We are first and foremost concerned with the way in which a McGill administrative head has sent a message from the Media Relations Office (MRO) to all McGill constituents prior to the petition even being submitted – this raises the question of whether or not this petition and our demands have even gone through the official procedural channels. We suspect that our demands were dismissed without due process. We would also like to point to the power and racial dynamics in the response to our open letter: a group of racialized students which includes Palestinians who are directly impacted by the colonial violence that Zionism promotes are being told by a Vice-Principal of an elite institution – that is built and founded upon the forced labor of enslaved Black and Indigenous people – that our demands are a “misuse” of EDI values. 

We consider the response to our open letter nothing short of an abuse of power and a fear tactic to silence our just demands – which have already been signed by over 1 100 of McGill constituents and counting. Provost Christopher Manfredi: you are abusing your position of power and are using coercive language to deter your constituents from supporting our open letter, while vilifying our anti-racist demands as “unacceptable.” We have already received messages from constituents who had signed the letter, informing us that people in their departments are being targeted for supporting the open letter and bullied into removing their signatures. These are constituents who have expressed their solidarity with us and wish to support but feel as though they are unable to do so given the hate messages they have received. Despite these scare tactics, employed by both the administration and Zionists on campus, students are showing their support for Palestinian liberation, as they continue to sign and share this petition, which is clearly expressing popular student anger at McGill’s continued complicity in violent settler-colonial ideologies, from Turtle Island to Palestine.

The email sent by the Provost office to the McGill community is not only itself confirmation of what we know to be true and have experienced, it is also evidence of what the letter denounces: McGill is not a welcoming place for Palestinians, Arabs, Muslim people, and their allies, and it has no desire to become a welcoming place for these communities. In particular, this following excerpt from McGill’s EDI Strategic Plan 2020-2025 Vision subsection contradicts the claim that the Provost is making:

Universities across Canada are presently called upon to recognize and address historical and contemporary forces that result in social inequities in postsecondary contexts. Many such forces have their roots in ideologies and practices – such as colonialism, slavery, and patriarchy. Although these ideologies and practices no longer reflect McGill’s values, their harmful effects persist. As such, our institutional commitment to equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) must acknowledge and seek to address the lasting effects of historic injustices that continue to challenge equal opportunities to access, and to succeed within, the McGill community.

Conceptual Framework- Equity (p. 3):

Equity, unlike the notion of equality, is not about sameness of treatment. It denotes fairness and justice in process and in results. Equitable outcomes often require differential treatment and resource redistribution to achieve a level playing field among all individuals and communities. This requires recognizing and addressing barriers to opportunities for all to thrive in our University environment.

Despite McGill’s supposed commitment to recognizing and addressing the way that McGill upholds the legacy of violent ideologies, administrators continuously refuse to listen to and amend the very real harm they have enacted on racialized communities. This proves that McGill has no intention of addressing the “historical and contemporary forces that result in social inequities.” Further, the claim that our demands for the University to denounce an apartheid state – which is currently inflicting deadly violence against a colonized people – is a “misuse of our EDI-based plans and policies” is particularly abhorrent. These policies are made for our use and it is the responsibility of the Provost to apply them in ways that promote justice for racialized and colonized students facing entrenched systemic violence. 

Furthermore, framing the current events as “erupted violence” and “unrest” that has an effect on “Palestinian and Jewish members of the campus community” is shockingly irresponsible. This disingenuous framing is violent in several ways: (1) it conflates Zionism with Judaism. This is hugely insulting to the anti-Zionist Jewish students who signed the petition, in addition to constituting a classic trope of anti-Semitism, which portrays all Jews as monolithic and supportive of the oppression of Palestinians. It also implies that any criticism of the state of Israel is anti-Semitic, which  is dangerous and wrong. As a settler-colonial regime, Israel is as deserving of severe criticism as any other settler-colonial, racist or otherwise oppressive state. (2) it implies that Palestine and Israel are engaged in “conflict” or “unrest”. This vocabulary implies equal power and responsibility, and serves to deliberately ignore the blatantly unbalanced reality of what is occurring in Palestine: settler colonialism, military occupation, land theft, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing of stateless Palestinians, by a powerful settler-colonial Israeli state, its military forces, and its settlers. Implying otherwise is shallow and violent, and false, since it serves to hide the oppressive system of colonial domination which has lain at the root of the violence since 1948. 

