How Canada's relationship with Israel went from 'best friend' to breakdown

Warning: This story includes an archival image of dead bodies.

Canada's relationship with Israel has travelled a long way since 2015, when prime minister Stephen Harper and aspiring rival Justin Trudeau competed to claim the title of best friend of the Jewish state.

After winning his majority in 2011, Harper realigned Canada's votes at the United Nations, joining a firmly pro-Israel bloc comprised of the U.S. and a group of Pacific island microstates that normally follow Washington's lead.

That bloc would often be joined by a wider circle of pro-Israel nations; on the most controversial matters, however, its core members voted alone with Israel against overwhelming majorities.

From 2011, Canada opposed almost all motions favouring Palestinians or criticizing Israel — a near-reversal of its votes on the same annual Israel-Palestine motions 15 years earlier.

Harper also developed a personal friendship with Israel's eternally returning prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, even serenading him at the piano in 2014. (Harper remains a popular figure in Israel today.)

And yet Justin Trudeau's chief fundraiser Stephen Bronfman claimed the Liberal was an even better friend of Israel, pointing out that he, unlike Harper, had actually visited the country (a deficiency Harper has since made up for several times).

WATCH | Carney says Canada will investigate IDF firing at diplomats in West Bank:

Prime Minister Mark Carney is calling for a 'full investigation' and an 'immediate explanation' after the Israel Defence Forces fired shots at at a diplomatic delegation in Jenin that included four Canadians. The tour was assessing the humanitarian situation in the West Bank city. Senior officials at Global Affairs Canada say embassy staff are shaken up, but are receiving support from the department.

Canada "must always be a strong, true friend of Israel," Trudeau said during the 2015 campaign, and for several years afterward, Israel had no reason to doubt that sentiment.

The Harper government took the position that Israel was being "singled out" unfairly at the UN, and instructed Canadian diplomats to oppose even those motions that upheld Canada's own official positions on the conflict. Trudeau continued that approach.

For example, Canada under Trudeau continued to vote against applying the Fourth Geneva Convention to the Occupied Territories (namely East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and the Golan Heights), although the Global Affairs website explaining Canada's position on the conflict states that "the Fourth Geneva Convention applies in the occupied territories."

The Trudeau government was ready to accept being diplomatically isolated for supporting Israel, as in December 2016, when it joined Israel, the U.S., Micronesia, Palau and the Marshall Islands in opposing a UN resolution guaranteeing the protections of the Geneva Convention to Palestinian civilians in the occupied territories, while Britain, France, Germany, and 167 other nations lined up on the other side.

Canada's position began to shift in 2019, after Netanyahu formed his fifth (and fourth consecutive) Israeli government.

Following a year of violent attacks by Jewish settlers in the West Bank, Canada voted for a UN motion affirming the Palestinians' right to self-determination, and the core pro-Israel bloc shrank to just the U.S., Israel, the Marshall Islands, Nauru and the Federated States of Micronesia.

The vote change was roundly condemned by pro-Israel groups in Canada. The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs called it "a dramatic departure from a 10-year record" of support for Israel at the UN.

However, Canada continued to mostly follow the voting pattern established by Harper. Trudeau again faced criticism from former ministers and diplomats in 2020 over his perceived passivity in the face of Israeli plans to annex parts of the West Bank.

Canada's position was shifting by inches, however. Back in 2012, Canada had voted and campaigned against Palestine receiving observer status at the UN. But when Palestine's supporters pushed in 2021 to elevate that status in several significant ways, Canada abstained (and the motion passed).

At the end of 2022, an election stalemate signalled trouble ahead for Israel's international relations.

Netanyahu had won a sixth mandate after a brief interregnum, but his traditional coalition partners refused to deal with him, and he had to turn to parties previously on the fringe of Israeli politics to form a government.

The resulting coalition deal saw some of the most extreme figures in Israeli politics enter key cabinet posts, including Bezalel Smotrich, who has done much to worsen relations with Canada and other allies, and who is seen by many Israelis as the man preventing Netanyahu from reaching a ceasefire in Gaza.

Violent West Bank settlers took the new government as a signal to increase their attacks, and the new Netanyahu government soon found itself at odds with allies, to varying degrees, over expanding settlements, displacements and land confiscations.

But as has happened in the past, what finally caused a rift was Israeli conduct in war.

The current war was triggered by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, when the Palestinian group and allied militants invaded Israeli territory and massacred hundreds of Israeli civilians in their homes, cars and workplaces, and at a music festival.

Israel's allies were united in outrage at the atrocities. As they pointed out in a joint statement as recently as this week, the Canadian, French and British governments all gave Israel strong support.

