Montreal- Darine Houmani

Martin Lukacs is an investigative journalist and the managing editor of The Breach. He’s a former environmental writer for The Guardian, and has written for The New York Review of Books, Toronto Star, Walrus, CBC, and other Canadian publications. He is the author of several books, most notably "The Poilievre Project: A Radical Blueprint for Corporate Rule" and "The Trudeau Formula: Seduction and Betrayal in an Age of Discontent".

This month, he released a new book titled "When Genocide Wasn't News", which explores how Canada’s most powerful media outlets distorted the ongoing genocide in Gaza, justifying Israeli violence, stripping Palestinians of their humanity, and misrepresenting the growing anti-war protest movement across Canadian cities. The book is co-edited by Dania Majid and Jason Toney.

The Breach, founded and led by Lukacs, embodies his vision of delivering critical journalism and serves as a platform for the “voiceless.” The outlet carries the mission statement:

"Canada’s establishment media won’t tell it like it is- or how it could be…They not only misrepresent our most pressing issues, but they leave people hopeless about ever changing them. We provide a platform for voices you won’t often find in the establishment media and investigations, analysis and video content about the crises of racism, inequality, colonialism, and climate breakdown- and what to do about it”.

In this interview, we talk to Martin Lukacs about his bold critical stances, his journalistic work, and his latest books.

Could you share with us the political, cultural, or life experiences that led you to support the Palestinian cause and engage critically with issues of colonialism, occupation, and justice in the Middle East?

I traveled to Israel and Palestine when I was 20 - so, twenty years ago. I had come to university here in Montreal at McGill, and I had started becoming politicized. I had friends who took me along to public presentations by Palestinian thinkers and Jewish thinkers like Norman Finkelstein. And so, I was starting to educate myself on the situation. Then, when I was 20 years old, I went on a trip called Birthright, which is a free, all-expenses-paid trip for young Jewish people in North America. It's run by philanthropists and organizations that want to try to forge a stronger connection between Jews in the diaspora and the state of Israel. Because they understand that younger, more liberal Jewish people are starting to become more critical and are distancing themselves from Israel.

And so I went there, and it’s the kind of trip where you touch the Western Wall, you ride camels, you’re supposed to bond with Israeli soldiers who join the trip. And it’s really an attempt to deepen the kind of myth-making that a lot of younger Jews are exposed to growing up, with the goal that you come back home as a stronger defender of Israel.

And they didn’t have that effect on me because I knew what I was getting into. My main goal was to use it as a free trip to then go to the occupied territories afterward and work with the International Solidarity Movement. That was in 2004, the tail end of the Second Intifada. And the ISM was still a very strong organization doing coordinated nonviolent direct action against the Israeli occupation. So I worked there for a month.

We were doing a march alongside the apartheid wall, trying to help people get through checkpoints, trying to remove roadblocks that the Israeli army had set up to prevent movement on Palestinian roads. And it was a very eye-opening experience for me, especially coming back home to Canada and reading the mainstream media coverage of what was going on there. I remember discovering that what I had seen with my own eyes was flipped on its head in the pages of Western media.

So, Palestinian people who desperately wanted peace somehow, in the Western media, became a people who were set on violence. People engaged in nonviolent resistance, or sometimes throwing rocks, somehow became a match for fighter jets and tanks and one of the best-funded militaries in the world: The Israeli one. And the obvious facts of Israeli violence, slaughter, and massacres somehow became framed as self-defense.

I think that really transformed me, the understanding that in the West, in the Western media, the media dispossesses Palestinians of their humanity and their history so that Israel can all the better dispossess them of their life and their land. And so, as a young journalist, that really shaped how I approached my work as a young journalist, and also how I started to understand many other interconnected struggles, like the anti-colonial struggle for Indigenous rights and self-determination here in Canada. Much of my work since then has actually been about colonialism here in Canada.

I remember someone telling me -I’m trying to remember this anecdote- it was like they pointed out that protesting and doing solidarity work with Palestinians, but only Palestinians, and not concerning oneself with the struggles here in Canada for Indigenous self-determination, was kind of like if settlers in Gaza -because at the time, there were still settlements in Gaza, Israeli settlements- it was like if those Israeli settlers were marching around protesting for the self-determination of Indigenous peoples in Canada.

I remember that kind of shook me. It’s not to say that one shouldn’t be implicated and involved in struggling for Palestinian solidarity and Palestinian liberation, but it meant that we really had to work in a unified way - to advance the struggles of all colonized peoples around the world.

