Excluding Jews in Edmonton

A recent knife attack on the Israel Pavilion’s kitchen tent at Edmonton’s Heritage Festival ended with a man in police custody and with Jews in Canada once again asking if the “peaceable kingdom,” as Canada was once known, is safe for them any longer. Video footage captured an assailant tearing canvas with a blade before security personnel tackled him; dancers, volunteers, and children sheltered inside while protesters outside jeered.

The attack coincided with an anti-Israel demonstration and included Independent Jewish Voices Edmonton, Edmonton Jews Against Zionism, and the Palestinian Student Alliance of MacEwan University.

There is no evidence that connects those organizations to the knife suspect, much less that they would sympathize with him. Rather, the useful observation is twofold: the rapid degradation of the civic space where attacks on Jews are now commonplace in Canada; and how Jews are assumed to be responsible/answer for every policy of the Israeli government.

It’s clear both are in play and are routinely planned by activists. Months before the Edmonton festival, activist groups petitioned organizers to purge the Israel Pavilion—a fixture that had presented Israeli food, music, dance, and history without disruption for 47 years.

That prospect ought to alarm Canadians of any identity. A multicultural festival tests a foundational principle: whether citizens may enter public life as themselves without first answering for a foreign government connected to their heritage or ethnicity.

Except Edmonton Councillor Michael Janz suggested just that, saying that specific countries should be excluded if their presence made residents “uncomfortable.” Janz had earlier this year amplified a post baselessly asserting that a newborn anywhere on earth was statistically more likely to be killed by Israel than to perish from any other cause.

Local elected officials rarely circulate canards so detached from reality. For Janz, no denominator accompanied the claim; no mortality dataset accompanied it; no calculation existed that would make the proposition statistically meaningful.

That horrific blood libel entry was later removed, but the rhetoric has long been cascading through Edmonton discourse. On the r/Edmonton Reddit forum—a digital town hall where user votes dictate which topics frame municipal attention—a thread debating Israel’s exclusion attracted hundreds of comments. One comment calling Israel a “terrorist state” drew substantial digital applause, while another in the same thread demanded that discussion move beyond even considering a ban.

Consider this comparison: When a 2023 thread examined whether to exclude the Russian pavilion over the war in Ukraine, the forum arrived at the opposite verdict. Subreddit users readily argued that local Russian-Canadians bore no responsibility for Kremlin foreign policy. Why were local Jews denied that same fundamental distinction?

This is not just a Canadian problem. Travel almost 8,000 kilometres east to Venice, where that same double standard played out in early May. At the Venice Biennale, hundreds of activists choked access to Israel’s pavilion. Banners proclaimed “No Artwashing Genocide” and “No Genocide Pavilion at Biennale.”

Operating under the banner of the Art Not Genocide Alliance (ANGA), the campaign rallied hundreds of cultural administrators behind demands for Israel’s expulsion, culminating in a 24-hour strike that paralyzed national pavilions across Venetian plazas. The campaign moved in lockstep with the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.

The rhetoric in Edmonton and Venice mirrored each other. On physical placards outside the Arsenale, activists demanded: “Boycott the Israeli pavilion and SHUT IT DOWN.” Demonstrators in Edmonton fielded the same core imperative on their protest banners: “Free Edmonton from Zionist Pavilion Israel—shut it down!”

The exclusionary language surged during the Venice setup, where petitions alleged that Israel had eviscerated all maternal health care in Gaza.

We are overdue for facts: Maternity services in Gaza have indeed operated amid acute shortages of medicines, equipment, and anaesthetic drugs. Those conditions warrant scrutiny of Israeli military policy and conduct. Yet Israel actively works to address those humanitarian concerns, coordinating with COGAT to facilitate field hospitals, civilian evacuations, and the entry of tens of thousands of tons of critical medical supplies and incubators. Claims of famine and child malnutrition in Gaza are similarly overstated, yet still persist in the face of the facts.

However, between Edmonton and Venice, the underlying rhetorical architecture is identical: stern, uncompromising demands to expunge even a modest physical footprint of Jewish public life—anywhere and everywhere.

Some hope: Venice provides the response that is typically associated with Canadian pluralism. The Venice Biennale officially rejected censorship, holding open its space for dialogue. Israel remained a participant. Canada should be at least as confident.

Criticism belongs in a free society. So do protests, boycotts, and arguments many of us may find offensive. Equal civic participation surely belongs there too.

But a festival tent is not a foreign ministry. And municipal leaders and cultural boards must resist “purity” political tests for ethnic and civic participation.

Or put differently, multiculturalism and equality for all is a myth if it survives only at the mercy of the most easily offended crowd and those who think Jews must answer for every other Jew, in Israel or anywhere else.

Neil Seeman is a Senior Fellow with the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy and a data science researcher and professor at the University of Toronto. Photo Credit: The Israeli pavilion at the 2023 Heritage Festival in Edmonton, Wiki Commons