“We at the Student Strike for Palestine Campaign, we’re putting forward a demand that we shut down our campus through mass democratic participation from the students on our campus in order to force our administration to change its policy, and in order to create a mass movement that can affect the Western Imperialist war machine.” said Kiam Bellam, an organizer with the student strike at York and the Revolutionary Communist Party.
Divestment from Israel has been a major focus of student movements across the Western world in the last year. Virtually every major post-secondary academic institution in Canada has investments in Israeli businesses – and most have financial ties to the Israeli military through corporations like Lockheed Martin.
For Bellam, this is not simply about a war halfway around the world. “It affects us here at home. The money that’s being sent to bomb children in Gaza is money that’s not being spent on healthcare in this country, not being spent on education, not benefitting actually regular students and working people in this country.”
In interviews with RCP members, the Revolutionary Communist Party frequently referred to the Quebec Student Strike of 2012 as a strategy to emulate. The 2012 strike went on for half a year, and at its peak involved hundreds of thousands of Quebecois students. It was focused on preventing student tuition hikes, and ultimately ended up bringing the province’s government to its knees – but it failed at its chief objective of preventing tuition increases, despite smaller successes.
The International Student Strike for Palestine, by comparison, is on its second and final day. While the current strike is unlikely to push universities to divest, nor grind the government of Quebec to a halt, the Revolutionary Communist Party will likely be celebrating anyway. The current strike is among the largest Canadian mass-actions ever organized for Palestine, and offers their movement a proof-of-concept for long-term organizing projects.
Be the first to comment