University students from across North America organized Gaza solidarity encampments last academic year to protest Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians and their financial complicity in the carnage. The sit-ins helped put Israel’s crimes against Palestinians at the top of the Western news agenda thanks to widespread media coverage.
Although the protests on campus were overwhelmingly peaceful and featured a large number of anti-Zionist faculty and students, Israel’s supporters in the media, politics, and academia responded by accusing protesters of selling anti-Semitism and intimidating Jewish students. At the conclusion of the school year, police detained the majority of these campus protests, making arrests and felony burglary charges against hundreds of students involved in the process.
The West Bank and Lebanon students are once more mobilizing in protest of the Zionist genocidal aggression that is beginning to come as the new academic year approaches. These student protesters are already facing unsubstantiated accusations of anti-Semitism from the mainstream media, threats from political leaders, abuse from the police, and intimidation from university administrations. Moreover, campuses this academic year are facing a new threat: intimidation , from so-called Zionist “self-defence” groups with far-right links.
At the University of Toronto, Magen Herut Canada (Defender of Freedom Canada), a volunteer-based Zionist vigilante group affiliated with Herut Canada – an organisation tied to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right, revisionist Likud Party, which advocates for the “Greater Israel” settler-colonial vision – was mobilised to ostensibly “defend” Jewish students from what they claim to be protesters ‘ anti-Semitism.
In addition to expanding its “volunteer safety patrols,” Magen Herut intends to start operating in the United States and throughout Canada. Membership requires ideological alignment with Zionism and experience in policing, security, or the military. With more than 50 members, Magen Herut coordinates through WhatsApp groups to patrol up to 15 zones, including university campuses, and to appear at Gaza solidarity protests, where they intimidate attendees. They are seen on camera in large groups, and they are identified as members of the “Surveillance team” at Magen Herut in black T-shirts. The group’s leader, Aaron Hadida, a security expert, teaches “Jewish self-defence”, including the use of firearms. Magen Herut works closely with J-Force, a private security firm that provides “protest security” for Israel supporters. J-Force sends tactical-looking volunteers to events celebrating Palestine. Both organizations are expected to continue their active campus activities throughout the academic year.
At pro-Palestinian events at the university, Zionist activists affiliated with the Jewish Defense League (JDL), a designated hate group affiliated with the Southern Poverty Law Center, have also been spotted. The group, which was largely inactive prior to October 7, was deemed a “right-wing terrorist group” by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 2001,
At a small pro-Palestine march at the University of Toronto on September 6th, several “counter-protesters” waved flags with the JDL or the Kahane Chai symbol on them, according to Haaretz. A fascist Israeli organization affiliated with JDL, Kahane Chai, supports the forced expulsion of Arabs from Israel. According to the newspaper, other Zionist protesters were seen chanting “Let’s turn Gaza into a parking lot” and wearing Kahane Chai caps.
Racist violence and terrorism have a long history at the JDL. Its members bombed American activists and other Soviet-era properties in the US and killed those who were portrayed as “enemies of the Jewish people.” They were linked to a number of 1985 bombings, including one in which West Coast Regional Director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee Alex Odeh was killed, a 1994 massacre in which 29 worshipers were fatally shot during the holy month of Ramadan, and a plot against US Representative Darrell Issa in his San Clemente, California district office and the King Fahad Mosque in Culver City, California.
Alarming is the University of Toronto’s use of uniformed far-right Zionist “patrol teams” and JDL flags. This implies that North American university campuses, which have historically been the epicenters of anti-Zionist resistance and solidarity between anti-colonial movements in the West, are now being used persecutory tactics that Zionists have long used to thwart anti-colonial resistance in Palestine and elsewhere.
The aim of these Zionist groups is twofold: fracture, weaken and defame intersectional resistance to white supremacy, which of course includes Zionism, and provide support for US-led Western imperial expansionism and genocide, spearheaded by Israel.
The Zionist vigilantes active at the University of Toronto falsely represent themselves as Jewish “self-defence” forces in order to divert attention away from their far-right ties, fascist roots, and blatant aggression against anti-genocide student protesters.
The concept of “self-defence” has vastly different meanings for the colonised and the coloniser. For the colonised, “self” is tied to cultural identity, ancestral land and vital resources. While the coloniser is based on a constructed identity, land theft, and the shifting of blame for colonial resistance onto the victims of colonization, the situation is rooted in colonization. Indeed, the leading Zionist militia from 1920 through the 1940s, the precursor of the “Israel Defence Force”, was named Haganah, meaning “defence” in Hebrew, and was a major force in appropriating Palestinian land and ridding it of its native population.
Zionist vigilante organizations like the JDL have used the same “self-defence” rhetoric and methods since 1948 to justify hostility and colonization while appropriating and tying Jewish victimhood to Zionist criminality. They use fear to stifle support and subservience for their eliminare agenda. Extreme measures are used by these groups to justify extreme measures, using the concepts of deterrence and dehumanization of Palestinians to mask offensive aggression and counteract perceived threats with lethal force.
Zionist vigilante groups on Northern American university campuses target anti-genocide protesters under the guise of “Jewish defence” as a means of defending white supremacy in its Zionist and American forms and fracturing anti-colonial resistance led by Palestinian, Black, brown, Indigenous, immigrant and Jewish anti-Zionists.
In contrast, the anti-colonial alliance, both in North America and globally, is built on a shared understanding that white supremacist oppression is entrenched in systemic racism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and imperialism. By presenting a united front against all forms of racism and capitalism, it challenges the colonial and neocolonial establishments. As part of this resistance, it rejects Zionism as a white supremacist, European-driven project, drawing parallels to other manifest destiny ideologies that have fuelled Western settler-colonial ventures, including in the US.
Regardless of the outcome of the upcoming US elections, white supremacy, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism continue to rise across North America. Additionally, the election discourse runs the risk of distracting attention from the dangers posed by the rise of Zionist organizations with direct links to far-right violence. To challenge it, people, including Jews, must stand against all forms of ethnocentrism and exclusion. The Jewish community’s long history of trauma and persecution should inspire a unified pursuit of justice, freedom and equality for everyone, rejecting Zionist vigilante terrorism.