Additionally the Provost’s response claims that our open letter demands to “exclude some worldviews and ways of self-identifying from our campus.” We wish to point out that Zionism is not a simple worldview nor is it a way of self-identifying; Zionism is an ideology that upholds and promotes a violent settler-colonial structure that is currently terrorizing, maiming, and killing Palestinians to enforce and expand the Zionist colonization of Palestinian land. 

The administration’s statement also conveniently sidestepped a central demand of our petition: divestment from all institutions complicit in the aforementioned atrocities. This is nothing new. In the 1980s, Black and African students demanded that McGill divest from South African apartheid. This campaign was largely driven by the McGill South Africa Committee, which pushed for divestment through educational workshops, sit-ins, and protests. McGill officially divested in 1986, although the practical implementation of total divestment took a few years. This push was reinforced by a “four-hour protest by 1 200 McGill students” in order to pressure the University to cut all academic or financial ties with institutions dealing with South Africa. McGill therefore has a history of promoting and financing apartheid states, only divesting after sustained student pressure. And that is why we are pressuring. 

We reject McGill administration instrumentalizing the language of care, community, and inclusion in its institutional effort to silence dissidents and perpetuate a damaging “both-sides-to-blame” narrative. As we stated in our open letter “If McGill fails to actively respond to and institutionalize our demands, then it would confirm what most racialized students on campus feel, which is that the McGill administration’s creation of various ad-hoc committees, policies, and working groups are lip service meant to assuage our well-founded and immediate concerns.” 

Despite it all, we hope that McGill University will revise their official statement regarding our open letter and engage with it in good faith. In the meantime, we urge constituents of McGill University to consider the email sent by the Provost with a more critical eye, and we hope that the document below will help in doing so. 

Below is a critical analysis of the Provost’s email:

The post Official Statement by Organizers re: Provost and Vice-Principal Academic Christopher Manfredi’s Response to the Open Letter appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The Jordan River Valley has historically been a site of arable land and fertile soil, and the River Jordan is a significant source of water for Palestinians. According to a report by the United Nations, Israel has already set up an extensive system to divert Palestinian water to Israeli settlements, while Israeli drilling and pollution contaminates the waters still accessible to Palestinians. Given Israel’s current behaviour, the annexation of the Jordan River Valley can only be understood as an extension of its policy of environmental racism against Palestinians, and only further serves to deny them their human rights. It would also facilitate and accelerate the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the Jordan Valley and other regions targeted for annexation. In the words of nearly 50 independent UN human rights experts: “the morning after annexation would be the crystallization of an already unjust reality: two peoples living in the same space, ruled by the same state, but with profoundly unequal rights. This is a vision of a 21st century apartheid.”

How did we get here?

Ever since its establishment in 1948, the settler-colonial state of Israel has subjected Palestinians to a wide range of racist policies, designed to physically eliminate them from their ancestral lands, while erasing or appropriating their history and culture. From 1947 to 1950, Zionist paramilitaries and the Israeli army carried out the first major phase of this violent process, through a terror campaign of ethnic cleansing, including over 70 massacres, in which 15,000 Palestinians were killed, at least 530 villages and towns were destroyed, and around 750,000 Palestinians (half of the Palestinian population) fled their homes, and were barred from returning. To this day, Israel denies these refugees and their descendants their internationally-recognized Right of Return. The Palestinians who remained within the borders of the Israeli state have since been subjected to military rule, displacement and land expropriation, ghettoization and other forms of state-sanctioned discrimination, despite being Israeli citizens. In 1967, Israeli forces occupied the remaining Palestinian regions of the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, as well as the Syrian Golan Heights. Once again, Israeli forces expelled 300,000 Palestinians from the West Bank, as well as 80 per cent of the Golan’s Syrian population. 

In 1980, Israel formally annexed occupied East Jerusalem, in violation of international law. The next year, it annexed the occupied Golan Heights. Today, the Israeli government has pledged to begin annexing large parts of the West Bank, without granting citizenship rights to its Palestinian residents. As it did in occupied East Jerusalem, annexation would essentially formalize and entrench an Israeli policy of apartheid which has existed since 1967 in the occupied West Bank, where Israeli settlers enjoy full access to natural resources, infrastructure, and the protections of civil law, while Palestinians endure a brutal military regime of checkpoints, house demolitions, land theft, environmental destruction, deportation, and murder at the hands of Israeli soldiers, police, and settlers. Meanwhile, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip continue to live in ever-worsening conditions under a destructive blockade, where attempts to protest or resist the siege are met with the bullets of Israeli snipers.

