Specious claims of antisemitism and incivility merely distract from the genocide before our eyes
It’s been a (deservedly) judgmental summer for Israel, as its public support in Canada declines and given its ongoing, precipitous collapse to the status of a pariah state.
On May 20, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court announced that there are reasonable grounds to believe Israeli leaders have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. And on May 24, the International Court of Justice concluded yet again—on the heels of earlier judgments in January and March—that Palestinians in Gaza face a real and imminent risk of genocide (due to the particular risk posed by the current offensive in Rafah, the Court ordered Israel to immediately halt its military offensive there, which it has belligerently defied). These significant cases are testing the integrity of our supposed liberal international legal order.
International cases, however, have domestic counterparts closer to home. On May 31, the Honourable J. Michael MacDonald, a former Chief Justice of Nova Scotia tasked with investigating a group of Toronto Metropolitan University law students who proactively called out Israel’s relentless atrocities, concluded that the students’ pro-Palestine letter “should not have been characterized as antisemitic” by their own administration or by overzealous lawyers, was “a valid exercise of student expression” and, further, that “none of the students who participated in the letter were found to have breached” the university’s Student Code of Non-academic Conduct.
This is an important victory for Palestinian solidarity specifically and academic freedom in general. But it is crucial to appreciate that this victory involved significant costs and remains incomplete. (more...)
Righteous student activism and evolving anti-Palestinian reprisal in Canada
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