110 days of Incidents

The following is a non-exhaustive list of incidents that address some of the tactics used by the university in its attempts to shut down the Gaza solidarity encampment.

Incident 1

Before the Encampment could even establish its protest, the university’s student association had its annual general meeting in May and zionist student groups took their opportunity to attack the Encampment by submitting a motion for the association to condemn the camp. The Encampment mobilised students across campus and from outside the encampment to attend the meeting and vote against the zionist motion. Students from camp showed their genuine solidarity with Palestinians by mobilising hundreds from many different BIPOC student groups. The power of these students was not just in their ability to vote down the motion that condemned encampment but also in their own motions that supported the camp and rejected the racism that underpinned attempts to silence solidarity with Palestinians. However, the zionist reaction to BIPOC students was more of the same violent racism. Muslim students attending the meeting were called ‘radicals’ by those running the meeting. They also had university security called on them by those same people. Interestingly, these security contractors were mostly people of colour themselves, employed by white executives to police students and enforce their racist policies. But the zionists didn’t stop at calling security on Muslim students. They pasted a Muslim student’s name and photo all over the newspapers and social media, with the usual bullshit of labelling them an antisemite. Those responsible for harassing the student should have been reprimanded and held accountable for their racist actions. Instead, the student themself was investigated and further harassed by the university that had no interest in addressing racism.

Incident 2

After the student association meeting, the safety of Muslim students at the encampment was endangered. But these students and many others at the camp were further mobilised by a major show of support from the wider student body. University executives were following this and sent their head of security, of all people, to threaten encampment with nullifying the motions that it submitted in the student association meeting. The lies used to justify this threat were blatant as usual. University security claimed that the votes were unfair because some students were not admitted to the Zoom meeting. For this to be true, there would have to have been hundreds of zionists lining up to join the meeting being turned away. Sure enough, the lies were exposed, as no such nullification was enforced. In the same interaction, the head of university security claimed that the university was ready to talk about encampment demands and that the camp should keep an eye on its email for an invitation from the chancelry. The email was sent on a Friday evening. The following Monday morning, the university revealed its true intentions by sending emails to seven students who were apparently going to be disciplined for their participation in the camp. What followed was the violent deployment of various security forces to crackdown on encampment through tactics of harassment and intimidation, culminating in the university calling police to forcibly remove the camp and arrest students if they continued their protest. At one point in the crackdown, students were called by university security to have a message from chancelry conveyed to them, but even this message was preceded by a threat that these students could be disciplined by the university at any time.

Incident 3

By the time exam season finally came along in June, the encampment had established itself as a protest site that was there to stay. It had organised and mobilised to disrupt the university’s business that many students realised was based on research and investment activities that made it complicit in zionist genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. The Encampment’s organising had not disrupted student learning. If anyone was responsible for unwelcome interruptions of student experience on campus, it was the university that had already put encampment participants through so much psychosocial harm that many of them were unable to maintain focus on their studies. Despite this, the university once again tried to portray the encampment as a threat to teaching and learning by posting signs around the camp that asked participants not to disturb exams that were apparently being administered in its immediate surroundings. To no one’s surprise, the encampment went about its usual sit in protest and the university made a point to ‘thank’ us for what they called our compliance with their directive, as if the noise of the encampment was ever an issue for the university’s executives.

Incident 4

When the university lost hope of an Encampment shut down, it resorted to an especially disturbing tactic. It sent in two of its senior indigenous staff members as an attempt to convince the camp that it must pack up and cease its demand for the university to divest from weapons and research partnerships with zionist institutions. Said staff members met with Palestinian students to ask them what they could offer for the camp to disappear, an attempt at bribery. They were told that nothing less than full divestment would be enough. The staff members proceeded to praise university security and emphasise to Palestinian students that the only staff to whom they could express grievances with university policy were security personnel, whereas zionist students, they were told, had the attention of chancelry whenever they so chose. The more disturbing aspect of the praise for security that was heard in that meeting was an admission by these two staff members that security personnel play a role in preventing student suicides in university residences from going public. Palestinian students came out of this meeting even more traumatised but also with more resolve to fight for encampment demands.

Incident 5

As the Encampment fought back against university attempts to shut it down, university security became complacent and inadvertently revealed some of the executives’ tactics. Encampment participants overheard university security talking on their phones next to encampment in the early hours of the morning. They were complaining that their colleagues were not adding enough detail to their daily reports on activity at the camp. They talked about the expectations of their supervisor, the head of university security. But their surveillance of students at the Encampment was not limited to reports that they submitted to the head of university security. The university also tracked the movements of students around campus by collecting data from all the building entrances where scanning ID cards is required to gain access. Constant surveillance and harassment by security was the university’s final tactic for shutting down encampment. Despite this and the complete cutting of electricity to the camp that made it impossible for students to survive winter, encampment remained for another whole month, making it the longest sit in across the continent to protest zionist genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.