University Encampments and the Conditions of State Violence
By occupying the campus in support of Palestine, students around the world are reimagining that space as one that promotes relations of care here and abroad.
The militarized suppression of pro-Palestine encampments at Alberta’s two largest universities, cheered on by Premier Danielle Smith, reveals how a student movement to divest from companies profiting from Israeli human rights abuses is disrupting settler-colonial dynamics locally.
Ending the horrific violence the Israeli state has waged against the Palestinians over the past seven months and 76 years is the focus, but these protests raise crucial questions about the purpose of the university and to whom it belongs, the limits of liberal notions of free expression, and state violence.
At the crack of dawn on May 11, Edmonton police were seen chanting "move" in unison while assaulting community members with their batons and firing “special munitions” at them after the University of Alberta administration asked them to remove the encampment from their quad, resulting in three arrests.
This came two days after Calgary police marched on the University of Calgary campus in riot gear like they were going to war, firing tear gas and stun grenades at community members in response to a similar request from UCalgary admin, making five arrests.
Encampments calling on their universities to disclose all their investments and divest from those involved in Israeli war crimes have emerged on campuses across Canada, including the University of Toronto, University of British Columbia, McGill University and University of Manitoba, among others, as part of a global student movement.
As of writing, the only encampments in Canada that have been met with force from authorities are UCalgary and UAlberta, but the threat looms over all the encampments.
After the UCalgary protest was removed, Premier Smith said it’s up to the universities to determine the limits of protest on campus, but proclaimed herself “glad” UCalgary admin made the decision to disperse the encampments through the strong arm of the state.
“It’s their private property,” she said. “I think what they found in Calgary is that a large number of the people who were trespassing were not students and I think we have to be mindful of that.”
It’s their private property. The student encampments pose a clear challenge to this conception of the university, one in which students are no more than consumers and academics are mere service providers, fenced off, whether literally or figuratively, from the community at large, with which the university has no larger relationship.
Some critics of the encampments’ removal have embraced this transactional logic underpinning access to the space and the ability to exercise freedom of expression therein, arguing that students, as the university’s paying customers, and faculty, as employees, have a right to access the quad and use it for protest.
This is a seductive logic—if students are customers of the university, then don’t they have a right to know where their tuition dollars are going?—but it ignores the broader obligation the academy has to the public writ large, eliding the question of whether an institution of learning on occupied Indigenous land, which it uses every opportunity to “acknowledge,” should be invested in companies that facilitate further dispossession at home and abroad, whether through weapons or extraction.
UAlberta often describes its mission as the “uplifting of the whole people.” Debating what percentage of protesters are students or faculty is a distraction from the key question of how public spaces and notions of free speech are constrained by the liberal capitalist state, which regards its subjects as atomized individuals with no collective power outside rigidly hierarchical institutions.
Any challenge to this order, such as the one the encampment exemplified, is regarded as a threat to security, and this hypothetical violence must be countered with the state’s actual violence.
In this respect, police in Calgary and Edmonton did precisely what they exist to do—protect the sanctity of private property from those critical of state interests.
Within this framework, the nominally progressive Alberta NDP Opposition decried the police response as “completely disproportionate,” as if there exists “proportionate” state violence against students of many and no faiths coming together with faculty and community members against genocide.
Premier Smith, apparently backtracking from her initial enthusiasm for the universities calling in cops to uphold their private property rights, said on May 13 that her government has ordered an investigation into the encampment teardowns “to make sure that there wasn't any unreasonable use of force," identifying the investigation’s aim as exculpatory.
The greatest threat posed by the encampments is the creation of a community exercising its collective power outside state control, similar to the Occupy movement of 2011. But unlike Occupy, the Palestine encampments have clear and concrete demands—disclose and divest.
U of A president Bill Flanagan’s series of statements to the narrowly defined “U of A community” were filled with lies and obfuscations, as the encampment leaders have pointed out, but it’s worth interrogating the notions of safety and protection from violence that the university invoked in their decision to unleash cops in riot gear on students, faculty, and members of the broader community.
