McGill Admin Battles its Pro-Palestinian Students
Image by Sohaib Al Kharsa.
The Harvard of the North has been the site of an increasingly intense battle linking Justin Trudeau, Roger Waters, a government handbook marginalizing Palestinians and a historic student strike for Palestine. The alma mater of the prime minister and a disproportionate share of Justin Trudeau’s cabinet is aggressively repressing a movement to divest from apartheid and genocide.
At the start of the month, the McGill administration canceled the room booked for a talk by the UN Special Rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories Francesca Albanese. It’s remarkable that the prestigious university would suppress a representative of the United Nations but it’s consistent with McGill’s increasingly authoritarian response to those protesting genocide. Days before Albanese’s talk, the university sought to convince a judge to extend a 10 day ban on protests near its many buildings across downtown Montréal. The administration also had Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR) banned by threatening the Students’ Society of McGill University’s (SSMU) entire funding structure if it didn’t suspend the longstanding student club.
The administration’s response to an encampment calling for the university to cut ties with Israeli universities and companies assisting the slaughter in Gaza was to repeatedly ask the Montréal police to intervene. They even sought a court ruling to force the police to do so. After that was unsuccessful McGill hired a private security firm to demolish the encampment in July. They then largely shuttered campus for the next six weeks.
The encampment on McGill’s lower field, which is unused but exceptionally well-placed downtown, enraged genocide supporters. They pressed the police and politicians to act and instigated a court case to force the police to dismantle it. Over the past decade the Zionist lobby has become ever more aggressive in seeking to overturn student democracy and undercut opposition to apartheid.
Last November McGill students voted for the Policy Against Genocide in Palestine. In the largest referendum turnout in SSMU’s history, 78.7% of undergraduates called on the university administration to denounce Israel’s “genocidal bombing campaign” against Gaza. The resolution also called on McGill to sever ties with “any corporations, institutions or individuals complicit in genocide, settler-colonialism, apartheid, or ethnic cleansing against Palestinians.”
Before the election was completed the genocide lobby had already demanded the student’s vote be ignored. Simultaneously, they pressed McGill’s administration to condemn the resolution and demand SSMU jettison the results. If the student society ratified the results, the administration announced that it would terminate its Memorandum of Agreement with SSMU, which regulates fees, use of name and other matters between the university and student union.
The Israel lobby followed a similar playbook 18 months earlier when 71% of McGill undergraduates supported a Palestine Solidarity Policy, which called for boycotting. Between 2014 and 2016 there were three votes inspired by the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement at biannual SSMU general assemblies. Fearing students at the prestigious institution would support BDS, the Israel lobby went into overdrive. Among a slew of pressure tactics, they got then Liberal party leader Justin Trudeau to tweet that “the BDS movement, like Israeli Apartheid Week, has no place on Canadian campuses. As a McGill alum, I’m disappointed. Enough is Enough.” In February 2016 a motion mandating the student union support some BDS demands passed the union’s largest ever general assembly. But after the McGill administration, Montreal’s English media and pro-Israel Jewish groups blitzed students the online confirmation vote failed.
In response to growing sympathy among students for the plight of Palestinians, Zionist activists worked to ban these resolutions, claiming they were discriminatory. After being challenged for promoting this suppression campaign, anti-Palestinian activist Noah Lew cried “antisemitism” when he wasn’t elected to SSMU’s Board of Directors. At a October 2017 general assembly, Democratize SSMU sought to impeach the student union’s president Muna Tojiboeva for her role in suspending a SSMU vice president and adopting a Judicial Board decision that declared a BDS resolution unconstitutional. While they couldn’t muster the two thirds of votes required to oust the non-Jewish president of the student union, Democratize SSMU succeeded in blocking the re-election of two Board of Directors candidates who supported the effort to outlaw BDS resolutions.
After failing to be re-elected to the Board of Directors at the same meeting Lew claimed he was “blocked from participating in student government because of my Jewish identity and my affiliations with Jewish organizations.” Lew’s claim received international coverage and the affair was even mentioned in the House of Commons, prompting the (anti-Palestinian) administration to launch a major investigation. After interviewing 38 students, former student ombudsman Dr. Spencer Boudreau concluded that he could “not substantiate the notion that the vote was motivated by anti-Semitism.” Rather, Boudreau found that the vote was “motivated by politics, that is, based on his [Lew] support for Israel and Zionism and/or for his view of the BDS movement.” Considering the uproar and political climate, this was a devastating finding.
