Can we march down this street? the activists ask, their Palestinian flags flying against the grey sky. The officers, deployed by the dozens this day to seal off the area’s residential roads, respond: keep moving.

The roughly 20 protesters obey, chanting “Free, free Palestine!” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” as they go. Behind them trails a smaller group with a megaphone of their own, trying to drown out the marchers with calls of “F—-, f—- Palestine!” and “From the river to the sea, Israel is all you’ll see!”

The nasty, roving shouting match in a Jewish neighbourhood in North York is at the heart of a bitter dispute. Amid alarming antisemitic incidents in the GTA, weekly anti-Israel protests in the community have led to calls from politicians for a crackdown, and tested the Toronto Police Service’s ability to balance local residents’ concerns with activists’ Charter rights. The two opposing sides at the centre of the storm agree on almost nothing, except that the authorities are getting the situation wrong.

Ground zero for the fight is the suburban intersection of Bathurst Street and Sheppard Avenue, where — next to a strip mall home to a Metro, Wimpy’s Diner and Dollar Store — pro-Palestinian activists have shown up for the past 75 weeks or so to denounce Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza and alleged rights abuses.

Israel’s offensive in the Palestinian territory has killed more than 72,000, according to the Hamas-run health ministry. The campaign, which followed Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel that killed 1,200, has been characterized as genocide by UN-commissioned experts, an allegation vehemently rejected by Israel.

Each Sunday, the demonstrators have faced off against a crowd of Israel supporters who say the activists’ very presence in the neighbourhood, which has no government institutions but is home to thousands of Jews, is hateful.

“I’ve seen this every week,” said Adam Grech, a 22-year-old student who lives in the area. “I think it’s just kind of disgusting that they come here on purpose.”

The protesters say they’ve chosen the intersection not to harass Jewish residents, but in response to pro-Israel rallies held there after Oct. 7 that they claim were “celebrating a genocide.”

As protesters began to arrive this past Sunday morning, the scene looked much as it had in previous weeks. Demonstrators, some organized through GTA4Palestine, a loose subset of the Toronto area’s pro-Palestinian activists, set up signs and flags on the northeast corner; on the northwest was the pro-Israel contingent, with flags and signs of their own. Passing drivers honked, or rolled down their windows to shout abuse into the mild spring air. The Metro was busy with shoppers preparing for the coming holiday; its kosher options advertised in end-of-aisle displays.

But this day was different. The week before, the Toronto Police Service announced a directive banning protesters from the area’s residential streets. The force justified the restriction based on the “changing security landscape” in the city. In early March, three GTA synagogues were hit by gunfire. On March 15, protesters at the intersection allegedly displayed antisemitic signs of hook-nosed Jewish caricatures. Police Chief Myron Demkiw announced Thursday, while the Jewish community was marking the first full day of Passover, that his force had charged a 33-year-old man with public incitement of hatred in connection with those images. A day later, a restaurant in North York owned by a Jewish activist was shot up. Police didn’t immediately say whether they were investigating it as a hate-motivated crime. 

GTA4Palestine say they have only marched on side streets two or three times since they started more than a year ago, without serious incident. They nevertheless oppose the new restriction, which they say is further evidence of an unjust system that denies rights to Palestinians and their supporters both in Canada and abroad, while protecting Israel and its boosters.

“Charter rights for some, checkpoints for others,” read one of their signs Sunday. 

Around 1 p.m., the protesters set out to test the limits of the new rule — not to violate it, they said, but to publicly demonstrate how their rights were being curtailed. They crossed the intersection and headed west on the north side of Sheppard, as some pro-Israeli demonstrators hurried after them.

The police were prepared. As marchers reached the first side street, Hove Avenue, they encountered about a half-dozen officers, who formed a cordon with their bicycles and cruisers to block the roadway. One protester carrying a clipboard with a paper map approached and asks where their group is allowed to go. Police said stick to Sheppard. 

For the next hour, the protesters kept marching, the scene repeated at every side street: protesters asked if they were allowed in, and police kept them on the main thoroughfare. As they marched, they traded chants and insults with the pro-Israeli group, while officers on bikes and in police cars followed. The activists made no attempt to break through police lines. 

Daniela Bonamico, the day’s emcee for GTA4Palestine, cheerfully led a call and response.

“One, two, three, four, genocide no more! Five, six, seven, eight, Israel is a terrorist state!” she shouted through a megaphone. “Viva viva Palestina! Viva viva intifada!”

A man in a green sweater raced to get to the front of the march. “We don’t need racists in our neighbourhood” he yelled. “You’re not coming into this neighbourhood, a———s!”

A protester wearing a keffiyah sang a song in response. “All the Zionists are racists!” he repeated. 

“God bless the Israel Defense Forces!” yelled a man in motorcycle jacket and yarmulke, as he filmed the protesters with his phone.

An elderly resident watched the scene through his front door. A family paused on their porch to watch the group go by. As the protesters passed a midrise apartment building, a woman rushed out onto her balcony. “F—- Palestine!” she shouted, to cheers from the Israeli counterdemonstrators, as she gave the marchers the finger.

