This article originally appeared in the National Post.
By Alan Kessel, June 12, 2025
Judih Weinstein Haggai was a Canadian. A teacher, a poet, a peace activist. She was also a victim of Hamas’s October 7 massacre, murdered — alongside her husband Gadi Haggai — by terrorists who violated every principle of humanity and international law.
Her death should have shaken this country to its core. Her name should have been remembered in our schools, our Parliament, our streets. Instead, Judih was nearly forgotten.
There is a quiet shame in how Canada responded to her murder. While she and Gadi lay dead, their remains taken into Gaza — our leaders equivocated. When it mattered most — when Canadians were kidnapped, raped and slaughtered — Canada’s political voice was cautious, hedged, and absent. And now, after that moral failure, we watch in disbelief as the government moves to restore funding to support a “reconstructed” Hamas-led Gaza under the guise of humanitarianism, and to recognize a Palestinian state without a single assurance that terrorism will cease or that Canadian lives will be protected.
Judih had devoted her life to peace. Her work as a teacher reflected a belief in dialogue, education, and coexistence. She was everything we say we value: compassionate, thoughtful, engaged. But her Canadian identity and her Canadian death were treated as inconvenient. Her story didn’t fit the narrative that had taken hold — one in which nuance is unwelcome, and moral clarity is drowned in political calculation.
Her body and that of her husband were finally recovered from Khan Yunis in a special operation by the Israeli military — retrieved from the territory of their murderers, where they had been discarded and hidden for over 600 days. The terrorists who held their remains were members of the Palestinian Mujahideen Movement — the same group that kidnapped and murdered Shiri Bibas and her two young sons, Ariel and Kfir. That is who we are dealing with: not freedom fighters, not a resistance, but sadistic murderers who hold the bodies of grandparents and babies as bargaining chips in a depraved game of political leverage.
The rescue of Judih and Gadi’s bodies offered a measure of dignity long denied to their memory by those who should have been their advocates.
We are right to feel profound sorrow, and we are right to feel anger, not only at the terrorists who killed Judih, but at the silence that followed. When a Canadian peace activist is murdered by genocidal extremists, and our government cannot even summon the decency to name the crime, or the courage to defend her memory, we have lost more than lives. We have lost our compass.
Canada should have mourned Judih Weinstein Haggai as one of our own. Instead, we left her to history’s margins — and that silence speaks volumes. It speaks to a broader failure in Canada’s response to October 7, not just as a foreign policy lapse, but as a failure of moral and civic imagination. From the moment news emerged of Canadians among the murdered and abducted, our national reaction was curiously muted. There were no national vigils. No major speeches. No commemorative resolutions. Instead, there was hesitation. Anxious parsing of words. A quiet fear of appearing too sympathetic to the victims, lest one be accused of political bias.
And last week, a new insult was added to injury. The Prime Minister’s Office issued an official statement with the title incorrectly claiming that Judih had been released by Hamas. Hours later, the statement was quietly corrected. But the damage was done. That kind of misstatement — made so many months after her murder — showed not only a failure of situational awareness but a stunning insensitivity to the family and to the memory of a Canadian murdered abroad. It revealed a disconnect that can no longer be dismissed as bureaucratic oversight.
To his credit, Prime Minister Mark Carney did extend condolences to Judith Weinstein Haggai’s family and to the Canadian Jewish community, acknowledging the alarming surge in antisemitism across Canada following the October 7 attacks. The recognition was welcome — but far too little, far too late.
It is difficult not to contrast this with the intense, co-ordinated national response to the detention of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor by China. Their plight rightly galvanized the Canadian government and the public. Speeches were made. Diplomatic pressure was sustained. There was no confusion about whose side we were on. Yet when Judih — a Canadian peace activist — was abducted and murdered by Hamas, the urgency vanished. The advocacy evaporated. The silence was deafening. Why?
When Canadians are murdered abroad — especially by genocidal terrorists — there should be no confusion. No fear of clarity. The murder of Judih and Gadi Haggai was not a “tragic consequence of conflict”; it was the deliberate targeting of civilians for the crime of being Jewish and Israeli. That Judih was also Canadian makes Canada’s silence even more bewildering.
Some will argue that the government must maintain neutrality to preserve credibility as a peace broker. But neutrality in the face of barbarism is not diplomacy — it is abdication. And the insistence on “both-sides” language in the wake of atrocities sends a clear signal: some victims are more politically acceptable than others.
In that light, Judih’s story is not just a personal tragedy — it is a mirror. It reflects the deep discomfort some feel when confronted with violence that cannot be neatly explained away. A peace activist who taught children, who wrote poetry, who carried two passports and lived her values, was taken hostage and executed. Her murder forces us to reckon with what happens when good people become inconvenient symbols.
The Canadian government claims to stand for human rights, international law and the protection of its citizens. But its actions — or lack thereof — in the case of Judih Weinstein Haggai tell a different story. We have failed to honour her life. We have failed to defend her dignity. And by normalizing the erasure of Canadian victims of terror, we set a dangerous precedent.
Remembering Judih is not a partisan act. It is a moral obligation. Her life deserves to be spoken of, her death to be mourned, her memory to be defended. To do anything less is to collaborate in her erasure.
Alan Kessel is a former Legal Adviser to the Government of Canada and Deputy High Commissioner of Canada to the United Kingdom. He is also a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
