The Isrealification of the Canadian University

A year into Israel's genocide in Gaza, both the state of Israel and Canadian institutions continue to respond to resistance with increased repression and violence.

[This is an English version of text published in Le Devoir, October 19, 2024.]

A year after the Hamas-led attacks of October 7 and the beginning of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the prospect of peace and justice feels ever further away. In the last year, Israel has only intensified its violence, as its inability to achieve its military objectives has simply produced new objectives and an ever-expanding geography of destruction. Thus, an operation Benjamin Netanyahu once misleadingly described as a “war on Hamas” in Gaza is now labelled a war on “our enemies” in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Yemen, Iraq, and Iran.

As Israel escalates, the support of the United States, Canada, and other Western allies remains intact and registers in a bloody expanse of stolen lives and pulverized cities half a world away.

As the Palestinian scholar Abdaljawad Omar argues, Israel’s Western-backed violence has no obvious endpoint, as it finds its justification, ex post facto, in the resistance it inspires. “As Israel escalates [its violence],” Omar writes, “the resistance in the region finds itself … both battered and more alive,” a stance that prompts Israel to escalate once again. The circular logic of this endeavour was captured by an Israeli official who told Axios in September the military was pursuing “de-escalation through escalation.” Similarly, Omar suggests “Israel’s strategy is to borrow time, pushing the can down the road.”

Here at home, a similar dynamic is increasingly apparent. Over the last year, the Palestine solidarity movement has continued to grow in strength and numbers, as the lively protests across Canada on October 5 to 7 showed. In response, the Canadian government and the other domestic institutions targeted by the movement for their complicity in Israel’s violence have largely held their ground and amplified their recourse to the police and other agents of repression to protect the status quo.

Universities have been key sites of this confrontation between Palestine solidarity and the violent status quo. Students, since October 7, have organized passionately around a set of straightforward demands. Inspired by the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, students have demanded that universities sever their financial and practical ties with companies and institutions that enable and profit from the dispossession and killing of Palestinians.

Rather than accepting these simple demands, universities have generally responded by demonizing students, egregiously mischaracterizing their actions, and constructing an ever-widening system of surveillance, repression, and violence against them.

These repressive actions have escalated over the last year and finally reached bewildering and dystopian proportions in the last week. At a walkout protest for Palestine at Concordia on September 25, students were met with the “layered” repression typical of modern counter-insurgency. Campus security agents surveiled the protest, with some agents pointing out specific students to target while other agents physically detained the targeted students until police arrived to arrest them.

In one incident, security agents crushed a young activist against a ticket machine in the Guy-Concordia metro station. As two students sought to protect their peer, riot police flooded the metro station and a security agent directed police to arrest the three individuals and named the specific charges that should be applied.

While campus security is best used as an alternative to police, it has come to function as an accomplice to police that makes both of their actions more repressive. Two students arrested in the metro station on September 25, while they have yet to be formally charged, have been suspended from the university and have also been denied the customary opportunity to contest their suspension before a disciplinary tribunal on the grounds of their arrest and pending criminal charges. On September 30, the Concordia administration explained that such repression was necessary to “maintain a climate of respect” and “curate the difficult conversations that will be needed to move us all forward.”

On October 7, the merger of campus security and the police was omnipresent downtown. At McGill, the entire campus was surrounded by a security fence, with checkpoints staffed by security agents, drones flying overhead, and police patrolling the area inside and outside the fence by car, on foot, and on horseback. At Concordia, where a student walkout was planned for 2pm, hundreds of riot police from the Montreal and provincial police forces  scuttled into the streets, many of them clutching their baton or their tear gas launcher.

Just as Israel’s repression tends to produce its own justification in the resistance it compels, the same has occurred repeatedly in Montreal in the last year. In the latest example, the defenestration of two McGill buildings on Monday, which hundreds of riot police were unable to stop, is being used to justify the police deployment, as well as a further escalation of repression.

True to form, McGill announced on Wednesday that it has obtained an injunction against “protest activities within 5 metres of any McGill building” and named the vandalism on Monday as a justification.

In a statement issued from a campus surrounded by a security fence, McGill explained that the injunction would prevent “obstructive protests barring students and instructors from accessing classrooms and buildings.” The university nevertheless “supports the rights of all community members to express their views” in this increasingly carceral geography.

In this context, it is hard to ignore the connections between Israel’s violence abroad and political repression here at home. A Palestinian friend, after observing the locked-down McGill campus on Monday, reminded me of a seminal article by the Israeli anthropologist, Jeff Halper. In the article, Halper argues that Israel views Gaza as “a testing ground for … varied instruments of suppression” that it now exports worldwide.

The key selling point of the instruments is not their effectiveness – since ever more instruments are needed to put down the resistance they inevitably elicit – but Israel’s claim that they are compatible with democracy. Israel, after all, is purportedly “the only democracy in the Middle East.”

While Israel’s violence against Palestinians and the people of surrounding countries is obviously more deadly and egregious than the repression of Palestine solidarity actions here, Halper helpfully identifies the logic uniting these contexts. Here, as in Palestine, we are told that democracy and free expression are not only compatible with repression but require it, while every expression of resistance is used to justify an escalation of the repression.

There is no natural end to this cycle, except perhaps the full lockdown of universities and other “democratic” spaces, but there is a potential political end: accepting students’ demands to end universities’ complicity with Israeli Apartheid and genocide, barring police from campuses, and reinstating and paying reparations to the students punished for acting consciously in response to unconscionable Israeli violence and domestic complicity.