By World BEYOND War, April 1, 2025
On Thursday March 27 charges against three additional people co-accused as part of the Indigo-11 were dropped, bringing the group a major step closer to the end of a prolonged legal ordeal that began with a violent police raid 16 months ago.
Here is the speech given by World BEYOND War organizer Rachel Small at the press conference held outside the court house immediately after the charges were dropped:
My name is Rachel Small, I’m an organizer with World BEYOND War and Jews Say No to Genocide. We just got out of court and we have important and good news to share. We’ll be hearing from four of the co-accused in the Indigo case, as well as one of their lawyers.
The context today of course is not only what’s just taken place in the courtroom behind us, but the complete decimation of Gaza, happening as we stand here right now. A Geneva-based rights group released a report today that Israel is killing 103 Palestinians on average per day since their bombing and raids on Gaza resumed this month. In just one week, over 200,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have been forced to leave their homes. This of course is deliberate action intended to wipe out an entire population. This is genocide.
This is the context today, and this was the context 16 months ago in November 2023 when it is alleged that peace activists put up posters and washable paint to protest Indigo’s financial support of the Israeli Defence Forces via CEO Heather Reisman’s HESEG Foundation.
The majority of the 11 co-accused were awoken in the middle of the night to upwards of ten police officers who broke into their apartments and handcuffed them in their bedrooms. Their apartments were raided in a way that is typical only for the most violent drug crimes. The police ransacked living rooms, front doors were broken, left dangling off their hinges, computers and cell phones were confiscated, everyone present was handcuffed including elderly relatives. Parents were handcuffed in front of their children.
For what? I want to remind us that the 11 who were arrested, who were raided at night, who have been dragged through the court system and described in the media as perpetrators of “hate crimes,” are alleged to have put up posters. Their homes were raided, their lives thrown upside down for a year-and-a-half all for anti-war posters. The posters were in support of a longstanding boycott of Indigo, highlighting Indigo CEO Heather Reisman, who has made it her mission through her foundation, HESEG, to provide direct financial support to Canadian citizens to join the Israeli military, an army that is engaging in an ongoing genocide in Gaza, that is killing over 100 Palestinians per day on average, mostly women and children – a daily death toll that exceeds all other major conflicts in the 21st century.
These were posters that continue a decades-long Jewish-led campaign calling for a boycott of Indigo until Indigo CEO Reisman stops making her customers unwitting accomplices in Israel’s crimes. Every purchase from Indigo enriches its CEO Heather Reisman and her husband Gerald Schwartz (who own 60% of shares in the company), who in turn have been using these profits to operate their charity, the HESEG Foundation for Lone Soldiers. HESEG exists to support the IDF by financially supporting foreign nationals—referred to as “lone soldiers”—to serve in the Israeli military. We want to be crystal clear, boycotting Indigo has absolutely nothing to do with her CEO’s Jewish religion and ethnicity, and everything to do with her support of the HESEG foundation and her complicity in genocide.
Right now, as the people of Gaza experience genocide, all of us, Jews, Christians, Muslims, atheists and people of all faiths, have a moral obligation to name and hold accountable companies that are aiding in the slaughter of Palestinians. Children account for nearly half of presently known deaths. Instead of ending their complicity in genocide, a multi million dollar corporation has decided to push outrageous policing and charges against anyone who calls out their complicity, and it should be noted that they also went to court to sue and censor the Indigo Kills Kids website, a public education campaign who simply tried to share the public facts about Indigo and Reisman’s connection to the Israeli military.
With these no-knock raids and incredibly trumped up charges, with the police’s attempts to use politically motivated arrests to vilify a time-honored staple of peace activism, red paint, through the police’s attempts to label peace activists calling attention to state violence as people guilty of “hate-motivated” acts, without a shred of evidence to support that claim… It seems clear that police were attempting to suppress and intimidate the rapidly expanding Palestine solidarity movement in Toronto. And to distract us from the true crimes playing out at the hands of the Israeli military and its allies. To point fingers and yell ‘Hate” at the fake blood of washable red paint on a window is an obvious ploy to distract us from the real blood running down the streets of Gaza.
But instead of what the Toronto police and those who approved their outrageous house raids on the Peace 11 could have hoped for, Instead of silencing dissent, instead of sowing divisions in our movement, what we’ve instead seen over the past 15 months is an unprecedented wave of resistance in Toronto.
Despite well over 100 people arrested and charged for Palestinian solidarity in this city over the past 17 months (and credit for tracking those numbers and building and sustaining a support infrastructure for all the arrestees goes to the Legal Support Committee in Toronto)
despite millions upon million of dollars spent by Toronto police to pursue charges and show up by the hundreds in militarized gear and on horseback at our protests, despite them using an avalanche of policing to suppress us and to criminalize our despair, our grief, our horror..Despite all this, our eyes and hearts remain on Gaza and our resolve to end Canadian complicity in the genocide has not waned but has only grown stronger
At this moment of Israel reinstating violence, with this renewed assault and Israel showing the world that it has absolutely no intention of stopping its genocidal violence – the need for brave action is exceedingly clear.
Today in court charges against 3 additional co accused were withdrawn and the two remaining have moved one step closer to the end of this nightmare. In total, charges against seven of the 11 activists have been entirely dismissed, while two received absolute discharges, and two remain. Finally their nightmare of criminalization and police harassment has come to an end.
We already knew the actions taken to end complicity in Israel military violence were moral and just. But now the court has agreed to largely dismiss a case that the police and crown have spent millions of dollars prosecuting.
This is a vindication. This is a win.
And as these charges are once again being dropped, as the crown is being forced once again to withdraw unjust criminalization, after spending a fortune harassing these folks for 15 months, we are calling for all the charges to be dropped for the over 100 who have been arrested for acting in solidarity with palestine here in Toronto. All of their charges are wrong. We expect all to be dropped. More than 40 indeed have already been withdrawn. And it’s clear that the rest will not stand up to scrutiny.
But we must also note that getting all charges dropped does not go far enough. What we have seen here today and time and again is that the “process is the punishment”. And this process looks like both the home raids we are discussing today, but also mass surveillance campaigns, door knocks and phone calls by the police, harassment campaigns by the police, having people spend extensive amount of time with charges on their head when the Crown does not have intention to prosecute, getting people to do absurd amounts of community service or financial donations to charities in exchange for bogus charges to be withdrawn, and an overabundance of Peace bond offers to slow us down in the long term. This too must end.
Global News coverage of this event can be watched in part here on the site formerly known as Twitter.
Global News coverage of yesterday’s courthouse press conference announcing good news – the withdrawal of charges against 3 additional Indigo 11 co-accused. We called out police violence and how “what we have seen time & again is that the process is the punishment.”#BoycottIndigo pic.twitter.com/MfDOQLuDlC
— World BEYOND War Canada (@WBWCanada) March 28, 2025
