In an article attacking the Israel Defense Forces for what it called “ethnic cleansing, war crimes, apartheid and now genocide,” the Canadian site The Maple published a list of 85 Canadian-Israelis, whom it said were current or former Israeli soldiers, on Feb. 24.
Davide Mastracci, the site’s managing editor who has worked for the Qatari channel Al Jazeera and anti-Israel site Electronic Intifada, wrote in the piece that the intention was to provide “mini-profiles for as many Canadians that have fought in the Israeli military at any point as I could find.”
Several of the 85 on the list expressed a range of emotions and responses in interviews with JNS. Noy Leyb, of Calgary, who spent three years as an Israeli paratrooper and left the army as a first sergeant, told JNS that he has been a reservist in Unit 551, a special forces group and wasn’t surprised to be listed.
“I knew that my face would end up on a page like this,” he said. “What surprised me was the language they used, the way they shaped us IDF soldiers and how non-human they made us look.”
“We are moral and ethical soldiers,” he told JNS. “Not monsters like Hamas.”
Leyb isn’t afraid, but he is alert after receiving “a ton” of threats on social media. “It doesn’t faze me,” he said.
Israel Ellis, whose son Eitan Ellis is an Israeli soldier who is currently serving, told JNS that he is angry as a parent “that someone would put my son in harm’s way, intentionally.” (JNS sought comment from Mastracci.)
“That’s my first emotion,” he said. “This guy’s not aggregating public information as a community service. He’s not doing it because he wants to help the community, right?” The point of the article, he thinks, “is to intimidate, to create fear and to cause harm.”
“He’s essentially hunting IDF soldiers,” Ellis told JNS, and he blames the Canadian government in part, due to what he calls its “apathy and complicity.”
“They have not defined legislatively and judicially what hate law is today, and what is incitement to hatred,” he said.
Shai DeLuca described the site’s project on social media as an “SS-style hit list.”
The Maple “literally just put together a list of Jews,” he told JNS. “This is why I call it the SS list, because, other than that, what was the purpose, if it wasn’t to dox or if it wasn’t to say that these people did something wrong?”
DeLuca, who is a designer with a large following on social media, is a former IDF combat engineer of three years who dismantled munitions in minefields and took apart explosives. He was in Israel during Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror attacks and returned to Canada that day on the last flight. He told JNS that he wasn’t surprised by the list.
“I looked up the Maple and saw some antisemitism. Do you even call them articles? Excuse me, but no,” he said. “Sadly, I think that this is what Canada has become, so I would have been more surprised had it not happened.”
Moshe Tzvi Shapiro told JNS that when he first saw himself on the list, he was shocked “that there are people who are so blind to reality.”
“To dox people who literally put their lives on the line to protect not just Israel, but the world from terrorism, is insane,” he said.
“Unlike our enemies, none of us has any interest in hurting a fly,” he told JNS. “We volunteered to fight because we know it’s the right thing to do. Because, as everyone in Israel is aware, in the aftermath of the horrific events of a year and a half ago, and as tensions rise on all the borders around us and in Judea and Samaria, there are more and more fronts, and less and less soldiers to fill them.”
“If we weren’t there,” he added, “I don’t know who would.”
Leah Goldstein, a former IDF Krav Maga instructor and former member of the Israeli police force, told JNS that if The Maple really wanted balance, “where is the list of the Hamas supporters, or people that support radical Islam?”
Jew-hatred has “always been around,” and this Maple was “just giving them an excuse now to come out of their hiding place,” she said.
“There’s no way I’m going to hide who I am. I’m not afraid,” she told JNS. “His purpose is to put all 85 of us in danger.”
“You got to catch things when it’s young and early and squash it, so he’ll think three times before he writes any stupidity again,” she added. “I think it is good to attack it and make him feel small. There’s no point in silence.”
