At the time of writing, it had been 17 days since McGill University students began a hunger strike to demand that the University withdraw funds from companies contributing to human rights abuses of the Palestinians and puts an end to certain partnerships with Israel, in the context of the ongoing assault in Gaza.
Some have been on strike continuously since February 19, while others have been on strike for three or five days, under the supervision of nursing and medical students. The strikers have been holding a hard line: water, electrolytes and broth, nothing else, for almost three weeks for the most determined.
In an open letter addressed to the McGill administration, supported to date by nearly 800 graduates, professors and employees in solidarity with the strikers, we can read that calls for the interruption of partnerships with Israeli universities “target those with a documented history of complicity in violations of Palestinian human rights.” These, it is written, “participate in the development of weapons, systems and military strategies deployed in war crimes perpetrated by Israel, in contravention of international law”.
Some universities elsewhere in the world have already revoked their partnerships with Israeli academic establishments, for the same reasons. The strikers also recall that McGill University itself had adopted a divestment strategy in the context of South African apartheid in 1985, and had thus become the first Canadian university to withdraw its funds from companies with links with South Africa, following pressure exerted by student mobilizations.
The University has completely rejected the strikers’ demands and refuses to hold a public meeting to discuss its position with the mobilized students. The intransigence of the university administration only strengthens their determination.
When we speak on Tuesday morning, Sage and Shadi are a few days into fasting; the end of a three-day stint for one, and the start of an indefinite strike for the other. Hunger, they tell me, insinuates itself entirely into their daily lives. Pain down to the bones, intrusive thoughts related to food, inability to concentrate, fatigue, weakness. Their physical and mental integrity is compromised. Except that in the circumstances, the business as usual is no longer possible.
McGill presents itself as a prestigious establishment, Shadi explains to me. “But I go to school and I see that my tuition money is being used to bomb my friends’ country, to bomb my country too, Lebanon. The place where my mother, my family lived is being destroyed with my money. » This is a painful absurdity: “I see no point in academic prestige. What’s the point, if it serves as justification to kill and hurt my friends’ family, my family and my friends? »
When institutions cling to an immoral posture in the eyes of those who run them, when they close themselves to dialogue, they lose their meaning. What is experienced at the scale of a university can easily be extrapolated to society as a whole. While the severity of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is horrifying, the relative laxity of the posture adopted by our governments induces a similar sense of absurdity.
After five months of ferocious bombings on Gaza, five months of images of mutilated bodies, starving children, civilians crowded into an ever more cramped enclave, after the accumulation of legal appeals for violation of international law, the persistence of the The complacency of a large part of the international community towards Israel is beyond comprehension.
The half-words in calls for a ceasefire, the half-measures in the allocation of humanitarian aid, the timid calls for respect for international law, the absence of serious consideration of possible sanctions: all this leads to a unbearable gap between the objectively immoral nature of what is happening before our eyes and the reaction of political institutions.
Currently, in Gaza, more than 90% of children under 2 years old and 95% of pregnant or breastfeeding women are in a situation of severe food insecurity. One in six children under the age of 2 suffers from acute malnutrition. Given the clear shortage of food reaching the enclave, people are reduced to feeding themselves with animal food. Children are collapsing in the streets, dying of hunger.
This week, a post on Surrealist X by French President Emmanuel Macron showed packages of food being parachuted from a plane flying over Gaza. “Solidarity at work,” he wrote. Western governments are happy to send a few convoys of humanitarian aid, but none of them really dare to put pressure where it counts, by using concrete material and economic means. Solidarity performance accomplishes little, and inaction says it all.
Faced with such a discrepancy between reality and what is happening before our eyes, going on hunger strike to protest against the radical denial of humanity inflicted on the Palestinian people ultimately appears to be a healthy reaction in a world gone mad.