On June 10, Canadian foreign minister Anita Anand announced that the country is joining four other nations in imposing travel and economic sanctions against two extreme-right wing Israeli politicians over their involvement in West Bank settler violence against Palestinians.
Canada has slapped similar sanctions on civilian Israeli settlers three times since 2024, accusing them of fomenting attacks on Palestinians and their villages—attacks that largely go unpunished. But Canada has gone a step further in listing Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, Israel’s current finance minister and head of national security, respectively. Both men live in settlements on the West Bank, and both have made controversial remarks about Palestinians, explicitly calling to annex the West Bank and Gaza—even stating there is no such thing as a Palestinian people. The International Court of Justice is now hearing a case about incitement to genocide because of some of these remarks.
Canada’s sanctions are being seen as an important diplomatic move that signals its extreme displeasure with the Israeli government. Experts say in reality, Canada rarely enforces these sanctions.
To explain more about the strategy and meaning of the sanctions, Thomas Juneau, a professor of political science and an expert in Middle East studies at the graduate school of public and international affairs at the University of Ottawa joins North Star (formerly The CJN Daily) to sit down with host Ellin Bessner. Listen above.
Transcript
Anita Anand: These measures are directed against individuals who directly contribute to extremist settler violence. The measures are not directed against the state of Israel itself…
Ellin Bessner: That’s Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand outlining the reasons why on Tuesday of this week, Canada, together with the UK, Norway, Australia, and New Zealand, slapped personal economic, and travel sanctions on two of Israel’s most controversial high-profile cabinet ministers, who also happen to be right-wing West Bank settlers: Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, and Itamar Ben Gvir, the national security chief.
Smotrich has publicly urged the possible ethnic cleansing and destruction of Gaza and the relocation of its residents to third countries.  But Ben Gvir has been convicted eight times of incitement to racism against Palestinians. The sanctions mean the two politicians cannot travel to Canada or to the other four countries. If they have any financial assets or real estate in the five countries, these will be frozen. Any Canadians who try to help them get around the sanctions here or abroad could face a $25,000 fine or prison time, in some cases up to five years. It’ll be left up to the RCMP and to the Canadian Border Services Agency to enforce the new rules. Canadian banks and companies have to report whether Ben Gvir or Smotrich have any holdings here. We don’t know whether they do, or if Canada was on their next travel list, but that isn’t really the point: experts say the sanctions are more of a sign of “extreme displeasure with the Israeli government” and their treatment of Palestinians, and frustration with the recent approval of another 22 new Israeli [West Bank] settlements.
Thomas Juneau: People can legitimately disagree with the sanctions, people can legitimately disagree with the details of what is going on, but it is more broadly indicative of a more serious approach to foreign policy.
Ellin Bessner: I’m Ellin Bessner, and this is what Jewish Canada sounds like for Friday the 13th, June 13th, 2025.
Welcome to Northstar, a podcast of The Canadian Jewish News, made possible in part thanks to the generous support of the Ira Gluskin and Maxine Granovsky Gluskin Charitable Foundation.
Canada has a few different legal methods to crack down on bad actors from other countries and terrorist groups and rogue governments, too, like Iran and Russia and Sudan and North Korea and Lebanon, for example.  Now, Israel is NOT on those lists because it’s a Western, democratic country. A tool Canada used in this case is called SEMA. That’s short for the Special Economic Measures Regulations, although experts say prosecutions are rarely carried out. Still, at the end of May, Canadian police did charge, for the first time, a Russian national who lives in Toronto for supplying parts for military drones to Russia to be used against Ukraine. The particular SEMA regulations on Israeli settlers have actually only been in effect for over a year, since May 2024 when the Americans under the Biden administration started sanctioning settlers too.  Before today, 15 Israeli Jewish settlers and seven organizations are persona non grata in Canada. These include the Hilltop Youth who build illegal outposts and another group that opposes intermarriage between Jews and Arabs. Several of these sanctioned settlers have close ties to Ben Gvir and Smotrich, and one is the grandson of an extremist Israeli Rabbi, Meir Kahane.
When the earlier sanctions were brought down last year, Ben Gvir called them antisemitism against people building the Holy Land in Judaea and Samaria. But Canada says the two Israeli right-wing leaders encourage violent attacks on Palestinian civilians. Ottawa says there’s been an estimated 1,800 incidents since October 7th alone. In most cases, the perpetrators get away with it. None of which, Canada says, is helpful for peace and stability as it leads to the forced displacement of Palestinians. So why did Canada announce these new sanctions now? To explain, I reached out to professor Thomas Juneau. He’s a Middle East expert and professor of Political Science at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa. And he joins me now.
