This week, the last occupation camp still standing to denounce institutional support for crimes against humanity taking place in Gaza was dismantled by the security firm Sirco, mandated by McGill University, under the surveillance of the Montreal Police Department and the Sûreté du Québec.
This dismantling is the fourth after the destruction of the Sherbrooke solidarity camp (Al Isra), the Victoria Square solidarity camp (Al-Soumoud) and the Refus local camp denouncing the housing crisis.
These camps, which embody the values that I wrongly imagined to be at the heart of Quebec identity—humanism and solidarity—illustrate a burning desire to defend human dignity and life, here and elsewhere. Unfortunately, this aspiration seems absent from the DNA of our national and university community. Our political and university representatives, engaged in a mercantile logic, prefer to open the Quebec Office in Tel Aviv, maintain their investments in the colonial state of Israel, maintain ties with Zionist politicians and ignore the thousands of people thrown onto the streets.
However, the United Nations Security Council has been denouncing crimes against humanity and war crimes for several months, calling for an “immediate, total and complete” ceasefire. Similarly, for years, experts on social inequalities in Quebec have been warning about the housing crisis and its human consequences.
I feel deeply ashamed of the lack of courage of our political representatives, accomplices and hypocrites, who proclaim their solidarity while repressing actions of international and local solidarity. I also feel fear. Fear of the ease with which they shirk their responsibilities. Fear of this silence that endorses, tolerates and legitimizes the immeasurable violence of indifference.
This indifference affects the citizen who turns away from the pages of this newspaper, the parent who fears that his children will express their values in the street, the exhausted worker who only wants to go to work, the cynical student who only wants to follow his course, the cowardly columnist who is satisfied with police violence or the passive chairwoman of a board of directors who refuses to take a position.
This normalized indifference is also expressed in the face of other social and ecological crises, whether local or international. Before assuming that it is impossible, why not try collectively to “solve all the world’s problems”?
So I congratulate all those who, despite the obstacles, the batons and the pepper spray, have disrupted this widespread indifference. You put aside your daily lives and your privileges to become the last bastions of our humanism and our solidarity, using your bodies, your resources and your time. Devoid of acquired power, you defy that of the government and corporations in the streets. And to those who judge these camps and actions as violent or useless, know that your reaction is only a reflection of your own apathy. It is time to define the people we want to be: indifferent or humanists?