The student Intifada rises at Montréal universities

 

CD reports from the McGill Palestine solidarity encampment

Students from all four Montréal universities came together over the last week to express their solidarity with the Palestinian people and pressure their institutions to cut ties with Israel. Following the lead of the camps protests in the United States, they set up an encampment on the grounds of McGill University on April 27, calling for a ceasefire and demanding that Montréal’s halls of higher learning disclose their investments in companies complicit with the genocide in Palestine and divest from those companies, in addition to cutting ties with Israeli academic institutions.

In the specific case of McGill University, two student groups, McGill Hunger Strike for Palestine and Students for Justice in Palestine, created a dataset of McGill’s investments in companies with links to the State of Israel. They found that “as of December 31, 2023, McGill University held approximately $74 million in direct investments and $5.5 million in undisclosed investments in companies complicit in upholding the apartheid regime of Israel and financing its genocide.”

McGill students have pointed out to the media that there is a proud precedent for divestment at McGill, as it was the first Canadian university to divest from its holdings in apartheid South Africa in November 1985.

In December 2023 it announced it would divest from all direct holdings in the Carbon Underground 200, that is the top 100 public coal companies globally and the top 100 public oil and gas companies globally.

Safa, a graduate student at the Université du Québec a Montréal (UQAM) who is participating in the McGill campus protest, pointed out that the call for divestment is not new to Montréal universities and that while the wave of US campus protest in solidarity with Palestine certainly had an influence on the establishment of the encampment at McGill, students there but also at UQAM and Concordia University have been organizing around BDS at Québec universities for decades.

“Last month, UQAM became the first university in Canada at which all the student unions voted to adopt a Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) mandate against Israel,” Safa said, noting that organizers are now seeking to win support for an academic boycott from various university faculties. Safa stressed that it’s a tougher battle at McGill, which has particularly strong ties with Israel and where the administration has consistently refused to listen to the students or work to find common ground.  (more...)

The student Intifada rises at Montréal universities

Related:

“And I Went Down to the Demonstration”