Those running McGill University are deeply anti-Palestinian. Soon after Israel was reported to be responsible for upwards of 200,000 deaths in Gaza, the university hired a private security company to dismantle a camp opposing its horrors.
Early Wednesday morning the McGill administration hired private security firm SIRCO to dismantle an encampment calling for the university to cut ties with Israeli universities and companies assisting the slaughter in Gaza, which prestigious medical journal The Lancet says has likely caused 186,000 Palestinian deaths. Hundreds of police, including the provincial Sûreté du Québec, assisted the operation to remove the encampment on its lower field, which is unused, but well situated in downtown Montreal.
The security/police operation that shuttered all activity on the campus for the day violated the spirit of a May 15 Quebec Superior Court ruling rejecting McGill’s request for an emergency injunction to dismantle the encampment. McGill has an ongoing case before the courts against the encampment and a Laval university law professor told CBC they may have defied the law in suppressing the encampment.
Since the camp was set up April 27 the administration has effectively refused to negotiate with the students. Rather than consider the students’ position, McGill released a steady stream of malicious statements smearing internationalist, social justice minded activists. They repeatedly suggested the encampment was violent or anti-Jewish or “an illegal occupation.” In a statement on Wednesday McGill President Deep Saini claimed: “This camp was not a peaceful protest. It was a heavily fortified focal point for intimidation and violence.”
McGill refused to negotiate despite the encampment’s democratic mandate. In the largest referendum turnout in the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) history, 78.7 per cent of undergraduates called on the administration to sever ties with “any corporations, institutions or individuals complicit in genocide, settler-colonialism, apartheid, or ethnic cleansing against Palestinians.” The November vote followed a March 2022 vote that supported boycotting “corporations and institutions complicit in settler-colonial apartheid against Palestinians.” Seventy-one per cent of undergraduate voters backed that motion.
In a sign of its hostility to Palestinians, the McGill administration threatened to terminate its Memorandum of Agreement with SSMU, which regulates fees, use of name and other matters between the university and student union, if SSMU adopted either of those resolutions. Similarly, in the lead-up to the encampment the administration refused to meet student hunger strikers calling for corporate divestment and severing ties to Israeli universities even after two were hospitalized.
Over the past decade the administration has repeatedly intervened to undercut Palestine solidarity on campus. Simultaneously, as I detailed, McGill administrators have participated in a slew of initiatives with the racist colonial Jewish National Fund.
As part of its response to the encampment, Saini stated that the university would only consider “geographically neutral” actions. While the university’s corporate holdings are largely based on financial considerations, its partnerships with Israeli universities were mostly instigated by anti-Palestinian donors. When Sylvan Adams gave McGill $29 million to establish the Sylvan Adams Sports Science Institute two years ago the billionaire required it to partner with Tel Aviv University. In recent years Adams has plowed tens of millions of dollars into various sports and cultural initiatives explicitly designed to whitewash Israeli apartheid and violence.
Similarly, Gerald Schwartz and Heather Reisman, who set up a charity to finance non-Israelis joining that country’s military, put up the funds for a McGill project with Ben Gurion University.
“Students experience Israel’s Start-Up Nation first-hand” is how McGill’s official organ described the 2019 launch of the study abroad program.
When will the McGill administration launch a study program so “students can experience Gaza’s reality first-hand”? Only if some wealthy benefactor pays for it. It is extremely unlikely that the university would ever treat Palestinians with respect simply because it is the right thing to do.
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