Thomas Juneau: Thanks for having me.
Ellin Bessner: So we’re talking after the Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister announced that they are joining with other countries to sanction more Israeli, “extremist” settlers on the West Bank. The thing, though, is that these are also sitting cabinet ministers in the Israeli government. How unusual or draconian is this move for a Western allied democracy nation to have two cabinet ministers sanctioned?
Thomas Juneau: It is absolutely unusual. And I mean that in technical terms. Whether one agrees or disagrees with the decision, it’s unusual the fact that five countries, not just Canada—also the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Norway—so, as you said, all democratic allies or friends of Canada and close partners of Israel would sanction ministers. The symbol is powerful, and it’s very unusual. I’m not aware of precedents, and I’ve heard a lot of people say they’re not aware of precedents. I think we can assume that it’s the first time, at least until I actually see a precedent.
The symbol is powerful. Materially, the impact is actually limited. These two individuals probably didn’t have the intention of coming to Canada anyways. Now they are barred from entry. I’m not aware of these two individuals having financial interests in Canada. There might be some, but I’m not aware. But for them to be barred from financial transactions with a country like Canada is not going to act as a major deterrent. So it’s more on the symbolic side that it matters.
Ellin Bessner: Right. Canada has done a lot of sanctions recently under the previous Trudeau administration. IRGC, finally, after six years of trying to get them to put the IRGC [on the terrorist list] and sanction Iranian regime bad guys, to freeze their assets when they came here, to try to escape into the diaspora here. But in terms of the other rogue nations, Belarus and Russia, like Israel’s on the list now with these settlers? but not the country? Can you explain the difference in terms of who is getting sanctioned?
Thomas Juneau: That’s a good question. Because there’s a lot of different tools that can be used here that have different kinds of impact. You mentioned the IRGC, for example, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is the Praetorian Guard, or the ideological military of the Islamic Republic, which was added to the list of terrorist entities under the Criminal Code. So that’s a different tool. It’s not what we’re talking about here. It leads to different impacts, different implications.
What Canada did now was not to Israel, it was to two individuals.  And there is, in practice a distinction, even though I fully understand that symbolically and psychologically or emotionally, for a lot of people, that distinction doesn’t matter. The Canadian government is using two tools against them. One is under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, which bars them from entry into Canada. That is a tool that we have widely used against individuals, officials, and military officials from some regimes that have done things we disagreed with on the human rights front. So the logic here is that their aggressive support for settlements in the West Bank, their calls for annexation of parts of the West Bank, and more broadly, even though it wasn’t clearly said yesterday, their calls for the mass displacement of the Gazan population so that Israel can more or less take possession of the Gaza Strip. That fits into the broad agenda of barring them from entry into Canada.Â
The second tool that we used is something called the Special Economic Measures Act, or SEMA, which is very complicated. Pretty quickly, it gets into a technical dimension that is above my pay grade. By and large, what it means is that any financial asset that they would have here in Canada would be frozen. It bars Canadians or Canadian entities, i.e., businesses, from transactions with them. Whether that actually matters or not, in the sense of do they have bank accounts in Toronto, these two individuals, I don’t personally know. Typically, the Canadian government would not say that because of the Privacy Act. But again, here the idea is the symbol of making those two moves against these two individuals, Smotrich and Ben Gvir.
Ellin Bessner: What about the timing? It’s very interesting because of all the international meetings that are coming up in Canada and New York. Can you situate the timing of this statement with what we’re going to see in the G7 in Kananaskis and maybe even the New York meetings, where recognition of a Palestinian state was on the agenda?
Thomas Juneau: So it’s interesting that you’d mention the G7 because I am actually curious as to what, if any, role the Israeli-Palestinian issue will have on the G7 agenda. Because the US, as of about 5 p.m. on Tuesday evening, clearly expressed its opposition to these sanctions.  The G7, with everything going on with Mr. Trump that we talk about extensively, will be very difficult. It will be an extraordinarily fragile equilibrium for Prime Minister Carney to host this G7 without the whole thing imploding. So if I had to guess, and this is purely a guess, I would say that Prime Minister Carney will try not to have Israel on the agenda just because there will be more than enough reasons for the whole thing to blow up.  Given Mr. Trump’s personality, I might be wrong, of course, on this.
