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Labour’s Gaza Reckoning

Dan Iley-Williamson

It wasn’t just a ‘bad night’ for Labour. It was a catastrophe for Labour. It was Labour’s worst local election results since becoming a party of government and the worst midterm results for a governing party in living memory. Labour lost 1,498 councillors in England, it lost control of the Senedd for the first time in its history, and it slumped to 17 seats in Holyrood.

The Labour government’s refusal to support working-class people through the cost-of-living crisis; its ongoing embrace of Treasury orthodoxy and underfunding of public services; its scandals, cronyism and appointment of Peter Mandelson—all were major factors in Labour’s devastating result. And so too was the Labour government’s ongoing support for Israel’s genocide and apartheid against Palestinians.

In opposition and in government, Keir Starmer has been a loyal ally to Israel. He has continued to arm its atrocities; he continued to fly spy-flights over Gaza, providing Israel with real-time information on the annihilation of the besieged enclave; and he has refused to name Israel’s war crimes, let alone acknowledge its genocide. After ignoring electoral warnings before—from the five pro-Palestine independents elected in the 2024 general election, to the Gorton and Denton by-election drubbing in February—in this election, progressive voters up and down Britain delivered a damning verdict on Starmer’s shameful record.

Further polling will confirm it, but we already know this: while Labour lost hundreds of seats to Reform, it lost far more votes to the Greens, Plaid Cymru, the SNP and Your Party-backed local independent groups. All these parties have robustly challenged the Labour government for its complicitly in Israel’s genocide, and all saw voters reward them.

Putting Palestine on the Ballot

Responding to Israel’s genocide in Gaza and building on decades of campaigning, the movement in solidarity with Palestine has become the largest mass mobilisation in Britain since the suffragettes and one of the biggest movements for Palestine in the Global North. The Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), alongside our partners in the Vote Palestine coalition, brought this mass movement into the elections. We launched a Candidate Pledge for Palestine, asking all council candidates to make a commitment to advocate for Palestine if they were elected, including supporting the divestment of pension funds from companies complicit in Israel’s crimes. PSC did the same in the Senedd election, where the pledge included an explicit endorsement of the Palestinian-led call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS).

The results were significant. More than 2,200 council candidates made the pledge, alongside 141 candidates for the Senedd. This support came from a wide political spectrum, including candidates from Labour, the Liberal Democrats, and the Conservatives. But in England, by far the biggest proportion were Green candidates, with significant numbers of independents and local party candidates too. In Wales, again candidates from Labour and the Liberal Democrats made the pledge, but the vast majority were from Plaid Cymru and the Greens.

And many of them were elected. Over 600 council candidates who made the pledge—12 percent of all councillors elected—were successful, as well as 36 Senedd candidates—almost 40 percent of the new Senedd Members. This includes high profile wins, such as the Greens’ new mayors for Hackney and Lewisham—Zoe Garbett and Liam Shrivastava respectively—the re-elected Aspire mayor for Tower Hamlets, Lufter Rahman, and the Wales Green leader, Anthony Slaughter MS. The majority of Plaid Cymru’s new Welsh government Cabinet—seven of its ten members, including the new Deputy First Minister, Sioned Williams MS—made the pledge, thereby publicly supporting the BDS movement.

During the election campaign, in an interview with Zack Polanski, the BBC’s Nick Robinson asked—with derision dripping from every word—if ‘Palestine is on the ballot?’, as some Green Party candidates had said. While Robinson was clearly contemptuous of this idea, the truth is that Palestine wasn’t just a protest vote.

PSC’s research shows that Local Government Pension Scheme funds, which are administered by local councils, invest more than £12.2 billion in companies complicit in Israel’s genocide and apartheid. This includes around £500 million in BAE Systems, the arms company that make components for the fighter jets that have been used to decimate Gaza. It also includes millions invested in Caterpillar, the manufacturer of bulldozers Israel uses to demolish Palestinians’ homes, schools and hospitals in the occupied Palestinian territory. And in Wales, last year it was revealed that the devolved government had given a £500,000 grant to SENIOR, an arms supplier that exports military equipment for Israel’s F-35 fighter jets, despite the then-First Minister claiming otherwise.

