Navigating the TDSB: An investigation into the document's aims and source (part 1)

Here, we begin to unpack how an anti-Zionist influence campaign dressed up as a cultural celebration of Palestinian life operates.

Front cover of the latest in anti-Zionist campaigns targeting the Toronto District School Board.

Navigate verb [I or T]: to lead a company, activity, etc. in a particular direction, or to deal effectively with a difficult situation.

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The authors of Navigating the TDSB: A Guide for Palestinian & Ally Families chose their words carefully.¹ I examined the various definitions of the term navigate in the New Oxford Dictionary of English and Cambridge’s online dictionary. The definition above from Cambridge is the one that best fits what I believe the authors had in mind.

The title wasn’t “Navigating through the TDSB” or “Navigating around the TDSB”. It was “Navigating the TDSB”, which at first before I read the document, had an odd ring to it. I mean if the TDSB had extremely complicated procedures that required a manual to decipher them, I could understand navigating through. Or if the TDSB had recently instituted some nefarious policies that hurt children, I could make sense of navigating around. In hindsight, though, it’s clear the authors have a firm command of the English language.

The aim of the document is indeed to explain to readers how to navigate the TDSB; that is, how to steer it from its current position to a desired position. Unlike a ship, whose future position is a new desired location to be reached safely (i.e., safely for the ship, its crew and its cargo), the new position sought by the Navigating authors is political. The document aims to commandeer the TDSB and steer it from its current value-based commitments to a new set of commitments that are incommensurable with the existing ones.

Of course, if the authors were merely to state transparently that the aim was to fundamentally transform the TDSB by severing many of its vital value commitments to the Jewish community and by nullifying its relationships to organizations that support Israel’s right to not only exist but—dare I say—to thrive as a nation, it would be ineffective. So, the authors instead say all of that quite clearly but only in the subtext. It is a classic example of an influence operation, more colloquially known as propaganda.

I hinted at this strategy in a letter I sent to all TDSB trustees before they voted on adopting “anti-Palestinian racism” (APR) as a new category of hate that the TDSB would be committed to combatting. I explained that the push for APR adoption was an influence campaign consistent with the Islamist tradition of taqiyya or strategic deception when fighting an adversary that is still more powerful than you are. Unfortunately, as I predicted, the trustees didn’t listen and voted in APR. Or maybe they listened and voted in APR anyway. Either way, the majority of voting members supported it.

Okay, let’s dig in.

Page 1 of Navigating the TDSB

The report begins with some self-congratulatory gloating in which an online group called Toronto Palestinian Families (TPF) was part of a coalition that pushed the TDSB’s adoption of APR over the finish line.² Page 1 also signals to readers that TPF works closely with Toronto Jewish Families (TJF).³ Doesn’t that interfaith allyship just warm your heart? It’s supposed to. But it’s not just interfaith allyship the authors are signalling. No, it’s convergence on key issues with THE JEWS. This is meant to diffuse any suspicion that might arise in the reader’s mind that the authors might have an ulterior motive, say, of an antisemitic nature. But you, dear reader, now know that THE JEWS are okay with this stuff. After all, they’re working together. Kumbaya established on p. 1.

Okay, so who are these harmonious groups, the TPF and TJF? Well, I visited their websites many months ago long before Navigating appeared and, lo and behold, not only are they harmonious, but they’re more or less duplications of one another’s content with some superficial changes.

Here’s TPF’s homepage (zoom in if the text is too hard to read):

And here’s TJF’s:

Ain’t it amazing how perfectly aligned the Palestinian and Jewish communities in Toronto are! It’s almost too good to be true and that’s because it’s 99.99% likely to be false, at least in any sense of general community alignment.

This is the point at which it’s easy to jump to conclusions that may also prove to be false. The truth is I still don’t know exactly what’s going on but I do know this. Let’s face it; the probability of two independent groups producing online content that is virtually identical is next to nil.

But that’s not all. These online groups were created two days apart. Here’s the search results from the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA):

Note the creation date of January 26, 2024. Now look at the results for TJF. It was created two days later.

This must be the age of Aquarius because the synchronicity is ubiquitous. First, the content is virtually identical and now the creation dates are a stone’s throw apart. Since I don’t believe in astrology, I smell an attempt at strategic deception.

But wait, it gets better. All the registrar, registrant, and contact information for the TPF site is redacted. Someone seems to have something to hide.

But now here’s where things get positively weird. The TJF site was not redacted and provided further information to go on (again, zoom in if you cannot read the text).

I ran a reversed phone number search on the administrative contact and got this hit:

Looking up the school, I found their website with much in the way of interesting reading material.

Banner on the landing page of winchevskycentre.org.

As I am no expert on the United Jewish People’s Order (UJPO). Okay, that’s an understatement. I had never heard of them until now, so let’s turn to scholars who have written about them for insight.

