Jalila Freve
Mother and realtor
So you have some context, my grandmother was forcibly removed from Haifa in Palestine in the first Nakba in 1948. Then during the 1967 war is when my family came here. I grew up and live in the east end.
The last two years, it has been hard to be around other parents who just choose to look away. That’s been the hardest part. It feels so dystopic to walk into a schoolyard of parents when I can barely find the courage to drop off and pick up my kids at school because of the grief and the trauma I’m feeling. And there’s no space for me to exist in that way.
In a lot of ways, the group East End Acts was born out making space to share our grief, and then figure out how to put that into action. I just couldn’t sit back and let the grief be consuming.
The moment that Oct. 7 happened, I knew Israel was going to use whatever they could to manufacture consent to do what they’ve been trying to do for years.
As I watched so many people be like, “I stand with Israel,” I was like, “Do you even know what that means?” I knew that there was going to be so much propaganda coming out.
A few things happened that really changed the way I saw my workplace and my neighbours. My employer, they called me maybe three weeks after it had happened and they said, “We knew you were Palestinian, but it took us a long time to call all of our Jewish agents who work at our office.” And I thought, “What, so you’re literally telling me that you prioritized them even though they’re not Israeli?” And that was really hard for me to swallow, because I was like, you clearly don’t care about me.
At that time, people that you work with and employers were trying to silence people, and they were only silencing one side of things. And I said to my brokers, I want to make sure that you’re going to have my back and that I’m allowed to speak my truth and that I’m not going to be silenced. I refuse to be silenced here. They at least had my back with that.
Later, there was this period where people started to realize that everything they had been told about Israel and Palestine wasn’t right. It was bizarre to watch that the starvation piece was finally safe enough that they could call it out. Do they just not see it, do they not see any of the rest of the genocide?
Raed Hamdan
Advocating to get visas for his family in Gaza
I have two brothers in Gaza, each one with three kids. I also used to have a middle brother with three kids, but he was killed in the beginning of this genocide, on Oct. 21, 2023. He was a teacher. And my mom was there.
I applied for all of them to come here through the Gaza special measures program. I was only able to get my mom. It took almost a year and a half.
I was not able to get my two brothers and their families. There is no evacuation plan, no intention from the Canadian government to evacuate around 4,000 applicants waiting in Gaza.
My late brother’s family is still in Egypt. I paid around $20,000 CAD to the Egyptian authorities to get my mom and my little brother’s family out of Gaza before the Israeli forces occupied the Rafah borders. They arrived in Egypt in April 2024, and since that time they have been waiting for the security check to be completed by the Canadian government. For some reason they are still stuck there. There are 800 other applicants in Egypt in the same situation.
I lost another 14 family members — cousins, uncles, aunts — from this genocide. We lost family members while they were waiting for the visa to be processed.
The government is not willing to bring our family. This is what I believe and what my community believes. We don’t believe this government has a will to bring our families here. They are finding excuses.
Other countries, like France and Belgium, were able to evacuate hundreds and hundreds of people. Over 200,000 Ukrainians were able to come to Canada. They also evacuated people from Afghanistan.
We are frustrated. We are really tired of this. When I call my brothers in Gaza, their only question is when we will be evacuated. And I have no answer.
I am exhausted and tramatized. I feel dehumanized and my government is being racist against my family, because of my background.
We are holding sit-ins on a weekly basis, in coordination with IfNotNow and other Jewish community groups. They are telling us what is happening now is exactly what they were facing when they tried to come to Canada fleeing the Nazis during the Second World War. Canada was closing the doors in front of their families’ faces. The policy was “None is too many.” Now this is happening again with our community. History is repeating itself.
Nyla Obaid
Mother and store owner
My kids and I have been discussing this for the last two years. When my middle child was only four in 2023, I don’t think he knew there were other countries in the world, really. I had to explain that to him. There are families and moms and dads and children in Gaza and their homes are being taken away and their families are being taken away. Their parents are unable to parent them and now there’s no food and they’re being starved. To just explain that to a child. And it feels so permanent to him.