“There can be no question that the encampment posed a serious and imminent risk of potential violence and injury to university community members and members of the public,” Flanagan wrote, referring to the presence of “potential weapons,” such as hammers, axes, screwdrivers and syringes at the encampment. The latter consisted largely of Naloxone kits, a necessary form of community care and relationality during a devastating drug-poisoning crisis in Alberta that disproportionately affects Indigenous people.
To evoke the camps as a threat, Flanagan could only provide examples where the camps were the objects of violence.
“We have seen that these encampments can quickly spiral out of control and attract the attention of counter-protesters, as happened at the University of Calgary and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). With our limited security resources, we have no means to protect the encampment from escalating tensions and potential violence if there are counter-protesters,” Flanagan added, obscuring the counter-protestors’ instigation at UCLA.
Flangan invoking the presence of camping and harm reduction supplies and “outside agitators” at the encampment as a potentially violent threat requiring militarized intervention illustrates how state violence is used to quash any sense of community solidarity rooted in care.
The spectre of the “outside agitator” is a tired trope that must be rejected in the face of a movement seeking to reclaim community space on Indigenous land.
As Indigenous scholar Chelsea Vowel writes in a statement supported by hundreds of signatures (including the authors of this piece):
This university, its president Bill Flanagan, and other members of administration, violated all of these principles, and failed to uphold their Treaty obligations when they unleashed state violence upon students, staff, and community members on May 11th… The People’s University for Palestine embodied the principles of decolonization, by enacting the Treaty principles of miyo-wîcêhtowin (good relations), wîtaskêwin (peaceful sharing of lands as a relation rather than a possession), and of tâpwêwin (truth telling). Non-hierarchical, land-based, experiential education, supported by community, reflecting Treaty commitments in action rather than just word – this encampment should have served as an example of what is possible. Instead, its existence was perceived as a threat by the same institution that purports to champion and value these commitments.
Katsi’tsakwas Ellen Gabriel, a renowned Kanien’kehá:ka Indigenous rights activist in Quebec, similarly rejected McGill University admin’s attempt to portray its campus as private property, reminding the university “that they have built their institutions upon our unceded homelands and that as rights holders, we have the authority over our lands.”
“Divestment is a simple request, and while universities might be reluctant to see their revenues drop, it will send the message that we as a society should be investing in peace, not war,” Katsi’tsakwas wrote in Ricochet.
Contrary to evidence, pro-Israel advocates and their friends, purporting to speak on behalf of all Jews, have been working hard to discredit the camps as antisemitic, contending that they are “unsafe” for Jewish students.
This rhetoric, as Adam Haber and Matylda Figlerowicz write in Jewish Currents regarding the militarized suppression of encampments in the U.S., represents a “moral panic,” which frames “these crackdowns as a necessary defense against lawless mobs who pose an antisemitic threat to the university.”
In a May 6 Toronto Sun column, Joe Warmington claimed the U of T encampment, which he described as “Little Gaza,” was practicing “anti-Jewish segregation” by refusing to allow hostile agitators to enter, including, by Warmington’s own admission, a Christian Zionist. The absurdity of his argument was highlighted in the article’s featured image, which showed a photo of the encampment with a “Jews for a Free Palestine” t-shirt displayed prominently from within.
The Jewish Federation of Edmonton, which is in the midst of efforts to defund the Pride Centre of Edmonton for its leadership’s statements in support of Palestinian liberation, pointed to the UAlberta encampment’s publicly displayed list of forbidden forms of discrimination, which include Zionism, as a smoking gun proving its antisemitism–yet clearly visible in the image was also a prohibition on antisemitism.
Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre for Holocaust Studies CEO Michael Levitt, whose employees teaching Holocaust education in schools told the CBC he instructed them to report any students who are critical of Israel to the organization, suggested in a May 13 Toronto Star screed that the very notion of bad faith allegations of antisemitism being used to suppress critical perspectives on Israel is akin to antisemitic conspiracies of a Jewish “master-plan for world domination.”