The timing, I think you have to go back to about three weeks when Canada, France, and the UK issued a statement threatening further action against Israel if it didn’t facilitate, among other things, the delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza.
Ellin Bessner: Those were not sanctions. Just to remind our listeners, those were measures. They didn’t say what they would be. The sanctions were for these settlements, which then two days after… I’m sorry to interrupt, but just to give our listeners context in case they haven’t been following, two days after the statement came out on our Victoria Day weekend, May 19, Israel allowed 22 more settlements. The government of Israel approved 22 more settlements to go ahead. Yesterday’s sanctions statement from Anita Anand basically specifically said, “We told you, we tried to tell you, we said, ‘Don’t do more settlements and you went ahead anyway.” So I’m wondering, you go back three weeks, but then stuff has happened since, so maybe they were waiting and this was the shoe that dropped? And now they had to, you know, draft the wording and get the law organized in order and then agree with all the other nations on the timing. But maybe that was already on the…they were watching for this, and Israel thumbed their nose and they said, ‘Okay, we’re going to get you!’
Thomas Juneau: I think your take is correct. I think that Canada and the UK, to some extent, painted themselves in a corner. It’s a corner they could have walked out of. Of course, you can always do that. As Jean Chrétien said, you could just walk on the paint, right, if you’ve painted yourself in a corner. Â
But there was an expectation that they would do something after that statement. I think beyond what has happened in the last three weeks in that specific statement, there has been growing irritation in Canada going back to the Trudeau government, in many European countries, even in the U.S.—and that would be a separate conversation—but even in the U.S., there is growing irritation, impatience, however you want to call it, with Israel, because of the war in Gaza, because of the humanitarian assistance dimension there, because of expanding settlements, and more broadly, expanding military operations in the West Bank. So that broader trend of growing irritation is essential to understand here why that decision was made.
Ellin Bessner: So let’s continue about the coming meeting in New York, where many nations are coming to talk about the possible two-state solution and possible recognition of unilaterally of the Palestinian state. This sanctions announcement comes, and the timing of that, in your opinion, do you think Canada is using sort of this runway to then go ahead and on that meeting in New York, say ‘We’re recognizing Palestine?’
Thomas Juneau: I honestly don’t know what Canada will do in New York, whether Canada will recognise Palestine or not. A small number of European countries, Spain for example, have already made that recognition. There are rumours that others will do it at the New York meeting in June, perhaps France, which is the co-host of that meeting and has been playing obviously a big political role as the driver behind this meeting, working a lot with Saudi Arabia in particular to try to get things moving on the two-state solution front.Â
There has been talk that Canada could also do that. I have no special insight into Prime Minister Carney’s thinking on this issue. To me, the fact that he was willing to adopt these two sanctions against Israeli ministers shows that he’s willing to rock the boat a bit on this issue. But whether he will take that extra step, I don’t know. Â
It’s important to understand, right, that recognition of a Palestinian state at this point is symbolic and will not create that Palestinian state. That will only come as a result of direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority or some kind of Palestinian entity.
The logic is that both sanctions by countries like Canada and the UK and recognition of a Palestinian state symbolically will put pressure on Israel to negotiate, will incentivize Israel to negotiate, and will also provide momentum to eventual negotiations. It’s a bit of a risky calculus. It’s not guaranteed to work at all. But that’s the logic behind it.
Ellin Bessner: Well, you know, maybe this new survey that came out, about 50% of Canadians now think Israel’s committing genocide. It was a Leger poll that came out yesterday or today. You know, Ottawa watches what happens in the public opinion before they do anything. And so this might give them, I mean, half don’t, so…
Thomas Juneau: And absolutely. And I would add on that point that within Western democracies in general, including in the U.S., there is a steady shift of popular opinion in favour of the Palestinians and critical of Israel. We’ve seen it, including in the U.S., and what is interesting in the U.S.—and by interesting, I mean in the noteworthy sense—is that you see that among Democrats, but you also see that among Republicans, where there is a faction or factions within the Republican Party, on the MAGA right, and some of these individuals are deeply antisemitic, so that obviously plays into that, but who are very critical of Israel. So there’s a lot of movement on that level. And if I were the Israeli government or if I were, you know, an activist in Israel, I would be concerned about that.