My kids and I have gone out to events organized around climate change or supporting the postal workers’ strike. I don’t normally need to worry about safety, but that hasn’t been the case with Palestine. The police presence is ridiculous. My nine-year-old was counting at this little thing at a street corner in our neighbourhood where we hold up signs every Tuesday. She’s like, “I counted, mommy, and there are 25 people here holding up signs and there are six cop cars with two cops each.” That’s pretty intense.
I run a small kids’ store in my neighbourhood in the east end. I’ve walked in twice where the sidewalk by our shop had the words “Fuck Gaza” graffitied on it. People at peaceful protests have come up to me and gotten very aggressive, yelling “What about the hostages?!” It feels particularly jarring with my kids around.
One of the men who graffitied beside my shop, he was on the parent council of my kid’s school.
We talk a lot about being responsible citizens. So for my kids, they’re like, “We’re just doing the right thing, why are people yelling at us? Why does it say ‘fuck’ at your shop? Why are there so many cops around? What does that mean for us?”
Joey Nicholson-Landau
Member of Jews Say No To Genocide
Watching the genocide in Gaza has reshaped the way that I interact with the world. It’s alarming, and it has been really strange to go about my day-to-day life while I’m watching this happen.
I didn’t grow up going to Hebrew school, but my family celebrated the Jewish high holidays, and some family members are Zionist.
The way Jewish institutions in Toronto have supported Israel since Oct. 7 isn’t something I’ve been surprised by, but it is really disturbing, especially with more and more evidence about what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank.
It makes me feel almost gaslit, because I’m watching this happen in real time and then my community saying, “That’s not what’s happening. That’s not what you’re actually seeing.”
It’s making me also feel like all of these institutions … I don’t know if there’s any hope for them. Holding them accountable is definitely what anti-Zionist Jews need to do, but it feels like an almost impossible task because their very foundation was created with this Zionist ideology. It’s almost like we have to completely build new ones from the ground up.
The folks I organize with in Jews Say No To Genocide, we have been trying to hold those institutions accountable by exposing them, because I don’t think they’re willing to change, but at least we can put public pressure on them to be accountable for what they’re saying.
Nour Hadidi
Comedian and TV writer
After a year and a half of donating to people in Gaza, protesting, hosting fundraisers, scrolling through videos of dead children and crying myself to sleep, I decided to go to Egypt in June 2025 for the Global March to Gaza in June, with the aim of establishing a humanitarian corridor for food, water and medicine to enter the Gaza strip.
There were over 4,000 people who came to Cairo from all over the world. I was very emotional the night before we headed out, when the magnitude of what we were about to do hit me.
The next day, our hopes came to an abrupt end when at a military checkpoint our passports were confiscated and we were detained by the Egyptian authorities. No one expected the level of violence we were met with. While we didn’t establish a humanitarian corridor, we showed the world that Egypt is complicit in this illegal siege and blockade of Gaza.
Back in 2023, one of the ways I felt like I was fighting back was telling jokes about Israel-Palestine on stage. In my 13 years as a professional stand-up comedian, I’ve written jokes about mental health, depression, racism and Islamophobia. All of those were nothing compared to writing jokes about Israel-Palestine at the end of 2023. That was also the time when so many people were being blacklisted for speaking out in support of Palestine.
While some audiences appreciated my jokes, there were times I’d get heckled by Israelis in the crowd, or Gen-Xers and Boomers wouldn’t laugh and would tell me I wasn’t funny. I feel like I grew so much as a person and as a comedy writer with what I was trying to accomplish back then by offering a different narrative than the mainstream media.
Some days there are psychological breaking points and crying and feelings of despair and depression and helplessness. But when I come out of those feelings, I try to continue fighting.
This article appeared in the 2025 Oct/Nov issue.