Welcome to camp, where the most dangerous thing isn’t a bear or poison ivy, it’s a purity test of geopolitics. We’ve traded capture-the-flag and friendship bracelets for geopolitical warfare, and campfire stories for coordinated ideological hit jobs. If you thought The Hunger Games was a cautionary tale, you haven’t seen the latest demands from the anti-Israel & pro-Palestine activists who have decided seventeen Canadian Jewish summer camps aren’t just places for kids to swim.

These activists – groups like Just Peace Advocates (JPA) – levy a series of scorched-earth accusations against the Ontario Camping Association (OCA), framing the Jewish summer camps as ‘complicit in international law violations’ and facilitators of ‘settler-colonial projects’, effectively labeling campers and counselors as witting participants in a military machine. They argue the camps are ‘unfit for accreditation’ because they serve as – in their view – recruitment grounds for the Israeli military & are hostile outposts in a war of ideological attrition where the camp uniform is a political statement and all involved need to be systematically scrubbed from the Canadian summer.

There was a time when the only asymmetric warfare at summer camp involved a rogue counselor and an over-inflated dodgeball. Today, that innocence has been deflated by a geopolitical fever dream rooted thousands of kilometers away on the other side of the planet. We aren’t talking about arts and crafts; we’re talking about a coordinated campaign of institutional sabotage.

These activists aren’t just asking for policy tweaks. They’re demanding the total revocation of accreditation for Jewish summer camps across Ontario, Quebec, and Nova Scotia, along with the removal of OCA’s Jewish leadership. Their evidence? A buffet of absurdity:

• A “Zionist” Executive Director who publicly supports Israel
• Raising money to bring Israelis to Canadian summer camps
• Publishing a “Statement on Antisemitism”
• Encouraging support for a “genocidal, settler-colonial State”
• Celebrating Israel’s “Independence Day”
• Employing former or reserve IDF personnel
• Adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism
• Enmeshing the connection of Jewish identity with a connection to Israel

But they’re not only going after tents and cabins, they’re going after the kitchen too.

Claims of ‘cultural erasure’ regarding Levantine staples like hummus and za’atar often miss the deeper historical picture. We are witnessing a geopolitical debate over plants that have been central to Jewish life since the Torah – long before the arrival of Islam or the rise of modern nationalism and the nation state.

The fact is, Jews are indigenous to the Levant, and the region’s flora is baked into our ancestral DNA. While we must respect the centuries of Palestinian agricultural stewardship and culinary refinement, these ingredients and dishes are fundamentally products of the land. Hummus and za’atar aren’t political property; they are the shared heritage of the entire Levant, belonging equally to all who have called that ancient soil home.

They’re even upset about the use of Arabic loanwords like yalla and sababa in Israeli culture, in spite of the fact that two million Arabs currently live in Israel and Arabs have contributed to its culture since its founding in 1948.

It’s a level of micromanagement that makes Seinfeld’s Soup Nazi look as Zen as a yoga instructor. We’re debating the botanical lineage of legumes and spice blends while the most recent statistics show that Jewish institutions are forced to spend 14 per cent of their entire annual budgets just on security: guards, cameras, and hardening costs, all required to remain not only safe, but also insurable.

The theatre of absurdity meets the unscripted nonsense of reality however when you realize this isn’t just about food; it’s about a mutation of antisemitism that is spreading faster than a viral TikTok video. B’nai Brith Canada just reported a 124 per cent rise in antisemitic incidents over the last three years, averaging 17 reports daily.

And where are our leaders? Playing a game of Backbone Hide-and-Seek. As I’ve said before, it is 2026 and our leaders have the backbones of jellyfish, all while a specific minority group is being subjected to a bigoted litmus test – even at summer camp. The activists are calling out specific staff – like a former staffer or the Head of Camper Care – simply for being IDF veterans, which is mandatory for all Israelis. This is targeted harassment.

While the anti-Israel protesters are busy doxxing 17-year-old camps counselors and pressuring the OCA Executive Director to step down over social media posts, they’ve also realized they can weaponize the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) as a tool for their pursuit of destruction and dismantling. Amidst politically motivated pressure, the CRA is increasingly deploying automated risk-profiling and AI-driven pattern matching to selectively target established Jewish charities, weaponizing administrative technicalities to dismantle organizations that have provided decades of support to Israel in full compliance with Canadian law.

We’ve already seen the Red Wedding of Jewish charities: JNF Canada and the Ne’eman Foundation had their statuses revoked in 2024, followed by Herut Canada and the Emunium Fund in late 2025. It’s a regulatory asymmetric nightmare where even if you survive the audit, the insurance will get you.

People love to say “this isn’t Canada” whenever things get ugly. But when campers and counselors are being targeted because of their “Zionist” ideologies, or because a camp serves hummus or za’atar, this is exactly what Canada has become, and is.

The OCA has issued a “Special Statement” rejecting these demands as a “dangerous expression of demonization”.” They are refusing to let accreditation – hundreds of safety standards – become an adjudication of international geopolitics, and good for them; rightfully so

The Canadian Antisemitism Education Foundation (CAEF) extended its support on February 15, labeling the campaign “predatory” and an attempt to delegitimize Jewish leadership through antisemitic tropes.

The Abraham Global Peace Initiative unequivocally condemned the targeting and intimidation of Jewish children at summer camps and community programs by what it called “Palestinian extremist groups and their supporters”, adding that “children are not political actors. They are not combatants.”

While the anti-Israel activists try to frame “Zionism” and “Zionists” as a fringe & extremist ideology, the data tells a different story. In Canada, 94 per cent of Jews believe in the right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland, and they aren’t extremists for holding that view. This isn’t a radical outlier; it is the global standard, mirrored by roughly 90 per cent of Jews in the U.S. and the vast majority of the G7 diaspora.

The activists aren’t just targeting a political subset; they are applying a bigoted litmus test to roughly nine out of every 10 Jews. They aren’t just coming for ‘Zionists’, they’re coming for the fundamental identity of the entire Jewish community and have decided that a belief held by almost every Jewish family globally is now a disqualifying trait for those attending summer camp in Canada.

Their message is clear: Zionist expression is not an integral part of Jewish identity in their eyes, and they believe that the targeting of Jewish children & Jewish summer camps to settle geopolitical scores is not only fair game, but just and righteous.

If we allow ideological purity tests to dictate who gets to run or attend summer camps, then Canada isn’t a cultural mosaic anymore; we’re just a fragmented collection of echo chambers with high-voltage fences, outraged by what the latest algorithm sprays onto our feeds.

It’s time for our elected leaders to stop acting like they’re in a horror movie, constantly shocked and surprised, and always ready to run from the danger (of losing votes?). It’s time for our unelected leaders to stand up and act as the responsible community stewards they purport themselves to be. It’s time for non-Jewish Canadians to stand up and say “enough is enough”.

People need to realize that the defense of society’s Jews cannot be solely left to the Jews themselves, which barely comprise 1 per cent of the Canadian population, yet according to the most recent data, are the targets of 68 per cent of all religiously motivated hate crimes. Let that sink in: a Jewish Canadian is 25 times more likely to experience a hate crime than any other Canadian.

These aren’t campaigns of activism; they’re campaigns seeking to further that very hatred and attempt to normalize the exclusion of Jewish identity – and Jews generally – from Canadian life itself, this time with summer camp.

If the government stands by while these numbers climb, and while campers and camp counselors are subjected to a bigoted litmus tests, it isn’t just failing Jewish children, it’s failing the very idea of summer camp and the core promise of Canada itself: inclusivity for all, not just for those who pass an extremist’s purity test.

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