History of Complicity

The scale of Israel’s violence against Palestinians has reached new heights in recent years, but it is nothing new. Today marks the 78 anniversary of the Nakba—the ‘catastrophe’—when Israeli forces ethnically cleansed 750,000 Palestinians from their lands. That was not just a historic event, but an ongoing process of dispossession, displacement and oppression, most horrifically witnessed in the Gaza genocide. Throughout this, the Palestinian people have resisted their erasure, steadfast in their commitment to their liberation.

British governments have been complicit from the beginning: from issuing the Balfour Declaration in 1917 and promising Palestine to another people, and Britain’s role as the colonial power in 1948 in laying the groundwork for the Nakba, to today, with Starmer’s aiding and abetting Israel’s genocide and apartheid.

Starmer’s time in Downing Street will soon be at an end, but changing faces at the dispatch box is not enough. Last year, Labour Party conference overwhelmingly voted to acknowledge the genocide and demanded meaningful sanctions on Israel, and now the wider public has spoken as well.

Rather than arming their annihilation, the Labour government must stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people, heed these demands, and end its complicity—starting by imposing comprehensive sanctions on Israel, including a full arms embargo.

That will be our message in London this Saturday, when we march to commemorate the Nakba and stand in solidarity with Palestine. Join us.

[Dan Iley-Williamson is a Political Organiser at the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. Courtesy: Tribune, a socialist magazine established in 1937 to give voice to the popular front campaigns against the rising tide of fascism in Europe. For eighty years, it has been at the heart of left-wing politics in Britain, counting giants of the labour movement like Aneurin Bevan and Michael Foot among its former editors.]

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Rima Hassan: The French-Palestinian MEP the Establishment Wants to Crush

Christophe Domec

On April 2, French-Palestinian MEP Rima Hassan was arrested and held in custody in Paris for a social media post after police launched an investigation into her statements for alleged “terrorism apologia.”

For a post made on X posted a few days before on March 26, she faced a charge which French law normally reserves for those caught in the act of committing a crime, known as a “flagrant délit.”

Hassan and her lawyers have claimed it is the first time this charge was used against a sitting member of parliament for a statement they made online.

In most cases, elected officials in France are given parliamentary immunity, which protects them from being held in custody–but “flagrant délit” is one of the few exceptions to this immunity.

“It’s the first time police sought this type of charge for a Tweet,” Ms Hassan told the Morning Star.

There was a desire from the court to overlook my parliamentary immunity and to obtain my arrest.

The last time an MEP was hit with [this type of charge] was during the Qatargate scandal, when elected officials were caught with suitcases full of cash given to them by Qatar.

The police probe into Hassan’s post on X had been opened a few days prior to her arrest last month.

It followed complaints concerning a quote Hassan shared from Kozo Okamoto, a member of the Japanese Red Army who took part in terrorist attacks on the Tel Aviv airport which killed 26 people.

An investigation by Mediapart later revealed that prior to her arrest, prosecutors tracked the MEP’s phone, looking at records dating back three months.

The Paris district court also went as far as to request Hassan’s travel records from the French national rail SNCF and Air France, as well as request help from Europol to further track her.

“It seems extreme that I would face the same type of charge for a Tweet,” she said.

But this latest campaign of what she calls “political-judicial harassment” is not the first time Hassan has faced legal issues. She has been the subject of 16 police complaints over the span of two years–about one every month and a half.

The majority of which came from groups or politicians “who are not neutral on the Israel-Palestine issue and who are supported by those in power,” she explained.

Hassan, a jurist and lawyer, has maintained these complaints only concern statements which were not illegal, such as defending Palestinians’ right of return or when saying that colonised people have a “right to armed struggle” in international law.

One claim, she said, was made after she quoted the Palestinian poet and writer Mahmoud Darwish.

And those are just the ones prosecutors have decided to examine. There are others which were dismissed immediately.

Since elected to the European Parliament in 2024, Hassan has become a leading voice on the issue of Palestine in France and Europe at large.

She was one of the core participants in the successful campaign against the Yadan law–which campaigners said would have effectively banned criticism of Israel in France.

Hassan also launched the European Citizen’s Initiative (ECI) to suspend the EU-Israel free trade agreement, which broke records when it received over a million signatures in three months.

But her activism goes beyond her role as an elected official. Hassan has twice joined the Freedom Flotilla Coalition in their mission to bring life-saving medical supplies and food to Gaza, an action for which she was detained by Israel alongside activist Greta Thunberg.

