July 25th, 2024: Hunger Strikes and the Commodification of Student Movements for Palestine (Fatima Khalladi)
“Students in most universities in Canada were planning for a nationwide movement before the establishment of Columbia’s encampment. In many universities, they wanted to take their time and plan a sustainable encampment while in others, especially in Canada’s larger and more prestigious universities such as McGill, they wanted to “hop on the US momentum”, which often resulted in ill-planned encampments.”
A: What would we call a “sustainable encampment”? What would we call an “ill-planned encampment”?
B: I think a sustainable encampment would mean different things to different universities, based on resources, student population, wealth… We need to take into account what different universities simply can and cannot do because of resources.
C: Sustainable encampments should be well-equipped, have capable leadership, good community dynamics so that there is support from other groups in the community, and that it has clearly established goals for what the encampment is to achieve.
D: Yeah. Similarly, I would see unsustainable encampments as those that are poorly-equipped resource-wise, are lacking in leadership, have a very disjointed encampment community as well as weak ties with other local movements, and have unclear goals and demands.
A: Do we think our encampment was sustainable?
B: At the start, yes. There was a lot of momentum and people seemed very united. But things began to massively stagnate. We didn’t really know who the leaders were - everyone began to rely on one or two people for answers about where the encampments were going and what to do, no one felt comfortable starting new initiatives. I started to feel useless in the space. There could have been more attempts to integrate those who were at the encampments into the functioning of the encampments themselves - like being in charge of food, media, signs, etc.
“The Iroquois nations graciously permitted students to set up encampments on their lands so long as they followed Iroquois laws and treated the land and the people respectfully. This permission was rescinded three weeks later after the camp pushed out most leftist students and adopted hierarchical decision-making systems in place of more inclusive democratic procedures involving all participants. This is a clear example of a problem plaguing many encampments in Canada: the desire for power and control by some people at the expense of grassroots democratic procedures.””
E: I did find it ironic how colonialist structures were adopted within the organization of an encampment designed to battle colonialism…
A: What do you mean by colonialist structures?
E: Having a more hierarchical instead of communal form of governance and organization.
B: It’s interesting to compare the encampments in Canada versus the US. Unlike the US, Canada does not have a history of human rights movements - like the civil rights movements in the States. Perhaps Canadian universities lack the cultural and historical context that may have naturally grounded the encampments in more firm, ordered ideology, intent, and governance.
E: Québec, however, does have a history of oppression relative to the anglophone population. And we do see that their encampments were more radical than those at anglophone universities.
“There is also a commodification-of-popular-movements problem that requires our urgent attention. And the movement in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for self-determination and justice is no exception. Under capitalism, commodifying a movement is one of the most effective ways of destroying it. Turn it from a legitimate intellectual and material cause to a bunch of slogans, t-shirts, and performative actions. The movement becomes devoid of roots. We saw this happen to the Black Lives Matter movement, when corporations started posting black squares, and white people who have always benefited from white supremacy washed their hands free of guilt by going to a protest or posting a video rather than genuinely understanding their part in the oppression.”
A: I definitely felt that there was commodification at the UWO encampments. I perceived that some people would shout and rally without a sense of purpose, and people would be content to simply exist in the encampment space doing nothing. Existence may be resistance to an extent, but it is not enough - the bar can be set higher, such as using the space to educate oneself about Palestine and taking time to understand one's own position in society relative to global power. I do get that burnout is real, so perhaps some stagnation was inevitable. Still, should have been spaces to hold for appropriately dealing with burnout in a way that doesn’t disillusion and commodify the movement.
B: Yeah. There were hierarchies and cliques that began forming within the encampment space, too. And that did create an anti-community sentiment which I think furthered the commodification. For some, the rallies didn’t seem to be about liberation or Palestine - they seemed to be about ‘looking cool’ and being disruptive for the sake of being disruptive rather than causing chaos in an ideologically grounded manner.
A: I also did find it profoundly disrespectful and detached from reality how some people without blood ties to Palestine were using the encampments as a partying space - knowing full well that there were people within that space who had family in Gaza or who had lost family in Gaza. How much more can a movement be commodified than to turn it into a playground, a capitalistic party space?
E: I do fear that if more people begin to join the. movement to ‘look cool’, then powerful resistance symbols like the keffiyeh lose their power as resistance symbols. They become devoid of symbolism: they become a fad when that was not their origin. I do wonder if social media may uniquely contribute to hijacking and erasing the movement because it renders its commodification much easier. This is sad, because then accusations that the Palestine movement is a social media-created fad actually start to become true…
C: I think something consoling regarding that is that the amount of people who treat it as a fad will not outright the amount of people who don't. The Hippie movement is a good example of this.
