How a year of war a world away has cast a shadow over Canada’s biggest city

Startling security threats have made too many feel unsafe in the city they call home. Protests in the streets have drawn hundreds of thousands of demonstrators. Amid fierce debates about the lines between political speech and hate speech, there have been clear examples of both.

After a year of heartache, the scars of a devastating war are visible everywhere in the city. Some see their home in new and darker ways. Others say they’ll continue striving to bring people together, in the face of what can seem like insurmountable odds.

Here are the voices of just a few of those who have been changed by this war.

For the past year, Maureen Leshem has done anything she could to help bring her cousin home.

Romi Gonen, 24, was shot and wounded before being kidnapped by Hamas a year ago, during the Oct. 7 attack on Israel that saw about 1,200 people killed and 240 taken captive.

Recently, her family received word that Gonen is still alive, but a cloud of uncertainty hangs over them.

Here at home, Leshem said, the waiting and emotional toll of advocacy has been all-consuming.

“Every single second of every day feels like a race against time, and we can’t afford to wait passively when so much is at stake.”

She says “emotional whiplash” describes the way she and other family members of hostages are feeling, saying they’ve “been jolted between such extreme responses” from people in the GTA and abroad.

“On the one hand, we’re filled with moments of compassion and solidarity, where people come together … And then, just as quickly as we feel lifted by the support, we’re met with hostility, apathy and hatred.”

Leshem says dealing with that has been difficult, personally and professionally. As the executive director of The 482 Collective, a non-profit in Vaughan supporting women fleeing domestic violence and human trafficking, Leshem says she feels there has been an overwhelming silence from many women’s rights organizations about Oct. 7.

“I’m unable to comprehend how anyone could see this situation and respond with anything other than compassion. These were innocent music lovers, young people. These were babies, these were Holocaust survivors. Like, how many times have we been to a music festival here in Toronto? … I don’t know where humanity went.”

Sam Ebid of Mississauga says he’s spent the past year in despair, trying, with few successes, to rescue as many people as he can from Gaza — where Israel’s retaliation has killed more than 41,000 people.

There, the lives of his sister and brother and their families have been ripped apart. For them, it has been a hungry, cold, violent year, shambling from camp to camp amid explosions in the distance.

When the Star spoke to Ebid in February, he had just returned from a fruitless trip to Cairo, where he waited in long lines, day after day, in hopes of at least buying passage for his sister. She was 67, living in a tent without electricity, heat or her asthma medication. 

A few months later, Ebid finally was able to pay $5,000 to have his sister brought to Egypt. There she has remained, recovering.

They had to leave their elder brother behind. He lives in a mud-lined hut, a more fortunate situation than that of many others in Gaza, Ebid says. Since Israel destroyed the Rafah crossing in June, the cost to rescue him leaped to $20,000.

“If I tell you my brother’s story you will cry,” Ebid says.

Ebid represents a group of about 1,000 Canadians with relatives in Gaza. Collectively, they sent hundreds of thousands of letters pleading with elected officials to apply more pressure to Israel to let their loved ones leave the territory.

“Helping Canadians with families in Gaza, along with my own, has been overwhelming, but their suffering and need for safety is what keeps me going,” Ebid says.

Relatives of Canadians are eligible for a special immigration program. But actually getting people out of Gaza has proven a huge problem. 

“My experience this past year has really changed how I see Canada,” Ebid says. “The government has let us down.”

Harvey Naglie has lived in Toronto for decades. The retired banker says the events of the past 12 months, however, have made him fear for the safety of his community like never before.

“Perhaps the most painful moment was seeing my 18-month-old grandson standing in the cold without a coat last November, when we rushed to pick him up after his daycare received a bomb threat.”

“It shook me up,” he says. “The idea that such innocent lives could be subjected to this level of hatred and danger is heart-wrenching.”

Even today, there’s a mobile police command post stationed outside the school his two granddaughters attend, a reminder of ongoing threats.

“It feels as though the spaces that should foster security and peace for our children have become battlegrounds for fear and division — a fear that is now rising as we approach the first anniversary of Oct. 7.”

Naglie says the pro-Palestinian demonstrations on the Highway 401 overpasses at Avenue Road, near his home, also contributed to his sense that the Toronto Jewish community was being targeted for the actions of the Israeli army half a world away.

“These protests seem to have been deliberately designed not just to express political views, but to intimidate and inconvenience the local population, many of whom, like me, are Jewish,” he says.

“Toronto and Canada have always been places where I believed tolerance and inclusion would prevail. But now, in this moment of rising hostility, it feels as though we are left to face these challenges alone.”

