you care about justice, you have to reject this framing. Because there is no neutral way to march for Israel, not in the past, and especially not now. There’s no apolitical way to sponsor an event that celebrates colonial conquest while Gaza is in ruins.

Walk With Israel is not benign. It is not harmless. It is the Canadian face of apartheid. A feel-good spectacle for genocide. And if you’re in that crowd, smiling and waving the flag, you are choosing a side.

You don’t have to be. You can leave. You can listen. You can dissent.

Because history won’t remember why people marched, it will remember who marched while this while this genocide continued. Who cheered while people starved. And who stayed silent—because it felt comfortable.

So no, Walk With Israel isn’t about community. It’s about complicity.

And that’s the truth, whether you can handle it or not.