An Anishinaabe Zionist on how Indigenous history is weaponized to promote antisemitism

Retired Canadian judge Harry LaForme stood at a podium in Tel Aviv and began his remarks with a familiar ritual, but one rarely heard in Israel: a land acknowledgement.

“We are gathered here today,” he said. “In the homeland of the Indigenous Jewish people.”

In Canada, land acknowledgments are a common way to begin public addresses — a formal recognition of the Indigenous peoples on whose traditional territories an event is taking place. But this time, LaForme was far from home, delivering his words not in Ontario, but as part of the keynote address at Tel Aviv University’s Annual Democracy Forum in May, hosted by the Irwin Cotler Institute.

For LaForme, a member of the Anishinaabe Nation and the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, and a self-described “Indigenous Zionist,” the connection was instinctive: “I don’t know of anyone who can claim indigeneity more than the Jewish people in Israel,” he said.

The jurist was on his first visit to Israel, a trip he described as “a dream come true.”

“We learned all about this impossible country,” he said. “Our love for it grew.”

As the first Indigenous judge appointed to an appellate court in Canada, LaForme’s life and legal career have been shaped by “the shadow of settler colonialism,” which he says contributed to the deep kinship that he feels to Jewish people and their “ancestral homeland.”

The notion of an “Indigenous Zionist,” let alone a First Nations justice, finding deep common cause with Jewish Israelis, may seem to some counterintuitive or even provocative, particularly in Canada, where parallels between Palestinians and Indigenous peoples have become a powerful talking point among pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel activists, many of whom frame Israel as a settler-colonial project.

Today, rhetoric surrounding Israel often morphs to adopt the dominant moral vocabulary of the society in which it appears. In the United States, it’s framed through the lens of systemic racism; in South Africa, apartheid; in Europe, Nazism.

In Canada, where colonialism and policies to erase First Nations’ cultures are widely acknowledged as foundational national sins, Israel is cast as a stand-in for colonial guilt, a way to absolve and redirect collective shame over Indigenous suffering.

For LaForme, whose culture, history and identity are often invoked as political talking points, it is deeply offensive.

“I don’t know of anyone who can claim indigeneity more than the Jewish people in Israel,” he said. “But people aren’t interested in history. The history is obvious — it goes back at least 4,000 years, and I don’t understand Canada’s reluctance to recognize this.”

The activists making arguments against this history, he noted, are rarely Indigenous themselves and see no irony in appropriating the grievances of First Nations to agitate for a foreign conflict.

“My people are too busy trying to survive and getting clean water on their reserves,” he said. “But my chief and council know exactly what is true.”

LaForme sees these tactics as violating the very spirit of the Treaties that form the foundation of Canada’s relationship with First Nations.

“Our land, the Treaties, our values, and our hospitality are being abused and pirated by treaty scofflaws,” he said.

“As an Anishinaabe Zionist, I am being made to feel unwelcome on my Treaty Lands by anti-Israel/pro-Palestinian treaty violators who self-describe as part of the current colonial settler regime that marginalizes and oppresses Indigenous peoples — me. They should examine the illogic of their own activities on my ancestral and Treaty Lands.”

A judge shaped by injustice

LaForme’s deep identification with Israel — and his fierce rejection of the claim that it is a settler-colonial state — is rooted not in theory, but in personal history.

Born under the Indian Act — a sweeping Canadian law that governed nearly every aspect of First Nations life — LaForme remembers a childhood shaped by control and constraint.

“Our land isn’t our land,” he said. “The legal title is vested in His Majesty.” Indian agents, appointed by the federal government, presided over council meetings and made land-use decisions for Indigenous communities.

As a child, the jurist says that he “spent a lot of time trying to avoid being Indian.” It wasn’t until his twenties, while coaching a youth basketball team of Indigenous kids, that something shifted.

“They were so proud of who they were,” he recalled. “I learned so much from them about being Indigenous.”

When LaForme entered law school in the 1970s, there were only a handful of Indigenous students nationwide in higher education. Some had to renounce their legal Indian status to attend university. When he graduated from Osgoode Hall at York University in 1977, just four Indigenous lawyers were practicing in all of Canada.

He went on to found one of the country’s first Indigenous law practices, representing Indigenous communities across the world and appearing before international bodies including the United Nations in Geneva and the British Parliament.

Throughout his legal career, LaForme felt like an outsider and, more often than not, the lone Indigenous justice in Canadian courtrooms. But it was among Jewish peers, who knew what it felt like to be “othered,” that he found a sense of belonging.