Dr. Yasser Khan, a Mississauga ophthalmic surgeon, has volunteered his expertise during various humanitarian crises for two decades in more than 40 countries. He says even that failed to prepare him for the suffering he witnessed on his visits to Gaza this past year.

The emergency room he worked out of was a hospital reduced to a refugee camp for 25,000 people where, “If you’re lucky, you get a mat to sleep on the ground” during 1 C weather and amid “the 24-hour sound of Israeli drones.”

Khan says 95 per cent of the dozens of patients he treated — which often meant removing their eyes — were children, including “a beautiful six-year-old girl who came in with her eyes completely blown out” with shrapnel, hair frazzled and crying for her parents, who were nowhere to be found.

“I don’t even know where she is now. She may be dead for all I know,” Khan says, emphasizing this is just one of countless similar examples.

The “horrific trauma,” the children with missing limbs, the bodies covered with rubble and dust were all “fundamentally altering for me,” Khan says.

He says he found himself strengthening his relationship with God, but that survivor’s guilt remains, “because I left them behind.” 

He says he’s been left “disillusioned” by material possessions such as his clothes and cars; by posts on social media of huge meals at restaurants when he saw skinny, malnourished children; by people he once admired in media, business and health care who have been silent or supported the war.

“You can’t stop it. So you have to have something that you can hold on to,” Khan says. “And I chose God versus drugs or alcohol or other things to drown yourself with.”

Serene Paul says this year has left her believing that many Canadians carry two different spools of moral measuring tape.

She sees one, applied to Palestinians, that seems to record each sin in detail. The other, for Israel, seems in her eyes far more forgiving.

Paul has witnessed the fury at the Hamas militants over their attack on Israel. What she hasn’t seen, she says, is anger for the indignity her Palestinian uncle and thousands like him have suffered in Israeli captivity for decades.

Beginning when he was 14 years old, Paul says, her uncle was repeatedly apprehended and brutalized by the Israeli army.

“One of the torture techniques they used on him as a 14-year-old was hanging him by his hands for hours on end with a plastic bag around his face that smelled like sewage water,” Paul says. This, she says, was for allegedly throwing rocks at tanks. Something she says her uncle did not do.

Paul’s uncle was 21 the final time he was arrested, she says. Now a man, he was accused of membership in a terrorist group. Paul said the charge was untrue and never proven. It would take over two decades for him to be released.

“He lives in constant fear,” Paul said. “He wakes up in fear, wondering when they’re going to take him again.” 

Paul says that in her view these people are hostages, as much as the people Hamas kidnapped. 

She says the focus on the latter by Canadian officials and institutions, coupled with their “complete denial” of the plight of the former, makes her ashamed of this country. It also made her feel she needs to raise awareness and change public perception. This is what spurred her to join protests this year, she says. 

“We, unfortunately, need to force it into people’s lives for it to be talked about.”

Mohamad Yassin says he feels Islamophobia, anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian racism became an epidemic in Toronto this year, and that he fears for his safety.

Worse, it feels as though there is no authority he can turn to for help, he says. Last month, people waving the flag of a listed anti-Arab terrorist group, Kahane Chai, descended on the University of Toronto’s campus.

Unlike two men charged by Toronto police this week for waving a Hezbollah flag — another designated terrorist group — no consequences came for the Kahanists.

Yassin said in addition to the flags, he saw these people carrying signs that read “Make Gaza a parking lot.”

He says this going unpunished by police and unaddressed by security makes him wonder whether anyone would listen if he was hurt one day.

“It’s not just on campus, it’s citywide,” he says. “I feel pretty unsafe. People might attack me, and if they do, there’s no recourse for that. I just rely on myself and God. That’s all I have.”

Yassin says he is grateful at least to have the Islamophobia-Motivated Incident Reporting Tool, an app released by the National Council of Canadian Muslims this year to log hate crimes.

This spring, Toronto police Chief Myron Demkiw expressed concerns publicly that Islamophobic hate crimes are going under-reported.

Journalist Fatima Syed says she felt like quitting in the early days of the war.

The devastation and destruction in a part of the world where she grew up and went to high school, where she knows people to this day, left her feeling for a time as though her own work at The Narwhal was “futile.”

But she says she found community through a Toronto vigil for journalists killed in the Middle East, which she helped organize and, also, inspiration and purpose to continue on, from journalists on the ground in Gaza.