Just like previous international reactions to Israeli atrocities, the response of the “international community” to the looming annexation has been predictably toothless. In particular, Canada’s government has not issued a single statement condemning the annexation, while Israel’s military continues to receive millions of dollars worth of hardware from Canadian contractors. Like the United States, the settler colonial state of Canada has long been a staunch defender of Israel’s behaviour, providing it with significant diplomatic, economic, and military aid, at the same time as it pursues the destruction of Indigenous land and life here on Turtle Island. 

McGill University: Accomplice in Occupation, Enabler of Annexation

McGill University’s complicity in Palestinian dispossession and suffering is every bit as egregious and unapologetic as that of the Canadian government. As the apartheid reality in Palestine becomes increasingly impossible to deny, it’s beyond time for McGill to drop its investments in Mizrahi-Tefahot Bank, which operates branches in illegal Israeli settlements and finances the construction of new settlements on more and more stolen Palestinian land. It’s beyond time for McGill to ditch its investments in Re/Max, which sells real estate in these same settlements, thereby facilitating and profiting from the transfer of Israeli settlers into occupied Palestinian territory, in violation of article 49 of the Fourth Geneva convention. It’s beyond time for McGill to divest from L-3 Communications, a company that supplied equipment to Israeli checkpoints, provided engines for Israeli tanks, and helped assemble the Hermes 900 Unmanned Arial Vehicle (UAV) used in the 2014 attack on Gaza, in which Israeli forces were instructed to deliberately target Palestinian civilians.

McGill’s complicity in apartheid is not limited to its investments. It also extends to its network of exchanges and memoranda of understanding with Israeli educational institutions which are deeply implicated in the atrocities committed by the Israeli state. For instance, McGill has established partnerships with Tel Aviv University and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, both of which are heavily and openly involved in military research and development (R&D). According to one Tel Aviv University professor, “Military R&D in Israel would not exist without the universities. They carry out all the basic scientific investigation, which is then developed either by defense industries or the army.” What’s more, Tel Aviv University’s Greenberg National Institute of Forensic Medicine has for a long time directly assisted in the state’s policy of detaining the dead bodies of killed Palestinians, as well as dissecting them without the family’s permission. Another formal partner of McGill, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, hosts a military intelligence training program, while its very rooftops have been used by Israeli snipers to shoot protesters in the Palestinian neighborhoods of Jerusalem.

It is beyond time for McGill to end its formal relationships with companies, universities and other institutions directly involved in the the subjugation and destruction of Palestinian lives, just as it cut its ties with the institutions complicit in South African apartheid in the 1980s, after concerted student activism. 

To our fellow McGill students

Do not shy away from the conversation because it is deemed “taboo.” Conversations about human rights should never be taboo or controversial. Refusing to have a conversation about Palestinian human rights under the pretext that the situation is “too complex” for firm moral stances is essentially suggesting that the existence of Palestinians and their fundamental human rights are controversial, or just inconvenient.

Start listening to what Palestinians have been telling you all along, rather than shutting them down and treating them like they are “biased” or “too emotional” just because they are speaking from lived experiences. Palestinian students are routinely excluded and ignored in conversations about Palestine-Israel on campus. Too many fellow students will only take anti-Zionist narratives seriously on the condition that they come from the mouth of a white non-Palestinian. Despite the fact that these issues affect us in profound, often upsetting ways, Palestinian students rarely get asked “what do you think?” It is important to understand not only that negating, ignoring, or gaslighting Palestinians is a harmful micro-aggression, but that consistently doing so creates an unsafe, systemically violent environment for Palestinian students to exist on campus. We ask that you, our fellow students, start to actively notice when our voices are not present or when our lived experiences are dismissed, and to actively make strides to include us and listen to us.

Stop treating the colonization of Palestine as an “unsolvable two-sided conflict” between equally matched rivals. The details might be complicated, but the overarching truth is the reality of settler-colonial domination and subjugation of an indigenous people. Since the late 19th century, the Zionist colonial movement and subsequently the Israeli state, backed by other colonial powers, has been expanding by forcibly removing Palestinians from their ancestral lands, restricting them to exile or to ever-shrinking enclaves resembling Bantustans, and distributing their lands and resources to Israeli settlers. Today, the Israeli state alone controls the borders, the economy, the population registry, the infrastructure, the lands, and the waters between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, sustaining the unjust and violent domination of one ethno-national group over another. 