At one point, a counterdemonstrator who had been heckling the protesters through her megaphone yelled derogatory comments about Muslims. At another, a protester in a Blue Jays jersey, their face covered by a kaffiyeh, appeared to turn and deliver a Nazi salute.

One of the few moments the noise died down was when protesters approach the Darchei Noam synagogue at Wilmington Avenue. A GTA4Palestine organizer went over to a police officer to make clear that they’re weren’t protesting the religious building; Bonamico put down her megaphone until the group had walked past.

After marching six blocks, they turned back when police stopped them from entering Wilson Heights Boulevard, and an hour after they started, they returned to Bathurst and Sheppard. There was some final commotion over a man who had shown up wearing what looked like a burqa, which the pro-Palestinian contingent took as a provocation. Then, after some parting shouts, the demonstration broke up.

Guidy Mamann, an organizer of the pro-Israeli protests, says GTA4Palestine came to his neighbourhood to “degrade people.” He likened the antisemitic signs on display last month to Nazi propaganda and said they served no purpose but to “incite the hatred of Jews.”

Mamann’s 93-year-old mother-in-law lost family in the Holocaust and shops in the local plaza, he said. “The last thing she needs to see are those images of her childhood where her six sisters and her parents were taken to a camp to be murdered,” he said. “That is disgraceful to be seen on a Toronto street, let alone a Jewish neighbourhood.”

Such is the divide between the two sides that GTA4Palestine won’t concede the neighbourhood they’re in is Jewish. They cite census data that show the ward’s most common ethnic group is Filipino. Still, Bathurst Street from St. Clair Avenue to Steeles Avenue has the highest concentration of Jewish residents in Toronto, according to statistics published by the city. 

The group also don’t agree the signs that led to Thursday’s arrest were antisemitic. “They’re a statement against Zionism and the occupation,” Bonamico told the Star. She contrasted authorities’ strong reaction to those images with how they handled concerns her group raised about allegedly hateful signs from the other side — including one depicting a rat wearing a kaffiyeh and people displaying the logo of the extremist Jewish Defense League. She said those complaints were “brushed aside.”

The demonstrations may have started in response to pro-Israel rallies, but protester Omar Abdullah said the group’s motivations have evolved as authorities have taken “discriminatory” measures such as the residential protest ban, which he said was only being applied to the pro-Palestinian advocates. 

Demonstrators’ rights are “being trampled on … so that becomes an issue as well,” he said. Having rules that only apply to one group is “extremely, extremely problematic.”

York Centre councillor James Pasternak says his community is being “held hostage” by 20 protesters. He says Jewish residents have a Charter right “to go about their daily lives without harassment, intimidation and incitement,” and that he’s advocating to police and the attorney general for the “protesters’ departure.”

In December, Ontario solicitor general Michael Kerzner issued a public letter to Chief Demkiw describing the Bathurst and Sheppard protests “unacceptable” and calling for “consistent and visible enforcement” of what he described as hate-motivated offences.

But Toronto police say they’re already doing all they can to keep the peace in the neighbourhood. The force deployed dozens of officers — including mounted units and plainclothes officers — to the area last Sunday, and since August 2024 has arrested 20 protesters on both sides of the dispute there. Police say that since October 2023 the force has spent about $46 million policing protests related to the Gaza war across the city.

In an interview at police headquarters this week, Deputy Chief Frank Barredo expressed frustration with officials whom he said “create false impressions about what the law allows the police to do.”

He acknowledged that some politicians and community members believe that merely walking through a Jewish neighbourhood with a Palestinian flag should be prohibited, but “just because you don’t like their cause or you disagree with the way they express themselves, that doesn’t necessarily create new powers for the police.”

When dealing with protests the service has to weigh citizens’ rights against the need for reasonable limits on those rights when it’s in the public interest, Barredo said. As things stand, Toronto police have determined that they have no grounds to confine pro-Palestinian demonstrators to one intersection or to prevent them demonstrating there at all.

Barredo also defended barring the protesters from residential streets as a “reasonable limitation” given escalating tensions, which he said had been fuelled by the synagogue shootings and the “grossly antisemitic signage” demonstrators had displayed. There is “a palpable, real fear” in the Jewish community he said. 

Police routinely bar protests from going into certain areas out of public safety concerns, according to Barredo, who rejected GTA4Palestine’s accusations of two-tiered enforcement. He argued that if pro-Israeli groups set up in a Palestinian neighbourhood, the force would apply similar rules.

On Sunday, Ariel Gershon stood alone at the intersection of Bathurst and Sheppard. He was on the Palestinian side of the street, a few metres north of the main group, and he held a sign showing both the Palestinian and Israeli flags. He said he was there to spread the message that neither Israelis nor Palestinians “are going anywhere” and “there has to be a peaceful solution.”

He was on the Palestinian side of the street, he said, because he believes Israel has the greater responsibility to change its actions, but he admitted that people on the Palestinian corner “don’t appreciate” him holding the Israeli flag. 

“Calling for peace, it definitely can feel lonely,” he said, “because there’s not that many people who care about both sides.”

Protesters planned to return to the intersection Sunday.

With files from Estella Ren