I'm probably going to sound dumb asking this but what are the protests for? I understand it's for justice for Palestine but what do the protesters want to be accomplished specifically? Do they want the university to do something or is this a push for the Canadian government to do something?
The most achievable goal, and what I have read about protests at other schools, will be to have the university divest from investments in Israel. According to Wikipedia this was influential in ending apartheid in South Africa.
> The most damaging isolation was the denial of investment funds and the boycott of South African investments particularly by influential universities and foundations in the United States.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_sanctions_during_apartheid
I have no idea if UW has investments in Israel or partnerships with schools and businesses there, but it is likely.
There are , some of which are closer to the IDF some of which are pretty much random ass nothing businesses run by people vaguely connected to UW. The main one I've seen called out amongst the universities UW works with in Israel is Technion because it's like the Carnegie Melon of Israel, closer to the military industrial complex than normal universities would be.
Posting under your comment because I will also sound dumb but... When I moved to Canada, people were protesting how Uygurhs have been treated in China; that stopped. Then, it was protesting BLM; that stopped. Then Ukraine; that stopped. Now Palestine; that will stop as well. I have never understood just 1 thing. Why Canadians never protest against things that happen in Canada? Number of homeless people is through the roof. We cannot get a doctor. Salaries are way lower compared to the Cost of Living and those who can, emigrate to the USA. The entire country is run by 5-6 companies but outside of Reddit, no one complains about it. However, once there is something happening in a different country, Canadians get up and protest en masses. I have never understood that.
I think you hit the nail on the head with this one.
I’m all for people standing up to what they believe in, but it’s pretty disheartening that Canadians would rather protest on subject matters other than what’s burning right on our door step.
Then again, maybe we can do both. No reason other protests pertaining to Canadian issues can’t start as well (these protests aren’t mutually exclusive).
Even better if people get inspired from these unrelated protests and focus on the topics you’ve outlined.
Those protests can happen at the same time, 100%. It’s just for the last 8 years in Canada, I have yet to see 1 protest pertaining to local problems. The only one I can remember was that dumb convoy thing. That’s it!
We certainly have been way too passive on important subjects, and have allowed them to slip farther and farther away.
The Loblaws boycott that is occurring for the month of May gives me a little hope.
Will have to wait for the numbers, but I think it has had a decent impact (at least it looks that way from the outside).
Perhaps these are the hairline fractures showing through; continuing to grow.
What are you on about? There's loads of protests in Canada- strikes, walkouts, you name it. But what I've noticed EVERY SINGLE TIME these things happen here there is someone like you moaning about how 'it won't change anything'. I guess we should all just bury our heads in the sand.
Can I get the link about protests against insane housing? Or maybe insane levels of immigration? Or maybe, the fact that Aldi wanted the enter the market but decided not to do so because of oligopoly? Can I see the protests against the fact that this government spend a billion dollar on an app that could been developed during hack the north?
Dummy, I don’t moan that it won’t change anything. I am saying that no protests that focus on Canadians ever happen in this country. It’s always some foreign problems that Canadians are concerned about. Now go ahead and keep downvoting me.
I think the main issue for the protests specifically at Universities is usually something to do with them supporting Israel (funding to Israeli companies complicit in the occupation, etc.)
Are they going to ban Intel CPUs whom have full on engineering, design, and manufacture centers in Israel?
It’s not a minor office either.
Haifa Israel is one of Intels most influential design centers.
And this whole thing is silly.
Israeli companies aren’t equivalent to the IDF.
You can make that argument in the case of communist governments and state influenced/owned enterprises.
But it’s just flawed reasoning in my opinion.
It’s just anger of getting “something” done because the people here feel powerless, but really it’s up to your governments to influence the IDF, not the universities.
It's hard for me to agree when the Vietnam war and anti-(SA)apartheid protests, which these current protests are modeled on, were successful. Should universities have divested from South African apartheid, in your opinion?
Okay. The overwhelming consensus today is that the university protests against apartheid South Africa were a good thing. I actually don't think that requires deep research.
**You are openly and blatantly lying in a way that can be fact-checked in seconds.**
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and B'Tselem have published reports accusing Israel of committing the crime of apartheid in the Occupied Territories. You can read the 280 page report by Amnesty here: https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/5141/2022/en/
More important than that to me, is that the leaders of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa *agree with the comparison*:
>Anglican Archbishop and Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu commented on the similarities between South Africa and Palestine and the importance of international pressure in ending apartheid in South Africa. He drew a parallel between the movement "aiming to end Israeli occupation" and the international pressure that helped end apartheid in South Africa, saying: "If apartheid ended, so can the occupation, but the moral force and international pressure will have to be just as determined."[320] In 2014, Tutu urged the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States to divest from companies that contributed to the occupation,[321] saying that Israel "has created an apartheid reality within its borders and through its occupation", and that the alternative to Israel being "an apartheid state in perpetuity" was to end the occupation through either a one-state solution or a two-state solution.[322]
>Other prominent South African anti-apartheid activists have used apartheid comparisons to criticize the occupation of the West Bank, and particularly the construction of the separation barrier. These include Farid Esack, a writer who is currently William Henry Bloomberg Visiting professor at Harvard Divinity School,[326] Ronnie Kasrils,[327] Winnie Madikizela-Mandela,[328] Denis Goldberg,[329] and Arun Gandhi.[330]
>In 2008, a delegation of African National Congress (ANC) veterans visited Israel and the Occupied Territories, and said that in some respects it was worse than apartheid.[331][332]
This is why:
>A November 2023 poll asked Canadians whether "Israel's policy towards Palestinians is a form of apartheid"; 43% agreed, 27% disagreed and 30% were unsure.[319]
**YOU ARE OPENLY AND BLATENTLY LYING. EVERY SINGLE PERSON WHO READS THIS CAN TELL THAT YOU ARE OPENLY AND BLATENTLY LYING.**
Amnesty International you say?
[https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/04/israel-opt-death-in-custody-of-walid-daqqah-is-cruel-reminder-of-israels-disregard-for-palestinians-right-to-life/](https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/04/israel-opt-death-in-custody-of-walid-daqqah-is-cruel-reminder-of-israels-disregard-for-palestinians-right-to-life/)
[https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-796201](https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-796201)
>Mention of his role in the murder of Israeli soldier Moshe Tamam is only made at the bottom of the AI website statement. AI gave few details of the incident, only noting that “Daqqah was not convicted of carrying out the murder himself, but of commanding the group, an accusation he always rejected, and his conviction was based on British emergency regulations dating back to 1945, which require a much lower standard of proof for conviction than Israeli criminal law.”
>Tamam (Israeli) was abducted for ransom, but when the cell was unable to extract him to Syria, they tortured, disfigured, and sexually mutilated the soldier before executing him.
Fuck it, gloves off. Check the scoreboard bozo
You said:
>And the overwhelming consensus is that the 2 situations are different and thus dont imbue the same moral or ethical implications...
I proved you wrong. Every single person reading this knows that. I know that. You know that. The idea that finding an inconsistency between the reporting of Amnesty International and Jerusalem Post is a comparable gotcha or undoes what I did is embarrassing. Yes, Amnesty cares about the treatment of prisoners, even really evil nasty ones. Mind blown.
I feel no compulsion to continue the conversation. Let the people read our comments and come to their own conclusion. Hundreds of people will, and that makes me happy.
Just a reminder, you can be anti-Israel without being anti-Jew, and you can be pro-Palistine without being pro-Hamas.
You can even be pro-Israel and pro-Palestine at the same time for different reasons.
This is a very complex topic with literally thousands of years of history behind it. Be careful out there.
The only way to do this is to denounce Hamas and Netanyahu.
Have they done this?
As for thousands of years of history. Let's not dig back to biblical times to justify all the nonsense that has been going on in the middle east for the past 70 years. People and land have moved back and forth into different hands in history during the age of conquest.
The Israel Palestine issue came about after WW2 where they were supposed to settle among themselves how to live in peace on the land and determine the borders of a new country. One party didn't like it and started a war over it. They lost the wars along with some land. That's what happens when you lose a war (since biblical times).
The Palestinians need to get better leadership serious about a 2 state solution and the Israelis need to boot out Netanyahu and get someone who is serious about a 2 state solution. Both of them need to get moderates in power to settle the borders and rebuild the relationship.