According to Canadian historian, Pierre Anctil, "The ideological confrontation between the West and the USSR would discredit communism within the Canadian Jewish community. The CJC, under the leadership of Samuel Bronfman, expelled Communists from its ranks in 1951 and marginalized the radical Left. This action applied to many small splinter groups within Montreal Jewish institutions, including the Faraynikter Yidisher Folks Ordn—also known as the United Jewish People’s Order—a semi-secret radical fraternal organization with a Communist allegiance that grew out of the working class. This was also true for the Morris Winchevsky Schools, founded at the end of the 1920s, which in 1948 had 500 students under the direction of the writer Sholem Shtern” (italics added).⁴

Canadian sociologists Robert Brym and Randal Schnoor write, "After the [Second World] war, many on the Jewish far left united to establish the United Jewish People’s Order (UJPO), which in addition to its secular cultural programming and educational agenda expressed hostility to Zionism. The national executive of the CJC, influenced by Cold War fears, expelled UJPO and called on its regional offices to do the same. Although there was some resistance to the decision in Vancouver, UJPO was effectively frozen out of the mainstream of Jewish communal life (Jones 1998)" (italics added).⁵

Jim Torczyner, a Professor of Social Work at McGill University, writes, “Closely aligned with Soviet ideology, the United Jewish People’s Order – the largest Canadian Jewish member organization at the time – lost 90 per cent of its membership in 1956, the year that Nikita Khrushchev revealed Stalin’s atrocities against Jews."⁶ But UJPO did not fully dry up and it appears to now be using sanitized fronts such as TJF to further its anti-Zionist objectives.

Terence Fay, a professor at the Toronto School of Theology, referring to the 1920s stated, "The Communist party and the Young Workers League formed cells to indoctrinate their members in world revolution and to penetrate Quebec society. Cell groups successfully infiltrated the artistic, cultural, and athletic associations of new Canadians. Social organizations that were penetrated with some skill included the United Ukrainian Canadian Association, United Jewish People's Order, Polish Democratic Association, Lithua [...]."⁷

From these and other sources, we see that the UJPO at least traditionally represented a radical Communist association of secular Jews. One might infer from the above quotes that the members who were hardcore enough to have remained in UJPO following the exodus in 1956, and even the formal dissolution of the USSR in 1991 are the ones who now make up the group’s composition. Alternatively, others such as Canadian sociologist Morton Weinfeld have noted that the Jewish community is now more united and point to the fact that “the more radical United Jewish People’s Order has all but disappeared.”⁸

Yet, as the present analysis reveals, the activities of groups such as UJPO may not be restricted to what they overtly showcase. Nowhere on their website is there a link to TJF, which it appears they created as a political tool of strategic deception.

Nor does there appear to be an abatement of their anti-Zionist stance. Consider the statement UJPO offered on October 9, 2023, a mere two days after Hamas’s terrorist attack on Israel.

Have you ever heard of such empathy? The worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust and they make as their central point an anti-Zionist message going so far as to contextualize Hamas’s attacks in what they see as the root cause: Israel’s so-called occupation and settler colonialism. This sure sounds a lot like the Navigating document, as we’ll get to it in a future post. At a minimum, the present revelations suggest that research into the current group size and composition, mindset, and activities of groups like UJPO should be carefully researched.

Going back to TJF, there’s one more thing I must mention: several months ago when the names TJF and TPF first were brought to my attention as they surfaced in connection with a small group of anti-Zionist parents who were trying to cancel an antisemitism awareness workshop to be delivered by TDSB partner, Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center (which Gili Zemer and I wrote about here), a couple of Jewish parents and I tried to join the TJF group to see what we could find out. No one ever responded to any of us providing further evidence that TJF is bogus.

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So what’s going on? One possibility is that UJPO is behind the Navigating document. It may have set up TPF and requested CIRA masking to cover its tracks. Another possibility is that it is working in close collaboration with Palestinian or other aligned activists who set up TPF and requested the masking. One fact that does not make sense to me is if UJPO was responsible for both sites, why did it not mask information for TJF and fully cover its tracks? This might suggest separate registrants but not strongly since, if they were coordinated well enough to provide near-identical content on the two sites, then surely, they could have coordinated on the issue of masking. This remains a puzzle.

That said, I want to amplify the point that we still don’t know who is behind TPF and whether there are others behind the Navigating document that may be unaffiliated with TJF and TPF. What we can ascertain already by p.1 is that the document has the markings of a political influence campaign which uses strategic deception to steer the TDSB in an anti-Zionist direction and weaken its commitments to mainstream Canadian Jews whose children have increasingly felt unwelcome and unsafe in the TDSB. It is incumbent on all parents who do not want their school systems hijacked by political operatives dressed up as “community voices” to analyze what is happening and shine a light on it. That’s what we’ll be doing at Tackle.

1. The document has no author listed. I don’t know if it was written by one or more people. For conciseness, I will simply refer to “the author” rather than to more cumbersome formulations.

2. The URL is https://torontopalestinianfamilies.ca but I’d rather not link to the site.

3. The URL is https://torontojewishfamilies.ca which redirects to https://torontojewishfamilies.wordpress.com.

4. Pierre Anctil, History of the Jews in Quebec, Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2021, p. 243. 

5. Robert Brym and Randal F. Schnoor, The Ever-Dying People? Canada’s Jews in Comparative Perspective, Toronto: University of Toronto Perss, 2023, p. 15.

6. Jim Torczyner, Rights-Based Community Practice and Academic Activism in a Turbulent World: Putting Theory into Practice in Israel, Palestine and Jordan, London: Routledge, 2021, p. 10. 

7. Terence J. Fay, A History of Canadian Catholics, Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2002, p. 222.

8. Morton Weinfeld, Like Everyone Else but Different: The Paradoxical Success of Canadian Jews, 2^nd ed, Kingston: Mcgill-Queen's University Press, 2018, p. 184.