Jewish residents and organizations in Vancouver say a relentless anti-Israel campaign of “chalking”—writing hateful slogans with sidewalk chalk in public, and waving a large Palestinian flag outside a hospital in their neighbourhood—has reshaped daily life in Vancouver’s historically Jewish neighbourhood.
For over two years, anti-Israel graffiti and stickers have appeared daily on sidewalks, bus stops, street signs and other public spaces along the Oak Street corridor, near major synagogues, in the Douglas Park area.
Two Jewish residents of this neighbourhood began documenting the messages by the lone perpetrator, whose identity they know. They’ve amassed proof of at least 2,000 incidents and have asked him to stop.
The duo have had real late-night runs-in with the activist, who they say lives and works near them, and who has, on social media, described his devotion to the Palestinian cause as living in “the belly of the beast”—a popular term in anti-Israel circles describing carrying out activism from within areas that support Israel and Western values.
The two Jewish men bought cleaning gear to wash the tags away, if the rain doesn’t do it first. But it’s become a war of attrition.
Vancouver police say they take hate speech and harassment seriously, but the one-man protest has not abated.
On today’s episode of The CJN’s North Star podcast, we’re joined by the two Jewish residents who are fighting back, Joshua and Steven, who have asked that their family names not be published for safety reasons.
Steven and Joshua speak to The CJN about their efforts to remove anti-Israel graffiti from the heart of Jewish Vancouver. (The CJN photos)
Related links
British Columbia promises legislation to establish safe “bubble zones” for synagogues, places of worship in order to curb harassing protests, in The CJN.Vancouver police arrested Samidoun’s Canadian leader Charlotte Kates after she was accused of making hateful comments during an anti-Israel protest in 2024, in The CJN.Why a recently elected city councillor in Vancouver has an anti-Israel problem, in The CJN.Transcript:
Josh from Vancouver: That’s all I’m really after is to be able to go out and go to the bus stop or walk around the park, and not have to see this hate.
Ellin Bessner:
If you’ve been following all the stories we’ve covered since October 7th about the weekly anti-Israel protests that have spilled into Toronto’s heavily Jewish Bathurst and Sheppard neighbourhood, some of what you’re about to hear may sound familiar, except this story is in Vancouver, along the historic Jewish stretch of Oak Street near the Orthodox synagogue Schara Tzedeck, near Max’s Bakery and Deli, and stretching north toward Vancouver General Hospital.
Local residents say they’ve spent the last two years waking up to fresh anti-Israel graffiti and stickers on sidewalks, utility boxes, bike lanes, and light poles. The messages, written in bright colours, mostly in chalk, are mixed with pro-Palestinian slogans but also anti-Zionist ones, sometimes featuring the red Hamas triangle with the F-word, comparing Israel to ICE agents in the United States, and on and on.
Jewish residents say they know who’s doing it because he documents his work publicly on Instagram and has launched a GoFundMe page to support what the man describes as his full-time activism. He’s repeatedly attracted the attention of police, Jewish organizations, and even security staff at Vancouver General. His slogans have appeared late at night near the Gordon and Leslie Diamond Healthcare Centre there, named after one of BC’s best known Jewish philanthropic families. He also regularly stands near the hospital’s Syd and Joanne Belzberg courtyard waving a Palestinian flag at rush hour.
For some Jewish residents nearby, the campaign has become a constant source of anxiety and frustration. Some have bought cleaning supplies and regularly scrub away the messages themselves, when the rain doesn’t do that first. They call police and Vancouver’s 311 service to get the city to come and clean it up, but what started as graffiti complaints has now escalated.
Local residents say they’ve been having disturbing late-night confrontations, and now they fear for their own safety because the man they say is behind the campaign actually lives in the neighbourhood.
Steven The more the message gets out there, the more that people are going to maybe start seeing his point of view, and maybe not him, but maybe somebody he has directly or indirectly influenced, will take action of some sort.
Ellin Bessner: I’m Ellin Bessner, and this is what Jewish Canada sounds like for Wednesday, May 13th, 2026.
