This article originally appeared in the National Post.
By Casey Babb and Alan Kessel, September 8, 2025
Throughout history, and across the ideological spectrum, terrorists, extremists and racists — often under the guise of some righteous campaign or cause — have sought to suppress open Jewish life and identity. One of the spaces they’ve repeatedly targeted is international sport — an arena meant to harness the universal language of athletic competition, sportsmanship, equality, team building, and excellence. Sadly, this trend is once again rearing its ugly head in Halifax, where some are calling for Tennis Canada to bar Israel from participating in the Davis Cup later this month. For a variety of reasons, these calls should be treated as anti-Canadian, anti-sport, and of course, antisemitic.
Excluding Jews from athletic competition isn’t a new phenomenon. After seizing power in 1933, Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party undertook a systemic campaign of persecuting Jews — pushing them out of all public spheres, including sports clubs and national teams. Even world-class athletes who had won competitions had their medals taken back before they were prohibited from participating in any additional competitions. Some, of course, were murdered. Three years later in 1936, the Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen and the Summer Olympics in Berlin were held without participation from Jewish athletes — even though many of those athletes were among the very best in their fields.
Roughly 40 years later in the same country, Jews weren’t merely excluded from athletics, they were slaughtered in the Munich Massacre of 1972 when Palestinian terrorists murdered 11 members of Israel’s national team during the Summer Olympics. Born out of Jordan’s civil war in 1970, which saw deadly fighting between Jordanian forces and Palestinian separatists groups, the terrorists used the world’s largest and most famous sporting celebration to call for the release of Palestinian prisoners in Israel and left-wing extremists in German jails. Yet for many, the attacks in 1972 felt like an assault on Jews for having the audacity to see themselves as part of a global community.
Now, in 2025, under the guise of “human rights,” activists are demanding that Tennis Canada, the Province of Nova Scotia, the City of Halifax, the Scotiabank Centre and the International Tennis Federation bar Israeli athletes from taking part in the Davis Cup. Their message could not be clearer: exclude Israel, silence its representatives, and erase its presence from public life, in sport, in culture, and beyond.
This is not a protest. It’s collective punishment.
To its credit, Tennis Canada has quietly rejected this pressure, stating that sport brings unity and must exist outside political conflict. That principle, that individuals should compete on merit, not suffer exclusion based on nationality, is at the heart of Canada’s sporting ethic.
Athletics in this country has always been a space where politics take a back seat to character and community. Canadians welcome competitors, even those from countries with whom we may strongly disagree, because engagement, dignity and mutual respect are part of what makes us a mature and inclusive democracy. We treat people as athletes and fellow human beings, not as political proxies to be cancelled or erased.
What is so disturbing about this campaign is its obsessive and targeted nature. No other nationality is told its very presence is unacceptable. Only Israelis are singled out and told they are not welcome. Afghanistan has a team, competing, though it’s governed by the Taliban. China has a team, despite the country carrying out a possible genocide against its Uyghur population, and Iran has a team in the competition, despite the fact that the Islamic Republic has carried out widespread human rights violences and crimes against humanity, along with funding global terrorist organizations. Yet — the Jewish state stands alone as the only one facing calls for its removal.
And we know, from hard-learned history, where such logic leads. When Jews are told they are not welcome on the tennis court, it does not take long before they are told they do not belong on our campuses, stages or streets. Canadians must reject this trajectory absolutely, not only for the sake of Jewish Canadians and Israelis, but for the sake of who we are as a nation. These are not our values.
Canada has never shied away from difficult global conversations. But we conduct our debates through dialogue and democratic institutions, not by erasing people from our civic spaces. We do not exile artists or athletes because of their nationality. We do not allow the loudest agitators to decide who may and may not participate in the shared life of this country.
Halifax now finds itself at the centre of a fundamental test of Canadian values. To cancel this Davis Cup tie would be to capitulate to exclusionary pressure and to betray the openness and fairness that Canadians hold dear. Hosting the match does not endorse any government’s policies, it reaffirms the principle that in Canada, people are not erased because of where they come from.
This is not just about tennis. It is about the kind of country we choose to be.
Casey Babb is Director of the Promised Land Project at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute in Ottawa, and an adviser to Secure Canada, in Toronto.
Alan Kessel is a former legal adviser to the Government of Canada and a former deputy high commissioner of Canada to the United Kingdom. He is a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute
