It took about one minute for the Toronto police officers called to my lecture at York University to realize there was nothing to see.
The two officers entered the room just as I was testing the sound with participants on Zoom. About 40 people were watching the lecture online and 20 others had gathered in a small classroom. The officers told us the university had called the police and asked them to check out a “major event” and “a possible protest” happening on campus.
I invited them to stay for the lecture and they just smiled. After a few short minutes, they left.
Though I have yet to hear anything from them directly, senior leaders at the university have since claimed, through internal communications that were shared with me, that York did not call the police. They said they would meet with the Toronto Police Service to find out why the officers were there and who called them and have offered to share this information with guests at my lecture.
While we await York’s explanation, the question remains: what was so major about this event that it required a call to the police, by the university staff or someone else, to check it out?
The answer is in the title of my lecture: “The Palestinian Struggle for Liberation: Aspirations for a Decolonial Life.” The lecture was part of a speaker series organized by the Department of Anthropology. After making some jokes about the absurdity of the whole episode, the lecture went on as normal. If their goal was intimidation, they completely failed.
The episode was not an isolated event, but rather a clear manifestation of a structure of colonialism and racism that permeates Canadian post-secondary institutions.
In so far as institutional anti-Palestinian racism is concerned, York University itself has a long and troubling history.
Since 2004, the university has:
- suspended a student without a hearing and banned him from campus for staging unauthorized protests supporting Palestine;
- interfered with an international conference about models of statehood for Israel and Palestine;
- suspended the official club status of Students Against Israeli Apartheid—twice;
- made statements that contribute to the idea that Palestine solidarity activism is a form of hatred;
- declared that a painting depicting Palestinian sumud (steadfastness) was “offensive” to the Jewish community;
- and participated in a trip to Israel led by the pro-Israel lobby group Center for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA), clearly taking a political position on the question of Palestine and Israel.
More recently, If you read York’s statements on Palestine and Israel, it is clear that the administration operates within a colonial liberal worldview in which Canada is viewed as a safe haven for human rights, freedom, and democracy, and where “tragedies” happening overseas allegedly have nothing to do with “neutral” Canadian universities. This worldview, however, is far removed from reality.
Canadian universities are not neutral spaces
Genocides like the one we are witnessing in Gaza are very serious events, and they do impact all students regardless of their ethnicity, religion, or connection to the region. Moreover, Canada is far from a neutral space: it is a staunch ally of the Israeli state. All Canadian institutions are complicit in the genocide of the Palestinian people, including universities. Therefore, it is not only reasonable to expect students, staff, and faculty to talk about the genocide on campus; more than that, it is imperative that they do.
But decades of censorship and erasure of Palestine on Canadian campuses, as well as a culture of harassment and intimidation against anyone who speaks honestly about Palestine, means that many teaching assistants, instructors, and professors lack the knowledge and tools to teach and talk about Palestine.
In January, a group of rank-and-file union members focused on Palestine solidarity tried to fix that by creating “A Toolkit on Teaching Palestine.” They were responding to a call from Bisan Owda, a 25-year-old Gazan filmmaker who has documented daily life during the genocide on Instagram and TikTok accounts followed by millions of people around the world.
Heeding her call to action, these workers released the toolkit to help teaching assistants (TAs) who wanted to engage with their students on the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza.
The toolkit speaks to a large number of teaching assistants and students who refuse “to abide by York University’s culture of repressive normalcy,” and CUPE 3903 shared the toolkit with its membership over email to make it accessible to everyone. The toolkit disrupts the institutional desire to marginalize and erase Palestine and most critically, the Palestinian critique of Zionism and Israel. This addresses a critical component of institutional anti-Palestinian racism, which seeks to expel the Palestinian critique from the realm of what the university deems a valid, legitimate, and acceptable sphere of knowledge production and exchange.
In such an environment that is profoundly hostile to Palestine, it was laudable that this group of workers stepped forward and provided the much-needed help for TAs, help that the institution itself had failed to offer.
How did York respond? On Jan. 30, president Rhonda Lenton wrote to the community saying that the university does not find the toolkit “to be in accordance with the rightful expectations of the University as an employer, the needs of the students and the legitimate claims of the community.”
The vacuous statement—which is more of a threat to CUPE 3903 than anything else—suggests, first, that TAs do not have the right to talk about topics and issues outside of their assigned curriculum. The reality is that we, as university teachers, do this all the time: whenever major events happen in Canada or beyond, faculty members often have discussions about those events with their students. This is in fact what many students desire. Thus, the administration’s message here is this: the genocide of the Palestinian people, which has stopped life in its tracks for all Palestinian students and a great number of Arab, Muslim, Black, Indigenous, and other students, including many Jewish students, is not worthy of discussion. Second, she is asserting that the needs of the students and the legitimate claims of the community do not include students and community members, Palestinians and non-Palestinians, who are yearning for an honest discussion on the genocide of Palestinians in all of their classes, regardless of discipline and area of study.
In short, by opposing this effort, Lenton confirms the toolkit’s claim that York University is guilty of complicity with Israeli settler colonialism and repression of Palestinian stories, experiences, and analyses.
Another recent example is the unjustified suspension of professor Lesley Wood, a prominent sociologist. York suspended Wood in response to charges brought by police, who accused Wood of taking part in a protest action supporting a longstanding campaign against the HESEG Foundation for Lone Soldiers and opposing the Israel state’s ongoing genocidal campaign in Gaza. The Department of Sociology, where I undertook my PhD studies, has made it clear that they are completely opposed to Wood’s suspension.
The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) policy on Academic Staff and Criminal Conviction indicates that being charged with or accused of a crime is not grounds for suspension. The CAUT policy states that suspension is only justified when the member’s presence on campus “poses a clear, serious and imminent danger to any member of the academic institution.”
What did Wood as one of the “Peace 11” allegedly do? She allegedly disrupted business as usual at Indigo to show customers that the store is complicit with the Israeli genocide of Palestinians. This is a form of protest that seeks to create economic pressure on parties that are complicit with crimes and violations of human rights. Without such economic pressure, change does not happen. To associate these actions with the idea that Wood is somehow posing a clear, serious and imminent danger to members of the York community is beyond the pale of reason, logic and justice. So how did the York administration come to this dumbfounding conclusion?
Honest talk on Palestine threatens the racist status quo
It is clear to me that it’s the same reason they saw, or facilitated the view of, my lecture as a “major event” requiring police presence.
In the eyes of York University’s administration, any talk or action on Palestine that reveals the reality of Israeli settler colonialism, apartheid, genocide, and Canada’s complicity, is deemed dangerous. And they’re right. It is dangerous, not in the disingenuous way they say it is dangerous, that is, the bogus claim that we pose an imminent danger to others. Rather, it is dangerous for the colonial and racist structures of the university.
As I said in my lecture that Friday evening at York, grassroots mass action is the best tool we have to decolonize racist settler-colonial structures. It is the students, workers and professors taking direct action who have a shot at radically transforming their campuses in support of the Palestinian people’s aspiration for a liberated and free life.
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Interesting spin on this considering universities routinely cancel virtually anyone who does not follow their woke ideology and dares to offer a different opinion.
You are aware that the antonyms of ‘woke’ are asleep or unconscious.
Seems appropriate given your ‘analysis’.