Welcome to North Star, the flagship podcast of The Canadian Jewish News, made possible thanks to the Ira Gluskin and Maxine Granovsky Gluskin Charitable Foundation.
Jewish leaders we spoke with say there’s little practical enforcement available because this activist operates in a legal grey zone: police generally view political protests as protected speech unless it crosses the line into criminal harassment, intimidation, or hate speech. As far as we know, no charges have been laid. Vancouver police told me that any reported incidents involving mischief or harassment are taken seriously, and investigators collect evidence where hate motivation might be present.
The activist behind the chalking says his messages are intended to provoke discussion, and he has also included hearts and peace signs and messages about love. Similar chalk activism has appeared internationally through a pro-Palestine online campaign encouraging supporters to use washable sidewalk chalk. But two Jewish residents have taken it upon themselves to document nearly all of his work. One has collected about 2,000 images connected to the campaign and has reported incidents to police.
Today on North Star, we’re joined from Vancouver by Joshua and Steven. They asked that we not use their full names publicly, for safety reasons.
Joshua: Yeah, thanks for having us. My name’s Joshua.
Steven: I’m Steven, also in Vancouver.
Ellin Bessner: We should explain — I said for security reasons, but maybe you want to, either of you, start to just quickly tell us what your security concerns are, which led you to prefer not to have your full identities on our show.
Joshua: Yeah, I’m a photographer by trade. I have a unique way of spelling my photography brand name, and I want to try to keep my professional career and my activism separate for obvious reasons. I’ve also had my full legal name published by certain pro-Palestine activists, and again, just trying to keep my identity out of my activism as much as possible.
Steven: Yeah, I was also recently followed — I guess for lack of a better word, almost chased down — by one of these individuals. Very unhinged. And yeah, I was outside erasing some of the graffiti, and he sort of chased me down. I didn’t want to go back into my apartment until he had sort of left the vicinity, so he didn’t see where I lived. Unfortunately, I think he lives right next door, but for now, yeah, I’d rather sort of keep my identity secret because of that.
Joshua: Unfortunately for me, the culprit of all these chalk messages lives across the street from me, so I see him from my kitchen window leaving his house wearing his keffiyeh every day.
Ellin Bessner: Did you discover each other geographically? Are you seeing the same stuff, or is this different?
Steven: Same stuff, same stuff, by the same person, same neighbourhood, yeah.
Ellin Bessner: Orient me. How close are you to each other?
Joshua: We probably live about six blocks away from each other, so we’re close. I walk the same neighbourhood that Steven walks.
Ellin Bessner: And orient me from the biggest landmark — the JCC, or the Vancouver Federation building, or King David, or all of that sort of thing.
Joshua: I mean, I live down the street from Schara Tzedeck, the temple that was firebombed back in 2024. That’s probably the closest Jewish institution.
Steven: Yeah, I’m about seven blocks from that.
Ellin Bessner: All right. Can we talk timeline here? What first caught your attention, and when was this?
Joshua: I’ll speak to that. What first caught my attention was the torn kidnapped-from-Israel hostage posters back in November of 2023. I had been putting them up, and this individual had been tearing them down. There was an event at Schara Tzedeck where Eylon Levy was speaking, and about 22 pro-Palestine activists came and tore down hostage posters in front of the entire Jewish community — did it with impunity, did it smiling. That was their first very public appearance in front of the Jewish community with their hate and their activism, so to speak. And the chalk messages really began around June of last summer — June 2025 — and have been persistent every day.
Ellin Bessner: Are you part of the main organizing groups that have been leading the Jewish community’s rallies and hostage runs and things like that in Vancouver? Just so we know this isn’t some random thing — that you’re really plugged in.
Joshua: Yeah, I’m part of both Vancouver Stands with Israel and the Bring Them Home group. And the individual in question would be standing across the street counter-protesting.
Ellin Bessner: So this is a person who is well known not only to the police but to the Jewish community. Correct?