Along with the U.S. and Germany, the three have been Israel's strongest historic supporters. Britain's Balfour Declaration in 1917 gave the Great Power seal of approval to a Jewish homeland in Palestine in the first place. And it was mostly French-supplied arms such as Dassault aircraft and AMX tanks — not American arms — that defended the Jewish state in its formative years after independence in 1948.

But over the year and a half since the Oct. 7 massacre, the destruction of hospitals, schools, power plants and water treatment plants in the Gaza Strip — often in demolitions that are not part of combat operations — as well as the repeated killings of doctors and paramedics, aid workers and journalists have been features of Israeli warfare that Western allies have found increasingly difficult to explain or excuse.

The Israeli Defence Forces' perceived disregard for civilian life has plagued the country's relationship with its closest allies for decades.

In August 1982, Ronald Reagan grew furious with prime minister Menachem Begin over the IDF's conduct during the first Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

"I was angry," Reagan wrote in his official diary. "I told him it had to stop or our entire future relationship was endangered. I used the word 'holocaust' deliberately & said the symbol of his war was becoming a picture of a 7 month old baby with its arms blown off …. Twenty mins. later he called to tell me he'd ordered an end to the barrage and plead for our continued friendship."

The following month, the IDF invaded West Beirut in violation of a commitment Begin had given Reagan. IDF commander general Ariel Sharon's forces surrounded Palestinian refugee camps and allowed a Lebanese militia under his control to execute hundreds of men, women and children.

A "horrified" Reagan, declaring that "all people of decency must share our outrage and revulsion over the murders," publicly demanded Israeli forces leave Beirut — a demand Begin could not afford to ignore.

More than 40 years later, Israel's approach to war continues to alienate foreign allies.

As the civilian death toll rocketed in the early months of the current war in Gaza, the Trudeau government found itself torn between its longstanding support for the International Criminal Court and its longstanding desire not to see the ICC go after Israel — which it had communicated more than once with the implied threat that Canadian funding for the ICC was at stake.

Confusion about Canada's position on ICC war crimes warrants against Netanyahu last spring was made worse by poor communication, muddled because of Trudeau's desire not to upset supporters of either side.

Canadian officials felt they had been played by Israel when they were pressured to cut funding to the UN Refugee Works Agency based on allegations its staff had colluded with Hamas in the Oct. 7 attacks. Canada was promised intelligence that would back up those claims, but didn't receive it, and instead faced an Israeli pressure campaign conducted through the media. In March 2024, two months after suspending funding to UNRWA, Canada restored it.

The Trudeau government's instinct to back Israel still held when Israeli settlers in the West Bank responded to Oct. 7 by escalating their attacks on Palestinian farms and homes, with impunity from the Israeli government and in increasingly open collusion with local IDF units.

Canada initially held back even as allies in Europe and Washington sanctioned the settlers. When the violence eventually forced Ottawa to announce sanctions, it dragged its feet about actually applying them.

There were growing signs of dissent within the Liberal caucus, especially as the death toll of children in Gaza soared. Polls revealed that younger Canadians in particular were turning against Israel.

In July 2024, with something like 40,000 dead in Gaza, Trudeau joined with the prime ministers of Australia and New Zealand to call for a ceasefire.

Three inflection points in a deteriorating relationship between Israel and its allies have involved attacks on humanitarian and medical workers.

In January 2024, the killing of five-year-old Hind Rajab, who had spent days alone in a bullet-riddled car with the bodies of her dead family, followed by the killing of the paramedics who attempted to rescue her, damaged the IDF's image. Investigations by the Washington Post and Sky News shredded its denials of involvement.

A deadly attack on an aid convoy of the NGO World Central Kitchen in April 2024, which killed aid worker and Canadian Army veteran Jacob Flickinger, marked the beginning of the end of the Canadian government's unconditional support for Israel's Gaza campaign.

European opinion was further alienated in March of this year (North Americans were distracted by other events) when Israeli forces broke a two-month ceasefire and, five days later, attacked a convoy of ambulances in Gaza, killing 15 paramedics and aid workers. When the bodies were discovered in a shallow grave days later, the IDF claimed they had approached a checkpoint with lights out, and the deaths were the result of a tragic confusion.

The IDF was forced to change its story after it was contradicted by a video on a mobile phone recovered from a first responder's body that left little doubt that the soldiers knew whom they were attacking.

While Canada, the U.K. and France have all made demands and urged restraint on Israel in the past, the joint statement they issued on Monday is very different in tone and content from anything they have said before.

What appears to have finally pushed Canada, Britain and France to say enough is enough was the use of food as a weapon of war.