The impending annexation merely marks a formalization, an escalation and a deterioration of this regime. It’s beyond time for our fellow students, as well as McGill University, to finally opt out of complicity in the violent erasure of Palestinians from their homeland, and decide which side of history they should stand on: that of Apartheid, or that of Justice.

The post It’s Beyond Time appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Early this October, two members of SSMU’s executive team, Samuel Haward (VP Finance) and Sanchi Bhalla (VP Internal) received a strange offer: a free trip to Israel. In addition to Haward and Bhalla, other SSMU staff members were also offered trips: SSMU Indigenous Affairs Commissioner Tomas Jirousek and two executives from the Black Students’ Network. Haward, Sanchi, Jirousek and the BSN executives all rejected the offer.

According to Haward, both he and Bhalla were initially approached separately during their respective office hours by Hillel McGill representatives, who pitched the offer. A week or so later, only Haward received a formal written invitation from Hillel Montreal (Hillel McGill’s parent organization) about this “once-in-a-lifetime, unique opportunity.” In the interests of transparency, Haward agreed to provide a copy of this invitation to McGill Students in Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR), who shared it with the Daily. It reads: “We’ve identified you as an invaluable student to have for this trip due to your student leadership experience and connections on campus.” On this “all-expenses paid” trip, intended for 20 selected McGill students, participants would be treated to “a roundtrip airfare from Montreal-Trudeau International Airport, 10 nights at hotels in Israel, 2 meals per day, and other programming costs.” The trip is planned from December 29 to January 8.

One SSMU executive reports that they were offered, in the words of the Hillel McGill representative, “a free trip to Israel so [they] could better understand the context of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement and educate others on campus” upon their return.

The actual objective of the trip is far from clear. One SSMU executive reports that they were offered, in the words of the Hillel McGill representative, “a free trip to Israel so [they] could better understand the context of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement and educate others on campus” upon their return. BDS is an international movement launched by Palestinian civil society in 2005, urging states and individuals to place economic and political pressure on the Israeli state and its institutions in order to pressure Israel to comply with international law and end its human rights abuses against Palestinians.

The written invitation was more careful to obscure the precise objectives of the trip. It vaguely offered “an intensive experiential seminar that will explore the region’s deep history and grapple with nuanced political and religious realities,” in which “a top cohort of student leaders […] will learn about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and examine its complexities and nuances while travelling throughout the region.” Furthermore, while Bhalla was approached in a closed office and told that this offer was “strictly confidential,” Haward was approached openly and told SPHR that “no such confidentiality was mentioned.” The SSMU executives in question felt these inconsistencies were “deeply troubling.” In a collective letter to Hillel McGill on October 15, the SSMU executive team expressed “discomfort with the process by which invitations of ‘free trips to Israel’ have been extended to SSMU and SSMU-affiliated Executives and Staff” and collectively rejected the invitations. They also demanded that Hillel McGill immediately publicize the following information: “The fact that these invitations have been extended”; “Who they have been extended to and why these individuals were chosen”; and “The details and specific purpose of the trip being offered.” Although Hillel Montreal responded to the SSMU executives and stated that the invitations were “by no means confidential,” at the time of publication, neither Hillel McGill nor Hillel Montreal have offered any public explanation or clear justification for offering this trip to so many McGill student representatives or clarified their selection process. The Daily also reached out to Naomi Mazer, the Director of Youth Engagement at GenMTL and Hillel Montreal, who has not responded to request for comment.

Neither Hillel McGill nor Hillel Montreal have offered any public explanation or clear justification for offering this trip to so many McGill student representatives or clarified their selection process.

One thing is clear: this is not an isolated incident. Last year, two SSMU executives, former President Tre Mansdoerfer and former VP Student Life Sophia Esterle, were also offered a similar trip. This year, Hillel McGill and Hillel Montreal have offered the trip to a large number of “student leaders” in the Arts Undergraduate Society (AUS) and the Science Undergraduate Society (SUS), in addition to inviting SSMU executives and staff. The Daily has confirmed that the following student officials have either accepted the offer from Hillel, or applied for the trip on their own initiative: Adin Chan (Arts Representative to SSMU and Incoming Director – SSMU Board of Directors); Andrew Chase (Arts Representative to SSMU); Paige Collins (Incoming Director – SSMU Board of Directors); Jonah Levitt (Director – SSMU Board of Directors); Stefan Suvajac (AUS VP Finance); and Jordyn Wright (Science Representative to SSMU and Director – SSMU Board of Directors). Adin Chan, Paige Collins, Jonah Levitt (who is also President of Hillel McGill), and Jordyn Wright are all currently up for approval by online vote to the SSMU Board of Directors.

