Hunger Strikes and the Commodification of Student Movements for Palestine
“Without revolutionary theory, there cannot be revolutionary movements” —Lenin.
On February 19, students at McGill University, in collaboration with Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP McGill), began a hunger strike demanding the university to divest all 74+ million dollars of investments in companies funding or involved in Israel as well as ending academic relations with Israeli institutions in historic Palestine. The hunger strike started with indefinite hunger strikers and rotational hunger strikers. The former was committed to striking for as long as possible, while the latter would commit to a defined time, such as 3–6 days, to show support for the indefinite hunger strikers and to further pressure the university by encouraging more students to join the action, fully understanding that hunger striking is a form of protest with serious physical and mental consequences for the participants.
The first indefinite hunger strike started on February 19 and lasted 34 days before the first person was hospitalized. The second student lasted 36 days before being hospitalized. The last student lasted 40 days. The hunger strikes lasted 76 days. The McGill administration met with the strikers once on day 55. In that meeting, the McGill administration refused to explain why as a publicly funded institution, McGill is investing in a state committing genocide. Angela Campbell, a “human rights lawyer” and McGill associate provost of equity and academic policies, sat there looking at Chadi, the second hospitalized student, in full view of the Zoom call, and refused to acknowledge their presence while stating that McGill’s association with Zionist institutions is a matter of academic freedom. Even with thousands of supporters in the community, including 1200 faculty and staff members, the hunger strike could not get the McGill administration to budge on the issue of divestment.
“McGill and Concordia don’t care at all if students live or die,” said Zulfaqar, a student community activist. “That is their level of detachment from the issues at hand and it is beyond disgraceful.”
“It has been a crushing experience to witness and live the cruelty and inhumanity of the McGill administration,” says Rania, the first hospitalized hunger striker. “My love and yearning for learning and higher education have been pulverized because the institutions that are responsible for educating us have white supremacist, colonial, and capitalist values entrenched at their core. McGill has now watched three of their students be hospitalized, me included, after starving ourselves for more than 30 days in protest of the university’s bloodied investments and academic ties to Israel and Zionism. It was evident that McGill places genocide-stained money and power like the colonial institution it always has been over the well-being of their students as well as the larger community.”
The hunger strike aimed to bring a focus on the suffering that McGill was contributing to in Palestine, including the weaponization of starvation affecting 2.2 million Gazans. Unsurprisingly, McGill administrators showed as much concern about the suffering of ordinary Palestinians as they did about the students. “It is disgraceful to see McGill continue to disregard the wellbeing of their students and human life in general,” says Ana, the hunger strike’s financial analyst.
The administration, however, was not the only obstacle encountered by the student hunger strikers. Liberal Palestinian groups on campus also often opposed both the hunger strikes as a form of protest and the more radical demands associated with them. The student hunger strikers belong to an independent group of students who nevertheless had partnered with and emerged out of the SJP McGill, a leftist intersectional Palestinian-led group with a horizontal structure. The SJP McGill was formed in October 2023 in response to the Palestinian students’ need for a space to organize after they were excluded from the existing Palestine organizing group on campus, Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights McGill (SPHR McGill). A disagreement ensued over issues related to questions concerning organizational hierarchy, policy, and intersectionality of the Palestinian liberation struggle with struggles for the liberation of all peoples.
Despite movement issues, the hunger strike had its successes. “It generated local, national, and international attention and pressure on McGill concerning its investments in Israel and support of Zionistic ideology” reflects Kit, of Hunger Strike Care Team. “An institution that paints itself as elite and a leader on the international stage was exposed for the genocidal institution that it has always been by The Guardian and Middle East Eye.” The McGill hunger strikers had “sparked their movement before encampments of students across the globe” demanding McGill University “divest from Israel-linked firms.” “Another success,” Kit states, “is that it fortified mutual aid and care networks necessary for furthering a sustainable movement.” The McGill hunger strikes inspired many other student-led hunger strikes across Turtle Island, one of which was the USF hunger strike with direct participation by McGill activists.
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Student movements have historically played a major role in struggles for social justice and change, such as in ending the system of apartheid in South Africa, challenging the Jim Crow laws in the US, the Arab revolts in West Asia, and the Palestinian struggles for self-determination and justice. The power of student movements within the Palestinian struggle can not be overstated. Concerning the latter struggle, for example, it was “[t]he political activism of Palestinian students in Cairo [that] laid the basis for establishing Fatah (Palestinian National Liberation Movement). Yasser Arafat and Abu Iyad were among the students who won elections in the Palestinian Student Union in Cairo as early as 1952.”
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In April, students at Columbia University in the US started an encampment on school grounds to pressure the university to divest from companies investing in Israel as it carries out a genocide in Gaza. Students at Columbia were met with heavy police suppression, which only made the encampments larger. Encampments started popping up nationwide and in Canada, both in solidarity with the students at Columbia and to pressure their respective universities to divest from Israel.
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.
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Less noticed in public conversations about the student encampments has been the large presence of the indigenous peoples of Turtle Island in Canada. The Mohawk people in Tiohtià’ke (Montreal), the indigenous nations whose land we occupy, were heavily involved in the movement. The Mohawk Mothers are currently in a lengthy legal battle with McGill University over dead bodies found under the Royal Victoria Hospital on McGill’s campus. These are deaths linked to the US-funded MK-Ultra experiments of the 1960s, most of which happened at McGill University. 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.
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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, principles, and thought. 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. We need to remain vigilant and prevent this from happening to the Palestine solidarity movements. Troubling signs are emerging. “A liberal fest, calling cops friends, idolizing identity politics, and allowing white Jewish allies to take precedence over actual Palestinians,” says Layla, a student activist at another university in Ontario, pointing to emerging troubling developments.
“Without revolutionary theory, there cannot be revolutionary movements,” said Lenin. Liberal groups are co-opting more radical movements for justice in Palestine. Solidarity encampments have begun slowly to take Oslo accord-type deals for partial divestment or simply for amnesty for the students involved. Intersectionality and collective liberation mean less to people who merely want to hop on a trend. At McGill, where students had a record-breaking referendum in support of divestment that led the university to threaten to defund the student union, a 76-day hunger strike was crushed by groups like SPHR and the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM). They took the work and efforts of countless students and degraded them to meaningless action. “It’s very disheartening to see non-profits and normalizing NGOs capitalize on student encampments and be pulling the strings. How can the students be confident that their demands will be met?” says Layla. When walking through the camp, you often genuinely forget what the encampment was for.
Without a deeper theoretical grounding and in the absence of an organizing tradition to reflect and build on, as US students can with their history of the civil rights movement, Canadian student movements are more easily subjected to cooptation and other machinations that dilute their energies. Hunger Strikers now increasingly stand alone in a sea of meek colonial normalizers, facing so many hurdles, including administrative recalcitrance in their university. The co-opting of the movement creates debilitating divisions too. “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.
People sometimes say that Palestine has divided the left; rather, it has defined the left. We know now the who is who of the participants and what happens when you let opportunists take power organizationally. The leftist Palestinians and those with intersectional identities have been pushed aside by the more mainstream activists with a more conventional 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.
“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.”
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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. We cannot play a Macklemore song about student encampments at the encampments while he does concerts in the UAE, which is participating in a genocide in Sudan. We must all learn as we act. Often in this journey of Palestinian advocacy, my comrades and I have been told that we are creating division. The fact is that we are divided. We work alone rather than fall in line under a false flag.