Canada and the Palestine Question

Canada played a key role in the establishment of the State of Israel and the Palestinian Nakba in 1947–1948 and has remained a steadfast supporter of Israel ever since, often at the expense of the Palestinian people.

Partition of Palestine and Canada’s Foreign Policy Golden Age

Canada was a British colony, and until the passage of the Statute of Westminster on 11 December 1931, Britain determined its foreign policy. The British conquered Palestine from the Ottoman Empire in 1917–1918, during World War I , ruling it as a League of Nations Mandate from 1922 until their withdrawal in 1948. During that period, Canadians were mostly uninterested in the Middle East , other than those who felt a Christian biblical connection to the “Holy Land” or who were concerned about the region’s significance to the British Empire .

After World War II , Canada began to establish itself as an independent and autonomous state and a “useful fixer” in international affairs. Acting on behalf of the Mackenzie King (Liberal Party ) government (1921–1926, 1926–1930, and 1935–1948), influential Canadians, such as Undersecretary of State of External Affairs Lester B. Pearson (1946–1948) and Supreme Court Justice Ivan C. Rand (1943–1959), played important roles on the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), which was created by the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) on 15 May 1947 to propose solutions to the conflict in Palestine. Pearson and Rand steered it to adopt a Majority Report that recommended the inequitable partition of Palestine into separate Jewish and Palestinian states, awarding a majority of the land (55 percent) to the minority Jewish community (roughly one-third of the population).

This was codified in UN Resolution 181 on 29 November 1947. By the time Zionist leaders proclaimed the establishment of Israel on 15 May 1948, Zionist militias were in control of 77 percent of Mandate Palestine and had ethnically cleansed about 90 percent of Palestinian residents from that territory. Canada was among the first countries to recognize Israel in 1948, establishing formal diplomatic relations with the new state on 11 May 1949. A future Prime Minister of Canada (1963–1968), Pearson earned the moniker “Canadian Balfour” for the role he played in establishing Israel.

Canada contributed to the establishment of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) in 1949, becoming one of its largest donors in its first two decades of operations and providing its first director from 1950 to 1951, former Canadian Army Major-General Howard Kennedy .

Canada’s Position on the Suez Canal Crisis and OAPEC Oil Embargo

In Autumn 1956, Canada helped defuse the Suez Crisis after the British, French, and Israelis invaded Egypt to carry out regime change and reassert control over the territory. They faced strong opposition from the United States , the Soviet Union , and the broader international community, as well as resistance from within Egypt and the Arab world. Working with the United Nations, Canada helped establish the watershed UN Emergency Force (UNEF), a force of 6,000 troops built around a core Canadian contingent of 1,000 soldiers for deployment in Egypt as of mid-November 1956. This helped create the political conditions for the British, French, and Israelis to save face and withdraw their forces from Egypt. This was also the first instance of Israel occupying Gaza ; remaining in the territory for several months before being forced to leave in March 1957. UNEF commanders were stationed in Gaza City until Egypt asked them to leave in May 1967. The first commander, Canadian Lieutenant-General E. L. M. Burns , served from November 1956 to December 1959.

Pearson was Secretary of State of External Affairs (1948–1957) during the Suez Crisis, and he won the 1957 Nobel Peace Prize for his role in establishing UNEF and de-escalating the crisis. This established Canada’s image as a multilateralist peacemaker and contributed to its foreign policy “Golden Age” in the 1950s and 1960s.

At the same time, Canada’s Middle East foreign policy remained defined primarily by alliance politics and an affinity for Israel. Just six years after the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) enforced an oil embargo against Western interests for their support of Israel in the 1973 War , Canada’s newly elected Progressive Conservative prime minister, Joe Clark , won a minority election victory, entering office on 4 June 1979 on a platform that included a pledge to move Canada’s embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem . This would have symbolically recognized Israel’s sovereign claim to the city, just twelve years after conquering it in the 1967 War , in violation of United Nations resolution S/RES/242 . This led to a major diplomatic backlash against Canada in the Arab world, threatened United States peace efforts between Egypt and Israel, and left Canadian diplomats worried that their carefully cultivated image as a peacemaker and honest broker was in tatters.

