Canadian police forces on alert for hate crimes spurred by Israel-Hamas crisis

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Russ Klein returned from the Thanksgiving long weekend to an outpouring of grief at Vancouver’s King David High School, a private Jewish school where he is principal.

The school had just learned that an alumnus, Ben Mizrachi, had been killed by Hamas fighters when a rave he was attending was swept up in the militant Islamist group’s attack on southern Israel. That day, Mr. Klein ran an assembly for his 266 students and crafted a public statement mourning the 22-year-old.

Then he tried his best to reassure parents that their children would be safe the following Friday, the day a former Hamas leader had designated as an international “day of rage” in response to Israel’s retaliatory siege of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, a densely populated Palestinian territory.

Even though police officers were stationed outside the school around the clock, only a third of his students showed up that Friday. The day was otherwise uneventful.

“It was disappointing, but we understand how parents feel. You don’t want to be wrong about a calculation like that. Your kids are too precious,” Mr. Klein said. He added that colleagues who run Jewish schools in other parts of Canada had told him they saw about the same rates of absence. “We want people to come to school, and we don’t want terrorists to control our lives.”

Around the country, religious groups and law enforcement agencies are on guard against a potential rise in hate crimes, as the war in Israel inflames long-standing tensions that cut across religious, ethnic and ideological lines. But, just like at Mr. Klein’s school, the evidence so far in most major cities doesn’t point to a significant rise in hate-motivated incidents.

The Globe canvassed police forces in Vancouver, Surrey, Calgary, Edmonton, Hamilton, Peel, York, London, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Quebec City. Only the Toronto Police Service reported a noticeable increase in hate-crime cases.

Hate incidents across Canada prompt schools, places of worship to tighten security

Toronto Deputy Chief Lauren Pogue said Friday that her force has recently begun investigating 14 such cases, two of them involving potential offences against Muslims, and the rest against Jewish people. The incidents included harassment, graffiti and online or in-person threats.

There were only five hate-crime cases during the same two weeks last year, Deputy Chief Pogue said. So far this year, she said, the force is investigating 45 more hate-crime cases than it was at the same time last year. She added that officers have been reaching out to Muslim and Jewish leaders across the city over the past two weeks, and have heard from them that safety is a top concern.

Arabic-speaking officers have been monitoring the many peaceful pro-Palestinian rallies that have taken place across the city, she said, and no cases involving hate speech have been opened as a result.

Police in Surrey are searching for a suspect who threw eggs at a rabbi’s house. Police in Calgary are on the hunt for someone who did the same to a Jewish community centre. In Vancouver, a man was arrested after returning to a Jewish school on the city’s west side, where had allegedly yelled antisemitic epithets earlier in the week. (That school was not Mr. Klein’s.)

Experts say targeted violence is unlikely to spill into Canada as a result of the conflict. But they say hate incidents could rise in tandem with any increase in Israeli military action in Gaza.

For now, Jewish communities in many cities remain on edge. Some police forces, including those in Vancouver and Montreal, are responding by parking squad cars outside of Jewish schools and community centres.

Other forces, such as those in Toronto and York Region, north of the city, have also set up mobile command centres in Jewish neighbourhoods, to allay concerns and answer questions.

Gerry Almendrades, director of community security for the Ottawa-based Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, said earlier this week that law enforcement agencies had told his organization there was no credible threat of any attack on Jewish people or their institutions in Canada. But members of the Jewish community do face the possibility of being harassed or even physically assaulted as they go to and from demonstrations in support of Israel, he said.

Mr. Almendrades, whose group runs a hotline for victims of antisemitism, recalled May, 2021, when CIJA reported that it had been contacted about 57 antisemitic incidents in and around Toronto, after an 11-day conflict between Hamas and Israel that killed nearly 250 people and left much of Gaza devastated.

Mr. Almendrades said Hamas’s call for a “day of rage” against Israel effectively targeted Canada’s 400,000 Jewish people.

“This is part of their information operations, or psyops, in order to disrupt people’s way of life without firing a single shot,” he said.

Police and criminologists acknowledge that hate crimes are often not reported. Police departments across the country typically don’t release up-to-date statistics on the cases they do investigate. (A Globe and Mail investigation found last year that even forces that devote the most resources to investigating hate crimes still solved fewer than a third such cases, while some solved fewer than 10 per cent.)

Statistics Canada’s latest federal snapshot, from 2021, shows that Jewish people were victims in about 15 per cent of all hate-crimes cases reported by police across the country that year, making Judaism the most targeted religion by far.

Nina Saini, executive director of the Alberta Hate Crimes Committee, a non-profit group that raises awareness of hate incidents, said she has been talking with Jewish and Muslim leaders in her province, and has found people engaged in a “waiting game.” They fear more hate crimes if the conflict between Israel and Hamas continues and intensifies.

Ms. Saini said this unease was palpable when she was chatting with a Muslim mother in Calgary on Wednesday. Police had been posted outside the Islamic school the woman’s child attends.

“She felt protected, but also was going, ‘Oh no, what does this mean?’ ” Ms. Saini said. “That’s scary. How do you send your kids into what, essentially, you feel could be a line of fire?”