Toronto 4 Palestine, in cooperation with fellow Palestinian, Arab and Canadian internationalist organizations, confronted Zionist war criminal and former “Israeli” prime minister Naftali Bennett on Wednesday, June 14 in Toronto. Bennett was hosted as the keynote speaker at the annual event of the “Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Center,” a Zionist organization in Canada. 

The Masar Badil, the Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path Movement, denounced the Canadian government’s decision to allow Bennett to enter the country despite popular rejection of his visit and the objection of dozens of Canadian, Palestinian and Jewish organizations that submitted a legal brief and a public petition to the government, calling for Bennett to be barred from entering Canada because of his participation in war crimes against the Palestinian and Lebanese People.

The Masar stated that “Naftali Bennett’s presence in Canada is a disgrace to the Canadian government. Bennett is a murderer and a war criminal who participated in the 1996 Qana massacre, which took the lives of 102 martyrs, as well as his public call for the killing and execution of Palestinians confronting occupation forces.”

Canadian law states that the federal government has a duty to deny entry to people who have committed war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide.

Toronto 4 Palestine said that Bennett, “like all leaders of the Zionist entity, is involved in many crimes against the Palestinian people, including building colonial settlements in the occupied West Bank during his term as prime minister, expelling Palestinian families from occupied East Jerusalem, imposing settlers in their place, and besieging the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip, in addition to his crimes against Palestinian prisoners in the occupation jails.”

Toronto 4 Palestine noted that  supporters of “Israel” tried to ask the police to silence the loudspeakers and stop the chants of the demonstrators outside, but the police did not respond to their demand. Instead, the event was delayed by over an hour, Naftali Bennett was forced to enter through the back door of the building under cover and surrounded by armored cars.

Bennett was prime minister of the occupation regime between June 2021 and June 2022, as part of what was called the “government of change,” in which he alternated in the position with current Zionist opposition leader Yair Lapid.