It was just after 10 p.m. on Saturday, April 4 when two Toronto cops walked into the lobby of Comedy Bar on Bloor Street, moments before the Stand-up For Gaza comedy show was set to begin. The monthly event raises funds for the Gaza Soup Kitchen.
Witnesses say the officers asked questions about the “gathering,” apparently under the impression that the comedy show was an organized “march.”
Comedian and host of the event, Isabel Zaw-Tun, spoke to the officers, insisting that there were no plans to march through the rain late at night. Eventually, the cops left.
“This sort of thing has never happened in my experience,” Zaw-Tun tells The Grind, describing the officers’ actions as “intimidating” and “infringing on my personal space.”
“After they left, I splashed some water on my face in the bathroom. Another comedian in the show gave me a hug and a glass of water, and I went onstage to open the show,” she recalls. “I mentioned that the police had been called on the show and the crowd loudly booed.”
It’s unclear why the officers showed up, and Toronto police did not respond to The Grind’s requests for comment for this article. Some organizers believe that a passerby might have called the police after seeing the name of the show on the venue’s marquee.
That same evening, just a few hours earlier, police disrupted a film screening of Palestine 36 — the acclaimed historical epic — at the TIFF Lightbox on King Street.
Midway through the film, which was presented by the Toronto Palestine Film Festival (TPFF), two officers entered the sold-out theatre and began to observe the audience.
Dania Majid, a TPFF organizer who was in the theatre, confronted the officers, asking why they were there and demanding that they leave. Majid says the officers claimed they were on a “neighbourhood walkabout” and were checking to see that the audience was “safe.”
“I have never seen police enter a theatre,” Majid, who has been a programmer with TPFF for more than 19 years, tells The Grind. “It was incredibly disturbing because everyone was so immersed in the film. They were completely disarmed and not aware of their surroundings when the police showed up.”
Majid says she spoke to TIFF front-of-house staff, who told her that they could not recall another incident in which police entered a theatre midway through a film.
TIFF and Comedy Bar did not provide comment for this story.
A growing trend
The trend of police showing up at events related to Palestine is not a new one.
In January 2024, police showed up at the venue for a Palestine fundraiser one day before the event, inquiring about security and suggesting metal detectors to the Black-run space. Organizers announced the event had been cancelled, and it was later held at a venue at a different, unpublicized venue.
In August of 2025, TPFF hosted its annual screening of Palestinian films in Christie Pits Park. There was an effort to get the event cancelled, but it went ahead with a heavy police presence just outside the park.
But organizers say that the presence of police at these types of events has grown in recent months.
“This stands against everything that stand-up comedy is about: speaking the truth and saying things that are deeply personal to us,” Nour Hadidi, who co-organized the comedy fundraiser in April, tells The Grind.
Hadidi — who alongside Alia Rasul is a co-founder of Comedians for Palestine — says she feels angry and frustrated that police are interfering with Canadian artists who are “just trying to feed people who have lost their houses, their livelihoods and their family members.”
This trend also takes place amid a backdrop of heightened rhetoric surrounding antisemitism and hate crimes.
In December 2025, Ontario Solicitor General Michael Kerzner sent a letter to the Toronto Police Service calling on them to crack down on the pro-Palestine movement. And in March, after the Ontario government unsuccessfully applied for an injunction to stop the pro-Palestinian Al-Quds Day rally in Toronto, Premier Doug Ford claimed without supporting evidence that the movement was “a breeding ground for hate and antisemitism.” Organizers maintain that the movement is focused on opposing Israel’s U.S.-backed genocide and ethnic cleansing in Palestine and beyond.
Later that month, Toronto police announced a new counterterrorism unit in response to a spate of shootings targeting synagogues in Toronto and in the U.S. which mostly caused property damage. By April, the police had increased patrols around Jewish places of worship and community gathering spaces.
According to Majid, the rhetoric about antisemitism has been used as the pretext to shutdown or intimidate pro-Palestinian expression or protests, even though “there is no evidence that the protests or protest organizers are connected to these incidents.”
“What we’re seeing now,” Majid adds, “is that (police) are not even distinguishing between protests, academic events or cultural events. Any time there are Palestinians speaking about Palestine, they are viewed as potentially anti-semitic or promoting violence.”
How organizers can prepare for police presence
Maya Menezes is a long-time climate and social justice organizer, who currently works for a union. In 2020, at the height of the protests against police brutality, she helped form Bloordale Community Response, a group dedicated to imagining viable alternatives to policing in Toronto’s west end.
Part of the group’s efforts included training local businesses, restaurants and bars in how to intervene and de-escalate conflict without involving the police, and creating a support network of bartenders.
The escalation of policing around Palestine, Menezes tells The Grind, is “startling,” and in many ways replicates the escalation that occurred at the height of the movement for Black lives.
Countering police escalation, Menezes argues, will not be achieved by lodging complaints or trying to “HR our way through” police escalation. Efforts to reform policing in Toronto have not made people safer, she says, citing the introduction of bodycams and the Special Investigations Unit.
Instead, Menezes believes that organizers must understand how policing works and develop safeguards in response.
“What’s the plan if the cops arrive outside?” she says. “Are the host and the venue on the same page, and what’s the plan to communicate to people in the room if this happens?”
Menezes says organizers must also be clear-eyed about the risk of putting on public events related to Palestine.
“To stand in our values in this political moment — to say no to genocide and the war machine — that wil always carry some type of inherent risk,” she says. “We need to be able to prepare ourselves for that, and steel ourselves, and be as informed as possible about our rights to assemble and protest.”
Britt Caron is a founder and organizer with East End Acts, a grassroots organization and part of the Palestine Solidarity Network. In addition to protest organizing, East End Acts also puts on cultural programming, including bi-monthly film screenings at Redwood Theatre.
“The cops have told us that, basically, anytime we put something on, they’re going to show up,” Caron tells The Grind.
“Part of this could be intimidation, but there’s another part that feels more like posturing — like the police just want to show the rest of the community that they’re handling us, that they’re listening to the people who want us to go away.”
Given these circumstances, Caron says that East End Acts always has at least one person in a marshalling or police liaison role, no matter what event they are putting on.
“We direct (our liaisons) to provide little to no information to police, and to just be firm and calm. Tell them: ‘We are allowed to be here, there is nothing illegal happening.’”
Caron also emphasizes the importance of working with trusted venues, and building relationships with the people who run them.
“We are transparent with our venues about who we are and what we’re doing and why we’re doing it and what risks are involved,” she says. “Because when push comes to shove, you really are going to need allies.”
Menezes echoes this sentiment.
“When people take coordinated risks together and it goes well, it builds trust,” she says. “And even when it goes badly, you’ve formed a relationship of trust. This makes us all a little bit better at what we’re doing.”
