In the night of 9–10 July, students and other pro-Palestinian protestors present in the camp located at the entrance to the McGill campus found themselves served with an eviction notice. According to the university administration’s press release, the camp represented ‘an increasingly serious threat to health and safety’. A few hours later, cranes, bulldozers and other construction machinery arrived and destroyed the much infrastructure built over a period of 75 days.
On the 1st and 15th of May, the Quebec Superior Court had rejected two applications for a temporary decommissioning injunction. The two parties were to face off again in court on 25 July, but the heads of the university, unwilling to wait for the due process of law, called on Sirco, a private Quebec security company. This decision came because of the breakdown in negotiations between the heads of McGill and Concordia, the city’s two English-language universities – the students of the latter institution having also established their camp at McGill for want of space on their own campus – and their students represented by Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR).
‘This camp will remain historical and revolutionary’, says 20-year-old Ward (pseudo), a Lebanese student in political science and general co-ordinator for SPHR. ‘In Canada, McGill is the equivalent of Columbia in New York. When we saw that they had set up a camp down there, we said to ourselves we must do the same,’ he explains.
Lethal investments
Despite the demolition of the camp, the students of McGill and Concordia have maintained their demands. They want the ‘complete disinvestment of the contracts’ signed between their universities and the private companies ‘complicit with the Gaza genocide.’ According to the data published by McGill, it has invested nearly 73 million dollars in companies involved in the crimes committed by the Israeli army in the occupied territories.
As of 31 March, McGill held $500,000 worth of stocks in the US company Lockheed Martin, supplier of Hellfire 9X missiles to the Israeli army. The French company Safran, in which McGill has invested nearly 1.5 million dollars also collaborates with the Israeli military technology company Rafael, on a project of advanced sensor systems and artificial intelligence – a technology which the Israeli army has used, particularly in Gaza, to kill on an even larger scale. The students also point an accusing finger at an investment of over 1.6 million dollars in the French company Thales, also specialising in defence and aerospace, in view of its collaboration with the Israeli military equipment firm Elbit Systems in June 2023. This association was denounced in a declaration published by the UN General Assembly in 2022, pointing to the use of the firm’s Apache helicopters ‘to bomb Lebanese and Palestinian villages’ but also in ‘the massive surveillance of the Palestinians’ and ‘the reinforcement of the military control over occupied Palestinian territory.’ Ward is outraged:
The college uses out tuition money to throw in with Israel (…) but those of us who come from the Middle East, we have known so many injustices [caused by Israel] in our lifetime, that we’re not afraid to fight one more. We’ve already seen much worse.
The complicity of the banks
At Concordia University, the administration assures us they have ‘moved away from certain investments, especially in the armaments industry’ and that their investments involving Israel ‘represent [only] 0.001%’ yet they refuse to publish the list of their holdings as the students demand they do. ‘We were ignored’ Sara Al Khalid, a former member of SPHR Concordia, deplores. She is 24 and has just got her degree in public affairs and political studies. She’s Palestinian, she’s a member of Montreal Palestine, an action group of young Quebecker Palestinians who organise demonstrations in Montreal in support of Palestine. She goes on: ‘I don’t know what we were expecting. What could a university reply if one of its Palestinian students asks it up front to stop investing in the murder of her people?’
The French-language universities in Montreal have been presented with the same type of grievances. But while the board of directors of the University de Québec à Montréal (UQAM) yielded to its students’ demands and voted a resolution to the effect that ‘no direct investment in funds or companies would finance weaponry, and that it would reveal each year,’ the list of its investments, l’Université de Montréal (UdeM) refused to follow suit.
According to its report for the year 2023, it possesses over 9.2 million dollars worth of shares in Canadian banks, such as the Toronto-Dominion Bank, the Royal Bank of Canada, the Bank of Montreal and the Scota Bank. Now all these financial institutions have been taken to task many times by the Boycott Divestment Sanctions campaign (BDS Québec) for their investments of several millions of dollars in the armaments companies Elbit Systems and General Dynamics. The latter is the world’s fifth largest military company, providing not only a wide variety of bombs to the Israeli air force, sch as the MK-82 and 84, dropped on Gaza in 2014 and 2021, but also the weapons systems and other components of Israeli fighter planes F-35, F-15 and F-16, implicated in the 2014 bombing of residential tower blocks and the offices of Al-Jazira and Associated Press in Gaza Cit. y. Questioned about the investments made with her money, Geneviève O’Meara, spokesperson for the Université de Montréal, has this to say for her defence: ‘I do not select our holdings one by one […] they are part of investment portfolios rather than direct investments and these portfolios are put together by external asset managers.’
