There are moments in history when silence is safer than speech—and moments when silence becomes a form of betrayal. Rabbi David Mivasair has chosen the harder path: to speak as a Jew against what he sees as injustice carried out in the name of Jewish safety, Jewish history, and Jewish survival.
That choice has placed him far outside the comfort zone of institutional respectability.
Ordained through the Alliance for Jewish Renewal and serving as the spiritual leader of Ahavat Olam, a progressive synagogue in Vancouver, Rabbi Mivasair represents a strand of Jewish moral thought that has always existed but has rarely been tolerated when it challenges power directly. His anti-Zionism is not casual, rhetorical, or fashionable. It is theological, ethical, and deeply unsettling to the mainstream Jewish establishment in Canada and beyond.
At the heart of his position lies a refusal to conflate Judaism with political Zionism. For Rabbi Mivasair, Judaism is not a state ideology, not a flag, not an army, and not a justification for domination. It is a moral inheritance—one that, in his view, has been gravely distorted by nationalism and sanctified violence.
This is why his words provoke such intense reactions.
When Rabbi Mivasair describes Israel’s policies using terms like apartheid, ethnic cleansing, or genocide, he is not merely making political claims; he is invoking Jewish ethical memory against Jewish power. When he refers to Hamas as a Palestinian resistance organization born of oppression—a framing rejected by Western governments and mainstream Jewish bodies—he is not celebrating violence but forcing a question many would rather avoid: what forms of resistance are produced when a people are trapped, besieged, and systematically stripped of political horizon?
This question terrifies polite discourse. It destabilizes the moral binaries that make comfortable alignment possible.
His reply to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani was emblematic of this refusal to accept easy narratives. He challenged the idea that pro-Palestinian protest chants automatically endanger Jewish communities, and he rejected the increasingly common conflation of Palestinian advocacy with support for terrorism. In doing so, he spoke from a place many Jews recognize privately but fear articulating publicly: that safety cannot be built on the erasure of another people, and that invoking Jewish trauma to silence Palestinian grief corrodes the moral foundations of both.
For this, Rabbi Mivasair is treated as a heretic.
Mainstream Jewish federations and rabbinic bodies largely define anti-Zionism as a threat to Jewish peoplehood itself. Within that framework, a rabbi who publicly rejects Zionism is not simply wrong—he is dangerous. Yet history offers an uncomfortable reminder: Jewish moral voices have often been most vilified when they refused to bless prevailing power, whether that power was imperial, nationalist, or religious.
Rabbi Mivasair works closely with Independent Jewish Voices in Canada, with interfaith groups, migrant justice movements, and Palestinian solidarity networks in British Columbia. In these spaces, he serves a particular role—not as a spokesperson for “the Jewish community,” but as living evidence that Jewish identity is not monolithic, that dissent is not betrayal, and that solidarity across lines of suffering is not antisemitism.
His stance is costly. It brings isolation, denunciation, and accusations of self-hatred or naïveté. But it also exposes a deeper truth: that the moral crisis of Gaza is not only a Palestinian tragedy or an Israeli catastrophe—it is a crisis of ethical inheritance. A crisis of what lessons are drawn from history, and who is allowed to speak in its name.
Rabbi David Mivasair does not offer comfort. He offers disquiet. And perhaps that is precisely why his voice matters.
Because when a rabbi stands among the rubble of moral consensus and says, “Not in my name,” he reminds us that faith—any faith—loses its soul the moment it becomes indistinguishable from power.
And in an age that rewards silence and punishes conscience, that reminder is both rare and necessary.
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