“I had an audience with Jewish colleagues,” he said. “They identified with my otherness. Social justice was a real concern for these judges, as it was for me. Our thinking tended to be aligned. They became my haven — my go-to people.”

LaForme became the first Indigenous judge to serve on an appellate court in Canada when Irwin Cotler, the former Canadian justice minister and internationally known human rights advocate, appointed him to the Ontario Court of Justice in 1994.

“I asked him at the time, ‘Why me?’” LaForme recalled. “He said, ‘Who better to know what justice is than someone who’s lived their life without it?’”

On the bench, LaForme led a storied career as a liberal jurist, authoring several precedent-setting rulings on civil liberties, including a groundbreaking exemption for medical cannabis use and a decision that helped pave the way for the legalization of same-sex marriage in Canada, which he says was impacted by his own experience being marginalized.

He was widely seen as a top contender for the Supreme Court, but was blocked by a 2016 rule requiring justices to be fluent in French — a language Laforme notes with irony was never taught to him under the very education system imposed by the colonial state.

He retired from the judiciary in 2018, but never stopped fighting for Indigenous rights and sovereignty.

“I would do my life all over again if I had the chance” and not change a thing, he said.

Shared traumas, shared hopes

LaForme said over the years he came to feel a profound kinship with Jewish identity and history.

“I can identify with the horrors that the Jewish people went through constantly,” he said.

He drew clear parallels between the Holocaust and Canada’s residential school system.

The ruthless schools “destroyed the lives of 150,000 people,” he said. “We have unmarked graves that we’re still trying to find.”

From the 1880s onward, more than 150,000 Indigenous or First Nations children were forcibly taken from their families and placed in government and church-run residential schools, where many suffered physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, and about 6,000 died. The last residential school was only closed in 1998, and mass graves of First Nations children who died at the schools have been discovered in recent years.

While the Canadian government has issued formal apologies, LaForme said public understanding remains shallow.

“Just like October 7 — it is forgotten,” he said. “Our histories are different, but there are so many similarities in terms of the emotional impact and intergenerational trauma.”

Since the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, attacks, Canada has seen a massive spike in antisemitic incidents. Antisemitic incidents reached a historic high in Canada in 2024, with 6,219 reported incidents including firebombing of synagogues, attacks on schools and Jewish-owned businesses, and several arrests of suspects on terror-related charges, according to the B’nai Brith organization’s annual report published in April.

LaForme is deeply concerned about the “tsunami of Jew hatred” he has witnessed and said Jewish friends have confided to him that they no longer feel safe.

He was particularly disturbed by protest chants like “There’s only one solution, intifada revolution” — a phrase, he noted, which is chillingly close to colonial-era policies like the “final solution to the Indian problem” once declared by Canadian official Duncan Campbell Scott in 1910, regarding the high death rate of children in Indian Residential Schools. The term final solution was later notoriously used by the Nazis regarding the Jews.

“Any Indigenous person and non-Indigenous Canadian aware of our shared history should shudder to hear those words chanted on our streets,” he said. “The term, in all its iterations, is offensive, hateful, and racist.”

Most egregious to him is that his people’s history and struggles are being invoked, in his view, to legitimize antisemitism.

“After October 7, I observed how in Canada, Anishinaabe culture and traditions were being appropriated by anti-Israel/pro-Palestinian demonstrators to justify the unjustifiable,” he said during his speech. “I am deeply troubled by the expressions of hatred against Jews and Zionists, and the willful, disappointing and overt ignorance, fueled by misinformation coming from educational institutions and broader society.”

For Jewish Israelis, many of whom are descendants of, or themselves, refugees from the Middle East, the suggestion that they are European colonizers is often met with derision.

But the accusation has found traction around the world and has been used to incite violence against both Israelis and Jewish communities.

“These words are used to assert revolutionary violence ‘by any means necessary,’” he said. “I unequivocally reject these assertions and any allyship with those who hold such views.”

“I know what settler colonialism looks like,” he said. “I’ve lived under its thumb.” That background, he said, makes him especially attuned to what such oppression looks like, and skeptical when the term is misused.

Which is also why, for Canada’s first and most senior Indigenous justice, Israel is not an example of settler-colonialism but one of the rare — perhaps only — examples of an Indigenous people reclaiming sovereignty over their ancestral land, and a source of inspiration for his own.

“We’re looking for land back and the right to govern that land. We’re not asking you to get out of the country, but let us govern our reserves, ” he said. “That’s true reconciliation.”