Her arrest by French authorities last month, she argues, fits within a larger context of repression of Palestinian and pro-Palestine voices in the West.

On top of her legal troubles, Hassan’s activism for Palestine and her prominent position in France’s largest left-wing populist party, La France Insoumise (LFI), Hassan has attracted the ire of France’s establishment.

When Hassan was arrested last month, the main story which ran on CNews, a 24-hour news channel owned by conservative billionaire Vincent Bolloré, was that she supposedly had illegal drugs on her–a fact leaked to the press while she was still in custody and was later reiterated by prosecutors.

Several days later they cleared her of all drug charges, following a series of tests..

A formal complaint has since been lodged with France’s broadcast regulator, detailing several direct accusations against the MEP after the Paris prosecutor’s office has said they identified a substance “resembling” a synthetic drug called 3-MMC.

“It’s a war in the media as well: ‘Rima was arrested’–that is an image that allows people to believe I have done a very bad thing,” she said.

Her status as the favorite pariah of establishment figures was perhaps best exemplified when last year, the former interior minister Bruno Retailleau called for Hassan, a Palestinian who was born in a refugee camp in Syria and came to France at the age of nine, to have her citizenship revoked.

But why has Hassan, and by extension her LFI party, become the target of such intense attacks?

“It has nothing to do with the fact that we want retirement to be at age 60. What LFI has not been forgiven for is its line on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

“Broadly speaking, the traditional left in France is in part still a zionist left, let’s be honest. You have many voices in the Socialist Party who are openly zionist, many of whom show unconditional support of Israel.”

But Hassan told the Star attacks on her would not deter her activism: “I’m an activist with a cause to carry. I’m not here to smooth things over. That’s not my role.

“I’ve helped blow open these four main taboos: on zionism, on the right of return of refugees, on alternatives to two states, and on the question of armed struggle of the Palestinian people.

She added: “And as long as leaders do not ultimately hear [the voices of Palestinians], they will always fall short of any solutions.”

I myself am living proof. I haven’t gone through what Gazans have. I have the privilege of a second exile, a Western passport.

But there is not a single day in my life when I don’t think of myself as a Palestinian refugee, coming from a history of dispossession, whose family is buried in a refugee camp, who lived through that humiliation across multiple generations, who knew the loss of a homeland, who knew displacement.

I’ve said it since the beginning of my entry into politics.The Palestinian question is a test for Western democracies.

Today it is affecting me, but who’s to say that in a little while it won’t affect journalists, trade unions. That’s what’s at stake.

[Christophe Domec is a journalist and contributor to Morning Star, writing on labour struggles, social movements, media and international politics. Courtesy: Morning Star Online, a socialist British daily newspaper with a focus on social, political and trade union issues. It has been functioning as an independent readers’ cooperative since 1945.]

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In France, Pro-Palestinian Solidarity Is Being Silenced and Criminalised

Rokhaya Diallo

Tensions in France over how to respond to a rise in antisemitism have been running high. A government-backed bill that aimed to deal with the problem was rightly denounced as an attack on freedom of expression before being quietly shelved by the government last month.

Introduced in 2024 by Caroline Yadan, a member of the national assembly, the draft legislation was intended to counter “new forms of antisemitism”. But while its explanatory memorandum raised legitimate concerns about the sharp rise in incidents of antisemitism recorded since the Hamas massacres in Israel on 7 October 2023, its wording quickly veered toward a different objective: curbing the ability to criticise Israel.

It must be possible to denounce the many crimes – extensively documented – committed by Israel, and to do so repeatedly without risking sanctions. Freedom of expression in France allows individuals to voice any form of sentiment towards any country as long as there is no incitement to violence.

But the purpose of Yadan’s bill seemed clear. It proposed widening the existing offence of “glorifying terrorism” so that “indirect incitement” could be punished. The draft introduced a new offence penalising the act of “inciting the destruction or denial of a state”.

Originally elected for Emmanuel Macron’s party to represent French citizens abroad, including in Israel and Palestine, Yadan distanced herself from the president’s political movement last year when he announced France’s recognition of Palestinian statehood.

Her draft legislation raised concerns on several levels. First, the creation of “indirect” or “insidious” – and therefore implicit – offences of glorifying terrorism would effectively force courts to infer a person’s intent. This is an impossible task. It would, as the former anti-terrorism investigating judge Marc Trévidic warned, lead to “total arbitrariness”. How can one prove what a person is implicitly suggesting?

