Canada’s defence attaché in Israel was briefed last year by a prominent Israeli academic who has publicly compared Palestinians to cockroaches, said “Palestinian culture is terrorism” and claimed there will never be a Palestinian state because Palestinians are “too repulsive.”
After the briefing, the Canadian attaché encouraged dozens of his colleagues to sign up for an Israeli government propaganda newsletter concerning the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
Col. Andrew Cleveland, whose role is to serve as a diplomat on behalf of the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) and Department of National Defence (DND) at the Embassy of Canada in Israel, told colleagues in an email dated for February 2024 that “CDA Israel attended a DA briefing by Dan Schueftan on Monday 29 Jan 2024.”
DND redacted details about the briefing in a copy of the email that The Maple obtained through an access to information request.
Schueftan, Cleveland wrote to his colleagues, “is the Director of the National Security Studies Centre at the University of Haifa.” Schueftan also served as an advisor to past Israeli prime ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Ariel Sharon, and is considered to be highly influential in Israel’s military and security establishments.
He has also been a frequent guest on a podcast called Two Nice Jewish Boys, a show that gained international notoriety last year after the hosts said they wished they could press a button to erase “every single living being” from Gaza.
In an episode published on Dec. 25, 2023, just more than a month before the attaché briefing and more than two months into Israel’s war on Gaza, Schueftan said: “Please stop thinking about Gaza stopping to be a problem. My grand, grand, grandchildren will fight in Gaza because we have a barbarian people as a neighbour.”
Schueftan dismissed the possibility of Israel ethnically cleansing and permanently re-settling Gaza, as pushed for by members of Israel’s far-right government.
While Schueftan said he respects some “individual” Palestinians and believes Palestinian political culture can eventually change, he claimed “in their national body there isn’t a single constructive bone.”
Regarding the possibility of Palestinian statehood, which the Canadian government officially claims it supports working towards, Shueftan said: “It will not happen because the Palestinians are too impotent, too repulsive, too corrupt.”
During the interview, Schueftan also rejected calls for a ceasefire in Gaza as “fundamentally immoral” because, in his view, doing so would send the message that “barbarians can kill civilized people, and then civilized people should not respond because the population of the barbarians may be hurt.”
The Canadian government has since Dec. 12, 2023, officially supported a ceasefire in Gaza. Israel had already killed more than 18,200 Palestinians in Gaza by that time, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, and was accused of committing a genocide against the Palestinians, a conclusion now shared by major human rights groups, a United Nations special committee, and leading scholars.
Schueftan’s comments have attracted criticism for decades. In 2009, he was quoted telling university students that “the Arabs are the biggest failure in the history of the human race” and that “while Israel sends a satellite into space, the Arabs come up with a new kind of hummus” (Schueftan reportedly claimed his comments were made “in jest” and that they were taken out of context).
More recently, Schueftan has elaborated on his view that a long-term solution to the conflict in Gaza is impossible.
In an interview with Quillette broadcast on Feb. 19, 2024, Schueftan said: “Palestinian culture is terrorism and then some. That’s Palestinian culture. They’re also good in whining.”
On a Jan. 8, 2025 episode of Two Nice Jewish Boys, he said “the Gazans” should rule Gaza, and continued: “What they want is to survive like cockroaches. In other words, ‘you can’t destroy us,’ which is true, and they say cockroaches will even survive a nuclear war. But they have not done anything for themselves.”
“They’re not a productive people [...] Whatever they have, they will weaponize.”
He added: “They’re indestructible in the cockroach sense of the term. But on the other hand what kind of life do they offer? By the way with the support of the population. This is not something that a bunch of terrorists came over and took over the innocent, nice Gazans.”
“Are they human beings? Yes [...] But are they in any way similar to what we are? Or what Americans are or Europeans are, or pluralistic societies are? No. Not at all.”
In an email to The Maple, DND media relations officer Andrée-Anne Poulin said the briefing was part of the attaché’s regular engagements with local academics and that the views Schueftan expressed during that session do not reflect those of DND or CAF.
Poulin did not elaborate on what Schueftan said during the briefing.
The department “engages with a range of perspectives to inform its situational awareness, without endorsing them,” Poulin wrote.
“Canada’s defence and foreign policy in the Middle East remains guided by international law, support for a two-state solution, and the protection of human rights for all people in the region. Any suggestion that any individual expressing inflammatory views are shaping our policy is incorrect.”
Schueftan’s views are not more extreme than much of mainstream Israeli society. He has opposed re-settling Gaza and has long argued for Israel’s unilateral disengagement from the West Bank.
A recent poll found 82 per cent of Jewish Israelis support ethnically cleansing Palestinians from Gaza, and in May last year, just 4 per cent of Jewish Israelis felt Israel’s war on Gaza had “gone too far.”
Muhannad Ayyash, a Palestinian sociologist at Mount Royal University, said most members of Israel’s security establishment who oppose ethnically cleansing Gaza do not hold that view because they respect Palestinian rights and sovereignty, but because they think doing so is logistically impossible.