Much of my work since then, over the last twenty years - whether in media or in organizing - has seen anti-colonial struggle as foundational to all other struggles.

In your recent book “When Genocide Wasn't News,” you examine the complicity of Canadian state media in the destruction of Gaza. You argue that, even as Canadians witnessed the horrors unfolding live from Gaza, the country's most influential media outlets distorted the reality on the ground, whitewashing Israeli violence and framing Palestinians as criminals. Could you tell us more about the central arguments of the book and what motivated you to write it?

I think so many people in Canada have felt in their bones just how profoundly anti-Palestinian the coverage in Canada’s media has been. And so, after October 7, we started doing reporting in The Breach and tried to provide an unassailable, uncriticizable empirical basis for proving that, in a way that could not be questioned.

And we found that the work we were doing -whether it was analyzing how often Palestinian perspectives were aired compared to Israeli, or how often the very language used to describe Palestinian death as opposed to Israeli death was very different- we found that work really resonated with people, because it confirmed what people felt but were constantly being gaslit about. Because people were constantly told, “Oh no, in fact, the CBC or Canadian media is pro-Palestinian”. which of course, is a laughable notion. But we did a lot of work that tried to show, in a way that could not be challenged, the anti-Palestinian nature of the Canadian media. And so, the book is really an outgrowth of our work.

Eventually, we also did exposés -some written by former journalists who worked within the mainstream media- who, for instance at CBC, like you mentioned, gave a behind-the-scenes look at how the double standards, omissions, evasions, and anti-Palestinian biases work within the newsroom daily to manufacture support for an ongoing genocide. And so we decided that our existing work, as well as the work of other independent journalists and independent outlets, really represented a record of a deep moral failing in Canada's media. And that it would serve well as a book. I think it would try to be a tool, ideally, for people who are working on these issues, but also to get those ideas to a wider audience that may not be reached by our journalism.

Books have a way of doing that. I mean the book includes tools for media advocacy. One of the editors of the book is Jason, who runs the media advocacy program at Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East.

To what extent do you think this level of media control and suppression of dissenting voices shapes public consciousness in Canada - possibly amounting to a form of ideological conditioning or even collective brainwashing?

I think that the corporate and mainstream media have a very powerful role in shaping and indoctrinating people's minds in Canada. It's not absolute, but it is very powerful. And it is one of the predominant, primary obstacles that we have in countries like Canada to advancing radical social change. I think its power is weakening.

And I think, in a case like the unfolding genocide in Gaza, more people than ever no longer trust the establishment media's coverage and are turning to alternatives like independent media.

In your view, can independent media effectively confront the dominant media institutions that operate within the ideological framework of Western colonial powers?

I think they're an emerging challenge. Well, just as an example that I cite in the book - which to me is a testament to the weakening dominance of the establishment media - is the fact that just a few weeks ago, there was a poll that showed that half of Canadians now believe that there's a genocide happening in Gaza. So I think that's a testament to challenges like we see in independent media, but also primarily to the work that the movement for Palestinian liberation has done in this country in countering the propaganda of the media.

What we're seeing in terms of the independent media is a really important challenge to the dominance of the elite media. But it needs to grow a great deal more. I mean, where an outlet like The Breach has a minor, a tiny fraction of the resources that a newspaper like The Globe and Mail has. So for instance, at The Globe and Mail, the publisher alone - his salary is, I think, twice what our annual budget is at The Breach. And that's just one publisher.

I think we need to have massive resources in order to reach hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people on the regular. And we're not there yet, but we are growing. And I think in this case, what we've seen is that the work of independent media can often push and shape mainstream media coverage. So I've heard, for instance, stories from journalists I know at The Toronto Star who have told me that when we scoop The Toronto Star on a story, it gives them leverage and an opening to push more critical stories of their own. Those windows often close because they don't primarily change the priorities of the corporate media. I mean, those things are pretty durable, as you say.

But I think in my own lifetime as an independent journalist, I've never seen so many people questioning and criticizing the mainstream media's coverage on an issue, and I think that's extremely promising. I mean, this book and our work is really an attempt to deepen that skepticism about elite media in this country - to encourage people to become more intellectually literate about what the structural problems are with the corporate media, not just on Palestine, but on so many issues, whether colonialism here or colonialism and imperialism elsewhere in the world.

I think we're seeing the beginnings of an independent media challenge, but we have a long way to go.

Do you see a symptom of a deeper crisis in Western media culture - one that undermines journalistic credibility and reflects the kind of thought control described by French sociologist Jacques Ellul, who warned against the subtle power of what he called 'the manipulators of minds'?

