From Lower Field to Palestine

After Israel destroyed every single university in Gaza, another one emerged in Montreal for the people of Gaza and Palestine. Montreal’s newest invocation of liberation began on April 27 with the People’s University for Palestine on McGill University’s Lower Field. Since then, hundreds have camped and set up tents and hundreds have joined together for daily protests, songs, meals, teach-ins, screenings, and prayers. We have made history as the first Canadian encampment in the global student intifada, and we cannot settle until Palestine is free from the river to the sea. 

Students, faculty, and community members of conscience have gathered across Turtle Island to demand divestment from and disclosure of their university’s financial ties to companies, institutions, and organizations complicit in this genocide. Universities’ policing, surveillance, and counterinsurgent efforts have attempted to stoke fear in a growing and diverse consensus of Canadian university students. The first injunction, student-initiated, tried to dismantle the right to protest on university campuses (Cherry). The second, university-initiated, failed to assert the university’s monopoly over health, safety, security, and private property. 

We have responded with hope, care, love, and revolutionary struggle—the university will not look the same after we divest. We keep us safe. We keep us healthy. We keep us secure. When a university, named after an enslaver, on stolen land, tells us that this property is private, we make it public—drawing the anti-colonial interconnectedness of Palestinian and Indigenous self-determination in this place.1 Business as usual will not proceed, precisely because the university cannot be run as a business profiting on military technology, endless war, and apartheid rule. Materially investing in the slaughter and genocide of Palestinians and consistently calling the police on students undermines this university’s repeated claim to the free exchange of ideas, to peaceful protest, or what one administrator terms McGill’s “esprit rassembleur.”2

Organizers have carefully situated this encampment into longer histories of struggle. The Liberated Zone comes thirty-eight years after the Black and African student–led mobilizations that led to McGill divesting from South African apartheid, a history the university now claims as its own. Two years after Divest McGill’s environmental occupation, two years after the 71.1 percent majority vote for the Palestine Solidarity Policy (McGill Tribune Editorial Board).3 The same year as the historic turnout for the Policy against Genocide in Palestine (78.7 percent of the vote, record student turnout), the weekly protests by Palestinian Youth Movement Montreal, the walkouts organized by Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights McGill (now Students for Palestine’s Honour and Resistance), the Bronfman blockade, and solidarity organizing among Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, Jewish, Black, and Indigenous students and Montrealers (see Students’ Society of McGill University, “Student-Initiated Referendum Question Fall 2023”).4

This historical consciousness explains the caress one feels walking through Lower Field. You hear conversations bridging difference, jokes under a rainy tarp, intellectual discussions over a hot meal from an auntie’s massive pot, and care exchanged between the tents, ensuring everyone is nourished, in body and soul.

When we contest these unjust, genocidal measures, we practice the world after divestment. We have done so following the courageous lead of the Palestinian people, who light the path of freedom, resisting Israel’s bombs, shootings, poisoning, and dispossession. The university funds this regime’s guns, planes, and weapons and legitimates the terror through clerkships, exchanges, and Start-Up Nation courses (Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights at McGill). Votes, protests, and encampments demonstrate the vibrancy of our democracy against administrative repression and coordination in the genocide against Palestine. The zone is another place for creation and world-making, envisioning universities that sustain collective liberation, imagining Palestinian futures beyond colonialism.

I wrote part of this reflection from within the Leila Khaled People’s Library for Palestine, a space at the encampment’s edge overflowing with Gazan poetry, Palestinian intellectual history, and accounts of revolutions in Cuba, Algeria, and Turtle Island. Posters, stickers, and lights adorn this tent, with passersby browsing the stacks, making recommendations, and reading aloud to one another. 

The encampment has formed roots in Lower Field. We hear translations of Arabic into different languages and comparisons of anti-colonial freedom movements. Every single day, a tale, a song. The media, the state, and the university try to erase us, distracting us with fear, violence, and the perceived impossibility of our demands. This has only sharpened our bonds to one another and to a free Palestine. We will not be moved, so that the university will. The people who make up this place are creating the world anew.

Matthew Molinaro is a journalist, cultural worker, and graduate student at the University of Toronto. He holds a BA in English (First Class Honours) from McGill University, where he served as editor-in-chief of The Tribune, a student-run, antioppressive newspaper, and organized in the Black Students’ Network political portfolio. Matthew researches and writes on culture, politics, racial justice, and solidarity.