How rallying around divestments helped unify Canada's pro-Palestinian movement

The encampment of proPalestinian protesters at McGill University in Mon‐ treal is nearing the threeweek mark, having sur‐ vived heavy rains, a failed lawsuit to get them ex‐ pelled and a sizeable counter-demonstration.

In an attempt to resolve the situation, the university said last week it was willing to host a forum to discuss the protesters' main de‐ mand: that it divest from companies with ties to Israel.

But the student activists say they won't leave without a firm commitment from the university to liquidate its in‐ vestments in defence com‐ panies like Lockheed Martin, which they say are helping sustain the current Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip.

"The encampment will continue as long as we don't have concrete news of divest‐ ment," said Ari Nahman, a student at nearby Concordia University who has been tak‐ ing part in the protest.

Since the tents went up on McGill's lower field, ac‐ tivists at at least nine other

Canadian universities have also set up encampments, part of a global wave of cam‐ pus protests against the war in Gaza. The most recent en‐ campment went up Thursday night at the University of Al‐ berta.

The encampments at Canadian schools have fol‐ lowed months of protest marches, petitions, sit-ins and hunger strikes by proPalestinian movement ac‐ tivists since Israel's military response to the Oct. 7 at‐ tacks. Some say the move‐ ment is stronger than it has ever been.

"There's nothing in the past that meets the kind of support that Palestinians are getting today," said James Kafieh, vice-president of the Palestinian Canadian Con‐ gress. "It is absolutely un‐ precedented. And it's genera‐ tional. It's young people un‐ der the age of 40 who are leading the way."

The current wave of protests is benefitting from 20 years of activism around a set of controversial demands known as boycott, divest‐ ment and sanctions (com‐ monly referred to as BDS), while also drawing on newer concepts - such as settler colonialism - popularized by other social movements.

'The window … has shifted'

Longtime activists say even though the Canadian govern‐ ment hasn't done enough to pressure Israel to end its mili‐ tary offensive, which has killed upwards of 34,000 peo‐ ple, they're surprised at small policy changes in recent months.

Ottawa's decision to pause permits for arms ex‐ ports to Israel, for example, "is something that we could‐ n't have imagined a year ago," said Michael Bueckert, vice-president of the progres‐ sive advocacy group Canadi‐ ans for Justice and Peace in the Middle East.

Scholars of social move‐ ments agree the current wave of pro-Palestinian protests have been effective in raising awareness around calls to re-examine Canadian ties to the Israeli govern‐ ment.

Until recently, calls for BDS were routinely met with criticism in Canada by politi‐ cians on all sides and ignored by major institutions.

"The window on this … conversation has shifted, I would say, quite dramatically in my lifetime, and in particu‐ lar in the past 20 years or so," said Roberta Lexier, a historian of progressive soci‐ al movements in Canada who teaches at Mount Royal Uni‐ versity in Calgary.

"The ability of people to have this conversation now is at a totally different level than it was a few years ago."

The origins of BDS

The BDS movement emerged in 2005 from a network of civil society organizations in the Palestinian territories.

It was a pivotal moment

for Palestinian resistance to the Israeli occupation. Nei‐ ther the Oslo peace accords of the 1990s nor the second intifada - a violent uprising that began in 2000 - had re‐ sulted in meaningful gains for independence.

In seeking new strategies, Palestinian activists noted the role an international boy‐ cott had played in helping end the system of white-mi‐ nority rule in South Africa in the early 1990s.

A group of Canadian ac‐ tivists responded to the 2005 boycott call by organizing an event called Israeli Apartheid Week at the University of Toronto, which sought to make the comparison with South Africa explicit.

The inaugural event fea‐ tured a photo exhibit of Palestinian refugee camps and lectures about Palestin‐ ian resistance. It was met with protests from pro-Israel campus groups; B'nai Brith Canada called the event a "hate fest" designed to dele‐ gitimize the Jewish state.

Since then, activists in cities across the world hosted their own versions of Israeli Apartheid Week.

In 2014, prime minister Stephen Harper called efforts to compare Israel to apartheid South Africa "sick‐ ening" and "the face of the new antisemitism." The fol‐ lowing year, then-Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau tweeted that the BDS move‐ ment and Israel Apartheid Week had "no place on Cana‐ dian campuses."

But the issue gained trac‐ tion among major unions, in‐ cluding the Public Service Al‐ liance of Canada and Unifor, and was supported by other progressive causes, such as Idle No More and Black Lives Matter.

