How the war in Gaza tore apart some of Canada’s most prestigious arts organizations

At a ritzy downtown Toronto hotel last November, on one of the year’s biggest nights for Canadian literature, a pro-Palestinian campaign quite literally took centre stage.

There, during the opening minutes of the 2023 Scotiabank Giller Prize gala, anti-war activists stormed the ceremony. Flanking host Rick Mercer with signs reading, “Scotiabank funds genocide,” the protesters called out the award’s title sponsor for its multi-million-dollar holdings in a controversial Israeli arms manufacturer. Then, as quickly as they arrived, the activists were escorted out of the star-studded ballroom by police and later charged. It was an event that marked the beginning of an ongoing movement led by pro-Palestinian activists that has upended the Canadian arts scene, with the goal of pressuring cultural organizations to distance themselves from corporations that they say are tied to the Israeli war effort.

Since then, the pro-Palestinian campaign has not abated, throwing museums, festivals, theatres and other cultural groups across the country into a political maelstrom while arts leaders grapple with how to respond to the activists’ demands — and whether their organizations can, or should, remain apolitical. But now, nearly 10 months since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, the reckoning has exposed fault lines throughout the Canadian arts landscape and, in some cases, torn apart some of the country’s most prestigious institutions.

For many cultural groups targeted by the activists, the campaign could not come at a more challenging time, as the arts sector continues to face financial stresses following the COVID-19 shutdown. The confluence of pressures has all pushed some organizations into a tough moral quandary: accede to the demands of the activists, many of whom are members of the artistic community, or maintain relations with the corporate sponsors who are at the heart of the controversy but provide a lifeline for these groups’ very existence.

More broadly, the issue has also resurfaced the age-old debate about whether it’s possible to separate the arts from politics and how leaders should — if at all — respond to these sociopolitical issues in their programming.

The months-long controversy has thrown the Scotiabank Giller Prize, in particular, into disarray and cast a cloud over its 2024 ceremony in November, as questions remain about how the organization can move forward in a divided literary landscape.

Soon after the activists disrupted last year’s gala, numerous Canadian writers and publishers expressed support for the protesters in an open letter that called on police to drop the charges. (To date, the online petition has received about 2,100 signatures.)

More recently in July, 43 authors, including former Giller Prize winners Sarah Bernstein and Omar El Akkad, said they were withdrawing their works from consideration for the 2024 iteration of the prize, which includes a $100,000 cash award. The signatories specifically urged the Giller Foundation to “use their organizational leverage to pressure its main sponsor, Scotiabank, to fully divest from Elbit Systems,” the Israel-based weapons producer.

Indian novelist Megha Majumdar and Ethiopian-American author Dinaw Mengestu, the two international judges on the five-person jury, also resigned from their roles over the organization’s refusal to cut ties with its lead sponsor. Three Canadian judges — authors Noah Richler and Kevin Chong, along with singer-songwriter Molly Johnson — remain.

Despite the campaign to force the Giller Foundation to distance itself from its lead sponsor, the organization has doubled down on its association with the bank. “Following a thorough review and deep consultation with members of the literary community, the Giller Foundation Board has agreed that our partnership with Scotiabank will continue,” executive director Elana Rabinovitch wrote in a statement to the Star. “We have seen firsthand the positive impact our partnership has had on Giller Prize winners, nominees, and the future generations of writers inspired by the work of the foundation.”

Rabinovitch added that the foundation “was not created to be a forum for political action” and that in spite of the tensions within the literary community, the prize “will continue as it has in the past.”

Scotiabank, a sponsor of many arts and cultural organizations, including the Giller Prize, the Hot Docs Film Festival and the Canadian Opera Company, has been the primary target of pro-Palestinian activists because of the bank’s financial ties with Elbit Systems Ltd. The Israeli defence contractor has been previously accused of manufacturing cluster munitions, a deadly weapon that more than 100 countries, including Canada, have banned. A 2021 New York Times investigation also found that the company made military-grade surveillance drones that were used by Myanmar’s military junta to crack down on citizens and its opponents.

Elbit Systems, which did not respond to the Star’s request for comment, has previously denied manufacturing cluster munitions, stating on its website that all the company’s activities “are in compliance with the international Convention on Cluster Munitions.”

In 2023, Scotiabank’s asset management firm was one of the top five shareholders in Elbit Systems, with a stake valued at about $500 million. But a Scotiabank spokesperson noted that the bank does not directly own shares in Elbit Systems. “The security is currently held in select products managed by the bank’s subsidiary, 1832 Asset Management, on behalf of its clients,” the spokesperson said.