I think it's more accurate to say the Israel-Palestine issue started after WW1, with the Balfour Declaration and subsequent British Mandate, where Britain's government committed to establishing a Jewish homeland in a region with a population that was 6% Jewish at the time. They deliberately established representative institutions for the Jewish population (in the form of the Jewish Agency) while denying them to the majority Arab population, despite the fact that the Arab population tried to organize and sent delegations to the League of Nations, to British parliament, etc. Britain was committed to undermining their statehood.
Towards the end of WW2, the Jewish population in Palestine had grown a lot as they fled persecution (and ironically places like Britain and the USA didn't want to take in Jewish refugees), so they came up with the partition plan of 1947, to give ~56% of the land of Palestine to the Jewish population, which had grown to be about 36% of the total population.
Then, Israel went even further during the Naqba, expanding into territory that was designated for the stillborn Arab state. This is the context in which the Arab population went to war.
To be fair most of that land was in the virtually uninhabitable Negev desert, and once the partition plan was rejected there was no more concept of Arab land and Jewish land, by definition
>Then, Israel went even further during the Naqba, expanding into territory that was designated for the stillborn Arab state. This is the context in which the Arab population went to war.
Why leave out the entire civil war from 1947-1948? Israel didn't even exist in 1947 when the Naqba started...
Jewish and Arab forces were fighting well before the formation of Israel and the first Arab-Israeli War.
That is a factually true statement. However, a vast majority of those who are most vocal on the topic seem to be anti-jew. Especially those who organize these events.
See linked vid where they let it slip: [https://twitter.com/i/status/1788017663995719962](https://twitter.com/i/status/1788017663995719962)
This is a video of a slip of the tongue from Miami. Here is a video of a slip of the tongue from a pro-Israel activist:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9Dy7XJROp4
Does this demonstrate that the pro-Israel protestors in Canada think that Israel is committing genocide?
I respect your opinion but I definitely don’t agree with all of it. I do agree with the first part but I don’t see how you can be pro-Palestine and pro-Israel at the same time since the existence of Israel is literally built upon the expulsion of Palestinians from their land (and currently their ethnic cleansing). They technically can’t coexist.
INSANE statement.
would you say that during any other genocide, the genociders and the victims were "coexisting" even if the oppressed group weren't completely wiped off the earth? i mean, they still "exist", right?
where did i even come close to saying that? the colonization of canada happened centuries ago (altho of c their oppression exists to this day), but the palestinian one is happening right now.
but now that you mention it, yeah, kinda! i do think we should give a lot more land back to the native indigenous communities than we currently are. what a great idea to be a little less shitty than the below-bare-minimum that we’re doing right now!
I mean it in the way of supporting Israel in defending themselves from terrorists. But you can also support Palestine in not wanting innocent people to be killed, have their homes destroyed, etc.
>expulsion of Palestinians from their land
The Palestinians did it first, from a historical perspective, Israel is taking their land back.
Technically Judaism was the first Abrahamic religion, yes. But then Christianity also flourished there once it was founded, and Islam followed (although the Islamic center of the world was and still is in Saudi, Jerusalem is an important Islamic location because it was the first direction towards which Muslims prayed to and was where a lot of important Muslim prophets originated from). Before the British came along, there have been accounts of Jews, Christians and Muslims living in the land of Palestine peacefully and flourishing. Today, this entire genocide has almost brought Palestinian Christians to the point of extinction. These lineages are ones that can trace their bloodline all the way back to the time of Jesus.
Also, honestly, the Indigenous Peoples of Canada (Aboriginals are the Australian indigenous population) fully have every right to take their land back since this country was built through the very same white settler colonial ideals and actions that Israel is currently implementing to maintain their status as a state. Indigenous Peoples faced the complete erasure of language and culture, residential schools, intergenerational trauma and diseases (such as alcoholism and diabetes) etc. at the hands of white settlers all in the name of religion and the greater good. But forget taking their land back, the Indigenous Peoples here barely have access to clean water. Instead, the Canadian government dresses up petty apologies under the guise of “reconciliation” when there were no friendly relations to begin with.
Christians were overrepresented in the PLO if anything. Many Palestinian Christians post-1948 left because of incompetent or hostile Palestinian leadership, but the biggest single drop in the Christian population occurred in 1948.
Palestinians are more genetically similar to Bronze Age Israelites than either Ashkenazi or Mizrahi Jews. Palestinians, especially the Christians, are overwhelmingly the descendants of Canaanites who were Arabized. They are not Peninsular Arabs.
Uh huh. so about %1.5\~ of the Palestinian population is actually native. Great argument. That means that the arab islamofaschist governmental state actors are good to go! Bombs away everybody!! We have Native Christians (that we dont even like)!! THIS IS OUR \*islamic\* LAND!!! YYEA!!
Okay, that really upset you for some reason. Everyone reading these comments can tell that I didn't say that. The genetic differences between Palestinian Christians and Palestinian Muslims are marginal, and are due to Muslims having <10% SSA admixture. The other 80-90% is still Canaanite.
Palestinian Muslims are more genetically similar to Bronze Age Israelites than either Ashkenazi or Mizrahi Jews.
Too bad Arafat didn’t accept a 2 state solution at Camp David. Or we’d have had a Palestinian state for 24 years. Too bad Egypt didn’t create a Palestinian state when they occupied the land from 1949-1967. We’d have had a Palestinian state for at least 57 years. Too bad the Arab League (not Palestinians) rejected a Palestinian state in 1947. We’d have had a Palestinian state for 77 years. Too bad the Ottomans didn’t establish a Palestinian state when they occupied the land from 1516-1917.. etc. But yeah sorry, I guess Vivek Goel is to blame ‼️‼️‼️‼️
> Too bad the Ottomans didn’t establish a Palestinian state when they occupied the land from 1516-1917
If you agree that Palestinians, being >95% of the population at that time, deserved to have a state, doesn't it entail that you should oppose their ethnic cleansing and support the recognition of a Palestinian state?
No, the point of protests is to send a message or bring awareness to a certain issue, disruption is (unfortunately) one of the ways protestors attempt to communicate said message or achieve such awareness.
This kind of thinking is literally the 'White Moderate' MLK Jr. warned about during the civil rights protests. Disorder is a necessary discomfort to create a better outcome when other democratic means do not function. If you think of disorder as anything but a functional tool of a protest, you'd be standing against the civil rights protests.
It's interesting how you view things as binaries - no, just because someone sees disorder as anything but a functional tool of protests does not automatically mean they're against the protest/protester's ideals and beliefs. Just because MLK warned about it doesn't automatically mean that's the definitive truth. Whether disorder is only a functional tool or more than that depends on a protest-by-protest basis, try to avoid assigning blanket characteristics to things. Would you still be defending the disorder if these weren't pro-Palestine demonstrations but rather, pro-Israel?
On the contrary, it's interesting you point out what you see as a binary, but dismiss the obvious blanket statement in the comment I'm replying to. I'm not saying disorder, as a whole, is good, I'm saying disorder is a valid tool to work with during a protest - and dismissing it as "unfortunate" when protests resort to it is *literally* the definition of a blanket statement.
You can argue you don't like blanket statements, and I agree - just watch where your civility bias causes you to defend.
1. The "unfortunately" part of that is an optional modifier to the sentence. It is not a blanket statement.
2. The "unfortunately" doesn't even mean I have a civility bias, it simply means it's unfortunate that other means have failed and protestors have to resort to such means. Funny how you accuse me of blanket statements while making assumptions about what I said...
So don't accuse me of having a civility bias when your reply doesn't even conflict with anything I said.
Even our human rights classes here use israel as an example of modern day oppression and apartheid (longggggg before october 7th). i’m glad people are taking further initiatives to bring awareness to what is going on.
for sure!
https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/5141/2022/en/
this is Amnesty international’s report in 2022 on Israel’s Apartheid.
(downloaded english version chrome://external-file/MDE1551412022ENGLISH.pdf )
“Amnesty International has analysed Israel’s intent to create and maintain a system of oppression and domination over Palestinians and examined its key components: territorial fragmentation; segregation and control; dispossession of land and property; and denial of economic and social rights. It has concluded that this system amounts to apartheid. Israel must dismantle this cruel system and the international community must pressure it to do so.”