By focusing their ire on Zionist political ideology, rather than Judaism as a culture, faith, and tradition, Levitt claims campus protestors are somehow engaging in the “weaponization of language aimed at Jews.”
To be clear, the struggle for Palestinian liberation does not require Jewish people within the movement to prove that it is not antisemitic. Criticism of a state is not criticism of an entire heterogeneous group of people with diverse histories and views.
Yet the camps have had significant Jewish presence and even leadership, with participants sharing Jewish cultural traditions and values—including that genocide should never happen again for anyone.
The night before the cops launched their raid, the UAlberta encampment hosted a Shabbat dinner—likely the first time many non-Jewish encampment members were invited to participate in Jewish cultural practices.
Rhetoric that conflates “Jewish students” with “supporters of Israel” is fundamentally antisemitic. Those who support Israel, whatever their identity, have the full backing of the state regardless of whether they “feel safe” or not. Jewish students, staff, and community members who support Palestinian liberation are subject to batons and pepperballs—that is, actual state violence, which was applauded by the Jewish Federation of Edmonton.
While pro-Israel agitators engage in false accusations of antisemitism against the encampments, the University of Alberta has concrete ties to actual antisemites. Its Canadian Institute for Ukrainian Studies, which routinely publishes distortions of Ukrainian nationalists’ role in the Holocaust, has received more than $1.4 million in endowments and donations honouring Nazi collaborators since 1987. Peter Savryn, who served in the Galicia Division of the Waffen-SS, was U of A’s chancellor from 1982 to 1986.
The Peter Jacyk Education Foundation, whose namesake was a Galicia Division reject who once publicly suggested that the Holocaust was divine retribution for Jewish deicide, funds a program of study and endowment named after him at UAlberta, both of which were partially funded by the Alberta government, and a program of study and building named after him at U of T.
Yet we are expected to believe that community members pitching tents in the quad represent an urgent threat to Jewish safety on campus.
It is tempting to call it hypocritical that Canadian universities, including UAlberta, have supports for Ukrainian students and not for Gazans, even as every university in Gaza has been destroyed and academics are systematically targeted for assassination.
Rather, this speaks to the alignment of Canadian institutions with state interests. Consider how a Ukrainian Waffen-SS veteran was applauded in the House of Commons as someone who fought “against the Russians”—no investigation into his past needed—while Palestinians are repeatedly asked to disavow Hamas before they are allowed to speak and any whisper of connection to armed resistance movements equates to being a terrorist.
Those appalled by the raids on the camp but who appeal to form (free expression) rather than content (Palestinian liberation) are missing the reality that formal rights (to space, to speech) are always negotiated in relation to state power. If the limit of free expression is hate or harm or a threat to safety, then those terms will be defined in relation to state interests.
Calling the protests “peaceful” already operates within a colonial logic of peace as the absence of resistance to that colonization. State violence is not legible as violent, but rather as police keeping the peace.
As resistance against colonialism and imperialism, a pro-Palestinian encampment is considered a threat of violence in its very existence, no matter how peaceful its content. On the other hand, the showcasing of Israeli weapons on Treaty 7 territory is not legible as violent—even as these very weapons are used to massacre Palestinians—but rather is described by the Department of Defence as an “opportunity” to develop its “defence innovation ecosystem.”
That the state is always acting in defence, and criticism of state interests—such as its material and ideological support for Israel as a fellow settler colony—is threatening, is the fundamental context within which UAlberta called the police on its own students.
Students around the world are fighting for Palestinian liberation through occupying the campus and reimagining that space as one that promotes relations of care here and abroad.
This ought not to be confused with the right to expression or a negative peace within a colonial framework. We applaud the students’ courage and stand with them for the liberation of all colonized peoples from Turtle Island to Palestine.
This piece has been updated to reflect the fact that nobody was hospitalized following Edmonton police’s teardown of the UAlberta encampment, although one person went to the hospital to check on their injuries.
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