Canada’s Policy toward the Palestine Liberation Organization and during Oslo and the War on Terror

Joe Clark had served as prime minister for less than a year when his minority government fell on 3 March 1980. He had, however, commissioned former Progressive Conservative Party leader, Robert L Stanfield, as Special Representative of the Government of Canada and Ambassador-at-Large appointed on 5 July 1979 to study the whole spectrum of Canada's relationship with the countries of the Middle East and North Africa. His tasks included ascertaining how Canada could improve relations in the region and better support Israel. Stanfield’s foreign policy recommendations included immediately halting any move of the Canadian embassy to Jerusalem, regional peacebuilding and economic development, and re-establishing Canada’s image as a fair-minded actor. Stanfield’s final report in 1980 acknowledged Canada’s western European roots and its close ties were with the United States, United Kingdom, and Israel, but suggested those ties should not preclude good relations with the broader Arab world.

While mostly considering the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to be a terrorist organization, Canada’s Department of External Affairs began to open dialogue with the PLO on political and security matters in 1980. Though reluctant to take a lead political role in regional Israel–Palestine peacebuilding in the 1980s, especially during the administration of Progressive Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney (1984–93) which had a close relationship with Israel, in March 1989 the Government of Canada lifted limits on Canadian contact with the PLO and accepted the Palestinian right to self-determination. This was done as part of a broader movement toward regional peacebuilding, and after the PLO’s recognition in 1988 of the existence of the state of Israel. In 1993, as part of the Oslo Accords, Canada established a Representative Office in Ramallah, marking the start of official Canada–Palestinian relations.

These shifts further set Canada up to play a significant political role in the 1990s Middle East Peace Process (MEPP). As gavel holder of the Refugee Working Group (RWG), it funded and researched peacebuilding policy models and solutions for Palestinian refugees and facilitated Track II peace negotiations. This was largely done under the auspices of the government of the Liberal Party leader Jean Chrétien (1993–2003). There were five working tracks of multilateral negotiations in the MEPP (water, environment, arms control and regional security, economic development, and the question of refugees), and the RWG was especially contentious because of its importance to millions of Palestinians who wanted to exercise their right to return to their homes after their expulsion during the Nakba and Israel’s strong desire to not allow them to return in order to maintain a demographic Jewish majority in Israel. Canada did not initially want to guide such a politically sensitive part of the negotiations, but it was the preferred candidate of the United States and Israel. The first meeting of the RWG was held in Ottawa in May 1992, and Canada ultimately embraced the role, holding the gavel to this day in the long moribund MEPP.

Although Canada’s Middle East foreign policy was still dominated by alliance politics, especially by deference to the United States, and a demonstrated a preference for Israeli aspirations, in the 1990s Canadian policy circles exhibited a relative openness toward Palestinian claims. The Government of Canada specifically supported what it called “fair-minded” peace initiatives and was open to Palestinian autonomy and possible statehood (though only with Israel’s assent). Canada joined the overwhelming majority of the world in supporting or abstaining on a series of resolutions presented every year at the United Nations that were supportive of Palestinian rights. During a regional visit to Israel and Palestine in 2000, Prime Minister Chrétien suggested the Palestinians could choose to unilaterally secede from Israel.

Canada’s policies toward the Middle East generally and Israel and Palestine specifically would change following a series of events, including the start of the Second Intifada in 2000, the US-led War on Terror that began in 2001, a Paul Martin-led Liberal government (2003–2006), and rule by the Stephen Harper Conservative government (2006–2015). During the War on Terror, Muslims were vilified globally, including in Canada, and Israel successfully interpreted its struggle with the Palestinians as part of that broader war.

Both Martin and Harper took overtly pro-Israel stances. They began to reverse Canada’s position of relative fair-mindedness in Israel–Palestine peacebuilding into partisan pro-Israel positions, and Canada’s voting pattern at the United Nations began to swerve to join, especially after 2011, the handful of countries that would regularly vote against resolutions supporting Palestinian rights. The Harper government took hard-line stands in support of Israel, identifying with it closely on a political and cultural level, as a fellow outpost of Western civilization with shared security concerns. His government would crack down on domestic support for Palestinian rights, defund programming, remove personnel, interfere in academic research like a 2009 conference at York University on models of statehood in Israel/Palestine, and even shut down entire organizations like Rights and Democracy in 2012, in order to enforce a more pro-Israel stance in Canadian institutions and civil society.

