John Clarke, former major organizer for the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP), posted the following without comment on Facebook recently. From Yves Engler (November 28, 2023) ( https://springmag.ca/toronto-police-should-target-heather-reisman-not-activists ):
Toronto police should target Heather Reisman, not activists
Aggressive pre-dawn police raids on homes and charging individuals with hate crimes for posting social justice messages is legal overreach at best and “thought crimes” reflecting creeping fascism at worst.
Truth is Heather Reisman, not those putting up posters, is the one who should have been charged with breaking Canadian law.
Between 4:30 and 6 am Wednesday Toronto police raided the residences of seven individuals alleged to have been involved in putting posters and fake blood on an Indigo bookstore on November 10. According to a summary of the police operation posted by World Beyond War, eight or more officers participated in each raid. Police knocked and quickly burst through doors, often without properly identifying themselves. All residents in the houses were handcuffed, including some elderly family members and parents in view of their children. Doors were broken and the police confiscated laptops and cellphones, including some provided by employers. Some of those charged were kept handcuffed in the back of police cars for hours.
This large, coordinated, police operation was a response to political messages put on an Indigo storefront downtown. The posters were photos of the book store’s high-profile CEO Heather Reisman with the statement “Funding Genocide”. Store staff removed the posters and fake blood with little difficulty.
The political stunt was a response to Reisman and her billionaire husband donating around $100 million to a charity they established to assist non-Israelis in joining that country’s military. Those promoting Israel’s genocide in Gaza panicked. Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center CEO Michael Leavitt posted: “An absolutely appalling antisemitic attack in downtown Toronto, targeting Chapters Indigo and Jewish CEO Heather Reisman.” While the media largely echoed Leavitt’s perspective, a few outlets at least offered context on why Reisman was targeted.
Reisman, not activists, supports terror
In 2005, Reisman and her husband established the HESEG Foundation for Lone Soldiers “to recognize and honor the contribution of Lone Soldiers to Israel.” The HESEG Foundation provides scholarships and other forms of support to Torontonians, New Yorkers and other non-Israelis (Lone Soldiers) who join the IDF [Israel Defense Forces]. For the IDF high command — the HESEG board has included a handful of top military officials — “lone soldiers” are of value beyond their military capacities.
Foreigners volunteering to fight for Israel are a powerful symbol to pressure/reassure Israelis weary of their country’s violent behaviour. At the first HESEG Foundation Grants Awards Ceremony in 2005, Israeli Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz said that “Encouraging and supporting young individuals from abroad” to become lone soldiers “directly supports the morale of the IDF.”.
After the IDF killed 1,400 Palestinians in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead in 2009, HESEG delivered $160,000 in gifts to IDF soldiers who took part in the violence.
More recently, HESEG has funded scholarships for members of the Duvdevan, an undercover commando unit known for disguising itself and blending in with Palestinians in the Occupied Territories to carry out operations. The Duvdevan scholarships are partly based on “excellence during army service”, which in the context of Israeli occupation likely means kidnapping or killing Palestinians.
The real lawbreakers: Reisman and HESEG
HESEG’s operations almost certainly violate Canada Revenue Agency rules for registered charities. CRA rules state that “increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of Canada’s armed forces is charitable, but supporting the armed forces of another country is not.”
Despite CRA rules, Reisman and Schwartz have received tens of millions of dollars in tax credits for donations to their charity. This abuse of the public purse is far more dubious than placing posters on a storefront to raise awareness of a wealthy individual’s assistance to a murderous foreign military.
While the social cost of taxpayers illegally subsidizing Reisman’s charity is much greater than anything people putting up posters did, at least Toronto police can rightfully claim that they don’t have jurisdiction over a matter the CRA is responsible for. But HESEG’s role in inducing Canadians to join the Israeli military may violate Canada’s Foreign Enlistment Act, which the Toronto police should enforce. According to the act, “any person who, within Canada, recruits or otherwise induces any person or body of persons to enlist or to accept any commission or engagement in the armed forces of any foreign state or other armed forces operating in that state is guilty of an offence.”
So, can we expect an upcoming early morning police raid on Heather Reisman’s Rosedale mansion with officers handcuffing everyone, taking her personal devices and detaining her for inducing people to join a foreign military that has just killed 15,000 human beings in Gaza?