Hasbara on North American Campuses

For a number of years now, free trips to Israel for student leaders have become an important feature of Israeli hasbara (a form of Israeli propaganda aimed at an international audience) on campuses in the United States. According to the St. Louis Jewish Light newspaper, Hillel chapters in the United States had organized more than 40 organized trips to Palestine-Israel for university students from 2014 to 2018.

The trips are funded by the Maccabee Task Force (MTF), an organization “aimed at combating the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel” by funding both overt and covert anti-BDS initiatives. According to its executive director, David Brog, “the deal with our partners was, if these are things you want to do, here’s the deal: you do them, we pay for them, and you don’t have to put our name or logo on it.” According to the Times of Israel, “one of MTF’s strategies has been to recruit what it calls ‘influencers’ on campus – including student leaders who might already favor BDS – and send them to Israel and the West Bank on fact-finding trips.” According to MTF’s own website, “returning from these missions, students are more likely to work against BDS activities, protests and resolutions on campus.” In 2018, MTF “expanded its footprint even wider, operating on 80 campuses, including several in Canada for the first time.” Given that the first trip of this kind was allegedly offered by Hillel Montreal in the same year (2018), it is reasonable to suspect that MTF is providing much, if not all, of the funding for Hillel Montreal’s initiative.

All these trips aim to promote Israel’s image, while paying lip-service to the “complexities” of its systematic oppression of Palestinians.

MTF was founded in 2015 as an initiative from conservative, pro-Israel billionaire Sheldon Adelson. Adelson also funds Taglit-Birthright Israel, an organization that sponsors free trips to Israel for Jewish youth, and he has contributed significant financial support to US President Donald Trump. Jewish Voice for Peace’s #ReturntheBirthright campaign has long highlighted the ethical issues of free trips to Israel mostly funded by a major Trump ally. Other wealthy donors have also poured resources into anti-BDS organizations like MTF – for instance, real estate millionaire Adam Milstein is another prolific donor to right-wing, pro-Israel causes. According to The Intercept, Milstein’s strategy is “to get ugly with BDS supporters, humiliate them, and tar them as racists.” To do this, Milstein has funded groups that “accuse student activists of ties to terrorists, monitor student supporters of Palestinian rights, plaster students’ names on shadowy websites, and file legal challenges that pose a threat to activist work.”

As the McGill example demonstrates, organizers will sometimes seek to obscure their political objectives of countering BDS and other forms of Palestinian activism. All these trips aim to promote Israel’s image, while paying lip-service to the “complexities” of its systematic oppression of Palestinians. Hopkins Hillel announced that its trip for students at John Hopkins University was meant to “deepen our understanding of the complex and beautiful region that is modern day Israel […] while developing a textured understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

“This is a propaganda tour with a new veneer” – Philip Weiss, writing for Mondoweiss

Northwestern University’s Hillel chapter also offered a “new leadership journey to Israel and the Palestinian Territories.” Similar to Hillel Montreal’s “intensive experiential seminar,” its stated purpose was “to educate emerging and current Northwestern undergraduate student leaders about Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, shining an intentional light on complexities and nuances in an immersive and experiential way.” According to Philip Weiss, writing for Mondoweiss, “the draft itinerary […] makes it clear that student leaders – apparently from all backgrounds – are to be propagandized to love Israel, but with a little more realism thrown in. Like a flyby in Ramallah with ‘Palestinian leaders,’ on the same day that the students drink beer at Taybeh brewery in the West Bank and do three other events. Also they’ll meet an Arab-Israeli journalist, in between learning about the thriving LGBTQ culture in Tel Aviv, startup nation, and co-existence projects. So there’s no real doubt about the thrust of this tour. The student leaders are [also] going to visit the illegal Efrat settlement and meet the mayor, and tour the occupied Golan Heights too. This is a propaganda tour with a new veneer.”

