In four months, thousands of Jewish children across Canada will pack their duffel bags and head to overnight summer camps, places where, for generations, young Jews have sung Hebrew songs around campfires, celebrated Shabbat (the Sabbath), and built a deep connection to their people and their land. Now, a coalition of anti-Zionist groups is working to ensure those camps never open their doors again.
On February 4, a coalition including the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, the Palestinian Canadian Congress, Just Peace Advocates, the Ontario Palestinian Rights Association, and PAJU Montreal launched a coordinated campaign targeting at least 17 Jewish summer camps across Ontario, Quebec, Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, and Nova Scotia. The goal: strip the camps of their provincial accreditation and federal charitable status, on the grounds that they support what the coalition calls “a genocidal, settler-colonial state.”
What exactly are these camps guilty of? Celebrating Israel’s Independence Day. Sending staff on trips to Israel. Hiring IDF veterans as counselors. One Quebec camp employed a woman who had served as a social worker in the IDF, which is apparently a disqualifying offense. A camp in Ontario was attacked for cultural “appropriation” for using za’atar, a common Middle Eastern herb blend eaten across the region for centuries, including by Jews. A camp director was condemned simply for being, in the coalition’s words, “a Zionist who publicly supports Israel.”
Is targeting Jewish children at summer camp the logical endpoint of the anti-Zionist movement? The Bible answered this question long ago.
The prophet Zechariah recorded the Divine response to those who harm the Jewish people: “Koh amar Hashem Tzvaot: acharei kavod shlaḥani el-haGoyim hashosim etchem, ki hanogea bachem noge’a b’vat eino”, “Thus said the Lord of Hosts: After glory, He sent me to the nations that plundered you, for whoever touches you touches the apple of His eye.” (Zechariah 2:12). The Sages understood bat ayin, “the apple of the eye”, as the most sensitive, most guarded part of the body. When you strike it, there is no ambiguity about the pain you have caused or the intent behind your blow.
The organizers of this campaign claim they are fighting genocide. The facts say otherwise. Genocide is a defined crime under international law. No international court has found Israel guilty of it. What is happening in Gaza is a war — a war launched by Hamas terrorists who invaded Israel on October 7, 2023, murdered 1,200 people, and dragged 251 hostages into tunnels. Israel’s response is that of a sovereign state defending its people. The anti-Zionist movement has worked deliberately to stretch the word “genocide” beyond its legal and moral meaning in order to apply it to Jewish self-defense.
The summer camps are not the first target, and they will not be the last. Anti-Zionist activists have spent the past two years systematically expanding their campaign against Jewish life in North America, moving from university quads to synagogue steps, and now to children’s campgrounds.
On college campuses, Jewish students have faced an environment that has become, at many institutions, openly hostile. Encampments that blockaded campus buildings excluded Jewish students who expressed support for Israel. Jewish professors have been heckled and removed from classrooms. Jewish student groups have been banned or de-platformed by student governments. At Columbia University, once a flagship of American academic prestige, protesters seized university buildings while chanting slogans in support of Hamas terrorists. At UCLA, a pro-Palestinian encampment physically blocked Jewish students from reaching parts of their own campus, while campus security stood by. These are not isolated incidents of political disagreement. They are coordinated exclusion.
Synagogues, the spiritual heart of Jewish communities, have not been spared. In New York City, protesters gathered outside a synagogue chanting in support of Hamas, the terrorist organization that massacred 1,200 Israeli men, women, and children on October 7, 2023. The choice of target was deliberate. A synagogue is not an Israeli government building. It is not a military installation. It is a house of worship where Jews pray, mourn, celebrate, and gather as a community. Targeting it sends one message: you are not welcome here, not because of what your government does, but because of who you are.
This is where the line between political anti-Zionism and naked Jew-hatred collapses entirely. When the target is a Jewish child at summer camp, a Jewish student walking to class, or a Jewish family attending Shacharit (the morning prayer service), and not an Israeli diplomat, a government policy, or a military operation, the political pretense disappears. The Sages taught that sin’at chinam, baseless hatred, was the force that destroyed the Second Temple. What is unfolding across North America is not a political movement with antisemitic edges. It is antisemitism with a political vocabulary borrowed to make it presentable.
Now they have come for the children.
Canada’s own data makes the stakes plain. Jews are targeted in hate crimes more than any other group in the country — a number that surged after October 7, 2023. Gunfire at synagogues. Antisemitic bullying of schoolchildren. Violent chants outside Holocaust museums. Attempted kidnappings of Jewish women. The campaign against summer camps lands on top of this already-alarming escalation.
The reaction from Jewish and non-Jewish groups has been forceful. The UJA Federation of Greater Toronto called the campaign “a deliberate act of intimidation.” The Ontario Camps Association, a non-Jewish body representing roughly 350 camps, released a statement condemning the rhetoric as “discriminatory and antisemitic in nature” and warned that campaigns of this kind represent “a dangerous expression of the singular demonization and wholesale attempt at the delegitimization of one minority group.” Joy Levy, the association’s executive director, was personally targeted and accused of promoting “anti-Palestinian racism”. Her crime? That she is a Zionist.
More than 800 letters have already been sent to provincial camp accreditors demanding that the Jewish camps lose their standing. The campaign is not hypothetical. It is organized, funded, and moving.
What these activists are really trying to extinguish is Jewish identity itself — the songs, the Hebrew, the love of the land of Israel, the sense of belonging to something ancient and real that Jewish camps have cultivated in children for generations. A Jewish child learning to love Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel) around a campfire is, to these groups, a threat that must be neutralized.
The campaign against the summer camps is not an isolated incident; it is the latest front in a global, escalating strategy. Anti-Zionist activists have already targeted Jewish nonprofits, university clubs, comedy shows, and synagogues. In recent months, protesters chanted for Hamas outside a New York synagogue. In Philadelphia, demonstrators hung effigies of Israeli soldiers. In the UK, a hip-hop group led crowds in chants of “Death to the IDF.” That chant has now migrated to American protests. Tactics field-tested in one country are exported to the next.
