Canada’s op-ed pages offer one-sided support for Israel, study shows

Jan. 25, 2024

Almost 90 per cent of opinion columns recently published by Canada’s major newspapers defended Israel’s war on Gaza

A small fraction of recent opinion articles published by Canada’s major newspapers expressed opposition to Israel’s war on Gaza or support for the idea that Israel should be held accountable, an analysis by The Breach has found. 

The vast majority of 63 columns appearing in The Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star and National Post between Dec. 15 to Jan. 15 either sought to justify Israel’s conduct in Gaza or expressed some discomfort about Israeli tactics while downplaying—if not totally dismissing—the urgency of ending the assault on Gaza, usually by hyper-focusing on Hamas’s attacks on Oct. 7. 

Just eight of the op-eds—or 13 per cent—opposed Israel’s assault on Gaza, which The Breach defined as either endorsing an immediate ceasefire or advocating for Israel to be held accountable for its actions through international bodies. 

The Breach’s findings show that the opinion pages of Canada’s newspapers are completely out of step with public opinion—and with the scale of suffering that Israel has inflicted on Gazans.

The position expressed in most of these op-eds reflects the views of a minority of Canadians. According to a poll published by Ipsos in late November, 81 per cent of Canadians want to see an immediate ceasefire. 

And while 18 per cent believe that Canada should support Israel, a far larger number—64 per cent—want Canada to either be neutral or remain uninvolved. 

Spokespeople for the three newspapers did not respond to requests for comment.

One of 33 pieces in National Post mildly criticized Israel

In the National Post, where 33 op-eds expressed a position on the assault on Gaza, not one called for an end to the Israeli onslaught. 

The lone critical column, from Fr. Raymond J. de Souza on Dec. 22, questioned whether the “pulverization of Gaza” serves Israel’s long-term interests, but didn’t call for it to stop. 

The general tenor of the commentary in the Post is reflected in a column from the newspaper’s founder, Conrad Black, who wrote on Dec. 16 that Israel’s war in Gaza was the most “just war” ever waged.

The most prolific defender of Israel’s conduct in the Post’s comment pages was Sabrina Maddeaux, who wrote four columns expressing support for Israel’s war aims. None of her columns even alluded to the humanitarian situation in Gaza, where more than 570,000 people face “catastrophic hunger,” with Human Rights Watch saying Israel is using “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare.” 

Maddeaux announced last week that she was leaving the Post to run for Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives. 

The Globe and Mail published 12 opinion columns directly referencing the situation in Gaza, of which just three, or a quarter, suggested the need for an urgent end to Israel’s bombardment. The Globe columns were more likely than those in the Post to acknowledge the “devastating human toll of the war in Gaza,” in the words of the former Israeli foreign affairs Shlomo Ben-Ami.

The Toronto Star came closest to having a semblance of a debate on Israeli conduct in its op-ed pages. Of the 18 op-eds examined, five—still less than one-third—opposed the war. 

In the same period, columnist Rosie DiManno alone wrote four columns suggesting that Israel was blameless for the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. As in The Globe and Mail, the bulk of commentary in the Star alluded to the suffering of Gazans but either didn’t attribute a perpetrator or blamed Hamas instead of Israel. 

Ceasefire when?

On Dec. 12, Canada was one of 153 states that voted in favour of a non-binding UN General Assembly resolution calling for an “immediate humanitarian ceasefire,” which was opposed by just 10 states, including the United States and Israel. 

Of the articles surveyed, 14 specifically referenced Canada’s vote at the UN. Only three (two in The Globe and one in the Star) supported Canada’s position, representing 21 per cent. 

In the Post, Tristin Hopper responded the day of the vote by suggesting Canada leave the UN altogether, purporting to quote the resolution calling the entire conflict an “illegal Israeli action.” Those words appear nowhere in the resolution.

Sabrina Maddeaux, writing on Dec. 22, called the government’s vote “a truly shocking move,” which “reflects the Trudeau government’s bottomless abyss when it comes to moral clarity.”

A Dec. 18 Star editorial fully endorsed Israel’s stated war aim of destroying Hamas, but gently suggested that, rather than bombing Gaza mercilessly, “other methods must be employed to eradicate Hamas.”

Both tactical alternatives the editorial board suggested have been floated by centre-right Israeli politicians who broadly support the war on Gaza: go after Hamas’ funding and send NATO troops to intervene in Gaza on Israel’s behalf. (The latter idea came from Ehud Olmert, who was prime minister during Israel’s 2006 invasion of Lebanon.)

