Montreal provides a model for student activism

 

In Montreal, the air has carried a specific resonance for over two years.

Every week, the city’s central arteries are filled with rhythmic chants in French, English and Arabic, all echoing the demand for a liberated Palestine. They belong to a movement that refuses to be ignored, and while the world’s eyes often fixate on the Ivy League centers of the United States, Montreal has quietly emerged as a primary engine of the global student intifada, a city where the current struggle for Palestine is grafted onto a deep, radical root system of student syndicalism.

We realized that our universities could not claim to educate us while simultaneously profiting from the erasure of an entire education system in Gaza.

However, the urgency of this movement is not born of student politics alone. As the world witnessed the livestreamed genocide of Gaza, the systematic destruction of every university, the targeted killings of academics and members of the press, and the scholasticide of an entire generation, the geographic buffer between Montreal and Palestine was incinerated.

For us, the destruction was an indictment of our own institutions. We looked at our university endowments and realized we could no longer read about justice in textbooks while our tuition fees funded its erasure.

The anger on Montreal campuses is not directed aimlessly, but at documented entanglements with Israel.  (more...)

Montreal provides a model for student activism