But it didn’t stop, and probably helped, Lew being hired as an antisemitism authority by Canada’s Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism Irwin Cotler (a former McGill professor and student). Lew interned at Cotler’s Raoul Wallenberg Center for human rights and in 2022 was hired to assist the special envoy. Probably the only Canadian ever shown by an official university inquiry to have fabricated claims of antisemitism to smear Palestine solidarity activists, Lew was the “lead drafter” of the government’s just released “Canadian Handbook on the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism”. Lew’s involvement tells you what you need to know about this latest effort to suppress opposition to apartheid and genocide.
In an example of how McGill weaponizes the charge of antisemitism against its students, university president Deep Saini recently smeared students at a town hall hosted by the most vocal advocate of Israeli violence in the House of Commons. In an event Liberal MP Anthony Housefather billed as a discussion about Jewish students and faculty’s “safe return to campus”, Saini declared, “It’s very hard to tell whether the antisemitism went up or it became more overt.” In a talk in which Saini asked Jewish Zionist students to spy on professors, the president added “Did we actually see a rise in antisemitism? Or did we see people using this moment, forum these circumstances, to give themselves a license to express antisemitism?”
Does Saini truly believe that students organizing an encampment, hunger strike, rallies and referendum in favour of divestment are engaged in antisemitism? The answer is yes if billionaire McGill donor Sylvan Adams, who promotes war with Iran and greater Israeli violence in Gaza, can be believed. In a Canadian Jewish News interview about McGill last month Adams said he and Saini “agree on everything” when it comes to the “problem” of anti-Semitism.
Even if Saini didn’t believe this nonsense, Adams and other mega donors would ensure he toed the line. In an interview in which he calls on McGill to expel students opposing genocide, Adams details how Zionist donors are coordinating to leverage their wealth to suppress students’ demands.
In 2022 Adams put up $29 million to establish the Sylvan Adams Sports Science Institute as part of a project that partners McGill with Tel Aviv University. Other Israel supporters such the Azrielis, Seymour Schulich, Aldo Bensadoun, Heather Reisman/Gerald Schwartz and Charles Bronfman have given tens of millions of dollars to the university. Also McGill’s chancellor, Pierre Boivin, is Vice-Chair of the Board of arch-Zionist Stephen Bronfman’s private investment firm Claridge Inc, which is heavily invested in Israel.
Alongside a series of racist bromides against Muslims and the former Black woman president of Harvard, Adams attacks rock legend Roger Waters as a “nutball” in an interview in which he describes his “fantasy” to reunite Pink Floyd to play Israel. Waters has been maybe the highest-profile supporter of the McGill students, signing a public letters criticizing the administration’s suppression of their 2022 vote and rallying with SPHR on the eve of his show in Montreal that year. A week after an event that draw significant attention to the administration’s undemocratic and anti-Palestinian actions, B’nai Brith announced a lawsuit against SPHR and SSMU for asking students to vote on Palestinian rights. Amidst his touring Waters wrote a powerful retort to B’nai Brith’s bullying.
In response to Adams’ recent call to repress students Waters penned an op-ed rebuttal and letter to the McGill president in support of students opposing genocide. In it Waters challenged the billionaire who paid Madonna and Argentina’s football club to play Israel, to debate whether wealthy donors should be allowed to dictate university policy and whether Israel is committing genocide.
On the eve of Waters participating in an online event on “Students over donor money: the suppression of Palestine solidarity at McGill University and beyond”, Adams responded publicly. In a column, video and interview the “self-appointed ambassador for Israel” repeated his absurd claim that Qatar, Iran and China have put “trillions of dollars” into supporting students opposing apartheid and genocide. He also responded to the letter Waters sent Deep Saini, which 3500 have emailed the McGill president. Adams told the Jerusalem Post that his people reached out to Piers Morgan about hosting a debate but Waters hasn’t received any indication of that.
As Waters was rallying with students online, many McGill participated in probably the largest international focused student strike in Quebec history. Over 40 student associations representing 85 000 students voted for a two-day strike in solidarity with Palestine. Quebec’s largest college was completely closed Thursday. The students want their institutions to cut all ties to Israel and are also criticizing the repression targeting students at McGill (and Concordia).
Amidst the McGill administration’s increasing repression and ongoing refusal to divest from genocide, the bigger picture is more hopeful. Students at the university have become increasingly sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and considering how many Canadian government ministers are McGill alumnus this must terrify the Israel lobby.
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