There was some relief this week when Montreal City Council rejected the most pernicious elements of a motion introduced by Projet Montréal to sever relations with Israel. The original motion sought to have the City of Montreal pronounce Israel guilty of “apartheid” and “genocide,” and suspend institutional ties with the Israeli government, its institutions and municipalities.
After extensive mobilization, those provisions were removed. An amended motion passed without them.
That matters. Those who spoke out were right to do so, and their efforts made a difference. But Montreal’s experience should not be viewed simply as a victory. It is a case study in a much larger and more dangerous phenomenon: the gradual normalization and institutionalization of antisemitic narratives.
The problem with the original motion was not simply that a municipal government has neither the mandate nor the expertise to adjudicate questions of international law and armed conflict. Montreal’s mayor was correct to insist that the city council is not an international court. The deeper problem is what happens when allegations are repeated, debated and given institutional platforms without regard to their factual or legal foundations.
The pattern is familiar.
First comes repetition. Zionism is racism. Israel is an apartheid state. Israel is committing genocide. Allegations are repeated until repetition itself becomes “evidence,” while the underlying legal meanings and factual foundations are increasingly ignored.
Then comes normalization. Language that once would have required evidence becomes acceptable in institutions entrusted to uphold principles, teach critical thinking and protect democratic discourse. The debate shifts from whether the allegations are true to what should be done in response to them.
Then comes institutionalization. Resolutions pass. Committees deliberate. Organizations adopt terminology. Statements enter minutes, reports, and protocols. Media coverage amplifies the claims. Eventually, the next debate begins where the previous one ended.
Those who opposed Projet Montréal can take satisfaction in the fact that its most damaging provisions were removed. Civic engagement mattered.
Canada has seen this pattern repeatedly with BDS campaigns on university campuses. A resolution may fail once, twice or five times. Those who oppose it celebrate each defeat, believing that they have put out the fire. But the embers remain. The allegations are repeated, the vocabulary becomes familiar, and what was once extraordinary becomes ordinary.
That is why Projet Montréal’s motion should concern far more than Montreal’s Jewish community. It comes amid other instances of antisemitic rhetoric entering Canadian public life, including a mayoral candidate in Ottawa peddling similar allegations, a professor in Ontario standing in a Jewish neighborhood repeating ancient antisemitic tropes, and when employees of the publicly funded broadcaster are instructed not to refer to 9/11 as a terrorist attack.
And although the original motion did not pass, its underlying allegations received a platform inside one of Canada’s most important democratic institutions. They were debated, repeated and disseminated. They became part of the public and institutional record. That is not nothing.
There is another danger. The motion attempted to distinguish between Israel and Montreal’s Jews: Whatever one thinks about Israel, Jewish Montrealers should not be held responsible for the actions of its government. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism makes precisely this point: Jews, in Montreal or anywhere else, should not be held collectively responsible for the actions of Israel’s government, any more than Chinese, Italian or Greek Canadians should be held responsible for the actions of their governments of origin.
But protecting Jews by creating a “purity test” that severs the inextricable connection between Jews and Israel, the homeland of the Jewish people—not the government of the day—is itself deeply troubling.
Zionism is integral to the identity of the majority of Jews around the world, including in Montreal. It is the progressive national movement anchored in millennia of memory, heritage and faith in which the Jewish people sought to return to sovereignty in their ancestral homeland.
Antisemitism, an ancient hate, adapts and survives by latching onto the guiding social construct of the time. In the post-World War II era, allegations of racism, apartheid and genocide have become libelous tools that place Israel, Zionism, Zionists and Jews worldwide on the docket of the accused.
The vocabulary changes. The mechanism of demonization, delegitimization and double standards does not. Whether excluding an individual Jew from an equal place in society or excluding Israel from an equal place in the family of nations, antisemitism gnaws away at the foundational principles that sustain free societies.
But what starts with the Jews never ends with the Jews. That should sound sirens in Montreal and across Canada.
“We may allow ourselves a brief period of rejoicing, but let us not forget for a moment the toil and efforts that lie ahead,” Winston Churchill said.
Those who opposed the Projet Montréal motion can take satisfaction in the fact that its most damaging provisions were removed. Civic engagement mattered. Speaking up mattered.
But satisfaction must not become complacency. The objective of campaigns built on lies is not necessarily to win the first vote. It is to move the goalposts of acceptable discourse. To repeat allegations until they become familiar, make the unacceptable debatable, and eventually, make the debatable mainstream.
Montreal stopped a municipal resolution from crossing a dangerous threshold. Now comes the harder task: recognizing how much that line has already moved.