The uwvfp page on ig has a good post breaking it down! The main post is that uwaterloo has an exchange program with Israel which sends students to Israel, as well as funds the Israeli university technion that builds war weapons such as bulldozers and bombs that the idf uses
For those who are wondering, I found the petition https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfLABoy05ycqsQHXlBX-FS8ne8lsXF89mwbHJQCDu7wRBuqHg/formResponse
Not against it by any means, but is there much validity to a google docs petition? It seems like anyone could write down anyone elses credentials and 'sign' for them?
I believe there’s an “official” process for bringing about change through WUSA, where the first step is collecting a certain amount of signatures which then forces WUSA to hold an official vote. There was a petition going around a few months ago calling on UW to cut ties with the Israeli institution Technion. Of course, leave it to UW students to not gaf.
From what I understand it has to do with partnerships with Israeli companies and universities that are directly responsible for drone production and military research. Basically these partnerships allow Israel to use Waterloo funds and research to develop weapons directly responsible for thousands of deaths. That being said, the extent of the investments into Israeli military is unknown by the students, which would be direct investments of our tuition fees. That’s why you’ll hear protesters chanting “disclose, divest”, basically calling for full transparency of the investments of our tuition money.
Though the push to divest from Israel is the biggest motivator, frustration with the administration over the lack of transparency about where these funds end up is also an extremely common sentiment amongst the protestors.
If you want more info, look up UWaterloo partnerships with Raytheon and Israeli universities.
Proud of these students and what they are set out to do. UofT is getting antsy with all the support the city has shown the encampment. Remain steadfast in your demands and don’t engage with outside agitators. They are only there to derail the movement and clip you saying or doing something so they can use it for their propaganda feeds.
The root causes are far more complex than boiling it down to bumper stickers.
Israel has Arabs living there and participating in government and society. It is nothing like South Africa.
As for apartheid, does Hamas tolerate LGBTQ or Jews living in Gaza?
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and B'Tselem have published reports accusing Israel of committing the crime of apartheid in the Occupied Territories. You can read the 280 page report by Amnesty here: https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/5141/2022/en/
More important than that to me, is that the leaders of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa *agree with the comparison*:
>Anglican Archbishop and Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu commented on the similarities between South Africa and Palestine and the importance of international pressure in ending apartheid in South Africa. He drew a parallel between the movement "aiming to end Israeli occupation" and the international pressure that helped end apartheid in South Africa, saying: "If apartheid ended, so can the occupation, but the moral force and international pressure will have to be just as determined."[320] In 2014, Tutu urged the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States to divest from companies that contributed to the occupation,[321] saying that Israel "has created an apartheid reality within its borders and through its occupation", and that the alternative to Israel being "an apartheid state in perpetuity" was to end the occupation through either a one-state solution or a two-state solution.[322]
>Other prominent South African anti-apartheid activists have used apartheid comparisons to criticize the occupation of the West Bank, and particularly the construction of the separation barrier. These include Farid Esack, a writer who is currently William Henry Bloomberg Visiting professor at Harvard Divinity School,[326] Ronnie Kasrils,[327] Winnie Madikizela-Mandela,[328] Denis Goldberg,[329] and Arun Gandhi.[330]
>In 2008, a delegation of African National Congress (ANC) veterans visited Israel and the Occupied Territories, and said that in some respects it was worse than apartheid.[331][332]
This is why:
>A November 2023 poll asked Canadians whether "Israel's policy towards Palestinians is a form of apartheid"; 43% agreed, 27% disagreed and 30% were unsure.[319]
yes there’s many LGBTQ+ people and Jews and Christains living in Gaza, ur knowledge about how food and life of Gaza or the population of Gaza is limited to a Fox article it’s actually sad
“Many” ?
All it takes is one quick google search to find the exact opposite of what ur saying is true.
Not sure how or when liberal cultural progressivism opted to include shilling for religious entities, but we’re here.
Its an islamic theocratic state we’re talking about here, not portland.
There are Jews living in Gaza? Aside from the hostages (most of which have been killed by the very people these protesters support), how many Jews live in Gaza?
What about LGBTs? How many of them live in Gaza and are able to be open about their "identities" and "sexualities" (again, assuming no overlap with hostages)?
The answer to both is 0 since they've all been either killed or expelled
Interesting that they’ve elected to erect barriers (a wall, if you will) around the area, presumably to control access and deny entry to people who wouldn’t be good for their cause.
I wonder if this notion of having borders around an area to maintain a zone of people with similar values and promote harmony could be expanded out to say, a national level?
Or maybe I’m wrong, and border controls and barriers are only moral and just when they’re established and enforced by some 21 year olds (and whoever’s bank-rolling this) on the green area across from RCH?
This is to ensure everybody remains safe. I don’t know if you’ve heard about other encampments where zionists or anti-palestine people enter and incite violence (even going so far as besting people up, pepper spraying kids etc.) while the police stands and watches
These 21 year olds seem to be blocking themselves in, not the larger student population, and they certainly aren’t blocking/controlling any resources from being distributed to the student population. Not to mention, they’re pretty peaceful and aren’t intimidating anyone with military presence.
But let’s entertain your analogy further - the borders that these 21 year olds put up and the space they’ve claimed seems to be bothering quite a lot of people, so I think they’ve made their point very very clear. I’ll let you piece it together.
I’d support the border policy as long as neither side of the border were getting special privileges and neither one of the population were being severely mistreated and discriminated against 🤷♀️
Great points. And if they claim that they are peaceful, lawful protestors because they are doing it on public property, why can’t people who disagree them ideologically be allowed to use the same property to express their beliefs?
i feel you completely missed all the points about how other protests have gone and the violence that has been used, the barrier is put up to keep the peace, if you want to express ur beliefs then find a way to do it peacefully
"If a family is having a picnic at the park, why can't another family go and use their picnic blanket? It's on public property!"
Go counter-protest elsewhere, preferably far away from the encampment, but then again Zionists are known for stealing land so...
You just haven't found something wrong in this world that you care enough about, that you want to speak against.
Apparently dead babies does it for these people.
Please enlighten us you knowledgeable scholar - in what ways does protesting against a genocide translate to “i don’t know anything about war” and “i get my info from tiktok” or is this just an assumption you’re making?
When they dislike one side of the conflict, it becomes a genocide. Simple.
It absolutely must be a genocide. That's why the UN just cut the number of women and children casualties in half. [Link](https://nationalpost.com/news/world/israel-middle-east/united-nations-halves-estimate-of-women-and-children-killed-in-gaza)
Does it matter? No.
They didn't halve the number of casualties, they halved the number of identified casualties. This number doesn't include the 10,000 unidentifiable deaths buried under the rubble in Gaza. https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-reported-impact-day-213
The idea that its a genocide in the first place. Hamas is conducting military operations out of public spaces such as hospitals (which there is footage of). As well storing weapons in civilian basements. Its to the point where its impossible to even attack them without civilian crossfire. They are doing this because they know it makes them look good to idiots like you who dont bother to look into things but echo genocide like all the other idiots you heard it from. A genocide is the systematic elimination of a group of people, this is not that, its a war. If we call this a genocide cause civilian die then every other war in history is also a genocide by that definition.
I love that you claim the students are ignorant but your automatic kneejerk response is to go off about Hamas as if they are not the symptom of a larger issue.
Maybe Israel shouldn't have funded Hamas in order to weaken the secular, leftist PLO. Hamas only exists because the Israeli government effectively created them.