Joshua: Yes, and he has had many interactions with the police. He was recently arrested and released with a verbal warning, which he has not complied with.
Ellin Bessner: How widespread does this happen? You said it started outside Schara Tzedeck. Now it’s in your neighbourhood. Is that it, or where else do you see this stuff?
Steven: Well, I’ve seen his messaging recently in a neighbouring area too. I saw it in a neighbourhood called Mount Pleasant. I was just out the other day — it’s probably about twelve blocks to the east, a different neighbourhood entirely from where Josh and I live, but he’s starting to, dare I say, expand his brand. You can tell by his very distinctive way of writing. So yeah, he’s getting out there. I don’t think he has much of a life or job or anything of the sort.
Joshua: Yeah, just to add on to that — he began targeting the public parks near the temple, where every 15 to 20 feet he would write more messages in chalk. They would target the Bring Them Home rallies and write chalk messages on the corner where we would stand. They target the Vancouver Stands with Israel marches, and they will go to the bridge and mark the bridge before the event.
Ellin Bessner: What colour is the chalk that he uses?
Joshua: He must order it in packs. We suspect he’s either being paid or someone’s paying for his supplies. This individual has created a GoFundMe account to support his own personal activism, and he’s referred to our Jewish community as “the belly of the beast.” He says he’s on the front lines and does mostly solo activism.
But he’s kind of gathered groupies who come — he’ll stand at the corner near the hospital and wave a flag during rush hour, and he’s had other activists come and wave a Lebanese flag and another Palestinian flag. And every time someone honks at him, he gives the V for victory sign and is emboldened by people honking.
Ellin Bessner: Well, when you’re talking about flag waving, some people will say it’s free speech. You can wave whatever flag you want — except for terrorist flags, soon, in Canada. You can honk horns, you can walk up and down — freedom of assembly, freedom of speech. We know about these. So when did you feel that this started to become more than just random political graffiti, and actually started targeting and crossing the line?
Joshua: He would write things like “Holocaust in HD.” He would engage in a lot of Holocaust inversion. He’d also write things like “Stop Israel Cult Now,” essentially labelling the entire state of Israel as a cult. He’s written my name, saying “Free Palestine from Joshua the neo-Nazi” at my bus stop. And again, knowing that he lives in a Jewish neighbourhood — which he has referred to as “the belly of the beast” — he chooses to write messages in front of the temple and along walking routes that Jews will take walking to synagogue on Shabbat.
Ellin Bessner: And this is Schara Tzedeck or another temple?
Joshua: I mean, there are probably three temples within walking distance of our community. One’s an Orthodox, one’s a Conservative, and one’s a Sephardic temple. He knows he lives in a Jewish neighbourhood — he essentially lives across the street from one of the temples.
Ellin Bessner: Steven, have you seen anything that’s really crossed the line, that jumps out and that you want to share with our listeners?
Steven: I mean, he’s just — profanity, Israel — and like Josh said, “Stop Israel Cult,” and he’s even referred to Israel with the letters I-C-E, that for Israel. When the ICE raids started becoming more in the news, he started writing it that way. And again, like Josh said, he refers to Israel as a cult. These were the photos I had uploaded to the Report It Now app from Stop Antisemitism — I found that app just by sheer luck. He likes to use, instead of the U for the F-bomb, he likes to write a V, and he likes to put the red triangle — or as red as it can be with the chalk — in the middle where the space is in the V, making an upside-down triangle in red. So he knows what he’s doing, and he knows what that means to us.
Joshua: He also makes like a devil-tail kind of symbol whenever he’s writing the word Israel — on the S he’ll draw arrows to make it look like a devil’s tail or pitchfork iconography. He’s not stupid. He knows what he’s doing.
Ellin Bessner: You know, it makes me uncomfortable even giving these examples airtime, but I want to focus back on you — you’ve both documented this extensively. Would you be able to estimate roughly how large your archive is now?