Similarly, a prohibition on “inciting the destruction or denial of a state” would run counter to the fundamental right to decolonisation. How, then, would challenges to the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements – or calls for a single “binational” state – be treated?

Under the proposed legal framework, what would become of the right to question France’s own borders? France’s overseas departments are former colonies in the Caribbean, the Pacific and the Indian Ocean. Independence movements in these territories have not disappeared.

A petition opposing the bill filed on the Assemblée nationale website gathered a record 700,000 signatures. Rights bodies warned of the dangerously illiberal trajectory of the proposal. The Ligue des droits de l’homme saw in the text a troubling attempt to “shield the state of Israel from criticism linked to its grave and repeated violations of international law”.

Five special UN rapporteurs issued an open letter expressing concern that the bill threatened “the exercise of protected rights, in particular the right to freedom of expression and opinion, including media freedom”.

The bureau of the Commission nationale consultative des droits de l’homme warned members of parliament of “the risks these provisions pose to freedom of expression and academic freedom, due to their vague and imprecise nature”. Despite refusing to consider the public petition, the government suddenly withdrew the Yadan bill at the eleventh hour. Instead, it is signalling it will bring forward broader legislation against racism. The prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, argued in a recent speech that anti-Zionism had become “the mask of an old antisemitism.”

Clearly there should be no tolerance for antisemitism, wherever in society, or on the political spectrum, it manifests. But the Yadan proposals should be seen as part of a broader pattern of structural criminalisation of pro-Palestinian activism.

In the aftermath of the 7 October attacks, the French interior minister attempted to ban Palestinian solidarity demonstrations on the grounds that they are “likely to generate public disorder”. This failed after the Conseil d’État rejected a blanket prohibition. But that ruling did not stop the drive to suppress the movement.

University students who mobilised against the Yadan bill faced violent police repression. The International Federation for Human Rights and the World Organisation Against Torture condemned the police conduct as “a further worrying step in the restriction of freedom of expression and peaceful assembly in France”.

Prosecutions for alleged cases of glorifying terrorism have multiplied since 2023, targeting a wide range of individuals, from influencers to athletes to trade union activists – and even members of parliament. The media outlet Orient XXI noted that while some of those prosecuted had described the attacks by Hamas and Islamic Jihad as acts of resistance, “few explicitly glorified the 7 October 2023 massacres or rejoiced in the deaths of Israeli civilians”.

High-profile figures, including the academic François Burgat, were charged with “apology for terrorism” before ultimately being acquitted.

The French-Palestinian MEP Rima Hassan of the radical left La France Insoumise party, a prominent voice for Palestinian liberation, was arrested last month, taken into police custody and questioned for “glorifying terrorism”. Her alleged offence was an X post (since deleted) quoting Kozo Okamoto, a Japanese terrorist convicted of a 1972 attack at Ben-Gurion airport in Tel Aviv that killed 26 people.

In a sign of the pressure Hassan is being made to face, news of her detention leaked as she was being questioned, appearing in Le Parisien alongside bogus claims that synthetic drugs had been found among her personal effects. The drug probe was dropped, but only after days of negative media coverage. Le Parisien later published an acknowledgement that it had jumped the gun and that the drug claims were entirely baseless. But it then emerged, via a Mediapart investigation, that Hassan’s phone had been under police surveillance from the start of the year, without her knowledge. Hassan, a lawyer and a former Palestinian refugee who will be tried in July on charges of online “apology for terrorism”, says she intends to refer the matter to an independent UN rapporteur and to the European parliament.

The disproportionate response to pro-Palestinian activism over what human rights groups have called a genocide raises questions about the lengths deployed, apparently to restrict a form of expression that is essential in a democracy.

The Yadan bill is dead, but that such provisions were ever considered should be seen within a broader dynamic – one that seeks systematically to conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism and narrow the space for, if not undermine, the legitimacy of any pro-Palestinian discourse.

[Rokhaya Diallo is a writer, journalist, film director, activist and Guardian Europe columnist. Courtesy: The Guardian, a leading British newspaper founded in Manchester in 1821 as The Manchester Guardian, and later renamed as The Guardian. It is known for liberal, independent journalism and major investigative reporting.]