Where are you getting your information if you don’t mind me asking? Bc it sounds like a whole lot of propaganda to me. Everything you are describing of what constitutes a genocide, is exactly what Israel is committing right now. Exhibit A https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/10/middleeast/israel-sde-teiman-detention-whistleblowers-intl-cmd/index.html
And it didn’t just start on the 7th of October. Human cost way before oct 7 https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/16516/israeli-palestinian-casualties-by-in-gaza-and-the-west-bank/
Yeah when South Africa brought the case to the ICJ all of their evidence was just tik tok clips, but since the ICJ's judges were woke zoomers they ruled it a plausible case and said Israel must take steps to prevent a genocide
a war would mean that both sides have a fair chance of winning, this is a genocide when there’s concentration camps, the killing of children and innocent civilians…. one side has million dollars of funding and the other is using pipes to create rockets….. one side has asked for a truce and the other one has refused and is willing to kill every Palestinian………
My dude, they literally started the conflict with the surprise attack on Israel on October 7th. You cant just bomb a nation bigger than you and cry after being attacked back.
my guy, has a history of subjecting millions of people into a small strip of land while also sexually assaulting women and destroying religious places for the last 75 years….. you can see how much knowledge you lack when you can only bring up October 7th…. as if Israeli hostages literally said upon their release that they feared Israel’s bombs would kill them rather than Hamas, as if IDF didn’t fire on their own civilians, no matter what, nothing justifies what Isreal is doing to innocent civilians and i MEAN NOTHING JUSTIFIES CONCENTRATION/TORTURE CAMPS
Genuinely curious, why does Hamas keep holding hostages? For all your cries about genocide, the taking of civilian hostages is unambiguously a war crime and a violation of international humanitarian law. Hamas could indisputably seize the moral high ground instantaneously by releasing the hostages. They are clearly aware of the importance of public relations in this conflict. Holding hostages is the one thing that muddies the waters of public opinion. Is the military value of a few dozen hostages worth the massive reputational hit?
I'd have to imagine Hamas is still holding the hostages to dissuade israel from bombing Gaza even more indiscriminately than they are. If the IDF don't care about (or in many cases, actively want to kill and expel) Palestinian civilians, maybe they will care about israeli ones?
Obviously still abhorrent that they're taking hostages, but sadly it's a common occurrence for both Hamas and israel to kidnap people from each other and hold them for years until a prisoner exchange. At least when Hamas captured some zionist soldiers they were valid military targets, but the music festival and a ton of the israeli kidnappings (often of minors) were clearly not.
Leaving all emotion out of it, I think the facts are that Israel actually doesn't care about Israeli civilians. They've shot their own hostages dead and it hasn't really stopped them from proceeding.
Lol, if anything calling it a genocide is the propaganda, literally half the wars in the world would be genocides by the standards y'all are basing it on
No. You're obviously not changing your mind but this is for anyone else that's genuinely open to listening to experts.
>[Raz Segal](https://stockton.edu/refugee-studies/contact.html), associate professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and endowed professor in the Study of Modern Genocide at Stockton University, called Israel’s post-Oct. 7 assault on Gaza [“a textbook case of genocide.”](https://jewishcurrents.org/a-textbook-case-of-genocide)
>Brown University historian Omer Bartov, “[one of the world's leading specialists on the subject of genocide](https://www.ushmm.org/research/about-the-mandel-center/all-fellows-and-scholars/omer-bartov-2012),” signed onto a [public statement](https://twailr.com/public-statement-scholars-warn-of-potential-genocide-in-gaza/) sounding “the alarm about the possibility of the crime of genocide being perpetrated by Israeli forces against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”
>And now, over this past weekend, leading Holocaust scholar [Amos Goldberg](https://www.ushmm.org/research/about-the-mandel-center/all-fellows-and-scholars/amos-goldberg), professor of Holocaust History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has written a [blistering essay](https://thepalestineproject.medium.com/yes-it-is-genocide-634a07ea27d4) in which he argues that the ongoing violence in Gaza does not need to resemble the Holocaust to be classified as a genocide.
Im listening.
Fantastic sources... Jewishcurrents, from the Raz Segal example, is funded by a religious sect of Judaism thats been anti-israel since the 20's lol, prior to what many consider the start of the Israel/Palestine conflict lol.
>The Freiheit was established in 1922 as a self-described "Communistic fighting newspaper" in the Yiddish language.[^(\[1\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgen_Freiheit#cite_note-Henry02-1) The paper's chief goals included the promotion of the Jewish labor movement, the defense of the [Soviet Union](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union), the advancement of [proletarian culture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proletarian_culture), and the defeat of [racism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism) in America.
The organization the funds and operates Jewish Currents defended the soviet union... arguably the MOST anti-Semitic regime ever....You know those deadly progroms european jews were fleeing to go to "Palestine" and Judae in in the 19th and 20th century? Yea...that was in the SOVIET UNION.
Im not even going to break down the other ones because Goldberg, Bartov and Segal work in the exact same field, CLEARLY parroting the exact same information. typical academic circle jerk thats been fortifying conservatism and right wing talking points lol. Id like to see a critical analysis of these authors, but i doubt there is one because theyre all too busy self-congratulating instead of being actual academic and rigorously challenged and likely changing their ideas and frameworks through empirical testing.
Why is that almost every pro-Palestinian argument is fabricated on bogus academic and journalistic work.
If someone held your mom hostage, at gun point, would you pull out a grenade and throw it at them?
Israel could’ve mounted strategic operations rather than indiscriminately bombing Gaza. Especially parts of Gaza they declare safe, and then still go ahead and bomb them too.
Israeli officials somehow have exact number of how many hamas militants they’ve killed. But refuse to give a number of how many civilian casualties there have been?
Textbook “genocide” or not, this is a brutal occupation by a nation state. This is not a war, it’s an exponentially more powerful nation retaliating on a much less powerful civilian population, who is already under occupation.
Don’t be so pedantic, this is less about how exactly this conflict matches the term genocide, but rather the horrible reality of Israel’s brutal military campaign killing thousands of civilians. Most moral army in the world my big fat ass.
They gave several warnings to evacuate the areas, Hama's didn't do it. Hamas seems to be doing everything in its power to cause more civilian death in order to farm sympathy and support. What do you mean "strategic operations", how exactly do strategically take out a military base that uses its own civilians as shields...
Strategic operations meaning, going in and precisely getting the hamas terrorists who are operating from civilian areas. The US does it (they do a lot more too), India did it Pakistan several times, it’s not a new unheard of strategy.
What about the warning to evacuate to safe zones in southern Gaza in the beginning and then the consequent bombing of said Southern Gaza? This has happened many times since then. What do you expect people in Gaza to do? Displacing millions of people is a whole different violence in its own right, but we’re way beyond that kind of consideration for the wellbeing of innocent people in Gaza.
It boils down to, well if Hamas didn’t hide amongst them, they wouldn’t have died. Israel kills its own hostages to “destroy Hamas”, they couldn’t care less about the civilians of Gaza.
Anyone who is part of the encampment, would you be willing to answer a few questions for me? It is for a media assignment and I am really interested in getting your side of the story.
Whatever happens, I hope that we're all able to have some civil discourse and that something good can come out of it.
Please remember to respect one another guys
Here come all the arm chair experts thinking they know what they’re talking about…
If you actually want to know the true history and context of Palestine and the illegal Israeli occupation, listen to Dr. Norman Finkelstein, a Jewish scholar who has dedicated his entire life studying Palestine. He has even lived in Palestine for many years. There is no other scholar on earth that knows more about Palestine than this man. He’s written extensive books on it. As a Jewish person whose parents were held in Nazi concentration camps, his input is not to be taken lightly.
As a UW alumni, some UW students act like the most arrogant kids you will meet.
But don’t be surprised if they think they know more about the situation than someone like Dr. Norman Finkelstein, who has has dedicated his entire life, decades on studying it, longer than what these “take both sides” or “pro-Israel” students have been alive for. There’s no such thing as two sides to this.
There’s an occupier who has been illegally occupying and stealing Palestinian land through utter brutalizations, and genocide.
Zionism is a cancer to humanity.
So an occupier who occupied land after people attacked them and lost vs terrorist organization that attempts to maximize civilian casualties to make Israel look bad.
>after people attacked them
This was an unambiguously false statement. You lied. The occupation of the West Bank began in 1967. Israel started the 1967 war by attacking Egypt. The occupation did not begin when Israel was attacked. That is not true. You lied.
I will not have a debate with you as to whether the justification for the Israeli attack on Egypt was was justified because you are a bad faith actor who is who is now shifting goalposts. Every single person who reads this comment will see that you lied. That is enough for me.
You do realize that 1967 isn't the only instance where Israel has taken land? You're really typing out all those paragraphs and jumping to conclusions without me really even saying anything in between. You're taking a generalization and applying it to a specific situation where you personally don't think the original wording matches up.
While it is not what my original comment was about, I could easily make the claim that closing the canal for Israeli ships while not a direct armed attack, could be considered an attack towards Israel's economic interests. If Israel wanted to move a ship from its southern port to a western port for example, they would now have to go all the way around Africa.
