At just after 1 p.m. on Sept. 25, members of the Comox Valley 4 Palestine group stood with a banner in front of the Courtenay Coles book store in Driftwood Mall, with other members laying down and pretending to be dead in protest of Coles' parent company Indigo's involvement in the Israeli war in Gaza.
Nineteen protesters laid in front of the store for about an hour, with supporters passing out pamphlets about the reasons for the action, as well as gift cards to locally-owned bookstores. Mall staff was on site as well, ensuring the protesters did not disrupt mall business too much. However, police were called when protesters blocked part of the access to the store. RCMP arrived just after 2 p.m. and informed the group that they were trespassing on private property and asked the group to leave.
The group left without incident.
The action was part of a nationwide protest, with protesters at more than 50 Indigo locations across Canada. According to organizers indigokillskids.ca, the CEO of Indigo Heather Reisman and her husband and co-founder Gerald Schwartz are director of the HESEG foundation, which provides support to members of the Israeli military. in 2023, according to Forbes, Reisman's net worth was estimated to be $2.9 billion, CAD, and Schwartz's is $1.4 billion.
Anti-war groups like Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East have criticized HESEG for violating CRA rules against supporting foreign militaries. HESEG's funding goes to lone soldiers, which according to lonesoldiercenter.com, "is a soldier in the IDF with no family in Israel to support him or her: a new immigrant, a volunteer from abroad, an orphan or an individual from a broken home."
The same website says that over 7,000 lone soldiers are serving in the IDF (Israeli Defence Forces), and that 45 per cent of them are new immigrants from Jewish communities around the world.
"The CEO of Indigo basically uses it as a non-profit setup that raises funds for lone wolf soldiers 鈥� or soldiers that are coming from foreign nations to fight for Israel," said James McKerricher, one of the protesters at the event. "That's not legal, by many definitions, and it's also just tax evasion."
Just Peace Advocates, an independent human rights organization, has submitted a formal complaint to the CRA about the HESEG Foundation.
"They give financial support and incentives such as bursaries or scholarships to Universities in Israel to entice foreign nationals to join Israeli occupation forces, which as we all know is committing genocide in Gaza and war crimes," said protester Jay Chaabi. "This is a violation of the CRA's own rules, prohibiting Canadian charities from funding foreign militaries. It's also illegal in terms of the Canadian Foreign Enlistment Act."
That act stipulates that it is an offence to enlist with a foreign state at war with a friendly state, to leave or intend to leave Canada to enlist or to induce a person to enlist and leave Canada by misrepresentations.
The protesters said that their goal was to bring awareness to Indigo's role in the crisis in Gaza, and to say that they were able to do something to try and stop the crisis.
Elmar Nabbe is one of those protesters. He said that when he was a child, he'd ask his father 鈥� who lived in Germany during the Second World War 鈥� why he did not speak out against the Holocaust occurring at the time.
"His position was one of 'what could anyone do we didn't know what was what was happening?'" Nabbe said. "I struggled with that ... just watching what happens now, it becomes clearer and clearer that I think the German people knew full well what was happening ... It seems that the people here in Canada ... they know full well what's going on.
"It seems that people at some point in time make the wilful decision that they don't want to know ... and then just bury themselves in that thought," he said. "There's a hope that I'll have grandchildren, and someday when they ask me what I did when the genocide was going on, I want to be able to tell them that I did everything I could."
Driftwood Mall staff declined to comment on the event.