Whereas the early years of pro-Palestinian activism in Canada were driven mainly by Middle Eastern immi‐ grants and informed by Arab nationalism, adopting the language of BDS and the an‐ ti-apartheid movement broadened support for the cause, says Hassan Husseini, a labour negotiator who has been involved in pro-Palest‐ ian activism in Ottawa since the 1990s.

"It mainstreamed the movement and gave it a great deal of strength," Hus‐ seini said. "It became easier to make solidarity links with other groups."

Adopting the language of settler colonialism

The younger generation of activists at the forefront of the current round of protests have retained the central de‐ mands of the BDS move‐ ment, while also adopting the language of settler colo‐ nialism.

A once-niche academic concept, settler colonialism has been popularized in Canada largely through the work of Indigenous scholars and activists, who use it to re‐ fer to the system of power that depends on settlers dis‐ placing indigenous inhabitan‐ ts to create a fundamentally unequal society.

WATCH | Trudeau on campus demonstrations in support of Palestinians:

For pro-Palestinian ac‐ tivists, settler colonialism can describe not only how Israel was formed in 1948 but also the country's aspirations for the remaining Palestinian ter‐ ritories - Gaza and the West Bank.

As a McGill student in 2016, Sarah Shamy became involved in the BDS move‐ ment as a member of Soli‐ darity for Palestinian Human Rights, a longstanding activist group in Montreal.

"When I was a student, people used the term Israeli apartheid," said Shamy, now an organizer with the Pales‐ tine Youth Movement, one of the groups behind the McGill encampment. "Now, I think most people say the Zionist regime, the Zionist entity, the Zionist state."

She said there is "this un‐ derstanding about Zionism and around imperialism and settler colonialism that was‐ n't as mainstream [back then] as it is now."

Some people who study social movements question whether the language of set‐ tler colonialism is helpful in swaying public opinion.

"There is some polling that suggests that it's actually pushing people away," said Howard Ramos, a professor of sociology at Western Uni‐ versity in London, Ont.

Ramos said the language of anti-racism and anti-colo‐ nialism tends to be "us ver‐ sus them" compared to the language of human rights, which can be more inclusive of different viewpoints.

Labelling Israel as a set‐ tler-colonial state, and equat‐ ing Zionism with a form of imperialism, has been criti‐ cized as antisemitic by a number of Jewish groups, who say it undermines Jews' ancestral ties to Israel.

Placards and slogans at the encampments inspired by opposition to settler colo‐ nialism have left many Jews feeling uncomfortable.

"I have seen some very hateful things chanted," said Avishai Infeld, an organizer with the Jewish student group Hillel Montreal, at a counter-demonstration near McGill last week.

But some activists who are new to the pro-Palestin‐ ian cause say settler colonial‐ ism was a vital entry point for them.

Justine Abigail Yu, an orga‐ nizer with Davenport for Ceasefire, a Toronto-based pro-Palestinian advocacy group, said she was first in‐ troduced to the concept by Indigenous writers who were critical of the Canada 150 cel‐ ebrations.

When Israeli forces in‐ vaded Gaza, in response to the Hamas-led massacre on Oct. 7, 2023, which killed an estimated 1,200 people, Yu said she started researching the Israeli military presence in the Palestinian territories.

"There were so many sim‐ ilarities that I suddenly started seeing" between Canada's treatment of Indige‐ nous people and Israel's treatment of Palestinians, she said. "I think that's how all this has opened up to me."

How will it end?

In the U.S., where the current wave of pro-Palestinian cam‐ pus protests began, encamp‐ ments have ended one of two ways.

At four universities - in‐ cluding Brown and North‐ western - administrators agreed to some of the stu‐ dents' demands around di‐ vestment in exchange for dis‐ mantling the camps.

Other universities have used police to forcibly re‐ move protesting students, giving rise to violent con‐ frontations at places like Co‐ lumbia and UCLA.

WATCH | Police forcibly remove protesters from U of C encampment

On Thursday night, police forcibly dismantled the en‐ campment at the University of Calgary, using flashbangs to disperse activists who re‐ fused police orders to leave the site.

Whatever the ending in store for the other encamp‐ ments at Canadian universi‐ ties, Bueckert expects to see a surge in support for BDS motions on college cam‐ puses this fall.

"The encampments are ... part of this bigger wave that I think is sort of inevitable any‐ time that there's something big happening in the Middle East," he said.