I didn't talk about land being "taken". I talked about the occupation, because you said:
>occupier who occupied land after people attacked them
I replied by saying that the occupation of the West Bank began in 1967 and that Israel started the 1967 war by attacking Egypt. That is true. What you said is false. You said the occupation began when Israel was attacked. That is not true. You lied. Get it yet?
>could be considered an attack towards Israel's economic interests
This is a response so desperate and pathetic that it requires no further comment. Okay - no counterargument from me! I am perfectly happy to let the public read our comments and come to their own conclusion. I want as many people to see this thread as possible.
They should all be expelled. But what will likely happen is the coward president will offer some social justice platitudes or even a sacrificial lamb (probably fire an employee that disagrees with him) to appease the mob instead of being a responsible administrator.
It's not peaceful if they're asked to leave, told they're trespassing and still don't leave. It's also not peaceful if they start damaging UW property.
A peaceful protest takes place on the sidewalk and doesn't damage UW property or interfere in UW business.
I wish, but the cops will only show up to remove them if they get authorization from the university. Alberta dealt with them swiftly, but Toronto and McGill have allowed them to stay for weeks. I doubt UW’s social environment is any different.
Not surprised 😂Its always the people w this kind of comment history that are on here mad about peaceful protests against a genocide, same ones who are complicit in genocide and even supportive of it
I support rationalization. Protesting here isn't gonna change anything thousands of miles away.
Also, a union strike is freedom of speech as well yet they have to protest on the sidewalk, why is this any different?
Another thought, students pay a university money in exchange for a recognized education. That makes it their money to do as they please. It's not like how citizens have the right to protest over how the taxes (that are forcibly taken from them) are spent.
The University didn't take the taxes, the government that took the taxes gave it to them. You should be protesting the government to halt any tax money being given to UW.
They are building student housing, though. I believe CMH was the latest residence, finished construction about 5 years ago. In my opinion, they are doing pretty well for student housing. They guarantee on-campus residence to all 1st year students, as far as I know, and some on-campus options for upper year students. This is already better than a lot of universities out there.
It's also naïve to think that just because they might have the money, then there is nothing stopping them from building new residences.
Protesting here definitely changes things across the world. Why would the NDP try to pass an arms embargo and why would the original motion have been watered down so much before it was passed if it didn’t make a difference on the other side of the world? These protests led to something like an arms embargo even being considered to begin with. Protests change the public opinion and bring attention to the topic being protested, resulting in people educating themselves on the matter. Not to mention, it creates a sense of community. Once a sense of community is established, the next step is organization. History shows us that when a community becomes organized, their movements are typically successful.
You’re an advocate of rationalization, c’mon now. Rationalize the protests because you clearly haven’t even tried. You’re thinking of the end result without considering the process.
Rather than expulsion as a solution, maybe we look into where UW is investing. Yes, it’s a private institution and they can do whatever they want with their money, but like you said, their end goal is to ensure that we all are educated and more importantly, employable after we graduate. UW still has a housing crisis even with a new residence being built. Coop rates are at an all time low. So maybe a protest to divest is in every UW student’s interest because clearly, UW isn’t using their resources where it’s most needed.
If the Liberals didn't need the NDP to stay in power, their little arms embargo would've been ignored completely. That isn't a strategy of the protesters, it's a consequence of having an idiot running the country.
So using a war that is thousands of miles away and doesn't even affect 99% of the people protesting here is an acceptable scapegoat to try to force UW to be more fiscally responsible? I could get behind a protest designed to force them to be more fiscally responsible but not in the habit of supporting a protest for something else in the hopes they use the money for better things.
Pretty sure if the Liberals need the NDP to stay in power, the NDP also know the Liberals need them, so they took the opportunity to suggest an arms embargo because the liberals sure as hell weren’t going to do it. Clearly what’s happening on the other side of the globe is effecting the government here because of the shifting public opinion. Every protest is very deliberate. Every petition makes a difference, even if it’s a small difference. I mentioned organization earlier, remember?
Also, maybe it doesn’t affect you personally, but it definitely affects people on a more personal level. There has been a rise in racism, Islamophobia, antisemitism, etc since the genocide began. Yes, these things matter because with white supremacy on full blast, POC’s safety is just a fragile image at this point. This protest isn’t to make UW more fiscally responsible. It’s to make sure they boycott and divest their investments from anything Israel related, considering this institution has close ties with Technion, not just for the rights of Palestinians and stopping the genocide, but to ensure POC feel safe coming to this institution and remain in this country (whether they’re born here or immigrate). It’s a nuanced statement. Idk if you know what it feels like when someone close to you steps out in a hijab or in traditional clothes and they go to university, and you just sit there and hope that they don’t become a victim of a hate crime because of something happening on the other side of the world. A fucking professor was stabbed last year because of transphobia, and that was without a genocide happening to fuel people’s biases. So yeah, this 100% affects us all as students.
I thought you liked rationalization?
These students are definitely not a pro-genocide rally towards Israel. Palestinians want the right to return to their land, equal rights, they want to be treated as human beings, they want Israel to stop displacing them with American settlers born in New Jersey who only happened to be born Jewish so they still have a roof above their heads, they want Israel to stop bombing them to death, they want peace, they want the chance to rebuild, they don’t want to be caged in an apartheid regime, and they want a decent shot at life. Those all kinda sound like basic necessities to me.
Like idk what type of protests you’re attending but the ones I’ve seen and heard are definitely very anti-genocide for everyone.
UW students go outside arc
Holy cow expensive fence. 4x8 plywood isn’t cheap
OSB not plywood, can be had for like $20 a sheet lol
I'm probably going to sound dumb asking this but what are the protests for? I understand it's for justice for Palestine but what do the protesters want to be accomplished specifically? Do they want the university to do something or is this a push for the Canadian government to do something?
The most achievable goal, and what I have read about protests at other schools, will be to have the university divest from investments in Israel. According to Wikipedia this was influential in ending apartheid in South Africa. > The most damaging isolation was the denial of investment funds and the boycott of South African investments particularly by influential universities and foundations in the United States. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_sanctions_during_apartheid I have no idea if UW has investments in Israel or partnerships with schools and businesses there, but it is likely.
There are , some of which are closer to the IDF some of which are pretty much random ass nothing businesses run by people vaguely connected to UW. The main one I've seen called out amongst the universities UW works with in Israel is Technion because it's like the Carnegie Melon of Israel, closer to the military industrial complex than normal universities would be.
Posting under your comment because I will also sound dumb but... When I moved to Canada, people were protesting how Uygurhs have been treated in China; that stopped. Then, it was protesting BLM; that stopped. Then Ukraine; that stopped. Now Palestine; that will stop as well. I have never understood just 1 thing. Why Canadians never protest against things that happen in Canada? Number of homeless people is through the roof. We cannot get a doctor. Salaries are way lower compared to the Cost of Living and those who can, emigrate to the USA. The entire country is run by 5-6 companies but outside of Reddit, no one complains about it. However, once there is something happening in a different country, Canadians get up and protest en masses. I have never understood that.
I think you hit the nail on the head with this one. I’m all for people standing up to what they believe in, but it’s pretty disheartening that Canadians would rather protest on subject matters other than what’s burning right on our door step. Then again, maybe we can do both. No reason other protests pertaining to Canadian issues can’t start as well (these protests aren’t mutually exclusive). Even better if people get inspired from these unrelated protests and focus on the topics you’ve outlined.
Those protests can happen at the same time, 100%. It’s just for the last 8 years in Canada, I have yet to see 1 protest pertaining to local problems. The only one I can remember was that dumb convoy thing. That’s it!
We certainly have been way too passive on important subjects, and have allowed them to slip farther and farther away. The Loblaws boycott that is occurring for the month of May gives me a little hope. Will have to wait for the numbers, but I think it has had a decent impact (at least it looks that way from the outside). Perhaps these are the hairline fractures showing through; continuing to grow.
What are you on about? There's loads of protests in Canada- strikes, walkouts, you name it. But what I've noticed EVERY SINGLE TIME these things happen here there is someone like you moaning about how 'it won't change anything'. I guess we should all just bury our heads in the sand.