Political and economic threats
Dov Baum, director of the Action Center for Corporate Accountability with the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) based in California, denounces this kind of sophistry.
When universities claim they don’t invest directly in these companies, it means they ought to be able to issue a declaration whereby they pledge themselves publicly not to invest in them. It shouldn’t be such a big deal, since they don’t invest in them directly.
Since 2005, her organisation has been collecting, classifying and publishing information ‘which is public but hard to find’ on the companies involved in the violations of human rights in Palestine, making it available to North American activists. Her opinion is that if University authorities are so firmly opposed to divestment, it’s because they would have to face serious pressures: ‘Political ones in the first place, because they’re afraid of reprisals, of being accused of anti-Semitism by government representatives and other lobbyists, but also economic pressures, because they would lose many alumni donors and their money.’ Because disinvestment remains an effective means of pressure:
That Israeli government can carry on with its genocide and benefits from this impunity only because it still receives too much direct aid from Europe and the USA, especially through the complicity of these companies.
The alibi of academic freedom
Besides the Quebec universities’ investments, certain collaborative arrangements with Israeli universities are also seen as problematic, by professors as well as students: ‘Israeli universities are not oases of liberal values where critical thinking is cultivated’, says Dyala Hamzah who teaches contemporary Arab history at the Montréal University and belongs to BDS-Québec.
McGill and the Université de Montréal have collaboration agreements. These include research programs with Ben Gurion University in Negev, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and that of Tel Aviv. On the other hand, the contract with Ariel University, located in occupied Palestinian territory, was ‘suspended indefinitely last Autumn’ Geneviève O’Mear tells me. Not only do these establishments host the military programs Talplot and Havatzalot, but also those dealing with strategy development, like the ‘Dahiveh doctrine’. Developed by the Israeli army during the 2006 Lebanese war, this doctrine advocates a disproportionate striking force and a targeting of civilian infrastructure so that the reconstruction process should be long and costly. ‘It is unthinkable that Western institutions that claim to embody liberal values and belong to a humanist tradition should cultivate relationships with universities which deal in death,’ Dyala Hanzah continues.
In March 2024, the McGill administrators declared having decided not to ‘cut themselves off from Israeli universities and research institutes’ in the name of the freedom of academic research. Same story from the Université de Montréal. Dyala Hamzah has been trying, in vain, to push through the university assembly a boycott that would suspend these agreements, yet she remains convinced: the Israeli universities play a direct role in the preservation of the colonial system and the occupation of Palestine.
‘Boycotting Israeli universities won’t give the Palestinians back their freedom or let them live in peace with their Israeli Jewish neighbours overnight,’ she explains.’But depriving it of the capacity for mobilising its soft power and whitewashing its crimes through these agreements, means working towards the country’s isolation, political, economic and social.’And the professor is keen to make clear that this boycott movement is not aimed at individuals but at institutions:
It’s true, we may lose some colleagues and interrupt some collaborative ventures, but there’s a genocide going on. The boycott isn’t just to be chic, it’s an act of resistance.
At the Université de Montréal, the private activities of Chancellor Frantz Saintellemy have also made many on the faculty and in the student body feel uneasy. This businessman of forty-eight turns out to be president and operations manager of Leddar Tech, a Québec Company established in Israel, specialising in automotive technology for autonomous driving systems. Seven of Leddar Tech’s employees were sent to Gaza as reservists following 7 October, and the company is also a member of the military consortium Autonomus Vehicle Advanced Techchnolgies for Situational Awareness (AVATAR). The students and other members of the Collectif UdeM Palestine have circulated an on-line petition demanding of Daniel Jutras, Rector of the University, more transparency as to the link between the Chancellor’s firm and the Israeli military industry. The spokesperson for the Université de Montréal asserted that ‘the Chancellor is appointed by the University Council and his functions at UdeM do not include any role in the choice of the University’s academic partners, any more than in the choice of investments for its endowment fund.’ But in the eyes of Dyala Hamzah there is a glaring conflict of interests here: ‘The Chancellor is head of a firm operating alongside companies at the heart the Israeli militaro-industrial complex, i.e. Rafael and Elbit Systems’, and she concludes:
The Université de Montréal cannot pretend to be a humanistic establishment, cultivating knowledge and critical thought and be headed by an associate of the merchants of death serving an ethno-nationalist project.