Rather than a ceasefire, the Star endorsed another limited humanitarian pause of the kind that occurred over a week in November, which its editorial board said it hoped would become permanent.

In a Dec. 21 Star column, Martin Regg Cohn conceded that “a ceasefire in some form is unavoidable, for the killing [in Gaza] is unsustainable,” in the final paragraph of a piece that suggested the world unfairly singles out Israel while ignoring “Arab versus Arab violence.”

A Jan. 1 Rick Salutin piece in the Star stood out for drawing an equivalence between the religious fanaticism of Hamas and the Israeli government, while calling for an end to the bloodshed in Gaza. “In the current setting, you look at Gaza and Oct. 7 and say, Both this and that are wrong,” Salutin wrote. “There must be a better way. As in fact there is.”

Just one column supported South Africa’s charge of genocide

A chorus of condemnation emanated from Canada’s op-ed pages against South Africa after the country formally accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). 

Of the op-eds analyzed, 16 specifically referenced South Africa’s ICJ case (nine in the Post, four in The Globe and three in the Star). Just two op-eds, both in The Globe, representing 12.5 per cent, expressed support for the ICJ hearing the case.

South Africa’s 84-page application outlining its arguments, filed on Dec. 28, included nine pages of quotes expressing genocidal intent from Israeli officials, including the prime minister, president, and defence minister.

The op-eds opposed to South Africa’s application all argued that it has been Hamas, not Israel, committing genocide, despite the wildly lopsided death toll in Gaza.

Former Supreme Court justice Rosalie Abella took to the pages of The Globe on Jan. 9 to call South Africa’s ICJ case against Israel “an outrageous and cynical abuse of the principles underlying the international legal order that was set up after the Second World War.”

But Abella conducted no legal analysis of South Africa’s case, complaining that, despite all the human rights abuses in the world, “the country that finds itself as the designated avatar of genocide is Israel.” 

“As a lawyer, I find it shameful; as a Jew, I find it heartbreaking; and as the child of Holocaust survivors, I find it unconscionable.”

In a similar vein, a Jan. 5 article from The Globe columnist Marcus Gee suggested that people who were once victims of genocide are incapable of committing genocide: “To accuse Israel of an act of which the Jewish people were themselves the most famous victims is truly contemptible.”

Who is inverting reality?

On Jan. 10 in the Post, former Liberal justice minister and founder of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights Irwin Cotler claimed South Africa’s arguments “turn fact and law on their head, inverting reality and effectively undermining international justice and the rules-based international order.”

Cotler wrote that “Israel consistently seeks to minimize harm to civilians ­using measures including leaflets, messages and phone calls to urge civilians to evacuate targeted areas, creating humanitarian zones and corridors, and facilitating humanitarian aid.”

This is contradicted by an investigation in The New York Times that found Israeli forces dropped 208 one-tonne bombs on the places it told Palestinians to evacuate to during the first six weeks of the Gaza attack. 

The following day, also in the Post, Conservative MPs Melissa Lantsman and Michael Chong published an op-ed bemoaning “Trudeau’s silence on South Africa’s anti-Israel case.”

“On the merits, South Africa’s case is worse than baseless. It is based on manipulated evidence and twisted and invented quotations attributed to Israeli officials.” It does not specify which evidence is manipulated, nor which quotations are distorted or fabricated.

In a Jan. 12 piece, the Star’s DiManno accused South Africa of “cherry-picking…the most radical and inflammatory comments made by some leading Israeli officials,” approvingly quoting a lawyer for Israel who dismissed genocidal rhetoric from top Israeli officials as “random quotes which are not in conformity with government policy.” 

In The Globe, international legal scholar Michael Byers argued on Jan. 2 that Canada must support the ICJ as it seeks to “follow the law and the evidence—wherever they might lead,” but declined to take a stand on the merits of South Africa’s case.

The only article in any of the three newspapers surveyed that supported South Africa’s application was written by filmmaker and journalist Avi Lewis in response to Abella’s op-ed. 

Lewis called Abella’s arguments “distressingly detached from reality,” which could accurately describe the general output of Canada’s op-ed pages regarding Israel’s assault on Gaza.

Support for The Breach’s work has been provided by the Inspirit Foundation. Inspirit does not endorse, influence, edit, or vet journalistic content in advance of or following any publication.