The speech to the U.K. Parliament by British Foreign Minister David Lammy this week revealed the extent of the damage done to relationships.

WATCH | U.K. suspends trade talks with Israel over Gaza operations:

The U.K. has paused free trade talks with Israel, summoned its ambassador and announced further sanctions against West Bank settlers as Foreign Minister David Lammy condemned a 'monstrous' military escalation in Gaza.

Calling Israel's proposed "Gideon's Chariots" operation — an open-ended plan to capture all of Gaza — "cruel and indefensible," Lammy took direct aim at Netanyahu for saying he intended to continue to use hunger as a pressure point.

"This is abominable. Civilians in Gaza facing starvation, homelessness and trauma, desperate for this war to end, now confront renewed bombardment, displacement and suffering," Lammy told the House.

"Israel has repeatedly struck hospitals, and three more in northern Gaza ceased operations this weekend. Yet more aid workers and medical workers have been killed, after last year proved the deadliest year on record for humanitarian personnel."

Lammy then looked ahead.

"We are now entering a dark new phase in this conflict. Netanyahu's government plans to drive Gazans from their homes into a corner of the strip to the south and permit them a fraction of the aid that they need. Yesterday, Minister Smotrich even spoke of Israeli forces 'cleansing' Gaza, of 'destroying what's left' and of resident Palestinians being 'relocated to third countries.' We must call this what it is: it is extremism, it is dangerous, it is repellent, it is monstrous and I condemn it in the strongest possible terms."

It was telling that, even while giving one of the strongest condemnations of Israel ever heard from a major Western government, Lammy was heckled by MPs who wanted him to go further and declare the war on Gaza a genocide.

The day after the joint Canada-U.K.-France statement, diplomats from several Western governments that had condemned the Netanyahu government came under fire from Israeli soldiers while visiting the West Bank city of Jenin.

The IDF claimed to have fired warning shots in the air after diplomats strayed from an agreed route, although video footage from the scene showed soldiers aiming their rifles in a horizontal direction. Four Canadian embassy staff, including head of mission Graham Datells, were among those forced to seek cover.

Prime Minister Mark Carney described the shooting as "totally unacceptable: it's one of many things that are totally unacceptable going on in the region."

Shortly after Lammy lambasted the IDF for bombing and shelling hospitals, Israeli forces launched new attacks on the Al-Awda Hospital in Jabaliya in northern Gaza.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu verbally attacked Carney, Starmer and Macron.

"By asking Israel to end a defensive war for our survival before Hamas terrorists on our border are destroyed and by demanding a Palestinian state, the leaders in London, Ottowa [sic] and Paris are offering a huge prize for the genocidal attack on Israel on October 7 while inviting more such atrocities," he posted on X.

Two days later, following the shooting deaths of two young Israeli Embassy staffers in Washington, D.C., by a pro-Palestinian assailant, Netanyahu went further by seeming to blame the three Western leaders.

In a video statement, Netanyahu accused Carney, Macron and Starmer of having "bought into Hamas's propaganda that says Israel is starving Palestinian children," and charged that "these three leaders effectively said they want Hamas to remain in power" and repeat the Oct. 7 massacre "again and again and again."

WATCH | Netanyahu criticizes Carney for 'emboldening Hamas':

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attacked Canada, France and the U.K. in his response to the killing of two Israeli Embassy staffers in Washington, saying that 'when mass murderers, rapists, baby killers and kidnappers thank you, you're on the wrong side of justice.' Israel's Ambassador to Canada Iddo Moed responds to the countries' joint warning of sanctions over Israel's expansion of the war in Gaza, telling Power & Politics that 'Israel has the capability of conquering Gaza in half a day.' Plus, NDP interim leader Don Davies addresses a letter from three of the party's seven MPs calling out his selection as leader.

On Thursday night on CBC's Power & Politics, Israeli ambassador Iddo Moed criticized Carney for signing the joint statement.

"When the choice of a new government is immediately to step out in the open and to come out with formal accusations and formal summons and so on, the response from Prime Minister Netanyahu is very clear that this is not the way."

But there was little sign that such admonishments would cause the British, French or Canadian governments to return to positions they held a week ago.

While Britain has already taken measures, including the suspension of free trade talks with Israel, Carney has refused to specify what "concrete actions" Canada will take if its demands are not met.

For Benjamin Netanyahu, this week portends a difficult future. He is still welcome in Trump's Washington, but it's difficult to imagine him ever thinking of visiting Ottawa, London or Paris again with a war crimes warrant hanging over his head and David Lammy's damning words ringing in his ears.

Yet if his past is any guide, Netanyahu's growing isolation may only increase his legendary determination to hang onto power.