PALESTINE AT CANADIAN UNIVERSITIES:

This is the first large-scale, cross-country primary documentation of anti-Palestinian repression and racism at Canadian universities since the Gaza genocide’s escalation in October 2023, conducted and reviewed by an Expert Task Force of Palestinian, Indigenous, Black, Muslim, and Jewish scholars and lawyers with expertise in racial and colonial violence. Despite the international legal obligations against genocide and other serious violations, Canadian university complicity in the internationally-recognized genocide of Palestinians has been maintained via investments in military and other corporations (amounting to just under $1 billion), relationships with implicated Israeli institutions, and other modalities.

Based on interviews with 140 students, staff, and faculty members at 31 universities across the country, Freedom of Information disclosures, and open-source reports/reporting, this study identifies, documents, and analyzes 21 tactics and 7 tropes used by institutions to repress Palestine solidarity against genocide complicity, as well as the ecosystem of institutions enabling repression and intersections with other forms of racism and domination.

Tactics: From high-level state operations to the everyday micro-disciplining of expression and activism; both the obviously repressive – like calling police on student anti-genocide encampments – as well as those that speciously operate as ostensible forms of engagement and/or benevolence, but in ways that perpetually serve to defer and deflect calls for accountability and divestment.

Tropes: deployed to denounce, discredit, and depict Palestinians and those opposing their genocide as the aggressors; some well-known, such as accusations of “terrorism” and “antisemitism,” others previously less well-documented in the context of anti-Palestinian repression but with long genealogies in settler colonial projects, such as representing Indigenous genocide resisters as “infantile” and “psychopathological.”

Institutions: the network of enablers with which the university is in relationship – including judicial institutions, police, government, private donors, civil society organizations, and media.

Intersections: between anti-Palestinian repression and other vectors of domination in the fabric of Canadian settler colonialism and transnational imperial relations – particularly anti-Indigeneity, anti-Blackness, Islamophobia/anti-Muslim racism, antisemitism, heteropatriarchy, anti-labour suppression, ableism and saneism, ecological/climate devastation, and anti-homeless discourses and practices.

Throughout the study, the Task Force heard accounts of student, staff, and faculty genocide resisters being beaten; prosecuted; sued; legally enjoined from protesting; investigated by university and government authorities; fired for wearing keffiyehs; suspended; removed from journal editorships and teaching responsibilities; threatened with disciplinary measures – for “offences” such as speaking Arabic; sent to “tribunals” to face anonymous and/or impossible charges; sexually violated with deep-fake nudes and rape polls; subjected to racist abuse and death threats – in some cases physically hand-delivered to the recipients’ offices; publicly defamed as “antisemites,” “Nazis,” and “terrorist supporters” – including by university governing board members, police, and politicians; reported to national security bodies; doxed; hacked; followed by university security – including being accompanied into the bathroom; and surveilled – with in at least one instance the surveillance being shared with university administrators in Israel. Concomitantly, universities have interpreted, altered, or manipulated their own procedures and policies to silence and suppress not only critical discussion of Israel’s actions – including by UN Experts – but basic expressions of Palestinian identity, history, and existence.