Why We’re Voting For Hope
- ameinucanada18
- May 28
- 4 min read
The 2024 New Israel Fund of Canada Naomi Chazan Fellows are proud to unanimously endorse the Hatikvah Slate in the 2025 Canadian Zionist Federation elections.
In July 2024, the four of us (Michael, Syvanne, Jacob and Carli) travelled to Israel-Palestine as Naomi Chazan Fellows with the New Israel Fund of Canada. We joined 12 other leaders from the Australian, British and American NIF chapters to meet core grantees and see firsthand how the country had changed since October 7th. We stood with the hostage families in Kikar Hatufim and met survivors of the Hamas attacks in Ofakim. We learned from physicians evacuating sick children from Gaza and witnessed the ongoing displacement in the West Bank.
Each day we met frontline activists, and each day they made it clear: Israeli civil society is under attack and they need support from the diaspora. We came home to Canada knowing the difference we could make. It is because of the experiences we had as Naomi Chazan Fellows that we are proud to unanimously endorse the Hatikvah Slate in the upcoming 2025 Canadian Zionist Federation elections to the World Zionist Congress.
We want you to keep reading, but you should know right now that voting in this election will help divert more than $7.5b cad from the control of Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, and protect Israeli civil society as they advance the NIF’s core values social and economic justice, religious freedom, civil and human rights, shared society and anti-racism, Palestinian citizens, and democracy itself.
One moment of the trip stays with us: the rubble of a school in Khirbet Zanuta, a tiny Palestinian village in the West Bank.
On October 11th, only four days after Hamas’s brutal attack on Israel, an American settler living in an illegal outpost overlooking the village entered Zanuta with a rifle and threatened the residents, telling them to flee or he would kill them. The Israeli army, though present in the area, did nothing to protect the villagers. Fearing for their lives, the families fled to the nearby Palestinian city of Yatta.
Months later, the villagers reached out to the army to ask if it would be safe to return. But instead of protection, they were met with a bureaucratic trap: the Civil Administration, now overseen by the extremist minister Bezalel Smotrich, told them they had "abandoned" their homes. Why? Because when they fled, they had removed the tin roofs on their homes in case they would be forced to sleep in makeshift shelters. Removing the roofs, Smotrich’s office claimed, rendered their homes “uninhabited” under Israeli military law, and meant they could not return.
So the families of Zanuta decided that since they couldn’t return to their homes, they would live together in the village schoolhouse. But before they returned, disaster struck. The settler who threatened their lives on October 11th had found out that they planned to return. It turns out he was the bulldozer operator whom the Army contracts to carry out home demolitions, and someone had tipped him off that the residents contacted the Army about returning. Before they could return, he drove his bulldozer and destroyed the schoolhouse, tearing the walls apart, and ripping the roof off. He left the building totally destroyed, with spelling books ground into the dirt. This day broke our hearts. To know there are Jewish people who destroy schools and burn books, and to know that the State will do nothing to stop them.
Civil society is the last line of defense against that kind of violence. The Palestinian families of Massafer Yatta told us that they know they would have been displaced years ago if not for Israeli and international solidarity.
But Israeli civil society is under attack, and they need our help. That’s why we are proud to endorse the Hatikvah Slate.
We know voting won’t undo the destruction in Zanuta or end the occupation overnight. But it’s a real, concrete step in building a different future, one grounded in Jewish values, civil rights, and shared humanity.
There are four core reasons that we are making this endorsement.
To strengthen Israeli civil society, the most powerful force for peace, equality and justice on the ground today.
To support Jewish pluralism in Israel and across the diaspora.
To fight back against the far-right and build a better, alternative vision rooted in human dignity.
Because the activists asked us to. They told us what’s needed. We promised to act.
We applied to be Naomi Chazan Fellows because we wanted to support a better future in Israel Palestine. We are all on the Hatikvah Slate for the same reason. If you believe in a better future too, sign up to vote for Hatikvah.
With hope,
Carli Fink, Courageous Conversations Vancouver
Michael Morgenthau, Community Leader in Jewish Renewal Canada
Syvanne Avitzur, NIFC Board Member and New Generations Council Member
Jacob Kates Rose, National Co-Chair Hatikvah Canada
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