Canadian Universities Risk Silencing Debate Over Israel

When I sat before the governance committee of my student union last month, I came with one clear recommendation: do not adopt the proposed Anti-Palestinian Racism (APR) definition that was being considered at the school.

My objection was not to the idea that every Palestinian student deserves protection from harassment or discrimination. Everybody does. The problem was how the definition blurs politics with discrimination, punishes ordinary criticism, and weakens academic freedom. I urged the committee to reject a definition that, as drafted, risks codifying political narratives into policing tools. Hopefully, they will take my position seriously when they issue their ruling.

Unlike the internationally recognized International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, which was created to clarify and address antisemitism without restricting legitimate debate about Israel, APR is fundamentally different.

While IHRA identifies antisemitism and provides examples to guide interpretation, APR functions as a prescriptive framework that risks ending debate by labeling broad narratives as inherently bigoted. IHRA, by contrast, identifies specific antisemitic tropes, such as Holocaust inversion, without restricting legitimate discussion of Israeli policies.

This dynamic is visible on campuses across Canada.

Activists have advanced APR-style motions into governance bodies, claiming they address a gap in how campuses handle incidents related to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. In practice, however, these definitions transform legitimate discussion into potential infractions and shield political entities from scrutiny. They also present a single, politicized framing of the “Nakba” as an unquestionable truth — and treat any attempt to acknowledge the role of surrounding Arab states or the choices of Palestinian leadership to seek Israel’s elimination in 1948 as an act of racism.

This approach effectively labels Israel as solely responsible for the 1948 war, which is inaccurate, because it was five surrounding Arab states and the Palestinian population that launched the war. Israel was prepared to accept a Palestinian state, as ordered by the UN.

The APR definition makes balanced historical debate impossible.

A central conceptual problem here is the treatment of “narratives” as if they were objective facts. The motion’s language reads: “dehumanize Palestinians or their narratives.”

Narratives are how communities make sense of history and identity; they are powerful and meaningful, but they are also contested, partial, and shaped by memory and ideology. Freezing a narrative into policy shuts off debate when universities should encourage questioning, not punish it.

The consequences of accepting the definition are grave. The APR definition conflates collective identity with collective responsibility, making it risky to criticize political groups or organizations for fear of being labelled racist. The motion would make discussion of terrorist organizations effectively off-limits. That shuts down honest debate about security, human rights, and political accountability, and the wording appears deliberately crafted to misrepresent what the IHRA working definition actually does.

In fact, Students for Justice in Palestine, the group largely responsible for pushing this movement on campus, has been responsible for harassing and attacking Jewish individuals and events at universities. Letting this group dictate codified political narratives is dangerous and irresponsible.

So what should campus communities do instead?

First, institutions must protect students from harassment while also safeguarding free inquiry. Existing anti-discrimination procedures already regulate speech in ways that maintain responsible discourse: they address harassment or conduct that creates a hostile environment, without broadly policing disagreement with collective narratives.

Secondly, defend academic freedom. Universities are laboratories of thought; they must tolerate uncomfortable, even offensive, ideas when they are part of honest inquiry. A definition that protects students by preventing harassment must do so without impeding academic freedom. The IHRA working definition is a non-binding tool to apply antisemitism policies without restricting debate; APR, by contrast, acts as a prescriptive framework that risks silencing discourse.

At a deeper level, this debate reflects a wider trend in Canada, where freedom of expression is increasingly being seen as under threat. The idea that speech can be restricted whenever it disrupts a preferred political narrative is dangerous. As free expression comes under threat, we must do more to protect it and keep open dialogue central to Canadian society.

The APR debate is not a trivial matter. It is a test of whether campuses can protect and preserve the necessary work of democratic debate and freedom of expression. If we get that balance right, universities can remain places where identities are respected and ideas are fearlessly examined. If we get it wrong, we risk turning our campuses into echo chambers where the very thing we claim to defend, free thought, is the first casualty.

Adam Katz is a 2025-2026 CAMERA on Campus fellow and a second-year political science and history student at the University of Manitoba.