Here are responses to common questions we’ve received since the project was launched. These questions were pre-emptively addressed, but we’ve gone into a bit more detail in some of these responses.
Is this a doxxing website?
Doxxing is not a defined crime anywhere in Canada, so there is no legal definition of it we can quote. Here are two definitions of doxxing from other sources.
- “To publicly identify or publish private information about (someone) especially as a form of punishment or revenge.” – Merriam-Webster
- “Sharing someone’s private information online without their permission.” – Twitter
All of the information contained on this website is public information. It was found through Google searches in news articles, social media profiles, newsletters, websites, public directories and other sources. If you’re not convinced that’s true for any reason, go through the soldier profiles. You’ll see that every claim is hyperlinked or textually linked to the public source where it was found, which means you can check it out yourself. As such, this project is obviously not doxxing.
Moreover, you’ll see that in all cases, the source of the information was either the soldiers themselves, their family members or media outlets and other venues that they willingly shared their status as a soldier with. For example, this project relies heavily on articles from The Canadian Jewish News, which is a public news outlet that anyone can read.
This project exists because these soldiers and/or their family members willingly shared their status and other details about their lives with public sources.
Did we make a list of Jews?
We compiled a list of current and former Israeli military members who are also Canadian. That was the only way someone could get included in this project.
Yes, all of the soldiers on the list are at least partially Jewish, and we have not shied away from acknowledging this fact. However, the list composition does not exist in its current form because we filtered out non-Jews.
Instead, it’s partially because Jews are the only ones able to immigrate to Israel as citizens due solely to their ethnoreligious background. That accounts for all of the soldiers who were born in Canada and immigrated to Israel later on — they could only do so in the way they did because they’re Jewish.
As per the few soldiers in the project who were born and raised in Israel and moved to Canada later, all of them happened to be Jewish. This isn’t a surprise given the demographic makeup of Israel, and the fact that only Jews (74 per cent of the population as of 2023), Druze (just under 2 per cent of the population) and Circassians (0.05 per cent of the population as of 2024) are required to serve in its military. If there are any Druze or Circassians with Israeli citizenship who served in the military, moved to Canada and discussed their service publicly, they’d be included in the project. We just haven’t come across any as of yet.
Moreover, there are more than 335,000 Jewish people in Canada, according to the 2021 StatCan census. If this project was intended to list Jewish people on the basis of their ethnoreligious background, it would be much larger than it is now.
Are we accusing anyone of committing crimes?
We aren’t accusing anyone on the website of having violated any Canadian law or participated in Israeli military crimes. It is also important to note that it is legal for Canadian citizens to join the Israeli military.
What’s the point of the project?
Readers should remember that every piece of information gathered for this project was taken from public sources. As such, it’s worth asking why the outlets that put this information out there in the first place found it to be in the public interest, and why the soldiers themselves decided to make their service publicly known.
Considering the range of sources we drew this information from — including the National Post, CBC, The Canadian Jewish News, Haaretz, The Jerusalem Post, government figures, public events held by synagogues and community centres, etc. — there’s a clear consensus that Canadians joining the Israeli military is of interest to the public.
As already noted on this website and its accompanying analysis article, we’re interested in learning more about who Canadians that have joined the Israeli military are, why they made the choice they did, who or what influenced them to do so, what they did while in the military, and how they may feel about it. One way to discover this information is simply hearing what the military members have to say, and this project does just that by compiling what they’ve publicly told others.
Through this compilation and subsequent analysis, this project adds something new to existing research out there in Canada about lone soldiers and Israeli military members more broadly.