Joshua: Yeah. I first started by collecting all of the stickers and all the defaced hostage posters and photographing as much as I could. I really did start an extensive digital catalogue back in — it must have been May of 2024 — when I started to speak with the Vancouver Police diversity and hate crimes unit to really document as much as I can. I also have pretty extensive screenshots of all of his Instagram stories, which he thinks will disappear after 24 hours, but we have records going back to June of 2024.
Ellin Bessner: How many would you say — hundreds? Both of you together, or you by yourself?
Steven: I don’t have anything — I don’t keep anything. I’ll photograph my stuff when I see it sometimes, if it’s really, really bad, and I’ll post it onto Facebook, onto the Jewish Vancouver Facebook group. I’ll delete it thereafter. I prefer not to keep the hate. I prefer not to have it. I think I’ve been to his Instagram like once or twice, and of course now he’s private. I just prefer not to have that material. It’s just so violent, so disgusting. I understand — and I’m not knocking it — Josh is great. Josh is the one who’s got it all documented, far more so than I would ever have.
Joshua: Yeah, I’m a photographer, so I understand the importance of having these digital records. Fortunately on Apple devices you can hide content from your camera roll, so I will screenshot, I’ll photograph, I will catalogue it onto a Dropbox which the VPD has access to, and then I will hide these images from my camera roll. I have maybe 2,000 images hidden on my phone.
Ellin Bessner: Why do you want to hide them?
Joshua: I don’t want my camera roll to be full of hate. I want it to be my daily life.
Ellin Bessner: Well, we should ask both of you — what has been the impact on you of doing this work? You want to start, Josh?
Joshua: Yeah. Unfortunately I see this person almost every day leaving his apartment. I have crossed paths with him. We’ve never actually spoken. He knows who I am — he would identify me because I used to wear the Bring Them Home dog tags. Someone saw that and claimed that I was an IDF soldier because I wore a symbol for the kidnapped hostages. And I became aware of him very early on because he would wear a Palestine flag baseball cap and a keffiyeh around the neighbourhood. He worked at a local café and bike repair shop, and one day I saw him wearing his flag at work, and I was like, oh yeah, I’m never shopping there again.
Ellin Bessner: Would you have any desire to try to sit down with him over a coffee and say, look, I think we are so far apart on this issue?
Joshua: He is so entrenched in his political belief that it’s not going to be a productive conversation.
Steven: For me, it’s not as bad because he has no clue who I am. I have photographed him, actually — I recently photographed him earlier this week. He was out waving his flag. He does it kitty-corner to where I live, right across the street from the hospital, right in front of the Belzberg — the Syd and Joanne Belzberg courtyard. And it’s a high-traffic area because it is the hospital and a main thoroughfare. Of course, in the summer I’ve got my windows open, and the honking is just incessant, generally between five and six o’clock.
And that’s really it. I mean, if I’m going to erase his stuff — which I do — I’ll go out in the wee hours of the night. A couple of weeks ago I was out at four in the morning. I figured, okay, I’m not going to encounter this guy, and I just don’t want to see him. I don’t want to be anywhere near him, in his vicinity, in his orbit. And of course I don’t want to get doxed either.
Unfortunately, there was also someone out — I call him an acolyte — who, at four in the morning, was also out and started chasing me after he saw me erasing. Something about having it on record that a doctor said Israel bombed children and stuff like that. Anyway, he chased me down. He’s like, “Oh, I just want to talk.” I’m like, I don’t want to talk to you, buddy. It’s four in the morning.
Joshua: Yeah. One thing to add — these activists frequently target high-traffic areas like bus stops so that their messages can be read. I will go out during the day and remove them, and sometimes I get people thanking me, sometimes I get people challenging me. And the thing that I tell everyone is: believe what you want to believe, but keep your politics off of the sidewalk. This is a public space that we should all be able to enjoy.
Steven: And yeah, I think that’s just the main thing. It really just makes a horrible mess, the chalking and the erasing of it. Okay, you know what — believe what you want to believe, but stop making a mess of the neighbourhood.