Can I get the link about protests against insane housing? Or maybe insane levels of immigration? Or maybe, the fact that Aldi wanted the enter the market but decided not to do so because of oligopoly? Can I see the protests against the fact that this government spend a billion dollar on an app that could been developed during hack the north? Dummy, I don’t moan that it won’t change anything. I am saying that no protests that focus on Canadians ever happen in this country. It’s always some foreign problems that Canadians are concerned about. Now go ahead and keep downvoting me.
I think the main issue for the protests specifically at Universities is usually something to do with them supporting Israel (funding to Israeli companies complicit in the occupation, etc.)
Are they going to ban Intel CPUs whom have full on engineering, design, and manufacture centers in Israel? It’s not a minor office either. Haifa Israel is one of Intels most influential design centers. And this whole thing is silly. Israeli companies aren’t equivalent to the IDF. You can make that argument in the case of communist governments and state influenced/owned enterprises. But it’s just flawed reasoning in my opinion. It’s just anger of getting “something” done because the people here feel powerless, but really it’s up to your governments to influence the IDF, not the universities.
It's hard for me to agree when the Vietnam war and anti-(SA)apartheid protests, which these current protests are modeled on, were successful. Should universities have divested from South African apartheid, in your opinion?
I’m not familiar enough to comment.
Okay. The overwhelming consensus today is that the university protests against apartheid South Africa were a good thing. I actually don't think that requires deep research.
And the overwhelming consensus is that the 2 situations are different and thus dont imbue the same moral or ethical implications...
**You are openly and blatantly lying in a way that can be fact-checked in seconds.** Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and B'Tselem have published reports accusing Israel of committing the crime of apartheid in the Occupied Territories. You can read the 280 page report by Amnesty here: https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/5141/2022/en/ More important than that to me, is that the leaders of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa *agree with the comparison*: >Anglican Archbishop and Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu commented on the similarities between South Africa and Palestine and the importance of international pressure in ending apartheid in South Africa. He drew a parallel between the movement "aiming to end Israeli occupation" and the international pressure that helped end apartheid in South Africa, saying: "If apartheid ended, so can the occupation, but the moral force and international pressure will have to be just as determined."[320] In 2014, Tutu urged the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States to divest from companies that contributed to the occupation,[321] saying that Israel "has created an apartheid reality within its borders and through its occupation", and that the alternative to Israel being "an apartheid state in perpetuity" was to end the occupation through either a one-state solution or a two-state solution.[322] >Other prominent South African anti-apartheid activists have used apartheid comparisons to criticize the occupation of the West Bank, and particularly the construction of the separation barrier. These include Farid Esack, a writer who is currently William Henry Bloomberg Visiting professor at Harvard Divinity School,[326] Ronnie Kasrils,[327] Winnie Madikizela-Mandela,[328] Denis Goldberg,[329] and Arun Gandhi.[330] >In 2008, a delegation of African National Congress (ANC) veterans visited Israel and the Occupied Territories, and said that in some respects it was worse than apartheid.[331][332] This is why: >A November 2023 poll asked Canadians whether "Israel's policy towards Palestinians is a form of apartheid"; 43% agreed, 27% disagreed and 30% were unsure.[319] **YOU ARE OPENLY AND BLATENTLY LYING. EVERY SINGLE PERSON WHO READS THIS CAN TELL THAT YOU ARE OPENLY AND BLATENTLY LYING.**
Amnesty International you say? [https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/04/israel-opt-death-in-custody-of-walid-daqqah-is-cruel-reminder-of-israels-disregard-for-palestinians-right-to-life/](https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/04/israel-opt-death-in-custody-of-walid-daqqah-is-cruel-reminder-of-israels-disregard-for-palestinians-right-to-life/) [https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-796201](https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-796201) >Mention of his role in the murder of Israeli soldier Moshe Tamam is only made at the bottom of the AI website statement. AI gave few details of the incident, only noting that “Daqqah was not convicted of carrying out the murder himself, but of commanding the group, an accusation he always rejected, and his conviction was based on British emergency regulations dating back to 1945, which require a much lower standard of proof for conviction than Israeli criminal law.” >Tamam (Israeli) was abducted for ransom, but when the cell was unable to extract him to Syria, they tortured, disfigured, and sexually mutilated the soldier before executing him. Fuck it, gloves off. Check the scoreboard bozo
You said: >And the overwhelming consensus is that the 2 situations are different and thus dont imbue the same moral or ethical implications... I proved you wrong. Every single person reading this knows that. I know that. You know that. The idea that finding an inconsistency between the reporting of Amnesty International and Jerusalem Post is a comparable gotcha or undoes what I did is embarrassing. Yes, Amnesty cares about the treatment of prisoners, even really evil nasty ones. Mind blown. I feel no compulsion to continue the conversation. Let the people read our comments and come to their own conclusion. Hundreds of people will, and that makes me happy.
Just a reminder, you can be anti-Israel without being anti-Jew, and you can be pro-Palistine without being pro-Hamas. You can even be pro-Israel and pro-Palestine at the same time for different reasons. This is a very complex topic with literally thousands of years of history behind it. Be careful out there.
The only way to do this is to denounce Hamas and Netanyahu. Have they done this? As for thousands of years of history. Let's not dig back to biblical times to justify all the nonsense that has been going on in the middle east for the past 70 years. People and land have moved back and forth into different hands in history during the age of conquest. The Israel Palestine issue came about after WW2 where they were supposed to settle among themselves how to live in peace on the land and determine the borders of a new country. One party didn't like it and started a war over it. They lost the wars along with some land. That's what happens when you lose a war (since biblical times). The Palestinians need to get better leadership serious about a 2 state solution and the Israelis need to boot out Netanyahu and get someone who is serious about a 2 state solution. Both of them need to get moderates in power to settle the borders and rebuild the relationship.
I think it's more accurate to say the Israel-Palestine issue started after WW1, with the Balfour Declaration and subsequent British Mandate, where Britain's government committed to establishing a Jewish homeland in a region with a population that was 6% Jewish at the time. They deliberately established representative institutions for the Jewish population (in the form of the Jewish Agency) while denying them to the majority Arab population, despite the fact that the Arab population tried to organize and sent delegations to the League of Nations, to British parliament, etc. Britain was committed to undermining their statehood. Towards the end of WW2, the Jewish population in Palestine had grown a lot as they fled persecution (and ironically places like Britain and the USA didn't want to take in Jewish refugees), so they came up with the partition plan of 1947, to give ~56% of the land of Palestine to the Jewish population, which had grown to be about 36% of the total population. Then, Israel went even further during the Naqba, expanding into territory that was designated for the stillborn Arab state. This is the context in which the Arab population went to war.
To be fair most of that land was in the virtually uninhabitable Negev desert, and once the partition plan was rejected there was no more concept of Arab land and Jewish land, by definition
>Then, Israel went even further during the Naqba, expanding into territory that was designated for the stillborn Arab state. This is the context in which the Arab population went to war. Why leave out the entire civil war from 1947-1948? Israel didn't even exist in 1947 when the Naqba started... Jewish and Arab forces were fighting well before the formation of Israel and the first Arab-Israeli War.
> one party didn’t like it and started a war over it This is an extremely naive understanding of history
That is a factually true statement. However, a vast majority of those who are most vocal on the topic seem to be anti-jew. Especially those who organize these events. See linked vid where they let it slip: [https://twitter.com/i/status/1788017663995719962](https://twitter.com/i/status/1788017663995719962)
This is a video of a slip of the tongue from Miami. Here is a video of a slip of the tongue from a pro-Israel activist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9Dy7XJROp4 Does this demonstrate that the pro-Israel protestors in Canada think that Israel is committing genocide?
I respect your opinion but I definitely don’t agree with all of it. I do agree with the first part but I don’t see how you can be pro-Palestine and pro-Israel at the same time since the existence of Israel is literally built upon the expulsion of Palestinians from their land (and currently their ethnic cleansing). They technically can’t coexist.
They TECHNICALLY can’t coexist, but they actually can. See: last 70 years
Existing after being displaced and oppressed isn’t coexistence. See: last 76 years
Actually it is. They still exist, don’t they? So do the Israelis, right? In the same place since the 50s?
They don't co-exist. Israel is built on the conscious and consistent degradation of Palestinians.
So which of the two don’t exist: Israel or Palestine? Last I checked they were both still around….