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National Coalition Promises to Fight Canada’s War Bank

Emma Paling

It was January 2026 when Canada’s anti-war organizers realized what they were dealing with. Activists from groups like World Beyond War and Davenport For Palestine jumped on a Zoom call to discuss Toronto’s bid to host a new global bank that will fund the arms industry.

The organizers, who mostly knew each other from Palestine solidarity protests and Signal chats, created a document and got together online to look for information about the bank.

“Could it really be that this was a financial institution whose sole purpose was to channel money into arms manufacturing?” Rachel Small, an organizer for World Beyond War Canada, said they wanted to figure out. “Yes, that is indeed what it is.”

“That was definitely when we coined it a ‘war bank.’”

Since then, Small and her fellow activists held dozens of one-on-one conversations with organizers from the student movement, labour unions, and civil society groups to build what they hope will be a national movement to stop the bank from coming to fruition in Canada.

On Friday, at a press conference in the heart of Toronto’s financial district, they launched their campaign with the slogan: “Stop the DSRB: No war bank in our city.”

The “Defense, Security and Resilience Bank,” or DSRB, was originally an idea proposed by NATO. Last week, Canada was officially selected as the host country, and some of its major cities–Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal–are vying for the chance to host the bank’s headquarters.

“The last thing Canada needs is a new military financial arms race,” said Sharmeen Khan, a member of World Beyond War Toronto, at the press conference. “Security comes from funding homes, food and education. Security does not come from an economy built on war.”

Meanwhile, organizers of a neighbourhood Palestine solidarity group are turning their focus from lobbying elected officials to pushing financial institutions to divest from the war bank.

Toronto teachers are pressuring the head of their pension plan to drop it. University students are linking the fight against war profiteering to the fight against Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s cuts to tuition grants.

And groups that advocate for better health-care and a healthier environment are condemning the bank as an example of how increased militarism will take resources away from those priorities.

“I’m seeing already a huge range of reasons why people feel really passionate about not letting this take place,” Small told The Maple. “It’s much harder to take down an institution that is established and that has been built, and this is a really unique opportunity to take down this war bank before it can launch.”

Rebranding War

Since 2019, NATO has been pushing for its own bank, according to the Atlantic Council, a pro-U.S. think tank that published a report on the benefits of such an institution.

The bank will help solve NATO’s money problems, the report said, by pooling investment from member countries and underwriting risks for commercial banks.

The DSRB Development Group, an organization that says it is co-creating the bank with various governments, lists RBC, BMO, Scotiabank, CIBC, TD, JP Morgan, Deutsche Bank and others as its supporters. Canada has said it is working with allies to establish the bank, but hasn’t identified which allies are involved.

NATO has specifically said the bank will address the perception that the weapons industry is at odds with guidelines that investors follow regarding the environmental, social and governance impacts of their investments.

The Atlantic Council said the bank can also solve another problem: that people in Canada and Europe want their public money spent on health care, education and infrastructure–not war.

Nikolas Barry-Shaw, a campaigner at the Council of Canadians, said that is exactly why his organization is opposed to the DSRB.

“It’s a big concern for the council, and I think for every progressive organization, because this push to undertake a really unprecedented military buildup is kind of gobbling up every other priority,” he told The Maple.

Barry-Shaw pointed out that while the Mark Carney government pours money and resources into military spending and the DSRB, it is poised to withdraw resources for health care.

The government could cut spending on Health Canada by $3 billion over the next three years. Three thousand public servants at Health Canada and one other department have been told they may lose their jobs.

In November 2025, CBC News reported that the Carney government wasn’t actively working on expanding pharmacare to any more provinces or territories.

“You can’t advocate for things like public health care, clean water or climate action without grappling with the fact that there’s this juggernaut of militarization barreling towards us,” Barry-Shaw said.

The Council of Canadians will support the fight to stop the war bank, he said, and will tie Carney’s agenda of militarization to the under-funding of health-care when the organization’s staff tour Atlantic Canada this summer.

A spokesperson for Canada’s Department of Finance said the government does not view defence and other types of spending as competing priorities.

“These objectives are mutually reinforcing and collectively essential to Canada’s economic resilience and security, particularly in a more uncertain global environment,” spokesperson Marie-France Faucher wrote in an email.

