By Sonya Ben Yahmed

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This text is written in resonance with a communication presented during a counter-event of the Congress of the Federation of Human Sciences (FHS), in June 2024, in Montreal. The counter-event was organized to protest the FHS’s lack of position on the genocide in Gaza and the pro-Palestinian student movement, as reflected in the encampment at McGill University where the congress was supposed to take place.

In this text, I take a brief inventory of the pro-Palestine mobilization in Canada and the recent backlash. I argue for the importance of a militant ethnographic approach (Juris, 2007) in this context, that mobilizes participant observation and autoethnography (Ellis and al., 2011), in connection with my involvement and a regular and diligent participation to the Al Aqsa Popular University (APU) student encampment, at the Université de Québec à Montréal (UQAM).

The experience of the encampment is very rich and deserves to be reported in a way that accounts for it. For my part, I deal here with specific elements, notably in relation to the educational alternative that the APU could represent and the question of violence.

We will see that a paradigm shift has become possible, by placing, more than ever, resistance at the heart of the struggle and by articulating it around a discourse of ongoing victory.

Struggle for Palestine in Canada, pre and post October 7th

Palestinians and pro-Palestine activists have experienced, especially since October 7, 2023, great repression and “fierce attack on freedom of expression” in the West (Awres, 2023). Artists, academics, journalists, politicians, and more are censored, defamed, and fired. In different liberal democracies such as Quebec and Canada, which espouses freedom of expression as a highly defended value, various pro-Palestine events are banned or canceled (Dupuis-Déri, 2024).

This hunt mobilizes discourses and rhetoric that range from allegations of anti-Semitism, even against Arab and Jewish people, to pro-Islamism, while instrumentalizing the issue of gender and women’s rights^[1] In this regard, one can for example read the statement of Women of Diverse Origins: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/xBEdRP8vanZFeEKG/

and violence. This “new anti-Semitism” aims “to dispose of the facts and evidence supporting criticisms of the Israeli state’s oppressions and crimes and to discover in their place libelous slurs against Israel that resonate with the shameful tropes of European anti-Semitism,” as Michael Keefer (2024, p.125) puts it.

Despite its alarming nature, this situation is not new. In the media world, for example, Davide Mastracci (2024) emphasized publication policies that exclude any criticism of the Zionist entity, ranging from refusing to publish to veteran journalists, dismissal, and even the rejection of content when pro-“Israel” groups put pressure on the media.^[2] This goes against the principle of freedom of expression advocated and defining the very existence of many media publications. Similar groups of censors act within universities, through class action lawsuits that they file against students, professors and faculty, accusing their own institutions of not protecting students and faculty against the anti-Semitic harassment they say they suffer.

The tracking and surveillance of pro-Palestinian activists in all spheres where they are active is, obviously, not new. October 7 remains, however, a date from which the pro-Palestine mobilization has occupied more spaces and made itself visible; the same goes for backlash and repression.

Some methodological and terminological elements

My long-time activism for Palestine naturally led me to get involved in the encampments’ movement at a time of genocide in Gaza, and my activist involvement led me, as a researcher, to do a methodical observation as a part of what we can call a “militant ethnography”. This concept of activist and anthropologist Jeffrey Juris (2007) combines politically engaged participant observation and ethnography, and is premised on a high reflexive collaboration between ethnographers and activists, generally in anti-authoritarian networks. It aims to produce politically applicable knowledge from within structures and movements (Apoifis, 2016) and highlights the importance of making this knowledge accessible both to the academy and the relevant social movements.

Participation and political solidarity with their collaborators, in addition to a commitment to distribute knowledge after the research is completed, are mandatory for this kind of ethnography. Also, several reflections and implementations of mechanisms that promote the democratization of knowledge and respect for the question of representation are important here; for example, the attempt to make output accessible to activist networks and respect the agency and voice of the collaborators.

It is with this in mind that this article is written.

In the following section, I will focus particularly on the educational aspect of the encampment and two moments which seem to me to be particularly important in its history. In doing so, the content will remain deliberately general at times, especially in the part concerning violence and sense making, out of regard for security issues.

Student mobilizations: the case of the APU

In resonance with the encampments that have emerged in the United States, starting from April 2024, several have been established in different universities in Quebec and Canada to protest against the genocide and the complicity of the institutions of knowledge that continue to have links with “Israeli” universities and companies and do not display a clear position against the genocide. The first one was McGill’s encampment, then others at various universities such as Toronto, Ottawa, British Columbia, Sherbrooke and Laval. The latter was immediately dismantled by force, which demonstrates, according to professors Nolywé Delannon, Louis-Philippe Lampron and Jesse Greener, in an op-ed published by Le Devoir on June 5, “that Université Laval has become a space for muzzling and judicializing democratic student life, a trend that the entire Quebec university community should be concerned about.”

At UQAM, an encampment called the Al Aqsa Popular University (APU) was set up from May 12 until June 6, 2024. Its major demands concerned the disclosure of all the links with the Zionist entity and the adoption of an academic boycott of “Israeli” universities by the entire Quebec university network, in addition to opposition to the judicialization of the struggle for Palestine and the abolition of the future Quebec Office in “Israel.”

The APU: an alternative to the university?

Starting from the first days, workshops and teach-ins open to the public took place outside the barricades of the encampment. Over almost one month, critical content was delivered on the history of Palestine, the history of campus occupations, information on rights in cases of arrest and detention, digital resistance, climate justice, collective gardening sessions and healing circles, storytelling, movie screenings, revolutionary singing, music and much more.

This emerged following a collective reflection on the importance of offering critical content, particularly focused on Palestine but not only, to attract sympathizers to the cause, educate the less knowledgeable and keep the encampers in continuous learning and contact with the wider public. I was part of the programming team for these different workshops and events.

As at McGill encampment, we also had a library, with many books, and a space for reading and reading circles.

The tranquility of the atmosphere and space were sometimes disturbed by the hostile looks and comments of some UQAM security officers, but especially by particular police interventions.

Violence, surveillance and sense making

Two important moments in the history of the encampment seem to me to be worth noting: two serious clashes or two moments of police brutality with quite serious consequences. These are moments when the encampers tried to occupy the street and faced police violence in the form of pepper spray, beatings, point-blank projectiles and an arrest. This highlighted that barricading oneself in a specific space is disturbing, but occupying public space, making oneself visible and making one’s cause accessible are more disturbing to the State.

The first moment concerned the formation of a block in the street, the other was the open protest demonstration following the dismantling of the encampment, on June 6, 2024, which aimed to take the cause elsewhere and headed towards other      liberated zones, as campers like to call them, such as McGill’s.

Increased surveillance (drones, a strong daily