Description

NOVEMBER 2025.

With a Foreword by Dr Gabor Maté.

Almost two years in and we continue to watch in horror as 2 million people living on 140 square miles of land bear an unprecedented and unfathomable pummelling by the Israeli Army. More bombs have been dropped on Gaza than in World War II; more children killed, wounded and orphaned than in any other conflict of this century; more journalists and healthcare workers killed than in any other conflict ever; and entire towns and districts are reduced to dust.

Those who speak about the carnage are punished by censure, sanction, smearing and worse. Across Canada—and internationally—journalists are muzzled, academics are stifled, doctors are fired, activists are arrested, and artists are banned. Words such as genocide and ceasefire have been excised from the vocabulary, and criticism of the conflict invites accusations of antisemitism.

Razing Palestine brings together the testimonies and stories of a wide range of individuals across a variety of domains who have suffered the cost and consequences of speaking up for Palestine. As Palestine is razed, the courage and the voices of those who raise the issue must be heard.

Contributors include: Sheima Benembarek, Amy Blanding, Safa Chebbi, Libby Davies, Yipeng Ge, Yara Jamal, Thoby King, Nora Loreto, Ehab Lotayef, Samira Mohyeddine, Kagiso Lesego Molope, Arfa Rana, Sean Tucker, the Jewish Faculty Network, and many more.

Leila Marshy is the author of The Philistine (LLP, 2018) and My Thievery of the People (Baraka Books, 2025). Leila’s Palestinian father was exiled from his home in 1948, never to return. During the First Intifada, Marshy lived in Cairo and worked for the Palestinian Red Crescent and the Palestinian Mental Health Association. She has been a community and political organizer, including founding a dialogue group with the Hasidic community in her neighbourhood. Her stories and journalism has been published in Canadian and American media. She lives in Montreal.

REVIEWS AND PRAISE

“This anthology is subversive in the most positive sense of the word. It seeks to provide an unequivocal and evidence-based response to the enforced silence around what millions of people the world over recognize as the most urgent moral issue of our time: the unspeakable suffering imposed on the people of Gaza.”
– Gabor Maté, MD, CM

“Razing Palestine: Punishing Solidarity and Dissent in Canada is an essential addition to the public record and history.”
– Libby Davies, former MP for Vancouver East

“The value of Razing Palestine lies not only in its emotional immediacy but in its documentary importance. We live in a moment when history is being rewritten in real time, and when silence—whether chosen or coerced—will be remembered. One day, younger Canadians will ask what was known, what was done, and what was risked as Gaza burned and as repression rippled outward. This anthology will not offer them policy blueprints, but it will offer names, voices, and moral testimony. It may also, in some small way, encourage others to close the distance between awareness and action.” – Ian Thomas Shaw, Ottawa Review of Books

“Razing Palestine pulls the curtain back on the violence and ugliness of the colonial machine, from its erasure of Palestinian culture and Palestinian voices from the mainstream, to the divisions sewed within the Jewish community itself. It turns those who are supposed to protect us into those who persecute us. The diverse selection of contributors shows the many ways and the many downstream effects of silencing dissent of Canada’s support of our genocidal ally has. We see the impacts of job loss and self-censorship, death threats and doxxing, even Jewish children being uninvited to Passover seder if their parents don’t tow the Likud Party line.” – Jeff Dupuis, Miramichi Reader