“On health care, the federal government continues to provide stable, growing transfers to provinces and territories, alongside targeted investments. Budget 2025 maintained the Canada Health Transfer, while national programs such as the Canadian Dental Care Plan continue to expand access to care.”

Omar Mousa, Ontario representative at the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS), tied opposition to the war bank to Ford’s recent cuts to student grants at Friday’s press conference.

For years, he said, Ontario’s education system was overly dependent on international students to fund the system. Now that Prime Minister Mark Carney has slashed visas for those students and Ford has slashed grants, students will be forced to take out loans from some of the same banks funding the DSRB.

“At the end of the day, this is a predatory system that feeds itself. The very loans that students will need to be taking out to access education will be used by these very same financial institutions and governments to fund their military expansionism,” Mousa said.

His colleague at CFS, York University undergraduate student Adaeze Mbalaja, told The Maple that the federation will try to channel students’ rage at Ford into fighting imperialism and war too.

“Students are really pissed,” Mbalaja said.

“Obviously, naturally, there’s a whole lot of ‘Fuck Doug Ford,’” chants at student rallies, she said. But organizers are also leafleting about the DSRB and war, and seeing a big response to chants like, “Drop fees, not bombs.”

Mbalaja said CFS organizers may escalate their fight against the war bank as more information becomes available.

Ontario has promised to provide funding to the war bank through funds like the $5-billion Protect Ontario Account, which invests in private companies, as well as the Ontario Shipbuilding Grant and tax credits.

NATO Spending to Soar

The bank’s supporters say it’s a creative way to finance the massive increase in military spending that NATO members have promised to undertake.

In March, Carney announced his government was spending billions of extra dollars on defence and had met Canada’s NATO commitment to spend two per cent of its GDP on defence.

However, NATO allies including Canada have agreed to more than double that spending target to five per cent of GDP by 2035.

At a press conference in December, Doug Ford, Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow, Liberal MP Julie Dzerowicz, and the CEO of the DSRB Development Group Kevin Reed announced Toronto’s bid to host the war bank.

They said the bank would help fund NATO’s dramatic acceleration in spending–one that they say will transform Canada.

“All 32 NATO countries, including Canada, are working to turbocharge our defence spending. And this means mobilizing hundreds of billions of dollars and we need diverse sources of capital to do it,” said Dzerowicz. “Our goal of raising defence spending to five per cent by 2035 represents one of the most ambitious industrial undertakings in Canadian history.”

Kevin Reed, a Canadian who is the president and CEO of the DSRB Development Group, said that NATO’s total spending will increase from $1.6 trillion a year to $4 trillion by 2035. “For Canada, that means moving from $30 billion, roughly, a year to $150 billion. Now, really think about what that means for our country.”

The Maple’s attempts to reach Reed were unsuccessful and the DSRB Development Group does not list any contact information on its website.

Palestine Groups Change Tactics

Dzerowicz’s presence at the press conference inspired Tyler Delmore, a Toronto dad, to join the fight against the DSRB. Dzerowicz is the MP for Davenport, the west-end Toronto riding where Delmore and his family live.

Delmore has been a member of Davenport For Palestine since the beginning of Israel’s genocide in Gaza in 2023.

Back then, Delmore believed that elected MPs would change their positions to reflect the will of their constituents. But over the past two and a half years, he’s been devastated by the Liberal government’s support for Israel’s war and wants to refocus his energy.

“Supposed mechanisms for political action here in Canada have completely failed,” Delmore told The Maple. “Many of us have been radicalized by the fact that our government has done nothing.”

For six months, from September 2025 to March 2026, Delmore and his neighbours in Davenport For Palestine poured their energy into lobbying Dzerowicz.

She hadn’t announced her stance on the No More Loopholes Act, which would have subjected Canada’s arms exports to tighter controls, and they wanted to convince her to support it.

The neighbours called Dzerowicz’s office every day, Delmore said. They met with her in person on December 5, and knocked on doors to meet other people who could contact her. They handed out leaflets at the subway station and organized a rally at her office.

The whole time, Dzerowicz and her staff said she was still considering the bill, according to Delmore and a screenshot of a January 14 email from Dzerowicz’s office viewed by The Maple.

Then, on March 11, the day of the vote, Dzerowicz voted against the bill.

“It was just a realization of darkness, like in a comic book movie where all of a sudden Superman’s eyes go black,” said Delmore of that moment. “Like, oh, there’s complete moral bankruptcy here.”