Only if Canada was indeed a state that upheld the rule of law, equally for all.
Pointing out that the law practically is often biased towards the rich has its merits, and this critique of the use of law to persecute protesters of the genocide of Palestinians on the one hand and the lack of use of law to charge a possible breach of law by the rich has its merits–if it is linked to a critique of law and not to its idealization.
However, the implicit idealization of the rule of law in the last sentence expressess a social-democratic or reformist view of the law. From Honor Brabazonin (2021), “Nomocratic social change: Reassessing the transformative potential of law in neoliberal times,” in pages 477-,500 Research Handbook on Law and Marxism, pages 478-479:
In general terms, liberal and formalist conceptions of law typically present law as a fixed,
politically neutral, and self-sustaining order that operates and can be understood independently of the historical context out of which it arose. While law might be seen as a site in which social contestation plays out, legal decisions are not understood to be shaped by such contestation or relations of politico-economic power. Rather, law tends to be understood as a determinate set of rules that exists in an autonomous social field, independent of the political, economic, and other spheres, and in many ways from the broader social forces that shape the emergence and development of laws and that influence their interpretation. Power relations, and the substantive inequalities they produce, are consequently viewed as separate from the nature of law, which is seen as equally capable of protecting the vulnerable from domination and exploitation through the formal equality embodied in central principles of liberal legalism such as the rule of law—loosely, the notion that the law applies equally to all.
The rule of law–the limitation of state power over its citizens through various legal mechanisms, such as habeas corpus and the equal application of law to all citizens (though its extension to immigrants and migrant workers often does not apply) and to government bodies–may be useful at times to protect workers, citizens, immigrants and migrant workers against the power of the capitalist state, but there is no reason why radical leftists should contribute to its idealization and the idealization of law in general. A defensive use of law does not mean that the rule of law expresses justice or fairness.
The rule of law is quite consistent with the exploitation and oppression of workers at work, for example. Equal treatement of employers and workers, given the unequal material conditions in which they live and reproduce their lives, leads to exploitation and oppression of workers. The rule of law in general is consistent with exploitation and oppression of workers and hardly contradicts it.
The rule of law sounds very progressive–the author of the article relies on the phrase to implicitly call for equal application of the law to all. However, the rule of law hides behind it the reality of violence, as Matthew Dimick (2021) points out in “Pashukanis’ commodity-form theory of law ” in pages 115-138, Research Handbook on Law and Marxism, page 137:
Reverent intonations to rule of law’s transhistorical significance obscure its premise: the existence of an organisation wielding violence and therefore in need of restraint. Legitimate violence is still violence. By all means, state violence should be restrained by the rule of law. But the more fundamental aim is to build a society without violence.
Furthermore, relying on the law without engaging in its inherent limits in the development of a socialist society contributes to legitimating exploitation and oppression. From Honor Brabazonin (2021), “Nomocratic social change: Reassessing the transformative potential of law in neoliberal times,” in pages 477-,500 Research Handbook on Law and Marxism, page 480:
… the legal form is co-constitutive of capitalist social relations. On this basis, Marxists have argued that, while individual legal decisions may at times bring short-term gains, law’s potential to dismantle capitalism is limited, and using law to advance anti-capitalist struggles may ultimately legitimise and reinforce the capitalist system. Likewise, critical legal scholarship more broadly has demonstrated numerous ways in which law is indeterminate, exhibits ‘structural bias’, and is constitutive of relationships of power and domination rather than an apolitical antidote to them. That is, while law is not
always and exclusively an agent of oppression, it structures and legitimises such relationships, and it shapes the conditions in which they develop, operate, and are challenged in ways that limit its potential to dismantle these relationships.
Clarke, by merely reproducing the above, fails to engage in any critique of the rule of law–as if the rule of law were somehow a benediction for workers, citizens, immigrants and migrant workers. The rule of law may prevent some forms of arbitrary treatment, but even in the ideal world of legal rhetoric (and not the reality of law–see for example Reform versus Abolition of Police, Part Two or Socialism, Police and the Government or State, Part One for the difference), the rule of law is hardly an expression of fair treatment and a dignified life.
Radical leftists need to engage constantly in a critique of institutions that limit our capacity to create a socialist society–and the idealization of the rule of law limits our capacities in that direction.
The Abolitionary 