A: How can we tell if people are in it for the fad or not? It does become hard - and even uncomfortable - to judge.
B: I think it’s about how much people actually know about the movement, the history of oppression, and their role in sustaining and resisting it?
C: There is also a difference between those who are in the movement because they are anti-genocide and because they are for liberation. It is far easier and less risky to be anti-genocide than to be for liberation. This distinction was also present at the encampments and caused an internal divide that was not explicitly articulated.
E: That’s true. There was a clear distinction between people - without blood ties to Palestine - who would shout at a rally and post on social media all the time, but would never go to a teach-in or self-educate.
“Without revolutionary theory, there cannot be revolutionary movements, said Lenin. Liberal groups are co-opting more radical movements for justice in Palestine... Intersectionality and collective liberation mean less to people who merely want to hop on a trend.”
C: There was no discussion of theory at the encampments. And there were issues with intersectionality. Dynamics at the encampments with the LGBTQ+ community were tense.
E: People do need to “learn” how to protest. It is a skill that needs to be built, otherwise burn out will prevail and there will be a pervasive sense of hopelessness that settles in. The encampments could have built relationships with seasoned human rights organizations within London - that could have been incredibly useful to keep the encampments ideologically and practically grounded.
B: I think what would have helped with that too is more organization for the logistical ways of sustaining the encampments - like having a consistent daily schedule for food, media, etc.
C: The divisions within the movement were also not resolved. Whenever there was tension, people simply left. For example, there was an instance where some people wanted to forge an alliance with one of the cops, wanted to have more militant actions, wanted to incorporate LGBTQ+ movements into the encampments. But there was also a desire to placate CPSA and other groups that desired non-militant action among other conditions in exchange for their support.
“This encampment claims it is for Palestinians and liberation for all, but it pushes away Palestinians who have other ideas, doxes them, and allows bigotry to run on-site unchecked, says Layla. It allows movement opportunists to assume positions of power, many of whom come from wealthier Gulf-Arab families. ”
C: This definitely happened in our encampment.. those with more militant beliefs were ousted. We lost key organizers that led the encampment to becoming headless and stagnant.
“The leftist Palestinians and those with intersectional identities have been pushed aside by the more mainstream activists with a more conversional version of “resistance”. The purging of the leftist students from McGill’s camp, however, resulted in the creation of an encampment at UQAM, a French university in Montreal. This encampment was much more militant and achieved full divestment and an end to all ties with Israel within three weeks of its formation notwithstanding multiple clashes with police and other authorities.”
E: We can really see the differences in universities where students have lived experiences with oppression. UQAM, for example, is a less wealthy, less elite university. It is perhaps freer from class divides that naturally puncture and sap away conviction and the clarity that drives and grounds movements.
B: We can contrast this with larger, more prestigious universities, like Yale, NYU, Harvard… that have significant endowments.
““While positive, I believe the student encampments have lost sight of their political goals and the replication of class dynamics seems ever-present,” says Lia, a community activist in Montreal. “As we saw Cal Poly Humboldt, a working-class polytechnic university, took the lead on what was regarded as more militant strategies, a similar analysis can perhaps be made in Montreal where the elite university McGill seems to have opted for more symbolic strategies. The formation of the UQAM encampment, a university where more socio-economic marginalization is present, was born out of frustration with this.””
A: I agree with this. The material existence of the encampments was good because of symbolic power of US encampments, especially Columbia, and the crackdown that ensued. But the movement itself stagnated rapidly.
C: There was very little space to discuss ideologies and resolve conflicts between or within ideologies.
E: It did unfortunately have a ‘one size fits all’ activism approach instead of nurturing an openness to multifaceted methods of resistance.
“In the final analysis, what is most needed if the Palestinian solidarity movements are to avoid the pitfalls of cooptation and marginalization is theoretical groundedness, intersectional practices, and liberatory education. Ironically, we are talking about a student movement in an elite university that fails to acknowledge a deeply radical approach to Palestine activism and education. A sure way to marginalize radical visions of liberation in movement-building is to isolate them from other struggles. The struggle for justice in Palestine is integrally connected with anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-patriarchal, and anti-imperialist struggles. In their absence, we are bound to repeat the same debilitating issues repeatedly. We must acknowledge race, gender, class, ethnicity, and nationality when entering spaces like an encampment. ”
E: There was some talk about Sudan, Congo, Haiti, and other liberation movements at the encampments. But the varying privilege associated with gender, race, class, ethnicity, nationality… was not explicitly discussed. There were intersectional struggles present within the encampment space. How do we work towards dismantling that privilege when people within those spaces simply are benefiting from that privilege at the explicit expense of others?