In University of Wisconsin-Madison Hillel’s version of the trip, recounted by Milwaukee’s Jewish Chronicle, “they took the group to the top of the Golan Heights; to see Jewish and Arab women working together to make fair-trade olive oil; to see Israel’s role in helping Syrian refugees at a Galilee hospital; to tour the Old City of Jerusalem; to a security barrier tour; and to meet with former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Daniel B. Shapiro, among other activities.” The Golan stop in particular illustrates the not-so-subtle propaganda of this kind of trip. Rather than face the reality that the Syrian Golan Heights, like the West Bank, have been conquered by military force and increasingly colonized by Israeli settlers since 1967, participants are encouraged to applaud a Jewish-Arab fair-trade olive oil initiative. Thus, a regime of military domination and illegal settlement expansion gets repackaged as a heart-warming example of interethnic “harmony.” In the gleeful words of one supportive participant, “Hillel got to control the narrative.” Another participant, dazzled by their free trip to Israel, exclaimed: “It felt so cultured and happy and so first-world.”

Conflict of Interest?

It is especially concerning that so many members of the SSMU Board of Directors, AUS representatives to SSMU, and the AUS VP Finance have accepted this thinly-disguised hasbara trip, given SSMU’s fraught history with BDS and AUS executives’ unconstitutional approval of POLI 339 last winter. In addition, no one has yet investigated the possibility that some of the officials responsible for those decisions may have attended similar trips to Palestine/Israel in previous years.

Andrew Chase (Arts Representative to SSMU) claimed that the trip will be “completely independent,” because Hillel Montreal “strives to give a balanced and nuanced view.”

McGill SPHR asked some of the AUS Representatives to explain their participation in the trip. Andrew Chase (Arts Representative to SSMU) claimed that the trip will be “completely independent,” because Hillel Montreal “strives to give a balanced and nuanced view.” In his own reply, Adin Chan (Arts Representative to SSMU and Incoming Director to the SSMU Board of Directors) stated: “Hillel has insisted many times that they have no political expectations on our return.” When SPHR provided him with evidence to the contrary, he acknowledged that “it was incorrect for me to characterize Hillel as a neutral or independent group.” Nonetheless, he has not changed his intention to participate.

The least we can ask of our student leaders is that they refrain from participating in these kinds of propaganda tours. Far from being “balanced,” the evidence shows beyond doubt that this trip is part of a broader campaign of hasbara in North American academia, which is funded by avowedly right-wing, pro-Israel organizations and individuals, and which seeks to whitewash Israel’s image and undermine the international struggle against Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people.

In addition, the fact that so many student officials have accepted Hillel’s offer raises the issue of SSMU’s Conflict of Interest Policy, which binds all student officials under SSMU jurisdiction “for the duration of their involvement with the Society.” According to Article 4.F, officials cannot accept gifts which “possibly would influence the Concerned Individual in the performance of their duties [… and] if a Concerned Individual has any doubt about the appropriateness of accepting a gift, hospitality, donation, or other benefit, the Concerned Individual must refuse.”

Far from being “balanced,” the evidence shows beyond doubt that this trip is part of a broader campaign of hasbara in North American academia, which is funded by avowedly right-wing, pro-Israel organizations and individuals, and which seeks to whitewash Israel’s image and undermine the international struggle against Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people.

We also support the SSMU executives’ demand that Hillel McGill immediately make public: the fact that these invitations have been extended; who they have been extended to and why these individuals were chosen; and the details and specific purpose of the trip being offered.

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The Board of Governors came close to passing an amendment to the mandate of the Committee to Advise on Matters of Social Responsibility, or CAMSR. The change would have CAMSR “refrain from using the University’s resources to advance social or political causes.” To repeat, the committee that oversees the ethics of McGill’s investments was told that it need not pressure the university to make investment decisions on the basis of morality.

The proposed amendment would have struck a serious blow to Divest McGill and the McGill Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign on campus, as both campaigns call for the university to “refrain” from investing in corporations that advance the social or political causes of Climate Change and Israeli colonialism of Palestine.

The moral integrity of our University is at stake.

Divest McGill has demanded divestment from fossil fuel corporations in McGill’s endowment, and has twice requested that CAMSR support such a demand. CAMSR determines whether McGill’s investments cause “grave social injury”; it has claimed that fossil fuel corporations such as Enbridge and Petro-Canada do not. CAMSR is currently chaired by Cynthia Price-Verreault, who has held several senior management positions with Petro Canada, an oil corporation that has since merged with Suncor.