Similarly, Ayyash said, past calls for Israel’s disengagement from Palestinian territories — as when Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 — were not made on the basis of respecting Palestinian rights, but in order to “create a concentration camp in which Palestinians live.”
Ayyash said Israel’s military-security sector broadly harbours the same racist views that are prevalent in mainstream Israeli society.
“There’s not really any strong opposition to the idea, for example, within Israel in general, let alone in this industry, to the notion that Palestinians are a lesser race of people,” Ayyash explained.
“Palestinians are [treated as] a mere security problem that needs to be resolved through force and violence.”
The Maple contacted an email address associated with Schueftan, but received no response.
‘The Israel Narrative’
In another email dated for Feb. 5, 2024, Cleveland, the Canadian attaché, encouraged dozens of Canadian government and military colleagues to subscribe to a daily newsletter published by COGAT, an Israeli military unit tasked with managing civilian affairs for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza.
Cleveland wrote: “This is a daily letter. I strongly recommend, those who have duties with a nexus to this conflict, sign up (tab at the bottom).”
“It offers the Israel narrative to the humanitarian situation in Gaza.”
Israel’s war on Gaza unleashed an ongoing humanitarian catastrophe, as documented by human rights monitors, aid workers and journalists. In particular, Israel has been repeatedly condemned for blocking sufficient aid access to Gaza since the beginning of the war.
According to a United Nations (UN) briefing document, “51% of aid missions planned for the north of Wadi Gaza and 25% of those planned for the areas requiring coordination south of Wadi Gaza were denied access by the Israeli military” between Jan. 1 and Feb. 12, 2024, a time span that included the date on which Cleveland encouraged his colleagues to sign up for COGAT newsletters.
The UN document also noted that 160 UN aid workers and at least 340 health workers had been killed at that time.
The COGAT newsletter shared by Cleveland listed the numbers of aid trucks and packages that Israel claimed had entered Gaza, but provided no accounting for whether or not those numbers were sufficient.
In February 2024, an average of 98 aid trucks per day entered Gaza, a 50 per cent decrease from January 2024, according to a UN situation report. Around 500 aid trucks entered Gaza per day before Israel launched its war in October 2023.
COGAT itself has long been criticized for its role in Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories.
According to Breaking The Silence, an organization that collects verified testimonies from Israeli military veterans, former personnel explained that COGAT uses collective punishment, and that the COGAT Civil Administration’s decision-making process is significantly influenced by Israel’s illegal settler movement.
COGAT also arbitrarily blocked goods that were allowed in and out of Gaza, according to the testimonies.
More recently, COGAT has co-ordinated supply operations with the controversial Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a U.S.-Israeli backed organization set up to replace UNRWA, the main Palestinian aid agency that Israel banned in October 2024.
According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, at least 766 Palestinians have been killed and another 5,044 injured while trying to obtain aid at GHF sites, with multiple reports that American contractors and Israeli soldiers have opened fire with live ammunition as unarmed Palestinians scrambled for food.
Israel recently announced plans to forcibly transfer Palestinians into a so-called “humanitarian city” in southern Gaza, a proposal that would “de-facto create massive concentration camps at the border with Egypt for the Palestinians,” according to UNRWA. Israeli ministers have indicated the plan is intended to facilitate the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
Ayyash said anyone who believes in principles of human rights and international law should be concerned to see any Canadian official promoting Israeli government propaganda sources.
“It’s saying that the discourse of the state that is committing these crimes of occupation, of annexation, of genocide is to is to be highlighted in the Canadian government’s understanding of the situation,” he explained.
“It’s not surprising to me that the attaché would be talking in this way, because that is the prominent worldview of the political class and the military industrial complex in Western countries like Canada.”
Canada’s Military Footprint
The Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) participate in several operations in the Middle East.
This includes peacekeeping and observer missions, as well as Operation PROTEUS, in which 30 Canadian personnel have helped train Palestinian Authority Security Forces in the West Bank under the auspices of the Office of the U.S. Security Coordinator.
The operation’s mandate was scheduled to expire in March this year, but no announcement about its future appears to have yet been made.
The Palestinian Authority (PA), which was established under the 1993 and 1995 Oslo Accords, led raids on Palestinian resistance groups in Jenin last December, reigniting long-standing criticisms that it primarily serves as a “subcontractor” of the Israeli occupation.
In Canada, campaigners have called for Operation PROTEUS to end, stating that “Canada is assisting a U.S.-Israeli effort to build a Palestinian Authority Security Force (PASF) to administer Israel’s illegal occupation of the West Bank.”
The Oslo Accords, said Ayyash, were never a real peace process: “It was just settler colonial occupation by other means.”
“Canada plays its role in this whole infrastructure of violence by supporting the PA Security Forces, and they train them to basically continue to be able to subdue the Palestinian population.”