It's not a new crisis. To me, it's an ongoing and enduring crisis that I think is fundamental and endemic to Western corporate media, dating back to its very origins in the early twentieth century. I think what is new is the level of recognition of the distortions and lies of the corporate media. I think that there has been, over the last few decades, a growing crisis of trust in the corporate media. But I don't think that's particularly new, and I think we have to be cautious about that - because to ascribe a newness to it suggests that they are weaker as institutions than they, in fact, are, in my opinion.

We have to be careful. Like, I hear a lot of premature declarations about the death or demise of the establishment media. And it is true that the advertising basis for their existence is in crisis, with advertising dollars going to the digital social media platforms like Facebook and Google. But as long as billionaires and integrated corporations exist who want to have organs for disseminating their priorities - for the manufacturing of consent that they engage in - those media institutions will continue to exist and wield power.

What we've seen over the last two years in Gaza is a crack in their legitimacy. And it's our task to shine a light on and magnify that crack as much as possible, and to keep encouraging these heartening tendencies: building more independent media, building movements that are critical and that understand the enemy they have in elite media - in this country and in the West.

( Martin Lukacs during the conference in solidarity with Gaza in Montreal)

You recently took part in a conference in solidarity with Gaza, alongside activist Manuel Tapial. How important do you think such events are in amplifying the voices of children in Gaza-and also in the West Bank, where systemic racism and daily killings continue under a disturbing media silence? Do you believe this kind of solidarity can break through the silence and indifference?

I think it's the only thing that ever does. I don't think it's journalists who change the world, I think it's activists and movements who do. And I think that has always been the case for Palestinians, as with any other colonized nation: forging links of solidarity around the world is the best hope for liberation.

These movements often start small. I mean, I got my start twenty years ago, and even then, the Palestinian solidarity movement was relatively much smaller. And in particular, Jewish dissent and resistance to what Israel is doing were incredibly small. I think in the past few years, that has started to transform. Both the Palestinian movement is much stronger and larger-reaching more people, persuading more people-and also Jewish dissent has grown. Not fast enough, but it is rapidly growing. And I think that bodes very well for the future of the struggle for Palestinian liberation.

You are of Jewish descent. Do you believe that Zionism must stop committing atrocities in the name of Jews-especially given how the charge of antisemitism is increasingly used to silence legitimate criticism of Israel?

What I would say is that it's the charge of antisemitism by apologists for Israel. It hasn’t necessarily increased; it's been quite a weapon that’s been used really since the sixties and seventies-quite consciously by state apologists. What's changed in the last few years is that the charge has become more brazen and more hysterical than ever before. And I think that's deeply unfortunate, because it's an attempt to silence the very legitimate articulation of solidarity with Palestinians.

It's deeply unfortunate because it actually cheapens and trivializes real antisemitism. A lot of these right-wing Israel lobby groups, right-wing organized Jewish groups, have really cheapened and trivialized antisemitism, which is a rising force on the right wing. And by so often mislabeling legitimate criticism of Israel as antisemitism, they are actually aiding and abetting the rise of real antisemitism.

I think that, more broadly, there is a much deeper reckoning with the ideology of political Zionism than I have ever seen in my lifetime. I think it's overdue. It's very welcome. Understanding Zionism from the standpoint of its victims-namely the Palestinians-is a deeply urgent moral imperative.

And I’m personally someone who understands that there are different traditions within Zionism. There are traditions within Zionism that have believed Palestinians and Jews should coexist under one binational state within the land of Palestine. But that is not the dominant current within Zionism today. Zionism, to most people, is represented by far-right, fascistic proponents who have decisive influence within the government of Israel today.

You mean the problem is caused by those extremist leaders now leading Israel? It’s not in Zionism exactly?

Well, I wouldn’t say it’s just a problem with extreme far-right Zionists. The drive to dispossess Palestinians of their land and ultimately force them from their lands is something that is deep within the DNA of mainstream Zionism. Everything from the Labor Zionist wing to the far-right Revisionist Zionism.

The Zionist tendencies that I don’t necessarily agree with-but I think are worth understanding-are the left-wing anti-colonial tendencies of Zionism, which, frankly, were always a very small minority. And that's something I think is worth being aware of: the kinds of tendencies that were represented in movements like Hashomer Hatzair, which was basically a socialist Zionist tendency that was much stronger in the 1940s, for instance. But people today would not even understand that as Zionism. I think most people would see that as anti-Zionism.

