The Crackdowns on the Palestine Solidarity Student Protests

College campuses in Canada and the United States of America seem to have become a frontline in the domestic struggle around the question of Zionism.

The situation is intensifying to the point where guards armed with rifles and riot gear have been deployed against the protesting students with videos of the corresponding crackdowns spreading like wildfire on social media, exposing the hypocrisy of the institutions of the supposed “free world.”

One of the most prominent pro-Palestine student protests in Canada has been at McGill University. There have been calls by Zionists here to deploy the Montreal police to evict the McGill encampment, as we have seen happening at colleges in the United States, even recommending the use of the Federal Emergencies Act, last used against the Freedom Convoy in 2022.

Condemned as “pro-Hamas” rallies by the Zionist-aligned media, most of the pro-Palestine students are simply calling for #CeasefireNow and do not even go that far to support militant groups engaged in armed struggle in the region against the Zionist State of Israel.

At Columbia University alone there have been more than 100 arrests and Mossad-affiliated groups have threatened to use facial recognition technology to ruin their future careers. This spectacle displays the sharpening contradictions in the imperial core where the radical students challenging their schools have been confronted with the reality that these “hallowed institutions of higher education” are designed to integrate them into that very power structure responsible for enabling the genocide in Gaza.

These student encampments have shown the futility of trying to protest the establishment within their own front yard — the Ivy League schools — as the students have been met with police brutality being beaten down and pepper sprayed while unarmed. This is an example of the concept sometimes referred to as the “protest cage.”

While campus radicals have often been regarded as more sheltered from adult realities, for the first time in many of their lives, they are directly engaged in something that is an actual struggle with the establishment. We hope that this radicalism can continue and mature past their campus life.

Unfortunately, not every protestor is steeled with a solid anti-imperialist worldview. Realistically, many are doing this for the social justice clout on social media, for those without ties to the region or its religions, Palestine itself seems to be secondary to their priorities, as such, they are unprepared for the weight of the police state to come down on them.

Respectfully, the radical students do not have the same level of conviction as the more recent counter-hegemonic protests, such as the Freedom Convoy or the Indigenous First Nations blockades for #ShutDownCanada.

We have also spoken before about the left-liberal Zionist front groups negatively influencing the Palestine “solidarity movement” alienating citizens in the process from building real solidarity in the West. This includes frankly acting bizarre and implementing terribly thought out tactics for organizing protests, such as obstructing traffic, making the lives of everyday working people even more tedious, pushing away those who should be the intended audience, intentionally or unintentionally, reinforcing the hegemonic line of the American imperialists trying to get citizens into supporting Zionism.

When it comes to building anti-imperialist solidarity around Palestine or any other geopolitical issue, the real difference will come from strengthening the resolve of everyday working people, compared to the more transient students in their “radical phase.” That is not to say they have no place here.

“There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop.” — Mario Savio, on the Vietnam War at the University of California at Berkeley walkout on December 2, 1964

Reminiscent of the past protests in the latter 20th Century, such as with the Vietnam War and South African Apartheid, the radical students have once again engaged in struggle at the belly of the beast, where if anything, the crackdown of police brutality is showing the disconnect in the narratives of “freedom and democracy.”

Regardless of how one may feel about campus radicals — we ourselves are critical of their ineffectual methods which are failing at reaching out to our fellow citizens — on principle something that Canadian Republicans should agree upon is that it is absurd calling for the government to deploy domestic security forces against its own citizens over stances on a foreign entity!

We must understand this over-the-top response from the establishment is only happening due to the significance of the Zionist State of Israel for geopolitical agenda of Anglo-American imperialism.

This ultimately comes back to the fundamental lack of sovereignty in the Dominion of Canada. This is why we need a sovereign republic to craft our own foreign policy and assert our popular sovereignty as Canadians.