Saleem Razack, pediatric intensivist and experienced professor, relates in a text published this fall in the international journal Teaching and Learning in Medicine an experience that marked him during his pediatric training in a hospital center affiliated with McGill University in the 1990s, but which he has since kept silent about. He was reviewing the case of “a 14-year-old Palestinian girl” with his supervising doctor when the latter interjected: “Stop right now! There are no “Palestinians”. They are just “Arabs”. » He added: “That’s what we say here, in this medical school and in this hospital. » This erasure of the identity of a Palestinian teenager is a blatant example of anti-Palestinian racism.
McGill University’s recent request for an interim injunction to dismantle the student encampment established on campus since April 27 shows how anti-Palestinian racism can be deployed on an institutional (even systemic) scale by erasing the Palestinian reality, and this, in two respects.
First, in a literal sense: in the 22-page request, there is no mention of Palestine. However, Marc St-Pierre, Superior Court judge, categorically rejected the request for an injunction earlier this week and noted “that the action of the demonstrators is part of a North American movement present in a few dozen universities in the United States in connection with the ongoing events in the Gaza Strip where tens of thousands of Palestinians have died, injured or dispossessed by the Israeli army.
Then, in a material sense: by insisting on dismantling a student camp — tolerated by UQAM and the University of Sherbrooke — McGill University wants to eliminate a space which mainly aims to safeguard, respect and promote the dignity and existence of the Palestinian people. Having visited the encampment myself several times, including on my first Shabbat, I was struck by the fact that the activists succeeded in creating a free and “generative” space.
The contrast between the Popular University of Montreal (UPM) — the name given to the camp by the students — and the McGill buildings in the background is striking: an agora where people of all ages, origins and backgrounds can gather and exchanging (and even bickering!) on one side, and on the other, the academic ivory tower that is McGill. At the UPM camp, people discuss how to end the carnage inflicted by Israel in Palestine by supporting four major demands, but the discussions also shape our collective imagination with the view that another world — fairer, more supportive, gentler — is possible.
In a colonial context, it is ironic that McGill chose to use the term “occupation” in its request for an injunction to describe a student encampment on campus that the University itself recognizes as being on “unauthorized territory.” ceded” from the Mohawks. In another colonial context, McGill refuses — in its request for an injunction, but also in its communications to the McGill community — to name the Israeli occupation of Palestine, even though it is recognized by a number of member countries of the United Nations.
The demands of the UPM camp – in particular that McGill and Concordia universities sever their financial and academic ties with Israel, but also that they “publicly condemn the ongoing genocide of the Palestinians” which Israel denies before the International Court of Justice – remain without a tangible answer. On the contrary, McGill management consciously avoids naming the suffering inflicted on Palestinians by the Israeli government in its communications.
Despite the fact that “more than 80% of Gaza’s educational facilities have been damaged or destroyed” by the Israeli army in recent months, McGill University made no mention of the “scholasticism” of the education system in Gaza, or “the systemic annihilation of education through the arrest, detention or assassination of teachers, students and educational staff, as well as the destruction of educational infrastructure”, a reality which greatly worries UN experts.
Students from Concordia and McGill universities were the first in Canada to follow up on this encampment movement which originated on the campus of Columbia University. Images of signs held by Palestinian children in Gaza thanking several universities — including McGill and Columbia — for their solidarity have gone around the world. However, as my colleague Aurélie Lanctôt mentioned in these pages on Friday, McGill has chosen the camp of university establishments which judicialize and/or repress their own students in solidarity with Palestine.
Hind’s Hall, the protest song by American rapper Macklemore, has become the anthem of university camps. In the magazine The Nation, sports journalist and political analyst Dave Zirin explains that by drawing inspiration from the students who are risking everything to finally respect the humanity and dignity of the Palestinian people, Macklemore “breaks a silence that has grown to almost every aspect of our culture. His music video, which went viral, ends with the words “ Free Palestine », an expression which has two meanings in French: “Free Palestine” and “Liberate Palestine”.
At McGill University, the watchword, at least for the moment, is to erase Palestine. The students will remember it. So does the rest of the world.