Still, I think it’s a current that is worth understanding as part of the diversity of kinds of Zionism that have existed. Mainstream Zionism, I believe, has always been committed not just to dispossessing Palestinians, but also to waiting for the moment when there might be an opportunity to complete the political project of the Nakba and expel Palestinians permanently from their lands.

And I think that’s the political project that is playing out now in Gaza.

 (Martin Lukacs during the book launch of "When Genocide Wasn't News" in Montreal)

In a video report in The Breach, you revealed that Canadian companies are supplying key components for the F-35 fighter jet, which led Lockheed Martin to remove all remaining Canadian supplier information from its website-reducing the Canadian webpage by 80 percent. Could you tell us more about the background of this revelation, how you interpret Lockheed’s reaction, and whether you see this as an attempt to obscure Canada's role in the military supply chain linked to the Israeli war on Gaza?

The Canadian corporate class has many ways in which they support Israeli actions toward Palestinians, and one of them has been through major weapons shipments.

Canada’s weapons industry is deeply integrated with that of the United States. Much of Canada’s military exports are actually obscured, particularly through, for instance, the F-35 export program. Canadian companies, with significant support from the Canadian government, provide many crucial components for the construction of the F-35, which takes place in the U.S., and the jets are then shipped to Israel, where they are used in bombing attacks on Gaza.

I believe there are upwards of 100 companies that provide different components for the F-35, and we discovered that one company in particular was providing sole-sourced components. That means the F-35 jet program sources materials from around the world-including Europe-but in this particular case, only a Canadian company provides those components. So, theoretically, if activists were to block those exports, it would cripple, at least temporarily, the construction of the F-35.

Lockheed Martin’s decision to scrub its website was, in my view, a very telling reaction. It was a useful testament to how keenly aware they are of the vulnerabilities in this very immoral arms and weapons trade. They know that the indulgence of this system really depends on people's ignorance of it.

I think most Canadians, if they became aware of Canada’s complicity in building these murderous fighter jets, would be deeply outraged.

They have gone out of their way to ensure that Canadians don't know about it. It has been really incredible to see activists getting organized around politically targeting the sources of this death machine and highlighting how Canadians can act to end their own complicity.

You have strongly criticized Canada’s complicity in the Israeli war on Iran, arguing that the government’s support amounts to an endorsement of a war of aggression. How do you interpret this complicity as an active political position? And what does it reveal about Canada's foreign policy identity, particularly its self-image as a defender of peace, diplomacy, and international law?

I think most often, when Canada’s actions are looked at closely, they unravel its carefully constructed image as a force for peace abroad. In this case, Canada went beyond silence as well.

Mark Carney, the new prime minister, openly stated on the day that Israel, with U.S. support, began bombing Iran, the absurd claim that it was an act of self-defense-even though U.S. officials themselves had made clear that Iran was only on the verge of developing a nuclear program. And even if they were, that alone would not justify a belligerent violation of their sovereignty.

Israel, of course, has a known nuclear weapons cache-it’s an open secret. But that doesn't lead Canadian prime ministers to suggest that, if Iran were to target Israel, it would somehow be an act of self-defense. Israel is the prime aggressor in this situation.

So I think Canada, under Carney and previous governments, has consistently positioned itself as a junior partner in the American empire-whether in Iran, Israel, Libya, Haiti, or elsewhere in the world. It has often played a role in advancing and providing assists to the interests of the U.S. government.

To me, this is a prime example. And, I mean, thank God there was a relative de-escalation and that the Israeli war on Iran ended and lasted only twelve days. But I believe that if the U.S. government had pushed it further, the Canadian government would have joined that military invasion in a full-fledged way-unless there had been a large mobilization on the part of Canadians to try to stop that participation.

You recently published a book titled The Poilievre Project: A Radical Blueprint for Corporate Rule. What can you tell us about this book?

The book was an attempt -similarly motivated by the establishment media’s inability and unwillingness- to help Canadians understand the threat that Pierre Poilievre posed to Canada. He is someone, I think, who is far more radical than people understand. He’s a politician reared on the ultra-neoliberal thinking of Milton Friedman, someone who thought that Stephen Harper was too moderate a politician.

I think he would have launched a savage, pro-corporate assault on many of the universal social programs and values that Canadians hold dear. He’s a politician who preyed on the insecurity and anger that many Canadians feel toward the failures of liberal governments.

I don’t think we’ve seen the last of him by any means. A lot of people are prematurely declaring his political demise. But if liberal governments continue to leave unaddressed the inequality in this country-the deteriorating public services. I think a politician like Poilievre will rise again and be in a very strong position to channel that disenchantment and anger in his direction. That’s the trend I see playing out right now with the Carney government.