Ellin Bessner:
Do you think that the authorities actually understand this cumulative psychological effect of this chalk, or do they just see it as chalk?
Joshua: They just see it as chalk. And this individual has even posted videos of himself out at six a.m. writing chalk messages in front of businesses that have told him not to — they don’t want politics in front of their business. And the police have basically said, “Oh, you’re drawing it with hearts beside it, it’s fine.” They don’t really look at the content or the context — they just look at the medium.
Ellin Bessner: Hang on a second. The Vancouver Police Foundation has an initiative called the Chinese Community Policing Centre graffiti removal team, to help businesses in Chinatown clean up because of anti-Asian graffiti. So when you hear about that, and then this — where do you go? How come they’re not interested in this?
Joshua: If this were homophobic slurs on Davie Street, which is like the Vancouver queer community, there would be zero tolerance for this. If this was anti-Asian racism in Chinatown, there would be zero tolerance for this. But because this is anti-Zionism, it’s being treated as political speech. And I think the VPD is very scared of entering into any kind of charge where they are becoming arbiters of freedom of expression.
Ellin Bessner: Have you seen any more or any less graffiti, and have you seen any more response from the authorities that makes you optimistic?
Joshua: There have been some developments. This individual was witnessed by a police officer writing on a city utility box, where he was arrested. It was documented, they forced him to erase it and gave him a verbal warning saying do not mark up City of Vancouver infrastructure. And since that happened, he has continued to mark up city poles, he’s marked up a couple of utility boxes, which I’ve documented before removing the chalk. But the VPD has basically said we need footage of him doing it in order to pursue charges against him. There’s no video — these businesses have cameras. I’ve spoken to two different businesses about it, and they’ve both said we’re not going to release footage to you, we will only release footage to the VPD. And I’ve said, here’s the case number, here’s the officer to contact. And I don’t believe either one of those businesses has followed through with sharing those materials.
But my hope is that if the Vancouver police won’t pursue criminal charges, maybe the city of Vancouver will pursue bylaw fines, and this person will get fined — because he is costing the city a lot of money in cleanup.
Ellin Bessner: Well, you’re doing it, or they’re doing it — both?
Joshua: We’ve encouraged community members to report the graffiti to the City of Vancouver 311 graffiti removal process. And every time that happens, they have to send a graffiti cleanup crew to go and clean up this mess. And this individual has even filmed himself taunting the graffiti crew, saying, “Chalked and loaded — I’ll come back when you guys are gone and write it again.” He has chosen this medium of chalk because it is semi-permanent. But every time we wash it away, he comes back and writes it again. It’s really just a battle of attrition at this point — whack-a-mole.
Ellin Bessner: Right, but you’re not giving up.
Joshua: Well, for the most part it seems like a cat-and-mouse game between me and him. I’ve been trying to rally more community members — Steven being one of the few consistent ones who also helps wash these away. But it’s really starting to feel like we need to get the community to band together to remove them as quickly as possible, to minimize his visibility so that we don’t have to endure this day in and day out.
Ellin Bessner: I heard when I was researching this from someone whose kids live in Vancouver that Starbucks near the art gallery pays its employees or pays people to go out every morning after the protests to clean the chalk outside of their store too. Is that something you’ve seen or know about?
Joshua: I have encountered — like Steven was saying, he targets the hospital quite a bit — and I have met hospital staff members who came out with a broom and a bucket of water to wash the messages away in the mornings. But they work Monday through Friday, so Saturdays and Sundays those messages will persist if no one removes them.
Ellin Bessner: Do you think he’s targeting the hospital because Belzberg is a prominent Jewish family name?
Joshua: I think he’s generally targeting his community because he knows it’s a Jewish neighbourhood. And he has admitted — in his GoFundMe, he’s admitted he’s taken out a line of credit, which he’s pretty much all but spent, and that he’s dedicating 30 to 40 hours a week on his activism because he thinks he’s making a difference. I simply ask people: who is the intended audience of these messages? Who do you think they’re actually helping? Because I don’t believe they help anyone in the Middle East.