If Hind Khoudary, a Palestinian journalist reporting from Gaza, “can still get up every morning and do it,” says Syed, “who am I to quit? I share the same commitment to truth as she has.”

It was also the year Syed, who is vice-president of the Canadian Association of Journalists, says she profoundly altered how she consumes news of international conflicts. 

When Russia attacked Ukraine in February 2022, Syed watched live coverage on CNN. But after Oct. 7, Syed looked elsewhere. Syed turned from traditional Canadian media, whose presence on the ground in the region has greatly diminished in recent years, to WhatsApp group chats. Those in turn led her to headlines, language and takes she says weren’t being reflected in western media. Often, it was individual Palestinian journalists, such as Khoudary, sharing what they were witnessing and living through on platforms such as Instagram.

“It was personal narratives by journalists sharing their observations with their world through mediums that were so different than what I as a journalist would have consumed,” says Syed. “But that really, for me, helped me understand what was going on.”

Khoudary could be doing a live hit, but then comes a post of “a photo of the sky” and her saying, “ ‘I told the sky everything’,” says Syed. “She’s on the ground, seeing it live and having no one to talk to, no editor, no newsroom to consult, other than the sky.”

Like others with relatives in Gaza and Lebanon, Mohammad Yassin (no relation to Mohamad Yassin, above) has been overwhelmed with a sense of helplessness.

“There is nothing that I can do that’s enough to help these people,” he says, expressing the guilt he feels just knowing he has a roof over his head and food on his plate — luxuries for people in war-torn Gaza.

None of the advocacy Yassin’s done over the past year, including going to rallies and organizing a months-long encampment at the University of Toronto, feels like enough. “There’s always more that can be done.”

Yassin says his relatives in Gaza, including cousins, aunts and uncles, have been living under constant bombardment, cut off from food supply, clean water and medicine. The stories he’s heard are horrific: People are eating flour and leaves, have been stuck under rubble for hours and have had their entire homes destroyed. He says families are strategically splitting up to ensure that if they come under attack, their entire bloodlines aren’t wiped out.

“For us, the dead are doing much better than the living,” he says.

The events unfolding in Lebanon have only added to the emotional toll on Yassin. His relatives on his father’s side live in the Palestinian refugee camp of Ein el-Hilweh in Saida, Lebanon, where he visits each year.

An Israeli airstrike on the camp last week reportedly killed five people, injured others and toppled buildings.

Yassin is constantly trying to reach family there to make sure they’re OK.

“It’s been a very rough week,” he says. “Imagine having to refresh your newsfeed every minute to see the names of the people who were murdered to make sure your family is not one of them … It’s very surreal.”

Karine Silverwoman, a Toronto social worker and therapist, is the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors and says this past year was one of the “hardest spiritual years” of her life. She says the legacy she grew up with has shaped her to “lead with compassion” and “not let go of my moral compass.”

But during the war, she says, that’s come at a high personal cost.

“I have never witnessed so much rupture and rifts within my Jewish community … so much polarization, fear and racism. And so in that way, I am a changed person and I don’t think I will ever be the same,” she says.

Silverwoman went on to explain that she is “much more public” now than she ever thought she would need to be, whether it’s protesting for a ceasefire or co-founding Jews For Tikkun Olam, a coalition of social workers and therapists advocating for social justice and human rights.

Silverwoman says she was kicked out of a Jewish support group on Facebook for “gently” pointing out some anti-Palestinian racism.

“I was nervous and still am nervous to do this article because of the possible repercussions (and) doxing just at the mention of Palestinians is so high,” she says. 

Silverwoman says she has gained patients “because I can hold multiple truths,” but that she’s also lost work by being open about her beliefs.

She says she’s also found strength in meeting others who share her points of view.

“I am a changed person because I have (both) created and been a part of such a beautiful, incredible, transformative, generative Jewish community that has come together to say, ‘Not in our name.’ ”

Dania Majid sees Toronto differently than she did a year ago. The human rights lawyer has mixed feelings about living in a city that she feels both supports and fails Palestinian and Arab communities.

At times, she said she feels hopeful. She walks down streets filled with pro-Palestinian flags inside buildings, stickers on lamp posts and signs on the windows of homes and businesses. She sees protesters, after one year of organizing non-stop, still take to the streets in large numbers.

“This is a good city,” she thinks to herself.

But it is the city’s public institutions that have left her feeling deeply frustrated.

“Our institutions have failed us on every level, and the amount of anti-Palestinian racism from our so-called diversity-promoting institutions is beyond what I could have expected.”

