By: Nick Gottlieb and Omri Haiven, SFU students
“It’s like we’re watching Auschwitz on TikTok.” That’s how Canadian physician Dr. Gabor Maté, himself a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, described the horrific videos coming out of north Gaza this week.
We are Jewish graduate students at SFU who share Dr. Maté’s horror at the violence being perpetrated by the state of Israel. We are also members of the national organization Independent Jewish Voices (IJV), a group that advocates for an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory, Israel’s apartheid system between Jews and Palestinians, and, most urgently of all, to the ongoing genocide of Palestinians. We have recently launched an IJV chapter at SFU.
Every day, Israel escalates its killings in Gaza and expands its territorial ambitions. Israeli newspapers are now reporting publicly that the Israeli government is “eyeing Gaza annexation.” The threat of an all-out regional war — that could easily become a world war — grows greater by the day as Israel invades Lebanon and attacks parts of Syria and Yemen. Thankfully, after more than a year of live-streamed genocide, famine, and torture, more and more Jews understand the reality that Israel’s interests are not our own, and more people across the world fight for a path to justice and peace that does not involve these kinds of crimes against humanity.
The Teaching Support Staff Union (TSSU) here at SFU has an upcoming referendum focused on one of the strongest actions we can take here in a country like Canada: Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS). The BDS campaign was launched in 2005 by a broad swathe of Palestinian civil society as a way to escalate social and economic pressure against the Israeli state’s apartheid regime. It does this by asking the international community to exclude Israeli institutions from a range of activities in order to apply pressure on the Israeli government to end apartheid, stop the illegal occupation of the West Bank, and free the people of Gaza from the military siege that has existed since 2007. All of these Israeli practices are illegal under international law, and BDS is a way for us to enforce international norms that countries like Canada and the US are currently ignoring.
The BDS campaign is modeled after the boycott campaign that helped end the apartheid regime in South Africa in 1990. While there were undoubtedly supporters of apartheid South Africa who accused the boycott campaign of bias at the time, it’s now obvious that to accuse that campaign of “anti-Afrikaner” racism would have been absurd. The same applies today, despite what supporters of Israel’s apartheid might say: BDS is not anti-semitic; it’s non-violent, and it is one of our best hopes for peace and justice.
It has become abundantly clear over the last year that generating economic and political pressure from within the Global North is the only way we can win an arms embargo, stop Israel’s genocide, and force the country to change its course. The path toward peace begins with an immediate ceasefire and an Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories. Only from there can Jews, Palestinians, and everyone else in the region begin the long, hard journey toward reconciliation and peace.
The TSSU has passed several motions in solidarity with the Palestinian labour movement and in opposition to the genocide. The Simon Fraser Student Society, the Graduate Student Society, and the Simon Fraser University Faculty Association (SFUFA) have as well. SFUFA’s June motion urged for an institutional and cultural boycott, particularly relevant for our academic context, and it highlighted the devastating “scholasticide” that Israel has committed in Gaza over the last year. As the motion notes, “Israel has destroyed 396 educational facilities, including all 12 of Gaza’s universities.”
The TSSU’s expressions of solidarity are important, but this last year has made it very clear that they are not enough: we need to take concrete actions. This upcoming BDS motion is one of these concrete actions. We are calling on our fellow TSSU members to vote “yes” on the digital referendum and ensure that our union and our broader academic community can contribute to ending these horrors.
Author bios:
Nick Gottlieb is a writer and a graduate student in the Geography Department whose research focuses on the links between fossil fuel infrastructure and imperialism.
Omri Haiven is a researcher and graduate student in the School of Communication. His research is on renewable energy systems, agriculture and democratic/economic renewal.