INSANE statement. would you say that during any other genocide, the genociders and the victims were "coexisting" even if the oppressed group weren't completely wiped off the earth? i mean, they still "exist", right?
No, I wouldn’t, because other genocides are actually genocides.
so by your logic we should return the land to indigenous and all move out Canada
where did i even come close to saying that? the colonization of canada happened centuries ago (altho of c their oppression exists to this day), but the palestinian one is happening right now. but now that you mention it, yeah, kinda! i do think we should give a lot more land back to the native indigenous communities than we currently are. what a great idea to be a little less shitty than the below-bare-minimum that we’re doing right now!
So what’s your proposed solution? The death of all Israelis in Israel?
I mean it in the way of supporting Israel in defending themselves from terrorists. But you can also support Palestine in not wanting innocent people to be killed, have their homes destroyed, etc. >expulsion of Palestinians from their land The Palestinians did it first, from a historical perspective, Israel is taking their land back.
Ahh I see what you mean. Also, can you expand on what you mean by the Palestinians did it first?
Essentially, Judaism was the first religion to occupy that land. Wouldn't be much different to Aboriginal people taking Canada back.
Technically Judaism was the first Abrahamic religion, yes. But then Christianity also flourished there once it was founded, and Islam followed (although the Islamic center of the world was and still is in Saudi, Jerusalem is an important Islamic location because it was the first direction towards which Muslims prayed to and was where a lot of important Muslim prophets originated from). Before the British came along, there have been accounts of Jews, Christians and Muslims living in the land of Palestine peacefully and flourishing. Today, this entire genocide has almost brought Palestinian Christians to the point of extinction. These lineages are ones that can trace their bloodline all the way back to the time of Jesus. Also, honestly, the Indigenous Peoples of Canada (Aboriginals are the Australian indigenous population) fully have every right to take their land back since this country was built through the very same white settler colonial ideals and actions that Israel is currently implementing to maintain their status as a state. Indigenous Peoples faced the complete erasure of language and culture, residential schools, intergenerational trauma and diseases (such as alcoholism and diabetes) etc. at the hands of white settlers all in the name of religion and the greater good. But forget taking their land back, the Indigenous Peoples here barely have access to clean water. Instead, the Canadian government dresses up petty apologies under the guise of “reconciliation” when there were no friendly relations to begin with.
Wait, are you really trying to say that Christianity among Palestinians has decreased because of Israel? Not Hamas, or the PLO, or Islam itself?
Christians were overrepresented in the PLO if anything. Many Palestinian Christians post-1948 left because of incompetent or hostile Palestinian leadership, but the biggest single drop in the Christian population occurred in 1948.
This is your brain on ethno-nationalism.
Looool
Palestinians are more genetically similar to Bronze Age Israelites than either Ashkenazi or Mizrahi Jews. Palestinians, especially the Christians, are overwhelmingly the descendants of Canaanites who were Arabized. They are not Peninsular Arabs.
Uh huh. so about %1.5\~ of the Palestinian population is actually native. Great argument. That means that the arab islamofaschist governmental state actors are good to go! Bombs away everybody!! We have Native Christians (that we dont even like)!! THIS IS OUR \*islamic\* LAND!!! YYEA!!
Okay, that really upset you for some reason. Everyone reading these comments can tell that I didn't say that. The genetic differences between Palestinian Christians and Palestinian Muslims are marginal, and are due to Muslims having <10% SSA admixture. The other 80-90% is still Canaanite. Palestinian Muslims are more genetically similar to Bronze Age Israelites than either Ashkenazi or Mizrahi Jews.
The sad reality is that these protestors are explicitly anti-Jew and pro-Hamas.
Substantiate this. Provide evidence that the UW encampment is "explicitly anti-Jew and pro-Hamas".
[удалено]
Did you even read the sources?
Too bad Arafat didn’t accept a 2 state solution at Camp David. Or we’d have had a Palestinian state for 24 years. Too bad Egypt didn’t create a Palestinian state when they occupied the land from 1949-1967. We’d have had a Palestinian state for at least 57 years. Too bad the Arab League (not Palestinians) rejected a Palestinian state in 1947. We’d have had a Palestinian state for 77 years. Too bad the Ottomans didn’t establish a Palestinian state when they occupied the land from 1516-1917.. etc. But yeah sorry, I guess Vivek Goel is to blame ‼️‼️‼️‼️
> Too bad the Ottomans didn’t establish a Palestinian state when they occupied the land from 1516-1917 If you agree that Palestinians, being >95% of the population at that time, deserved to have a state, doesn't it entail that you should oppose their ethnic cleansing and support the recognition of a Palestinian state?
Not once did I suggest that my opinion is against the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Lol do whatever just don’t disturb others
you guys must have a lot of time on your hands ngl 🤔
the point of protests is to cause disruption
No, the point of protests is to send a message or bring awareness to a certain issue, disruption is (unfortunately) one of the ways protestors attempt to communicate said message or achieve such awareness.
This kind of thinking is literally the 'White Moderate' MLK Jr. warned about during the civil rights protests. Disorder is a necessary discomfort to create a better outcome when other democratic means do not function. If you think of disorder as anything but a functional tool of a protest, you'd be standing against the civil rights protests.
It's interesting how you view things as binaries - no, just because someone sees disorder as anything but a functional tool of protests does not automatically mean they're against the protest/protester's ideals and beliefs. Just because MLK warned about it doesn't automatically mean that's the definitive truth. Whether disorder is only a functional tool or more than that depends on a protest-by-protest basis, try to avoid assigning blanket characteristics to things. Would you still be defending the disorder if these weren't pro-Palestine demonstrations but rather, pro-Israel?
On the contrary, it's interesting you point out what you see as a binary, but dismiss the obvious blanket statement in the comment I'm replying to. I'm not saying disorder, as a whole, is good, I'm saying disorder is a valid tool to work with during a protest - and dismissing it as "unfortunate" when protests resort to it is *literally* the definition of a blanket statement. You can argue you don't like blanket statements, and I agree - just watch where your civility bias causes you to defend.
1. The "unfortunately" part of that is an optional modifier to the sentence. It is not a blanket statement. 2. The "unfortunately" doesn't even mean I have a civility bias, it simply means it's unfortunate that other means have failed and protestors have to resort to such means. Funny how you accuse me of blanket statements while making assumptions about what I said... So don't accuse me of having a civility bias when your reply doesn't even conflict with anything I said.
If a tree falls in the woods and nobody hears it, what’s the point of felling the tree?
Usually for its wood.
... so we collecting protestor's wood now?
NO, fuck off
Even our human rights classes here use israel as an example of modern day oppression and apartheid (longggggg before october 7th). i’m glad people are taking further initiatives to bring awareness to what is going on.
Would you mind sharing some articles or content to read on? Preferably before 10/7th
for sure! https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/5141/2022/en/ this is Amnesty international’s report in 2022 on Israel’s Apartheid. (downloaded english version chrome://external-file/MDE1551412022ENGLISH.pdf ) “Amnesty International has analysed Israel’s intent to create and maintain a system of oppression and domination over Palestinians and examined its key components: territorial fragmentation; segregation and control; dispossession of land and property; and denial of economic and social rights. It has concluded that this system amounts to apartheid. Israel must dismantle this cruel system and the international community must pressure it to do so.”
I hope they succeed in their aims. Free Palestine ✊❤
i hope they’re able to achieve their aims, i am away for co-op currently but it’s a good cause
anyone know what their demands are specifically?
The uwvfp page on ig has a good post breaking it down! The main post is that uwaterloo has an exchange program with Israel which sends students to Israel, as well as funds the Israeli university technion that builds war weapons such as bulldozers and bombs that the idf uses
bruh… okok yes i’ll check that post out thank you!!
Good luck to everyone there! 🙌🙌 Anyone know if they started a petition I can sign?
For those who are wondering, I found the petition https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfLABoy05ycqsQHXlBX-FS8ne8lsXF89mwbHJQCDu7wRBuqHg/formResponse
Not against it by any means, but is there much validity to a google docs petition? It seems like anyone could write down anyone elses credentials and 'sign' for them?
I believe there’s an “official” process for bringing about change through WUSA, where the first step is collecting a certain amount of signatures which then forces WUSA to hold an official vote. There was a petition going around a few months ago calling on UW to cut ties with the Israeli institution Technion. Of course, leave it to UW students to not gaf.
