The Hamilton Spectator

Dear McMaster: Encampment students are your ‘brighter world’

“Qahr” is the untranslat­able Arabic word for deep burning anguish, a feeling of injustice resulting from a huge asymmetry of violence in power that is normalized and silenced, even while in plain sight.

We represent Faculty for Palestine McMaster, a group of McMaster professors experienci­ng qahr witnessing the genocide in Palestine over the last eight months, and most recently the horrific attack burning displaced Palestinia­ns in Rafah. We are in solidarity with the student encampment­s at our campus and across Turtle Island in support of freedom and justice for people everywhere. Many of us have spent nights sleeping at the encampment and days supporting the camp. We are profoundly moved and motivated by our students’ commitment to justice.

Over the last three weeks, we have been witnesses to how beautiful, highly functionin­g, creative and diverse the People’s University of McMaster camp has been. There have been regular Muslim prayers and Jewish Shabbat services, children running around in communal safety, zine workshops, intersecti­onal teach-ins and football and card games long into the night. The students recognize that the genocide in Palestine is about land and not religion, and about a colonizer and a colonized. We are struck by the consistent clarity and sophistica­tion of the student’ analyses at teach-ins, in conversati­ons with us and in their communicat­ion with the university. They have represente­d the very best of McMaster’s purported ideals of a “brighter world” with their courage and critical thinking. We are so, so proud of our students.

Since October, these student organizers have done tireless work on campus to support students affected by the genocide, educate our community and advocate for human rights, and they deserve admiration for those initiative­s. In light of what’s at stake, it’s important to highlight the vast disparity between McMaster’s responses to red paint versus the actual blood of nearly 40,000 people, some of whom are colleagues, family and community members related to the McMaster community.

We are deeply alarmed at rises in actual antisemiti­sm across Canada by the far-right, and we reject conflation­s of antisemiti­sm and anti-Zionism. We distinguis­h between actual unsafety for anyone in the McMaster community — Jewish, Muslim and otherwise — and feelings of discomfort and fragility expressed by racist, privileged individual­s at having their colonial narratives challenged.

The student encampment at McMaster was three weeks. That is a long time to have their lives on hold, to sleep on the ground through the freezing nights, sweltering days and insect bites, to postpone and cancel long-awaited trips, high-stakes admission tests and much more. Their demands and hardships, in service of their solidarity against the horrors being inflicted on Palestine, cannot be infantiliz­ed and brushed aside in favour of a naive desire for a return to business as usual. We stand behind the students’ demands to disclose and divest here.

Among our colleagues, families and communitie­s, as well as through our phones and social media, we have been experienci­ng qahr for the last eight months. Qahr is comparing McMaster’s response to the situation in Gaza versus its strong response to the situation in Ukraine. Are Palestinia­n lives any less worthy of justice and dignity? Qahr is witnessing McMaster’s slap on the wrist to faculty and staff who have publicly made hateful statements while McMaster students walk on eggshells in fear of reprisal. Qahr is knowing that every single university in Gaza has been destroyed, and Palestinia­n academics and their families wiped out, while McMaster and universiti­es across Canada marginaliz­e students and their demands for an academic boycott.

It has been our fervent desire that our students are able to go back home. The burdens they have undertaken represent a powerful social justice service to us all. We will be watching McMaster very closely and holding it accountabl­e to the commitment­s it made to the students in the agreement.