CHARBONNEAU – Pro Palestinians build on past protests

THE CURRENT WAVE of pro Palestinian protests is benefitting from years of activism, including the anti-war movement of the sixties. Pro Palestinian university encampments now total 140 in the U.S. and 15 in Canada.

The protests were marginal until Israel’s disproportional response to the Hamas atrocities of October 7.

Some North American universities haven’t learned the lesson of how to manage legitimate protests.

The belligerence of university administrators today is reminiscent of that fateful day, on May 4, 1970, when members of the Ohio National Guard fired into a crowd of Kent State University demonstrators, killing four and wounding nine.

The shots echoed around the world and changed the course of the war.

The heavy-handed use of police on pro Palestinian protests, as happened at the University of Alberta in Edmonton and the University of Calgary, increases public sympathy towards the protestors.

Administrators at Thompson Rivers University seem to get it. They have been negotiating with a pro-Palestine group on campus calling themselves The People’s University of Gaza at TRU. The group is asking what many pro Palestine groups are asking – a disclosure and divestment of assets that support Israel’s war machine.

Belligerence breeds suspicion. I have to wonder what those universities who use brute force have to hide. Are they financially supporting Israel’s mass killing and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza?

In addition to anti-war protests of the sixties, pro Palestine protestors benefit from 20 years of activism around demands known as boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS).

The new protests draw concepts such as settler colonialism popularized by indigenous movements such as Idle No More. More people are becoming aware that Palestine was not an empty country when Jews claimed that God had given it to them. About 700,000 Palestinians were forced from their homes in the founding of Israel in 1948.

Current pro Palestine movements have taken protests to a new level and the issue has become political. Canada’s Liberal government is paying attention. Prime Minister Trudeau has adjusted his views. In 2015, then-Liberal Party leader tweeted that the BDS movement and Israel Apartheid Week had “no place on Canadian campuses.”

With the support of most Liberal MPs, including cabinet ministers and the NDP, Ottawa has halted permits for arms exports to Israel. It’s “something that we couldn’t have imagined a year ago,” said Michael Bueckert, vice-president of the progressive advocacy group Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East.

The growing pro Palestine movement has caught Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre in a bind. Hawkish Conservative supporters, often Christians who feel a strong connection to the “holy land,” fiercely back the Israeli invasion of Gaza.

The Trudeau government supports a two-state solution that would recognize Palestine as a state.

But Conservatives, three Liberals, and an independent MP, voted against an NDP motion to work toward the recognition of the State of Palestine as part of a negotiated two-state solution.

Poilievre’s reluctance to call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza threatens to alienate some of his young supporters, on whom he pins his bid for prime minister.

As in the anti-war protests, there’s much that can go wrong, including an escalation of bloody clashes with police and counter protestors, and the mentally ill, strung out on drugs, looking for shelter.

David Charbonneau is a retired TRU electronics instructor who hosts a blog at http://www.eyeviewkamloops.wordpress.com.