Majid wears many hats. She is the head of the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association, a housing lawyer with a legal aid clinic in Ontario, and the co-founder and artistic director of the Toronto Palestine Film Festival, among other things.

Through her work, Majid says she has fielded phone calls from people who’ve been fired from their workplaces expressing any support for Palestinians. She says she’s also seen activists such as herself be criminalized for participating in demonstrations.

“I see all this money being poured into arresting people who are just wanting to pursue human rights and justice for Palestinians … And in the day-job world, I’m told there’s no money to provide people with housing and shelter,” she says.

“It’s really hard for me to understand what city we are living in anymore. Our priorities are so out of whack.” 

On the morning of Oct. 9, Deputy Chief Lauren Pogue stood before media in the lobby of Toronto Police Service headquarters on College Street for a hastily arranged press conference on demonstrations to be held later that day.

Top of mind for the cop in charge of the community safety command division was the policing challenges that come with mass protests.

“My immediate thoughts went to police response. That’s where my focus was,” says Pogue. “Thinking about how we were going to instil a sense of safety for everyone impacted, manage heightened tensions and really protect all communities involved.”

During the past year, police have been accused of over-policing, excessive use of force and taking sides. At one point, video of police officers passing coffee to protesters became a political controversy.

The events of Oct. 7 and all that has come since has sowed grief, division and worry in all corners of society, including workplaces, such as the Toronto Police Service.

“I think the moment that really stood out for me came from the conversations in the days and weeks that followed with our own members, many of whom are personally connected to the conflict,” Pogue says.

“I think it’s quite remarkable how they managed to balance their personal grief and worry with their duty to serve the communities of Toronto.

“It’s very different times. I think our officers understand that our role is to create that environment of safety and trust for everyone.

“But it can also be challenging to attend demonstrations where our members are accused of supporting one side or being impartial or really not caring, especially while internally carrying the weight of knowing that their loved ones are living through the conflict abroad or even feeling afraid here at home in Toronto themselves.

Police officers, says Pogue, have “ties that bind us, through family and friends and communities. And I don’t think a lot of people often think about the human side of our police officers.”

Rabbi Yossi Sapirman, who leads LivingJewishly’s NuShul in Toronto, says the past year has forced him — like many Jews in Toronto — to reckon with his relationship to Israel. 

The violence, death and destruction compel deep emotional reactions that are incredibly difficult to process and discuss in the current, politically charged atmosphere, he says.

“How do we balance between the love of Israel and its pain and suffering for our people and the pain and suffering of everybody in this conflict? How are we able to express the sadness we have over all deaths without being called horrible names? It’s almost impossible to do.”

Over the course of this war, Sapirman says, he’s noticed that many are starting to question their view of Israel.

“We’re struggling with what does it mean for the Jewish state to exercise extraordinary power and how should it be used? The question of how does one support Israel and its people even if you don’t support its government? These are questions we were not prepared for and we don’t really have great answers.”

Questioning is an important part of Jewish tradition. But in order to question you need to be able to talk openly, which few people on either side of the conflict feel is the case today.

“Who’s a Zionist and who’s not? What is Zionism and what isn’t? What’s antisemitism and what are we fighting for? … I think every single part of our lives is up for conversation, reinterpretation, and the most difficult challenge we have right now is: It’s almost impossible to talk anymore.”

There is emptiness throughout the world where Judih Weinstein Haggai should be.

In Toronto, where she once lived, in Israel, where she died.

She cannot be in any of the places where her four children and seven grandchildren wish she was. Instead, she is in Gaza, somewhere, dead for a year now, her body a bargaining chip in a conflict to which she lived her life in opposition.

This 70-year-old peace-loving Kibbutznik poet and teacher was killed alongside her husband, Gadi Haggai, by Hamas gunmen Oct. 7. They then stole both bodies away to Gaza to use as leverage.

“There is no closure,” says Judih’s sister, Andrea Weinstein. “It’s been horrific, and it’s not getting easier, especially for family, for their children. There needs to be a burial.”

Weinstein spent the year meeting with government officials, imploring them to fight for her sister’s return — best secured, she believes, through a negotiated ceasefire.

She speaks often with the media as well, she says, so that her grief and love can reach the public and conjure in them a sense that Judih was a person, not a statistic, not a reason to kill.

“We want our loved ones home, we don’t want anyone innocent harmed and we desperately want a deal so there can be a ceasefire and we can try to move forward,” Weinstein says.

On the anniversary of the attack, Weinstein will speak in remembrance of Judih at her local Jewish Community Centre, and share some of her sister’s poetry.

“I want her to live on.”