Movement ‘will not end with the encampments,’ pro-Palestinian protester says

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Tap here for live updates to this story July 10, 2024.

McGill University is dismantling the pro-Palestinian encampment that has been on its downtown Montreal campus since April 27.

SPVM spokesperson Jean-Pierre Brabant said Wednesday morning that the force had been informed by McGill that it would be taking action. Sherbrooke was closed between Peel and University Sts. and several nearby businesses were closed.

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Police and agents from the private security firm Sirco arrived at the camp around 4.30 a.m., according to encampment representative and McGill student Zaina Karim.

Excavators and front-end loaders brought in to take down the encampment’s infrastructure were moving debris into dump trucks and off campus.

“People tried to remain at camp and they were forcefully escorted out even though they wanted to remain,” Karim said. McGill “never had conversations in good faith with the students there,” said Karim, who added that protesters had been prepared to be forcibly removed.

McGill said the dangers associated with the camp had been escalating and that Montreal fire services had been denied entry.

“On July 5, a security guard was assaulted and the campus was again vandalized, with windows in multiple buildings broken,” McGill said, and the university hired Sirco to investigate.

Raihaana Adira and a few pro-Israeli friends who attended the protests outside McGill Wednesday morning got into a brief confrontation with pro-Palestinian protesters.

Adira was one of the two McGill students who tried to have a court injunction leveled against the protesters within days of the encampment’s erection. The request was rejected in Quebec Superior Court.

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“I think this is a great first step,” she said. “However, I fear there’s still going to be a lot of violence and antisemitism on campus. And I think that just because they take away the encampment does not mean that they’re taking the embedded hate against Jewish students at McGill away.”

McGill needs to keep having meetings with students “to repair the damage done on both sides,” she said.

Scott Weinstein, a spokesperson for Independent Jewish Voices, arrived at the encampment in the early morning. He said he was sad to see it dismantled, but called it a “good run.”

“I’ve got to hand it to the students, they grew up really fast,” he said. “I was here when it really started … when there were just 20 people here and all of a sudden it just grew exponentially. And many of the students were idealistic but didn’t have experience in this type of political confrontation situation, and they didn’t back down. I give them credit. They were very brave.”

He stayed despite threats of arrest because he said his future wouldn’t be jeopardized by a criminal record in the same way a young person’s might be, but added he didn’t think protesters would be arrested at all, since McGill previously lost two injunctions that aimed to remove them from campus.

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“They kept threatening us that we’d be charged with breaking and entering if we didn’t leave, over and over again, and after a while I said, ‘How come they haven’t taken us yet?’”

Félix Burt, 20, said he found it sad to see everything built at the encampment over the past two and a half months dismantled. Burt described himself as a civilian supporter of the encampment. He is not a McGill student.

“We put so much work into this,” he said. “We had a garden. I had an aerospace engineer help me set up solar panels. We put a lot of thought and work into this place so we could stay and keep fighting.”

Burt said the dismantlement was surprising because Mayor Valérie Plante had made a distinction between the McGill encampment and the downtown Square Victoria encampment last week when the latter was taken down.

The city was able to intervene at Victoria Square because it’s a public space and the protesters were contravening regulations regarding public security, Plante said at the time, adding that the city could not intervene at McGill because it’s private property.

Burt said protesters plan to keep up their efforts — whether they return to McGill or not.

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“As long as the people in Palestine are resisting we have no reason to stop,” he said. “They’re going through hell on Earth. Nothing we could live through here could possibly compare. So whether we come back to McGill or not, I’m not sure to be honest … but the fight persists and there are many other things to do, many other things planned.”

A spokesperson for Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante referred The Gazette to McGill University and the SPVM when asked for comment.

A spokesperson for Quebec Public Security Minister François Bonnardel also declined to comment “for the moment.” Last week, Bonnardel posted on X that he was surprised Montreal hadn’t done more “on the issue of encampments” and that his position was clear: Political leaders should denounce the occupation of public land.

The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs and the Federation CJA praised McGill for taking measures to “prioritize the safety and well being of the university community and to end the toxicity, the hateful glorification of terrorism and the targeting of Jewish students on the campus.”

The university said in a statement that the encampment represented “profound health and safety risks that continue to grow in scope and severity” and contended that the university had been “subject to ongoing and escalating acts of violence and vandalism associated with the encampment, up to and including criminal acts on campus last weekend.”

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McGill president Deep Saini repeated the university’s position that it supported “the right to free expression and assembly, within the bounds of the laws and policies that keep us all safe.”

Saini accused “people linked to the camp” of having “harassed our community members, engaged in antisemitic intimidation, damaged and destroyed McGill property, forcefully occupied a building, clashed with police and committed acts of assault.”

Saini said few people from the McGill community were in the encampment, but that most protesters were activists from external groups and that unhoused people were also using the camp. He claimed there has been drug use and said the camp is infested with rats.

Protester Karim denied McGill’s claims that the camp was infested with rats and had visible unsanitary conditions, calling the claims “baseless” and part of McGill’s “smear campaign.”

Karim vowed it would not be the end of the movement but did not comment on whether the protesters would set up another encampment.

“This movement did not start with encampments and will not end with the encampments. The movement has been going on for almost two decades,” they said.

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Wednesday’s dismantling operation came less than 12 hours after about a dozen pro-Palestinian protesters disrupted a meeting of the Ville-Marie borough council. Mayor Valérie Plante and her fellow councillors were taken out of the meeting as a precaution. There were no arrests reported in connection with that incident.

Protesters have demanded that McGill end its investments in businesses that profited from Israel’s military operation in the Gaza Strip as well as end all affiliations with Israeli universities.

Two attempts to obtain injunctions forcing the dismantling of the encampment were rejected by Quebec Superior Court.

On June 6, protesters entered the James Administration building at the downtown campus and Montreal police made 15 arrests. Other protest encampments in Quebec were dismantled after agreements were reached with the universities involved. Last week, a protest encampment erected on public property in Victoria Square was dismantled by Montreal police.

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Presse Canadienne contributed to this report.

This story will be updated.

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