Reporting on events on-campus and beyond, Canadian university student newspapers have dabbled in a little bit of everything in recent days, including revisionist history.

Tania Guiti’s column in the University of Toronto’s The Varsity claimed “ethnic cleansing” is happening in “Palestine.” Her October 24 commentary entitled: “Ethnic cleansing is happening in Palestine — as it happened in Canada,” claimed that “the Israeli state’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians [is] similar to that of Indigenous peoples in Canada’s history.”

The references in this article attempted to convey how Israel “converted 78 per cent of what was historically Palestine into modern-day Israel,” claiming that this parallels the cultural genocide committed by the Canadian government against Indigenous peoples through the residential school system.

For Guiti, the history of Israel/Palestine began with “all three Abrahamic religions — Judaism, Islam, and Christianity — [having] declared spiritual connections” to the land, and then after WWI, “the UK stepped in with the 1917 Balfour Declaration.” Do with that what you will.

This misunderstanding of history is also demonstrated in Sean Richard’s column entitled: “Israel is not alone in its genocide,” published in Concordia University’s The Link on October 22. Richard argued for treating “the United States and other Western countries” as equally accountable as Israel in genocide, referring to the war “as the deadliest period of Israel’s 76-year occupation of Palestine.”

Like Guiti’s framing Israel as an aggressor engaged in supposed Canada-level “ethnic cleansing,” Richard’s article built on this selective rewriting of history by omitting Jewish historical ties to the land and casting “the Indigenous Palestinian population” whose “sovereign right to their land” was overlooked by the British. The War of Independence was painted as “forced displacement” and “murder” by “Zionist forces,” ignoring that five Arab countries started the war (and ethnically cleansed their Jewish populations) simply to prevent the existence of Israel as a Jewish state. Furthermore, by referring to Israel’s “76-year occupation,” he explicitly denies Israel’s very right to exist.

These narratives not only erase Jewish history but present Israel’s founding as an extension of Western colonialism, falsely asserting that Israel and its allies perpetuate an ongoing “mass genocide of the Palestinian people.”

Shifting back to The Varsity, Eleanor Yuneun Park published a report entitled: “Jewish students at U of T reflect on changes to their identity, community over the past year” on October 21.

There are between 1,500-2,500 Jewish students at University of Toronto, and as of this fall semester, 118 international students from Israel; the likelihood of some Jewish students being Israeli, let alone closely connected to Israel, is high. Yet of the three students interviewed for this reflection, none had a familial connection to Israel and one, Oleskii Varlamov (author of this September 2024 article that was reported on in a previous HonestReporting Canada alert), expressed how Israel “is just a place that exists” and that he’s thought about “the oppression of Palestinian people by Israel (…) for a long time.”

This choice of interviewees notably excludes perspectives of pro-Israel students, Israelis, or Hillel-affiliated voices, despite the Jewish organization’s demonstrated active presence and statements addressing antisemitic incidents on campus. Park amplified students with limited or critical views on Israel and largely underdeveloped understandings of antisemitism, skewing the portrayal of Jewish perspectives, reinforcing a narrative that implicitly aligns with the prevalent campus anti-Israel sentiment.

No doubt, the pro-Israel and Jewish experience and perspective is seemingly not worthy of column inches. Take, for instance, James Bullanoff’s article in The Varsity entitled: “U of T President Meric Gertler issues remarks at conference on antisemitism,” which reported on the president’s speech at the Conference on Historical and Contemporary Antisemitism, and the response from UoT Occupy for Palestine (O4P) to the speech.

O4P, which organized the anti-Israel tent occupation on campus earlier this year, was the singular group to be given voice in the “Student concerns” section of the report. What about Jewish and Israeli student concerns — antisemitism directly impacts them, doesn’t it?

Or consider the October 18, 2024 article in The Cord, University of Waterloo’s newspaper, wherein Sangjun Han reported on the “WUSA referendum votes to end partnership with the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.” Both the student union president and vice-president referred to the “genocide in Gaza [being] one of the reasons why more students” voted, and the president, Nicholas Pfeifle, even admitted that he favored ending the partnership. Pfeifle claimed, “the students have expressed how they feel” — but those that voted no, those that don’t subscribe to the seemingly singular narrative on campuses, get no voice or recognition.

Similar is Liam Newbigging’s article in The Griff, MacEwan University’s student publication, which is effectively a conduit for the “Protestors disrupt MacEwan’s annual address” and their demands from the president for the university to address “the institution’s stance and silence on the Israel-Gaza war.”

All this considered, when The Ubyssey, the University of British Columbia’s newspaper, published Tiana Khandelwal’s “Vigil for Gaza and Lebanon” on October 15 about a “vigil in solidarity with all people affected by what organizers call a genocide in Gaza and Lebanon” the previous week, it isn’t surprising that no consideration was given to the anniversary of Hamas’ massacre, nor to Israeli and Jewish students’ experiences.

Simon Fraser University’s The Peak featured two articles concerning Israel, one on October 23, 2024 called “Protestors across Canada demand Indigo to stop funding the Israeli military” by Yildiz Subuk and Hannah Fraser. The singular interviewee was Gur Tsabar, from Jews Say No to Genocide, who was asked for his predictable opinion on the lawsuit.

The second was entitled: “Over 2,000 people killed in Lebanon” by Sofia Chassomeris published the day before, who actually did contextualize escalation between Hezbollah and Israel with the former’s attacks on Israel since October 8, 2023, but referred to it as part of “Israel’s ongoing genocide in occupied Palestinian territory (…) [a]fter the Palestinian armed group Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023.” Chassomeris downplayed Hezbollah’s ongoing attacks against Israel — which she quoted as being motivated by their desire to “support” Gaza — by extensively detailing Israel’s actions and sidestepping Hezbollah’s ongoing violations of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701, and its murdering of innocent Israelis with relentless rockets.

This conveyed the distortion of history and current events, but also of the picture of Jewish voices and perspectives across these various articles across university campuses in Canada.

Together, these articles and columns provided a disproportionate and unrelenting tunnel vision of the Iranian-backed terror war on Israel, blaming Israel for daring to exist and seeking to protect itself, and demonizing those who advocate for and believe in Israel’s right to exist in safety.