While Scotiabank has been the primary target of the activists, they’ve also called on the Giller Foundation to cut ties with other sponsors, including Indigo. The Canadian bookstore chain, which did not respond to the Star’s request for comment, has been subject to a wider boycott because of its founder and chief executive officer, Heather Reisman, who with her husband, Gerry Schwartz, runs a charity that provides scholarships to former “lone soldiers” — individuals without family in Israel who served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Critics have argued the charity’s program incentivizes and offers rewards to foreign soldiers who join the Israeli army.

In January, 11 other pro-Palestinian activists targeted an Indigo store in downtown Toronto, plastering posters of Reisman to the storefront and splashing red paint over them. All the alleged perpetrators were arrested and charged by police. While the group and their supporters have maintained that the vandalism was not motivated by hate but rather disapproval over Reisman’s support of IDF volunteers, others have characterized the targeting of a prominent Jewish individual as antisemitic violence.

Since the Israel-Hamas war began, there have been heightened tensions across Toronto, which has seen a marked increase in both antisemitic and Islamophobic incidents, as well as near-daily protests and a weeks-long encampment at the downtown campus of the University of Toronto.

Within the arts community, though many have expressed support for the pro-Palestinian movement in the city, there are also those who disagree, feel caught between the two sides or believe that cultural institutions should not wade into fraught political issues like those concerning the conflict in the Middle East.

Others will question the effectiveness of the campaign targeting arts institutions and whether the ardent activism can actually influence Scotiabank or instead do more harm to the arts organizations themselves. Though Scotiabank’s fund manager halved its investment in Elbit Systems by this past May — and activists were quick to frame the partial divestment as a result of their campaign — the Canadian bank underscored that the change was “based on their investment merit and are not influenced by protest activity.”

“Portfolio management in Canada is strictly regulated by the provincial securities commissions,” added a spokesperson for the bank told the Star. “Scotiabank cannot interfere in the independent investment decisions of its portfolio managers who are fiduciaries that are duty-bound to make decisions in good faith in the best interest of the funds they manage.”

Still, the pressure on cultural organizations to respond to the war is likely to continue. No Arms in the Arts, the coalition targeting the Giller Prize, has called out other well-known cultural organizations over their partnerships with Scotiabank.

Most notably, during May’s Hot Docs Festival, the coalition of activists hosted a 10-day “counter-program” in opposition to the main event, in which they called for Hot Docs to “end their complicity in the ongoing genocide in Gaza.” It came after dozens of documentarians, authors and other members of the coalition rallied at Hot Docs’ press conference earlier in March, when the organization announced its festival lineup.

There, the protesters stressed that they weren’t calling for Hot Docs to end their partnership with Scotiabank nor for filmmakers to withdraw from the festival. Instead, the group said they were urging Canada’s largest documentary film festival to pressure its sponsor to divest from Elbit Systems.

The ongoing controversy involving sponsors like Scotiabank and Indigo will undoubtedly lead to questions about whether the industry is too reliant on corporate money and, if so, what a sustainable funding model should look like for the sector moving forward.

According to the most recent data from Statistics Canada, grants, subsidies, donations and corporate sponsorships accounted for nearly 64 per cent of revenue for performing arts organizations in 2022, up from roughly 40 per cent just eight years earlier.

Since October, pro-Palestinian artists and activists not affiliated with No Arms in the Arts have targeted other prominent cultural institutions as well.

At the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) last November, for instance, three Palestinian artists and activists conducted an 18-hour sit-in at the museum. The trio claimed the ROM was censoring their work after they were asked to reword some of the materials in their new exhibit, including replacing the word “Palestine” with “West Bank” and “exile” with something “less harsh.”

On the West Coast earlier this year, organizers of a performing arts festival in Vancouver cancelled the Israel-set play “The Runner” following local tensions connected to the war and calls from activists to drop the work, which some claimed reinforced “dehumanizing narratives about Palestinians.” Written by Christopher Morris, the show centres on an Orthodox-Jewish man who volunteers to collect and identify the remains of Jewish people killed in accidents. But the man’s world turns upside down as he’s forced to confront his decision to save the life of a Palestinian woman, instead of treating the Israeli soldier she’s accused of killing.

The play’s cancellation at the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival came after “The Runner” was also controversially pulled from the lineup of another theatre in Victoria, B.C. following significant calls for — and against — its inclusion. In a statement issued in January announcing the cancellation, the Belfry Theatre said continuing with the production “may further tensions among our community.”

Activism in the Canadian arts world is not a new phenomenon, with reports of sit-ins and protests at cultural institutions dating back to the early 20th century. In the 1970s, for example, an Indigenous-led protest forced Canadian archaeologists and anthropologists to stop the practice of collecting human remains and artefacts from Indigenous gravesites without permission.

But few movements can compare with the breadth or scale of the current pro-Palestinian campaign, forcing many organizations — whether they’re prepared for it or not — into a sociopolitical reckoning, all arriving as they also stare down a confluence of other pressures.

Update – Aug. 2, 2024

This article was edited from a previous version.