With the start of the new year and beginning of winter term, our student groups are witnessing no progress. Over the past 15 months, we have witnessed the Israeli Occupation Forces wage a systematic campaign of terror against the Palestinian and Lebanese people. They have turned Gaza’s hospital courtyards into mass grave sites[1] for the Palestinian children and elders they have tortured and executed. They have deliberately attacked all twelve universities in Gaza[2], bombed schools sheltering displaced Palestinian families[3], and looted or destroyed thousands of precious antiquities from Palestinian archives[4].
They have hardened the already-brutal siege of Gaza, intentionally starving Palestinians to death[5] and preventing the delivery of vital food, water, and medical aid[6]. They have subjected Palestinian detainees, including abducted healthcare workers, to sexual assault and gang-rape[7]. They have intentionally attacked medical workers, ambulances, and clinics throughout Lebanon[8].
Israeli soldiers have proudly posted a sickening stream of content to social media[9], singing as they set fire to Palestinians’ homes[10] and posing as they burn library books[11]. Armed Israeli settlers have torched Palestinians’ cars, houses[12], and olive groves[13], and forcibly displaced thousands of families across the Occupied West Bank. They have marched through the holy city of Jerusalem, chanting, “Death to Arabs,” “Flatten Gaza,” and “May your village burn.”[14] Knesset members, military officials, journalists, and academics have repeatedly made public statements inciting the genocide of the Palestinian people and advocating for the colonization of more Palestinian land[15], in flagrant defiance of the International Court of Justice’s orders to prevent genocide[16], punish incitement to genocide, and end the unlawful occupation of Palestine[17].
Canadian Government Inaction
For over a year, our communities have protested and petitioned the Canadian Government to take meaningful action to end the ongoing genocide of Palestinians, from denouncing the live-streamed war crimes and crimes against humanity to sanctioning Israeli officials and enforcing a two-way arms embargo on Israel. They have failed to do so. More than this, ministers have openly defended the Israeli Occupation Forces, the racist ideology of Zionism[18], and Canada’s ties to military companies and Israeli government entities which are facilitating the ongoing genocide of Palestinians and settler-colonial occupation of Palestine. In doing so, they have reinforced[19] systemic anti-Palestinian racism[20] while also perpetuating the anti-semitic conflation of all Jewish people with the crimes of the Israeli apartheid regime[21].
Instead of condemning the crushing terror that the Israeli Occupation Forces are inflicting on Palestinians, the Canadian Government decided to target Samidoun: Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network[22], smearing the organization as a “terrorist entity”. Samidoun formed in 2011 to advocate for the rights of Palestinian political prisoners, including children, who are locked away for protesting their oppression and subjected to horrific torture and sexual assault in Israeli prisons[23]. By criminalizing one of the largest advocacy groups campaigning for the rights of Palestinian political prisoners through the racist discourse of the “War on Terror,” the Canadian Government is making it clear that it conceptualizes ‘terror’ through a white supremacist lens. In other words, it does not recognize or care about atrocities when they are inflicted on colonized peoples.
Such labels perpetuate the dehumanization of colonized peoples and the de-legitimization of Indigenous resistance to settler-colonial occupation and apartheid. The state’s criminalization of Samidoun is the latest step in a pervasive crackdown on the global movement to liberate Palestine from Zionist settler-colonial occupation. It also exposes the double standards of the Canadian settler state whose ministers pay lip-service to reconciliation with Indigenous communities while undermining freedom of association, freedom of expression, and academic freedom for all those who support Palestinians’ right to return[24], to resist militant settler-colonial occupation, and to live freely in their ancestral land.
More recently, the B.C. and Canadian settler-governments sought to criminalize Wet’suwet’en land defenders for protesting the Coastal GasLink pipeline that will sever their ancestral territory in two[25]. Similarly, the Mohawk Warriors were branded as “terrorists” during the 1990 Oka Crisis[26], as they resisted the expansion of a golf course on their sacred land. These historic examples show a clear pattern: settler-colonial states cynically designate many people who resist oppression as “terrorists” in an effort to silence movements for justice and liberation.
Our University is Complicit
UBC has similarly failed us. Members of the UBC community have experienced hostile, coordinated attempts by administrators, campus security officers, RCMP, and Zionist organizations to prevent us from teaching and learning about the settler-colonial occupation of Palestine. UBC remained silent when the media and Zionist organizations targeted professor Litsa Chatzivasileiou[27], and itself became complicit in targeting professors Brenna Bhandar[28] and Sean Tucker[29] for their Palestine advocacy. They publicly posted false allegations about student activity, exposing students to danger, and brought spurious charges of student misconduct during our peaceful encampment, harassing people of conscience who supported the protest. They targeted students with more surveillance, police intimidation, and racial profiling as our campus movement has grown.
UBC speaks of academic freedom but has stifled open dialogue and silenced advocacy for Palestinian liberation from Israel’s illegal occupation. Meanwhile, they refuse to name the genocide and systematic obliteration of education in Gaza despite the many UN and humanitarian agencies documenting those atrocities[30][31]. UBC’s administrators are aware that the institution is investing in military companies which are directly profiting from the ongoing genocide of Palestinians[32]. They are aware that the University maintains student exchange agreements with Israeli institutions occupying stolen Palestinian land[33][34][35][36]. They are choosing to remain complicit, just as former administrators chose to remain complicit in South African Apartheid.
Moving Forward
In the face of government ministers’ and UBC administrators’ choices to enable the ongoing genocide of Palestinians, the strength of our anti-colonial movement is in our unity. We will not be intimidated into silence. We reiterate that we will keep fighting to stop this genocide and ongoing imperialist support for the Israeli apartheid regime until Palestine and all Palestinians are truly free from the river to the sea.
United Nations Human Rights - Office of the High Commissioner ↩︎
United Nations Human Rights - Office of the High Commissioner ↩︎
United National Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East ↩︎
United Nations Human Rights - Office of the High Commissioner ↩︎
United Nations Human Rights - Office of the High Commissioner ↩︎
United Nations Human Rights - Office of the High Commissioner ↩︎