In 2014, the Harper government updated the 1997 Canada–Israel Free Trade Agreement (CIFTA), and in 2015 it signed a Joint Declaration of Solidarity and Friendship with Israel. At the same time, his government would continue to respect alliance politics, officially maintaining the language of support for the MEPP and a two-state solution. Canada would become among the largest donors of Palestinian foreign aid, all while strategically defunding bodies deemed too supportive of the Palestinians, like UNRWA. Canadian assistance was also restructured to help reinforce and reform the Palestinian Authority to support Israeli occupation authorities’ security needs.

The Era of Justin Trudeau and Genocide in Gaza

Harper spent much of his decade in power purging Canada’s government institutions not only of potential supporters of the Palestinians but also of the liberal internationalism that had dominated Canada’s postwar foreign policy approach. His focus was on maintaining “traditional” alliances with the United States, the United Kingdom and the monarchy, and a closeness to Israel. His government was defeated in the 2015 election by a Justin Trudeau-led Liberal Party, whose electoral platform promised to return Canada to its more liberal internationalist past. It garnered significant support from Arab and Muslim communities, who represented key constituencies in major Canadian urban centres, following decades of change to Canada’s demographic composition after the implementation of a policy of official multiculturalism in the 1970s by former Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau (1967–79, 1979–84). This was a much-transformed Canada. Though support for Palestine found a particular constituency among the Franco–Canadian and Indigenous peoples, who have been oppressed historically by the Canadian state, Canadians were now by-and-large more familiar with the Middle East and sympathetic to the Palestinian struggle, to the point where support for Palestine became one of the leading causes for liberals and the progressive Left in the 2010s and 2020s.

The Trudeau government offered many rhetorical nods to a past era of liberal internationalism, but it mostly followed the Harper government’s foreign policy path on Palestine. The government did restore funding to UNRWA in the 2016/17 fiscal year, which Harper had cut in 2011–2012, in solidarity with Israel after its 2008–2009 War on Gaza. Yet the Trudeau government also expanded Canada’s free trade deal with Israel in 2019 to include illegal Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, continued to vote against most United Nations resolutions supporting Palestinian rights, and backed US attempts to bypass Palestinian self-determination through implementation of the Abraham Accords.

The Trudeau government would remain a supporter of Israel through its War on Gaza and genocide that began on 8 October 2023. Canada helped justify Israel’s early assault on Gaza’s hospitals and was the first country in 2024 to coordinate a pause on UNRWA funding with the United States during a critical humanitarian period in the genocide. This support for Israel came despite incredible public pressure on the government to oppose Israel’s assault, including large-scale nationwide protests that took place every week for two years, among the biggest in Canadian history. While public outcry would force the Trudeau government to temper some of its support for Israel, like promising to restrict the export of some arms over human rights concerns, it continued to support Israel, contributing to Trudeau’s unpopularity and resignation from office on 6 January 2025.

Recognition of a State of Palestine

The Liberals managed to hold onto power in Canada’s spring 2025 election with a minority government under the leadership of Mark Carney. While campaigning, Carney seemed to recognize that a genocide was taking place in Gaza, though he would later walk back his statement. The Liberals were again able to garner a significant Arab and Muslim vote share over fears of what an overtly pro-Israel Conservative Party might mean for them. While remaining a supporter of Israel and the United States, Carney’s Liberal government recognized Palestinian statehood at the United Nations on 21 September 2025. Just two days earlier, Prime Minister Carney introduced the Combatting Hate Act (Bill C-9) ostensibly to combat rising hate crimes. It generated significant debate and concern by civil liberties groups about its potential impact on freedom of expression, especially for pro-Palestine speech, given Canada’s history of suppression of Palestine human rights advocacy to help maintain diplomatic support for Israel.