In your opinion, what does Poilievre’s rise in the recent elections indicate? Are we witnessing a deeper shift in the political culture-where populist rhetoric becomes a vehicle for reinforcing neoliberal power?

I don’t actually think the Canadian population has shifted rightward. I do think Poilievre was successful in deepening and expanding the Conservative voter coalition. I mean, they got more votes than any Conservative party has received since Brian Mulroney was Prime Minister in the 1980s. They were able to make inroads with immigrant communities, young voters, and even NDP and progressive voters.

I think the way they did that was by positioning Poilievre as a champion of the working class. He took advantage of the fact that the NDP had largely abandoned bold, progressive, working-class politics. So I think Poilievre’s relative success had more to do with the crisis of political representation on the left in this country than with any broad population shift to the right.

If the NDP-which is currently in the middle of or about to enter a leadership race-can go through a real process of revival and articulate a politics that speaks to people’s material conditions, a politics that excites people with a vision they want to fight for, then I believe the NDP could undercut Poilievre’s appeal. It could replace his fake populism with a real, progressive, intersectional, left-wing populism-which I think is the best recipe not only for defeating the right but also for winning electoral success in this country.

In your book The Trudeau Formula: Seduction and Betrayal in an Age of Discontent, you reveal the weaponization of Saudi Arabia's bloody war in Yemen, and a reconciliation industry that masks the ongoing theft of Indigenous lands and the sale of public infrastructure to private profiteers. Is this formula, not Trudeau’s creation, but merely the hidden strategy of the Liberals?

I think it is an enduring strategy of the Liberal Party in Canada. The Liberals have always been very skilled at campaigning to the left and then governing from the right, knowing how to appeal to and pay lip service to the progressive aspirations of the Canadian population, while ultimately serving their real constituency: the corporate elite.

Justin Trudeau’s father was very good at it. What’s interesting now is that with Mark Carney, we have a current within the Liberal Party that engages in much less of that progressive posturing. Carney has effectively returned the Liberal Party to its mid-1990s version-which, in that era, was pushed to the right by the Reform Party, just as it’s now being pushed by Poilievre.

And that's a kind of Liberal Party that sheds a lot of that symbolic progressive posturing and really governs its politics from the right. I think that on the left and in progressive anti-colonial movements, our job is actually less hard because we don't have to strip away that fake veneer that the Liberals paint over themselves. We will have a much clearer understanding of who they are and who they serve.

What we’re really facing in this country right now is a Liberal-Conservative coalition that is borrowing from each other’s playbooks. But I think that also opens up political space for us to articulate progressive alternatives that can build popular support.

In one of your posts, you wrote: "To counter Trump we need to stomp on Indigenous rights, empower extractive companies Canadians have no control over, and spread a lie of 'decarbonized bitumen". This was a scathing critique of Mark Carney. Do you think figures like Carney use the language of climate responsibility to justify certain policies? And what does this reveal about the broader alliance between liberal technocracy, corporate power, and settler colonialism in Canada?

What’s been interesting about the Carney government is that they are essentially engaged in a kind of “shock doctrine” right now. So many Canadians were shocked into anxiety and uncertainty by Donald Trump’s tariff attacks on this country. Carney and his Liberal Party have taken advantage of that state of disorientation to push through a pro-corporate, right-wing agenda that, under more normal circumstances, people would have more clearly recognized and resisted.

Carney himself branded as a climate savior in his work prior to leading the Liberal Party. But I think he’s shed that image very quickly-because he believes he can get away with it in a moment when people are still disoriented by Trump.

It’s true that when we produce critical journalism about Carney, people make endless excuses for him. There’s always a Trump-related excuse at the ready. And so, we’ve seen Carney adopt the full language and talking points of the fossil fuel industry; “decarbonized oil” is an absolutely nonsensical idea. You literally can’t remove CO₂ emissions from the burning of oil. There is no such thing as decarbonized oil. It’s a completely absurd talking point.

Carney believes that if he pushes through his agenda during this moment-when scrutiny is low because people are still afraid of Trump-he’ll be able to get away with it.

I think he's wrong. It may take a bit of time for the Carney denialism to diminish, but when it does, people are going to realize that we essentially have a pro-corporate technocrat who is endlessly trying to serve his primary constituency of bankers, weapons makers, and the financial and corporate elite- oil barons. At that point, people will try to summon a response. It's our task on the left to try to encourage lucidity and clear-sightedness as soon as we can, so that we can mount a response as quickly as possible.