Members of
Canada
played a key role in the establishment of the State of Israel and the Palestinian
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,
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
(
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
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
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
While mostly considering the
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
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
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.