The Machine We Built

Part 4 of The Architecture of Exclusion

This is Part 4 of a five-part series on anti-Palestinian racism (APR) called The Architecture of Exclusion.

If you’d like to read the previous essays, they are here:

Part 1: The Training They Don’t Want You to See

Part 2: How Did We Get Here?

Part 3: Complaint as Harassment

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There’s something important that we as a Jewish community must recognize: we helped build the machine that’s now being used against us. And until we reckon with that, we’ll keep losing to it.

A Short History of Good Intentions

Canadian Jews have been, for the better part of a century, among the most enthusiastic champions of the human rights infrastructure in this country. There are good reasons for that. Jews came to Canada fleeing persecution. They arrived in a country that had turned away the MS St. Louis, that had quotas on Jewish students in universities, that had unwritten rules keeping Jews out of neighborhoods. The memory of exclusion wasn’t theoretical but lived. “None is too many.” That was here.

So, when Canada began building its modern human rights apparatus, Jewish organizations were at the table. They supported the creation of human rights commissions. They advocated for hate speech provisions in the Criminal Code. They championed anti-discrimination legislation. They helped shape the frameworks that would later become the equity infrastructure of Canadian public institutions. This wasn’t naïve but strategic. Jews had experienced what happened when there were no institutional protections against bigotry, and they wanted those protections to exist.

And for a long time, the strategy worked. Human rights commissions investigated antisemitic incidents. Hate speech provisions were used to prosecute Holocaust deniers or actual Nazis. Equity frameworks in education meant that Jewish students could wear a Star of David and kippas without being harassed, that the Holocaust was taught in schools and incorporated into curricula, that antisemitism was named and addressed in institutional policy. The machine worked because it was designed to protect vulnerable minorities, and Jews were, by any reasonable measure, a vulnerable minority.

The problem is that a machine doesn’t care who built it. It cares about who operates it. And the people operating the equity infrastructure of Canadian public education in 2026 aren’t the people who designed it all those years ago.

How the Machine Changed Hands

The shift didn’t happen overnight. It happened gradually, in the way that institutional cultures change: through hiring, through professional development, through the slow replacement of one set of assumptions with another. Through changes in the world.

The equity offices that were created to protect minorities evolved. Their original mandate, ensuring that no student faced discrimination based on identity, expanded into something more ambitious: actively reshaping how people think about identity, power, and, importantly, “oppression.” This is the move from anti-discrimination to anti-racism, and it is not a small semantic difference. Anti-discrimination says: treat people equally regardless of their background. Anti-racism says: unequal outcomes are evidence of systemic racism, and the institution’s job is to dismantle the systems that produce them.

Under the first model, a Jewish student who is called a slur gets protected. Under the second model, the institution decides which groups are oppressors and which are oppressed and then reorganizes itself accordingly. The question is no longer “was this student treated unfairly?” but “which direction does power flow?”

Once you adopt that framework, everything depends on the taxonomy. Who counts as oppressed? Who counts as an oppressor? For a while, Jews occupied an ambiguous position: historically persecuted, but increasingly categorized as white, successful, and powerful. The ambiguity held more-or-less until October 7, 2023 (arguably earlier), when it collapsed. In the framework that now governs Canadian public education, Israelis are white settler-colonialists, Palestinians are Indigenous, and Jews who identify with Israel are on the wrong side of the ledger.

The British author David Bad­diel describes Jews as ​“Schrodinger’s Whites,” which is to say the Jews are sometimes considered white, and sometimes not, depend­ing on the con­text.

The machinery did not change. The classification did.

The Tools We Championed

Let me be specific about what Jewish organizations helped build that is now being used against them.

• Human rights commissions. Jewish organizations advocated for robust commissions with investigative and enforcement powers. Those commissions now receive complaints about “anti-Palestinian racism” (APR) and investigate Jewish organizations, educators, and public figures for speech that falls squarely within mainstream Zionist expression. The tool was built to investigate bigotry. It is now being used to investigate Jewish identity.

• Hate speech provisions. Jewish organizations supported criminal and regulatory provisions against hate speech, arguing correctly that Holocaust denial and antisemitic incitement should have consequences. Those same provisions and the norms they created now provide the template for classifying Zionist expression as hateful. When someone argues that saying “Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish state” constitutes APR (it doesn’t), they are deploying the same logic that was used to argue that saying “the Holocaust didn’t happen” constitutes antisemitism (it does): the idea that certain speech is not merely wrong but so harmful that institutions must act to suppress it.

• Mandatory equity training. Jewish organizations supported the principle that public employees should receive training on recognizing and combating discrimination. The training pipeline they helped normalize is the same pipeline that now delivers mandatory APR training to 8,000 teachers in Hamilton. The format is identical. The institutional authority is identical. The only thing that changed is the content.

• Complaint mechanisms. Jewish organizations helped build reporting systems in schools and workplaces that allowed individuals to flag discriminatory behaviour. Those mechanisms now accept complaints of, you guessed it, APR. A Jewish teacher who displays an Israeli flag, or a Jewish student who challenges a one-sided classroom presentation on the “Nakba,” can be reported through the same system that was designed to protect them.

Now, I’m not saying that building these tools was wrong. I’m saying that building them without considering who might eventually control them was a failure of imagination. Like the City of Toronto not realizing 40 years ago how bad traffic would become and planning accordingly. And it is a failure that the community has yet to confront effectively.

The Assumption That Broke

Underneath all of this was a single, foundational assumption: that the institutional left would be an ally.