Dzerowicz’s office did not respond to an email and voicemail from The Maple seeking comment.

Equipped with recent experiences in mind, Delmore said, Davenport For Palestine is changing tactics. Instead of lobbying their MP, members are focusing their energies on investors like banks and pension funds that will fund the new war bank if it’s established.

The strategy has been successful in the past.

Earlier this year, for example, Scotiabank dropped all of its remaining investments in the Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems. A grassroots campaign–which included protests, sit-ins, and a boycott by artists of the Scotiabank-funded Giller Prize–successfully put pressure on the bank to cut ties with Elbit.

Teachers Target Pension Plan

One of the investors that organizers want to see divested from the war bank is the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan (OTPP). The plan is one of the largest pension funds in the world with $279 billion in assets.

Jo Taylor, CEO of the OTPP, has signed multiple documents calling for the war bank to be based in Toronto.

“We are pleased to support the Ontario government in its efforts to have Toronto host the new global headquarters of the Defence, Security and Resilience Bank,” Taylor was quoted as saying in a document announcing Toronto’s bid to host the bank.

World Beyond War and Davenport For Palestine have built relationships with the teachers already calling for OTPP to divest from weapons manufacturers and other companies that are boycotted because of their connections to Israel.

On April 16, teachers rallied outside the OTPP’s annual general meeting–and disrupted the proceedings inside–to tell Taylor not to invest in the DSRB.

The teachers held huge banners that said, “Stop the DSRB. No war bank in our city.”

They gave speeches about how the violence in Gaza has affected them and their students. And they reminded other teachers who were present that they are complicit in war for as long as their pensions are invested in weapons manufacturers.

“We don’t want to be making money from war,” said James Campbell, a Toronto teacher who participated in the action. “We don’t want to be fueling war profiteering.”

Government Asked for War Investments

At the AGM, Taylor, the CEO of the pension plan, said the government had specifically asked the plan to invest in the weapons and defense industry.

“Our exposure to defence businesses is relatively low, less than one per cent of the fund,” Taylor told the crowd, according to a recording of his remarks obtained by The Maple.

“We also think that the defence sector more broadly is becoming more investible for some reasons. Firstly, we’ve been asked to do it. We’ve been asked to do it by our local government here to help them build national security and the defence of Canada. Secondly, it’s been a successful sector, delivering high return for those who’ve been investing in it, and is in line therefore with our desire to make sure to deliver returns for you as part of the plan.”

The Maple asked both OTPP and the federal government whether a member of the government asked the pension plan to invest in the DSRB specifically.

Spokespeople for OTPP did not respond. The Department of Finance’s written statement did not address questions about the pension plan.

Campbell said he was shocked by Taylor’s comments, which came after two and a half years of advocacy by teachers to divest their pensions from weapons and war. “For him to stand up on stage and say, ‘Well, we’re doing this because the government has asked us,’ felt like very much a slap in the face.”

The campaign against the war bank has another important reason to consider divestment strategies, according to Barry-Shaw, the campaigner at the Council of Canadians.

If the bank goes forward, weapons companies would have a permanent source of funding that is less vulnerable to pressure campaigns than individual companies currently are.

“It means yes, effectively, that popular movements against genocide, against militarism, are going to face an added barrier to putting pressure on private investors to pull out,” said Barry-Shaw.

That is one of the reasons why Small, the World Beyond War organizer in Toronto, says the fight against the war bank is about the future of Canada and the whole world.

“These major decisions Canada is making now about ramping up the military budget, about buying new weaponry from the U.S., about launching a global war bank, about refusing to regulate Canadian arms […] That’s them committing to wage war alongside the U.S. for decades to come,” she said.

I think we’re at a really critical turning point where either we put up roadblocks in this war agenda, we make it clear that it’s absolutely unacceptable for Canada to be contributing a single antenna to a single missile that’s being dropped on school kids anywhere in the world, or we will […] ramp up a military strategy that makes this country and its role in the world unrecognizable in the coming decades.

[Emma Paling is a Toronto-based writer and journalist whose award-winning work has appeared in The Maple, The Breach, CBC News, HuffPost, Vice and other outlets. Courtesy: The Maple, a Canadian entirely reader funded publication with a commitment to fact-driven journalism centred on issues concerning working class Canadians, that aims to be an antidote to the establishment corporate press.]