McGill Students in Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR) and the McGill BDS campaign have also critiqued McGill’s complicity in the Israeli occupation of Palestine. One example is its $2 million investments in RE/MAX, a real estate firm that has financed the development of illegal Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. In a 14-1 ruling in 2004, the International Court of Justice, the highest legal body in the world, ruled that Israeli settlements in the West Bank are illegal under international law.

McGill has divested from corporations supporting violations of international law before, such as those complicit in apartheid in South Africa, but it refuses to divest from corporations committing similar crimes today.

The proposed amendment did not pass because representatives of Divest McGill and SPHR McGill disrupted the meeting to stop its passing. We argued that students had a right to know about the proposal, as it has clear political repercussions, and demanded that it be tabled until the issue was brought forward in a community consultation session. The Board of Governors refused to agree to do this, and instead postponed a final decision on the amendment until the next meeting on February 15 so that the rest of the board, most of whom seemed ignorant about the content of the amendment and its social and political repercussions, could review the report further before making a decision. When it became clear that the Board had no intention to consult the community about the proposal, we shut down the meeting in song with a rendition of “We Have Got the Power.”

The content of the proposed amendment was carefully calculated to end McGill divestment campaigns, as the pre-empting of social and politically responsible investment decisions would be irreversible for another five years. The manner in which the amendment was proposed was equally brazen: the index of the agenda explicitly stated that “the current review [of CAMSR] does not introduce major changes,” merely “clarification in language and updates that reflect current practices.” We at Divest McGill and SPHR McGill believe this is a major change; do you?

Help us stop the second attempt to pass the amendment at the next Board of Governors meeting on February 15. The moral integrity of our University is at stake.

The post McGill tries to shut down divestment campaigns appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The Tamimi case
On December 19, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) shot Ahed’s 14-year old cousin, Muhammad Fadel Tamimi, with a rubber-coated metal bullet. He was subsequently placed in a medically induced coma. Shortly after, while the family was still unsure of Muhammad’s fate, IDF soldiers appeared at the Tamimi residence. The family ordered the soldiers to leave their property, and attempted to physically remove them. Ahed was filmed slapping one of the soldiers, an act that now founds the basis for her trial. Ahed’s mother, Nariman Tamimi, and her 21-year-old cousin Nour Tamimi, were also detained.

Ahed now faces up to ten years in prison based on 12 charges, including assault under aggravated circumstances and incitement. The Israeli military court filed the charges over offenses that include five other incidents over the past two years.

Child prisoners in Palestine
Ahed Tamimi is not a unique case of the injustices Palestine children confront daily. In the past five decades, an estimated 45,000 Palestinian children have been detained by the Israeli military. Israel is “the only country in the world” that prosecutes between 500 to 700 Palestinian children in military courts each year. Hundreds more are also arrested with their habeas corpus rights suspended, being left to languish in prison without prosecution or trial.

Israel’s actions and treatment of Palestinian child prisoners is in complete disregard of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which states that the arrest, detention or imprisonment of a child must be used “only as a measure of last resort and for the shortest appropriate period of time.” Despite this, lawyer reports show that “Israeli security forces are using unnecessary force and violence in arresting and detaining children, in some cases beating them, and often holding them in unsafe and abusive conditions.”

On trial in the occupier’s courts
Ahed, like other Palestinian children and adults, is currently being detained in a military prison and being tried in a military court. Illegal settlers on the Halamish settlement, which neighbours Ahed’s home, do not receive this treatment; if they commit similar acts, they are tried in an Israeli civilian court.

In the past five decades, an estimated 45,000 Palestinian children have been detained by the Israeli military.

Jonathan Pollack, a spokesperson for Tamimi’s legal team, drew attention to the ways in which Israel’s two-tiered legal system upholds apartheid, stating:

“Palestinians are subjected to military law, which is not based on legislation but on the decrees issued by the military commanders. That didn’t even exist in apartheid South Africa. They had one legal system — it was discriminatory, it was bad, but it was a single system of law.”
This is just one example of discriminatory laws and practices by Israel, which ultimately backed a recent United Nations report categorizing Israel as an apartheid state.

The fight for justice will go on
Despite ongoing attempts to pacify and suppress Palestinian youth, their spirit is not so easily broken. Just last year, over 1,000 political prisoners launched the largest Palestinian prisoner hunger strike against “Israel’s inhumane system of colonial and military occupation [which] aims to break the spirit of prisoners and the nation to which they belong, by inflicting suffering on their bodies, separating them from their families and communities, using humiliating measures to compel subjugation.”

