By: Yildiz Subuk, Staff Writer and Hannah Fraser, News Editor
On September 25, thousands of protestors gathered at 50 Indigo bookstores across Canada, calling for the company’s divestment from the Israeli military. A week before the protests, Indigo pursued a lawsuit against the campaign’s website, IndigoKillsKids.ca, now rebranded as boycottindigobooks.com.
The campaign accuses Indigo CEO Heather Reisman and her husband Gerald Schwartz of funding the Israeli military by funnelling nearly $200 million of Indigo’s profits into the HESEG Foundation. CBC reported that this foundation aims to provide “scholarships and support for living expenses to former IDF lone soldiers, who are recruits with no family or support system in Israel.” Lone soldiers are soldiers in the IDF who are recruited from other countries. Boycott Indigo Books explains that the HESEG Foundation incentives Canadians to join the IDF as mercenaries, who serve in militaries solely for financial gain. The campaign calls for a “renewed push to boycott Indigo due to its CEO’s involvement in the oppression of Palestinians and its complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza.”
Indigo’s lawyers stated the campaign’s website is defamatory and “falsely implies Indigo is ‘complicit in the death of children.’” Lori Shapiro, co-president of the Gerald Schwartz & Heather Reisman Foundation, which funds the HESEG Foundation, stated Indigo does not support the Israeli military. She added that the HESEG fund is “exclusively for charitable purposes.”
A court injunction allowed Indigo to shut down IndigoKillsKids.ca temporarily. A court injunction is “a court order requiring a person to do or cease doing a specific action.” The campaign demands that Indigo “drop its lawsuit against the Indigo Kills Kids campaign.” They also call for the CRA to hold “Heather Reisman, Gerald Schwartz, and the directors of Canadian charities accountable.”
The campaign also calls for Heather Reisman to “drop the charges against the Indigo Peace 11 protestors.” The Peace 11 protestors are a group of “professors, community organizers, legal workers, and labour activists” who allegedly put up posters and splattered “washable red paint on the window of a Toronto” Indigo bookstore in 2023. One protestor was arrested on November 14, 2023, and the other ten were arrested on November 22 for “criminal mischief.” As of May, four charges out of 11 have been dropped by the Crown.
The Peak interviewed Gur Tsabar, an advocate from the Palestinian solidarity group Jews Say No to Genocide. When asked why he thinks Indigo pursued the lawsuit, he said “I always like to tell friends that guilty people act guilty, and I think the same holds for corporations.” He believes the company is “scrambling to attempt to save themselves and their reputation and do whatever they can to remain legal.” Tsabar added that the fund has been “illegal this whole time,” as funding lone soldiers is against Canadian law, which states “it is not charitable to support the armed forces of another country.
“At this point, Indigo has no choice but to state they are not directly supporting lone soldiers because that’s the only way to stay within the law,” he continued.
The $200 million funneled into HESEG from Indigo are tax-subsidized dollars. These are tax credits donors receive when they donate to certain charities. Tsabar stated that “tax laws all over the world have been systematically used by the World Zionist Organization and people who support the Israeli war machine to steal money from local residents.” For instance, the Jewish National Fund sent money to Israel to build infrastructure for the Israeli military.
As far as protests from Palestinian solidarity groups go, “every corporation’s fair game and should continue to expect they’re going to be hounded and have their assets manipulated to get them to stop participating in a genocide,” said Tsabar.
The Peak reached out to Indigo for comment but did not receive a response by the publication deadline.