Ellin Bessner: You spoke about the Israeli government. So we have to of course bring up the fact that against all this backdrop, all this stuff is happening. There’s also the possibility that there will be elections in Israel, the government will collapse any moment now. There’s all this stuff about the right wings are going to leave, the extremists are going to leave, Ben Gvir and Smotrich are going to leave, and the coalition will collapse. So what should we understand about this as all these sanctions are now coming out?
Thomas Juneau: Well, you know, that adds a new layer to an already extraordinarily complicated equation. There are some analysts who are making the case that sanctioning Ben Gvir and Smotrich by Canada and other allies can provide impetus, if you will, to marginalize them in a future coalition-forming exercise inside Israel. I have my doubts as to whether that can actually work.  As, you know, Netanyahu, I think, has clearly shown that he’s more than willing to thumb his nose to international pressure. Obviously, Smotrich and Ben Gvir themselves do not care. They’ve been quite vocal about that.
Plus, I think we should all be mindful and careful of lesser powers like Canada and the UK trying to intervene or being perceived as intervening, even if it’s not the actual intent, in Israeli elections and democratic processes. So that part, I’m a bit uncomfortable with.
Ellin Bessner: Because Canada shouldn’t be overthrowing a democratic country?
Thomas June: Even if you don’t like their policies. I don’t think overthrowing it would be the right word because that’s too strong. I don’t think we should overthrow.
Ellin Bessner: Regime change?
Thomas Juneau: But if it is perceived as much meddling, even if it’s not overthrowing, if it’s a couple of notches below, the perception can be a challenge.
Ellin Bessner: Okay, so you mentioned, and this will be my last question, you mentioned Canada, UK. Why do you think this strategy is being used by Canada? To be part of the posse, and I’m saying it in a nice way, part of the group. They’re doing it as a group and not alone. All these sanctions, they’re all teaming up with the boys around the block. What’s the reason they would do this instead of acting on their own?
Thomas Juneau: So I’m happy you asked that question because that is an essential point. If Canada acts alone on an issue like this, it has absolutely no impact. And the only reason why it does it, it’s for domestic consumption. And in a democracy, it’s normal. You can’t pretend that elected governments will not make foreign policy decisions on the basis of partisan considerations. That’s part of the game. But the reality is that when Canada does that, it has precisely zero impact outside of our borders.
Again, whether we agree with it or not, if Canada is to have an impact on international issues, including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but others too, the argument absolutely applies elsewhere, it needs to act in coordination with allies. That’s the only way that we can have an impact, and then it is possible to have one. So here I’m actually happy that the performative aspect, the theatrical aspect of foreign policy under the previous government, clearly the only objective was domestic consumption, which for a foreign policy analyst like me, and I’m not a domestic politics specialist, I’m not involved in any political party. I used to find that very discouraging.
Now, if there is by this government an effort to work with allies on the basis of common interests to try to shape outcomes, that’s more serious. And in the world we’re in now with a potentially very difficult American administration to the south, we need to firm up these partnerships with countries like the UK and Australia, in particular France, but also Japan, South Korea, etc. I would add Saudi Arabia and India.
Ellin Bessner: They’re coming to the G7, Modi and MBS though.
Thomas Juneau: There’s no confirmation yet, but at least the invitation was launched. To me, the fact that Canada is closely working with allies here is a good sign.
Ellin Bessner: So “Canada’s back” under the new…?
Thomas Juneau: I completely refuse to use “Canada’s back” because that was ruined, but I’ll take the broader point.
Ellin Bessner: It’s been great to go through these points with you. I’m sure we’ll speak again as this develops. Thank you so much for being on North Star with me.
Thomas Juneau: Nice to chat. Thank you.
Show Notes
Related links
- How Canada, France and the U.K. rebuked Israel’s renewed military campaign in Gaza and threatened sanctions about expanding settlements, on May 19, in a joint statement.
- How Canadian Jewish leaders express concerns about Carney’s threat of sanctions on Israel.
- Here is Canada’s announcement of sanctions against extremist settlers, published June 10, 2025.
Credits
- Host and writer: Ellin Bessner (@ebessner)
- Production team: Zachary Kauffman (senior producer), Andrea Varsany (producer), Michael Fraiman (executive producer)
- Music: Bret Higgins
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