When brought to trial, and asked by a judge, “How did you slap the soldier?” Ahed boldly replied, “Take off the cuffs and I will show you!”

Let’s follow Ahed’s demonstration of defiance and join the call by Samidoun Palestinian Prisoners Solidarity Network to mark January 26-30 as days of action to free Ahed Tamimi, Palestinian prisoners, and all other prisoners unjustly held in Israeli jails.

Email mcgillsphr@gmail.com to get involved.

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SPHR would like to reaffirm that, regardless of opinion, the necessity of discussing socio-political issues within SSMU is indeed within its mandate. Citing Article VII of SSMU’s Equity Policy, SSMU VP External Affairs Amina Moustaqim-Barrette clarified: “SSMU’s constitution states that we should [take a stance on political affairs]. If you think that an issue is divisive or polarizing, that’s okay. The civil rights movement, same-sex marriage, South African apartheid – they were all divisive and polarizing at some point, too.” Moustaqim-Barrette’s support was clearly endorsed by countless attendees of the GA who, regardless of their stance on the motion itself, vocalized the complete unacceptability of suppressing its discussion.

Instead of engaging in debate on the issues, the student body chose to postpone debate indefinitely.

Even in light of cyber-intimidation tactics such as the deactivation of a “yes” campaigner’s Facebook page and the same-day disappearance of the “yes” campaign’s event page, many supporters continued to passionately voice their opinions and, importantly, hear the voices of those who disagreed with them. SPHR, along with other students who waited for over four hours to speak to the motion, finds it disgraceful that the student body chose to silence debate. Both sides were forced to continue along the path of mutual ignorance rather than expand horizons and share their own knowledge and experiences.

Let it be remembered that Wednesday’s GA was one of the largest in SSMU’s history. What could have been an opportunity for students to learn about and debate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ended in censorship and a reinforced marginalization of voices already on the peripheries of the student body. This was due to a motion to postpone debate indefinitely, so that the substance of the main motion itself would not be discussed. On Wednesday, the GA, a space that gains its value from all students, regardless of political sympathies, was transformed into an arena that privileged just a few.

While an indefinite postponement of the motion is a loss for the Palestinian voices that are continually silenced in the public arena, SPHR refuses to consider this experience a defeat. We praise the exciting effect the mobilizing has had and will continue to have on our campus. It shows that students will not be silenced. Even the reaction to the very existence of the motion at the GA has left many who were previously ignorant of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict curious. In this sense, the intended purpose of the motion to spread awareness, even just to have the word “Palestine” on the lips of students, was fulfilled – with or without a Facebook page or a debate.

While an indefinite postponement of the motion is a loss for the Palestinian voices that are continually silenced in the public arena, SPHR refuses to consider this experience a defeat.

Not only do we see people having conversations about Palestinian human rights, a rare thing at McGill, but we see a clear expression of anger and frustration from nearly all students after the motion was postponed. We see a growing awareness that the campus has always been divided. There are those who wait, fight, raise their hands, then their voices to fight, and there are those who have the power to repress the efforts they do not agree with. This clear display of censorship is targeted only at a minority – at those who choose to raise awareness about how narratives are driven in a university that does little to shy away from Israeli institutions. Let it also be said, on this note, that we remain extremely supportive and proud of our friends at Demilitarize McGill whose work formed the backbone of the approved motion to expose and condemn military research at McGill and stand in solidarity with those negatively affected by it.

If undergraduate students do not want SSMU to provide a platform for voicing their opinions and learning from others in order to represent the student body as it was designed to do, it is our job as a unified campus collective that stands in solidarity with Palestinian human rights, along with other political solidarity collectives at McGill, to provide an alternative venue that allows our voices to be heard. We believe it is our duty as critical and passionate students not to dictate opinions to others on this issue, but to allow the student body to learn from each of its members, as opposed to sweeping important issues under the rug out of fear of discomfort or intimidation. Education, particularly alternative and critical education, is the main vehicle for combatting the ignorance and denial that continues to create injustices across the world. It is our job as students to not only seek out this knowledge, but to break the silence that has hidden it for so long.

SPHR McGill is a non-profit, student-based organization that advocates a strong social justice message to uphold the rights of the Palestinian people. To contact them, please email sphr.mcgill@gmail.com.

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