By Alan Kessel, May 26, 2026
On May 14, a group of former Canadian ambassadors and senior public servants sent Prime Minister Mark Carney an outrageous letter calling on Canada to impose sweeping diplomatic, economic, legal, and domestic measures against Israel.
The letter called for sanctions, suspension of bilateral agreements, support for international legal proceedings, and the review of charitable status for organizations connected to Israel or the Israel Defence Forces.
It deserves to be rejected outright.
It is morally unbalanced, strategically naïve, and profoundly disconnected from the reality Israel has faced since the Hamas terror attacks of October 7, 2023.
At its core, the letter asks Canadians to sit in judgment of a democratic ally fighting for its survival after suffering the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust – while applying standards of restraint and risk that no Canadian government would ever accept for its own citizens.
If Canadian towns had been invaded, families butchered in their homes, women raped, children murdered, civilians kidnapped, and rockets fired daily at our cities from multiple fronts, no serious person would expect Canada simply to absorb the attacks while being lectured from abroad about proportionality and restraint. Yet that is precisely the standard these former officials seek to impose on Israel.
The signatories present themselves as defenders of international law and peace. But their letter is built on a staggering imbalance. It places overwhelming emphasis on condemning Israel while treating Hamas and Hezbollah almost as secondary actors in a conflict they helped ignite and perpetuate.
The current war did not emerge in a vacuum. It began with the atrocities of October 7 and continues amid missile attacks, regional destabilization, and the ongoing role of Iranian-backed terrorist organizations openly committed to Israel’s destruction.
Most astonishing of all is the silence surrounding the documented sexual atrocities committed during the October 7 attacks. The Israeli Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas Against Women, Children and Families has compiled extensive evidence and testimony concerning sexual and gender-based violence committed by Hamas and other Palestinian militants and civilians.
Yet the former diplomats who invoke human rights and international law somehow found no space in their letter even to acknowledge these crimes.
That omission is not minor. It is morally revealing.
The letter repeatedly invokes allegations of genocide and war crimes as though they are already established legal facts. They are not. International proceedings remain ongoing. Allegations are not judgments. But the signatories collapse those distinctions in order to create a narrative of unquestionable Israeli criminality demanding immediate punishment and isolation.
That is advocacy, not careful diplomacy.
And the punishment they propose is sweeping.
The letter calls for sanctions against Israeli officials, suspension of bilateral agreements, aggressive diplomatic pressure, and the use of Canadian domestic institutions – including the Canada Revenue Agency – against organizations connected to settlements or support for the Israel Defence Forces.
The implications of this are enormous and deeply irresponsible.
Once the federal government begins investigating or penalizing charities because of their connections to Israel, it becomes very difficult to draw clear boundaries. In practice, the distinction between support for settlements, support for Israel, support for Zionism, and ordinary Jewish communal activity can quickly disappear.
What happens when a synagogue hosts an Israeli speaker? What happens when Jewish schools teach Zionism as part of Jewish history and identity? What about Jewish summer camps, daycare centres, seniors’ homes, healthcare institutions, or community organizations that partner with Israeli charities or employ Israelis who once served in the IDF – as most Israeli adults have?
At a time of rising antisemitism in Canada, many Jewish Canadians will understandably see this not as a narrowly tailored foreign-policy proposal, but as a direct threat to the legitimacy and security of their communal institutions.
The deeper problem, however, is that the letter fundamentally misrepresents the history of the conflict it claims to address.
The signatories insist their recommendations are necessary to preserve a two-state solution. But it is not Israel that has repeatedly rejected two-state proposals. Over decades, Israeli governments accepted or offered frameworks involving land for peace, only to see them rejected by Palestinian leadership unwilling or unable to accept the permanence and legitimacy of a Jewish state.
This is not ancient history. It is one of the central political realities of the conflict.
Repeated Palestinian rejectionism, coupled with repeated waves of terrorism and violence launched from territories transferred or controlled by Palestinians, has profoundly eroded Israeli public confidence in the viability of a two-state solution. The lesson many Israelis drew from Gaza after disengagement was not “land for peace,” but “land for rockets.”
That reality cannot simply be wished away through diplomatic declarations issued safely from Ottawa.
Nor can the broader regional reality be ignored. Israel is engaged in a multi-front struggle against an Iranian regime that openly calls for its destruction while financing, arming, and directing proxy forces across the region. No responsible Israeli government – left, centre, or right – can realistically be expected to support the rapid creation of a sovereign Palestinian state that could become yet another forward operating base for Iranian-backed militancy on Israel’s borders.
Yet the letter barely grapples with any of this.
Instead, it substitutes moral denunciation for strategic thinking.
It is also difficult to ignore the selectivity of the outrage. This is now the second intervention by this self-appointed group on Israel, yet there is little public evidence of comparable campaigns directed at Sudan’s mass atrocities, Iran’s brutality against women and civilians, Russia’s devastation of Ukraine, the millions killed in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or China’s repression of Uyghurs.
Apparently, only one conflict consistently inspires this level of organized diplomatic activism.
People are entitled to notice that inconsistency.
The greatest weakness of the letter is that it mistakes pressure for peace-making. Sanctions, diplomatic isolation, legal escalation, and symbolic declarations may generate applause in elite political circles, but they do not create the conditions for coexistence. They do not weaken extremists. They do not build trust. And they do not prepare either side for the compromises necessary for any durable settlement.
If these former officials truly wished to contribute constructively, they would focus on strengthening moderate Palestinian governance, promoting regional normalization, confronting Iranian destabilization, encouraging economic development, and supporting educational reform that teaches coexistence rather than hatred.
Instead, they have produced a letter heavy on condemnation, light on balance, and blind to the consequences of the policies they advocate — both for Israel and for Canada’s own Jewish community.
Canada needs realism, consistency, and moral clarity rooted in facts rather than fashionable outrage. The May 14 letter offers none of those things.
Alan Kessel is a former assistant deputy minister and 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.