Steven: And they’re not the intended audience. The intended audience is the Jewish community of Vancouver. and I’ve seen some of the posts that Josh has sent me — it’s like, “Hate Zionism, love Jews,” or vice versa, in whatever order. But the two are inextricably linked. How can you love Jews and not — Zionism is not a dirty word. We all know that. But they choose to weaponize it.
So it’s really just a personal belief where I feel that this is just gross. And yeah, I just wish there was some way I could stop it. There’s really not a day that goes by where I don’t want to just ask that guy — why do you hate so much? What have we done to you? Literally, it’s practically a one-man hate campaign. Why?
Joshua: obviously became extremely activated after October 7th — when I would encounter fellow photographers sharing videos of the bulldozers crashing through security walls. I worked several high-profile events where medical staff and security were wearing keffiyehs, which I felt very uncomfortable around. And I’ve really seen how social media has radicalized people.
And I feel sad and sorry for this person, because he’s made anti-Zionism his entire identity. He has — I don’t believe he has any hobbies, or anyone in his life to challenge his point of view or give him a fresh perspective or a break from this level of hate.
And I knew, when the hostages came home, that this antisemitism wasn’t going to disappear. It was just going to morph into a new form. He’s gone from tearing down hostage posters to writing anti-Zionist messages. He’s also focused on other trendy topics — sometimes he’ll write “All eyes on Gaza, Lebanon, Venezuela, Cuba” — as if these regions have anything to do with each other. I mean, ultimately I think it’s a Marxist anti-Western point of view that has infected his mind, and he’s not going to change unless he actively chooses to deradicalize. It’s really scary.
Ellin Bessner: You mentioned he’s gone from defacing posters to spending 40 hours a week on this activism. Are you concerned that this will go further, into physical violence against somebody, including you?
Joshua: Yes. I believe that this is potentially a stepping stone to something far greater. Hopefully not. But I think the more the message gets out there, the more that people are going to maybe start seeing his point of view, and that maybe not him, but maybe somebody he has directly or indirectly influenced will take action of some sort, whatever that may be. I don’t see him really stopping here. No.
Steven: Unfortunately, I have to agree. I think he is getting only positive reinforcement from the community — people honking at him, people applauding him for writing these messages. He makes claims like, “Oh, it’s 90% love and 10% hate.” The only way he’s going to stop is if he either faces criminal consequences or financial consequences and is forced to go get a real job again. He’s not seeing any sort of real consequence for his actions. He’s essentially normalized anti-Zionism in our Jewish community in a way that is deeply upsetting, and it feels like we do not have the city or the authorities’ support in just neutralizing public space. That’s all I’m really after — to be able to go out and go to the bus stop or walk around the park and not have to see this hate.
Ellin Bessner: I applaud you for coming forward, and I really appreciate you exploring these themes with us here on The Canadian Jewish News’ “North Star” podcast. Good luck to both of you. Keep us informed.
Joshua: Thank you for having us.
Steven: Thank you. Appreciate it.
Ellin Bessner: And that’s what Jewish Canada sounded like for this episode of North Star, made possible thanks to Ira Gluskin and Maxine Granovsky Gluskin’s Charitable Foundation.
B.C. just recently became the first province to introduce legislation creating bubble zones around schools and places of worship to prevent harassment and intimidation by protesters, but those protections probably wouldn’t cover the entire Oak Street corridor and the stretch running north from Vancouver’s major Jewish hub — where King David High School is, and so is the Federation, the JCC, and the Holocaust Centre.
Our show is produced by Zachary Judah Kauffman and Izzie Helenchilde, with Michael Fraiman as executive director and Alicia Richler as our editorial director.
We’d like to hear from you about this story. You can write to us at [email protected]. Thanks for listening.
Credits
Host and writer: Ellin Bessner ( @ebessner )Production team: Zachary Kauffman (senior producer), Izzie Helenchilde (producer), Michael Fraiman (executive producer), Alicia Richler (editorial director)Music: Bret Higgins
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