For decades, Jewish communal strategy in Canada was built on the premise that progressive institutions were the natural home of Jewish advocacy. Human rights were a progressive cause. Anti-discrimination was a progressive cause. Holocaust education was a progressive cause. The Jewish community invested its political capital, organizational energy, and institutional relationships in the progressive infrastructure of Canadian public life because it believed, with good reason, that this infrastructure would always include Jews among the protected.

October 7 shattered that assumption into a billion pieces in a matter of hours. The response from progressive institutions, the equivocation, the “contextualizing,” the pivot to Palestinian suffering before Israeli bodies were even counted, the denial of Israeli women being raped, revealed something that had been true for years but that the community had been reluctant to see: the progressive framework had moved on. Jews were no longer categorized as vulnerable. They were categorized as powerful. And in a framework that organizes the world into the powerful and the powerless, the powerful do not get protection. They get scrutiny.

I remember that in May 2020, I was sitting on the board of Jewish organization, and we spent no less than two meetings preparing a statement of support for the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement on account of the George Floyd protests. We wanted to show that we were sympathetic, and that we cared. It only took three days after October 7, for certain BLM chapters in the United States to begin posting pictures of Hamas paragliders on their social media networks, in support of the murderous terrorists. So much for support.

The APR framework is the institutional expression of that reclassification. It doesn’t exist to protect Palestinian students from bullying, though that is sure how it’s marketed. It exists to encode a specific political analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into the operating system of Canadian public institutions. And it can do this because Jewish organizations spent decades building an operating system designed to accept exactly this kind of input.

What Adult Zionism Requires

I’ve written before about what I call Adult Zionism: the idea that loyalty to the Jewish people and to Israel doesn’t need cheerleading, but discipline. It means telling the truth even when the truth is uncomfortable. It means asking hard questions about our own choices, not just cataloguing the failures of others.

This is one of those moments.

The Jewish community in Canada is, right now, engaged in a largely reactive fight against APR. It is filing complaints, organizing rallies, writing letters, and showing up at school board meetings. All of this is necessary while little of it is, apparently, sufficient. Because, I submit, the community is fighting the content of the machine without questioning the machine itself.

Every letter that says “APR is biased and should be replaced with a balanced framework” accepts the premise that school boards should be in the business of mandating ideological training at all. Every complaint filed through a human rights commission accepts the premise that political disagreements should be adjudicated by bureaucratic bodies. Every demand for “equal representation” in equity frameworks accepts the premise that equity frameworks are the right vehicle for navigating a geopolitical conflict with 3,000 years of very nuanced history.

The community is asking the machine to be fair, but it wasn’t necessarily built to be fair. The machine, as it exists today, was built to process inputs according to a framework, and the framework has changed.

The harder, braver conversation is whether the machine should exist in the form it currently takes. Whether mandatory ideological training for teachers is appropriate regardless of its content (I personally don’t think Holocaust education is ideological training - it’s just history, and there’s no “other side” either). Whether human rights commissions should be adjudicating political speech. Whether equity frameworks in education have become a vehicle for institutional capture by whoever gains control of the terminology. Whether the tools that were built to protect minorities have become tools for the production of new orthodoxies.

These shouldn’t just be Jewish questions. They are Canadian questions. But the Jewish community is uniquely positioned to ask them, precisely because it built so much of what now needs to be questioned. There’s a credibility that comes from saying: we helped create this, we believed in it, and we are telling you it has gone wrong. That’s more powerful than any complaint about bias, because it’s not a claim of victimhood, but an act of responsibility. Let’s come up with some alternatives and put them forward.

The Way Forward

I’m not arguing that Jews should abandon the fight against antisemitism in public institutions. Nor do I believe for a moment that I have all the answers (or that I’m right at all). I am arguing however that the fight needs to change shape.

Instead of asking school boards to balance APR with better antisemitism programming, the community should be asking why school boards are in the business of ideological programming at all. Instead of demanding a seat at the equity table, the community should be asking whether the equity table, in its current form, is producing justice or just producing compliance. Instead of filing complaints through systems that have already been captured, the community should be building the case, publicly and relentlessly, that those systems need structural reform.

This means alliances that the community has traditionally avoided. It means finding common cause with parents of all backgrounds who believe that public schools (and universities, and work places) should teach children how to think, not what to think. It means engaging with civil liberties organizations that share a concern about institutional overreach, even if those organizations don’t share the community’s exact views on Israel. It means being willing to critique the infrastructure, not just the people running it.

And it means being honest about the fact that the community’s institutional strategy for the past 40 years was built on an assumption that no longer holds. The progressive infrastructure of Canadian public life is not an ally. It is a system, and right now it is an adversarial one. Systems serve whoever controls them.

The Jewish community built a machine to protect itself. The machine was captured. Now we have a choice: keep feeding inputs into a machine that will never again produce the outputs we want, or help build something different.

I know which choice I’d make. But this is a conversation the community needs to have with itself, honestly, without illusion, and without the comforting fantasy that the next rally or the next letter will be the one that finally makes the machine work the way it used to.

It won’t. The machine works exactly the way it was designed to. The only thing that changed is who’s sitting at the controls.

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Part 5 of 5, “The Eviction Notice,” will examine what the APR framework means for the future of Jewish life in Canada.

Here’s the Catch

Canadian Jews helped build the human rights commissions, hate speech provisions, equity frameworks, and mandatory training pipelines that now form the institutional infrastructure of anti-Palestinian racism initiatives. This isn’t irony but consequence. The machinery was built on the assumption that progressive institutions would always include Jews among the protected. That assumption collapsed on October 7. The community is now fighting the content being fed into the machine without questioning whether the machine itself has become the problem. Adult Zionism requires telling this truth: we helped create the tools of our own institutional marginalization, and the path forward is not to ask the machine to be fairer but to ask whether the machine, in its current form, should exist at all.