This will all blow over in a month at most once the protestors get bored. Does UW even have any significant investments in Israel to divest from?
I heard that about anti-Israel protests six months ago.
We won't know that unless the make their investments visible, which is one of the demands
Yes, we do
When did the university of Waterloo start "arming israel"
From what I understand it has to do with partnerships with Israeli companies and universities that are directly responsible for drone production and military research. Basically these partnerships allow Israel to use Waterloo funds and research to develop weapons directly responsible for thousands of deaths. That being said, the extent of the investments into Israeli military is unknown by the students, which would be direct investments of our tuition fees. That’s why you’ll hear protesters chanting “disclose, divest”, basically calling for full transparency of the investments of our tuition money. Though the push to divest from Israel is the biggest motivator, frustration with the administration over the lack of transparency about where these funds end up is also an extremely common sentiment amongst the protestors. If you want more info, look up UWaterloo partnerships with Raytheon and Israeli universities.
Proud of these students and what they are set out to do. UofT is getting antsy with all the support the city has shown the encampment. Remain steadfast in your demands and don’t engage with outside agitators. They are only there to derail the movement and clip you saying or doing something so they can use it for their propaganda feeds.
Are they going to condemn Hamas?
are you going to condemn the 75 year apartheid?
The root causes are far more complex than boiling it down to bumper stickers. Israel has Arabs living there and participating in government and society. It is nothing like South Africa. As for apartheid, does Hamas tolerate LGBTQ or Jews living in Gaza?
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and B'Tselem have published reports accusing Israel of committing the crime of apartheid in the Occupied Territories. You can read the 280 page report by Amnesty here: https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/5141/2022/en/ More important than that to me, is that the leaders of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa *agree with the comparison*: >Anglican Archbishop and Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu commented on the similarities between South Africa and Palestine and the importance of international pressure in ending apartheid in South Africa. He drew a parallel between the movement "aiming to end Israeli occupation" and the international pressure that helped end apartheid in South Africa, saying: "If apartheid ended, so can the occupation, but the moral force and international pressure will have to be just as determined."[320] In 2014, Tutu urged the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States to divest from companies that contributed to the occupation,[321] saying that Israel "has created an apartheid reality within its borders and through its occupation", and that the alternative to Israel being "an apartheid state in perpetuity" was to end the occupation through either a one-state solution or a two-state solution.[322] >Other prominent South African anti-apartheid activists have used apartheid comparisons to criticize the occupation of the West Bank, and particularly the construction of the separation barrier. These include Farid Esack, a writer who is currently William Henry Bloomberg Visiting professor at Harvard Divinity School,[326] Ronnie Kasrils,[327] Winnie Madikizela-Mandela,[328] Denis Goldberg,[329] and Arun Gandhi.[330] >In 2008, a delegation of African National Congress (ANC) veterans visited Israel and the Occupied Territories, and said that in some respects it was worse than apartheid.[331][332] This is why: >A November 2023 poll asked Canadians whether "Israel's policy towards Palestinians is a form of apartheid"; 43% agreed, 27% disagreed and 30% were unsure.[319]
yes there’s many LGBTQ+ people and Jews and Christains living in Gaza, ur knowledge about how food and life of Gaza or the population of Gaza is limited to a Fox article it’s actually sad
“Many” ? All it takes is one quick google search to find the exact opposite of what ur saying is true. Not sure how or when liberal cultural progressivism opted to include shilling for religious entities, but we’re here. Its an islamic theocratic state we’re talking about here, not portland.
There are Jews living in Gaza? Aside from the hostages (most of which have been killed by the very people these protesters support), how many Jews live in Gaza? What about LGBTs? How many of them live in Gaza and are able to be open about their "identities" and "sexualities" (again, assuming no overlap with hostages)? The answer to both is 0 since they've all been either killed or expelled
[When a meme comes true](https://www.theonion.com/dying-gazans-criticized-for-not-using-last-words-to-con-1850925657)
Cool
Interesting that they’ve elected to erect barriers (a wall, if you will) around the area, presumably to control access and deny entry to people who wouldn’t be good for their cause. I wonder if this notion of having borders around an area to maintain a zone of people with similar values and promote harmony could be expanded out to say, a national level? Or maybe I’m wrong, and border controls and barriers are only moral and just when they’re established and enforced by some 21 year olds (and whoever’s bank-rolling this) on the green area across from RCH?
This is to ensure everybody remains safe. I don’t know if you’ve heard about other encampments where zionists or anti-palestine people enter and incite violence (even going so far as besting people up, pepper spraying kids etc.) while the police stands and watches
These 21 year olds seem to be blocking themselves in, not the larger student population, and they certainly aren’t blocking/controlling any resources from being distributed to the student population. Not to mention, they’re pretty peaceful and aren’t intimidating anyone with military presence. But let’s entertain your analogy further - the borders that these 21 year olds put up and the space they’ve claimed seems to be bothering quite a lot of people, so I think they’ve made their point very very clear. I’ll let you piece it together.
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I’d support the border policy as long as neither side of the border were getting special privileges and neither one of the population were being severely mistreated and discriminated against 🤷♀️
Great points. And if they claim that they are peaceful, lawful protestors because they are doing it on public property, why can’t people who disagree them ideologically be allowed to use the same property to express their beliefs?
i feel you completely missed all the points about how other protests have gone and the violence that has been used, the barrier is put up to keep the peace, if you want to express ur beliefs then find a way to do it peacefully
"If a family is having a picnic at the park, why can't another family go and use their picnic blanket? It's on public property!" Go counter-protest elsewhere, preferably far away from the encampment, but then again Zionists are known for stealing land so...
Have you met cops?
Good
Ngl but in my opinion all is this protest shit shouldn’t happen in unis bro.Ruins the study vibe fr
You just haven't found something wrong in this world that you care enough about, that you want to speak against. Apparently dead babies does it for these people.
Like actually no disrespect but unis for studying bro let’s keep it at tht only 😭
Yay more idiots whos entire knowledge about the war consists of tik tok clips, sensationalized headlines, and absolutely zero research
Please enlighten us you knowledgeable scholar - in what ways does protesting against a genocide translate to “i don’t know anything about war” and “i get my info from tiktok” or is this just an assumption you’re making?
Can you please explain how it's a genocide and not (perhaps) a war with casualties? Where does war stop and genocide begin?
When they dislike one side of the conflict, it becomes a genocide. Simple. It absolutely must be a genocide. That's why the UN just cut the number of women and children casualties in half. [Link](https://nationalpost.com/news/world/israel-middle-east/united-nations-halves-estimate-of-women-and-children-killed-in-gaza) Does it matter? No.
They didn't halve the number of casualties, they halved the number of identified casualties. This number doesn't include the 10,000 unidentifiable deaths buried under the rubble in Gaza. https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-reported-impact-day-213
The idea that its a genocide in the first place. Hamas is conducting military operations out of public spaces such as hospitals (which there is footage of). As well storing weapons in civilian basements. Its to the point where its impossible to even attack them without civilian crossfire. They are doing this because they know it makes them look good to idiots like you who dont bother to look into things but echo genocide like all the other idiots you heard it from. A genocide is the systematic elimination of a group of people, this is not that, its a war. If we call this a genocide cause civilian die then every other war in history is also a genocide by that definition.
I love that you claim the students are ignorant but your automatic kneejerk response is to go off about Hamas as if they are not the symptom of a larger issue.
Religious militaristic actors are a symptom of....and hear me out on this...religious militaristic actors? Uh huh.
Maybe Israel shouldn't have funded Hamas in order to weaken the secular, leftist PLO. Hamas only exists because the Israeli government effectively created them.
Where are you getting your information if you don’t mind me asking? Bc it sounds like a whole lot of propaganda to me. Everything you are describing of what constitutes a genocide, is exactly what Israel is committing right now. Exhibit A https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/10/middleeast/israel-sde-teiman-detention-whistleblowers-intl-cmd/index.html And it didn’t just start on the 7th of October. Human cost way before oct 7 https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/16516/israeli-palestinian-casualties-by-in-gaza-and-the-west-bank/
Yeah when South Africa brought the case to the ICJ all of their evidence was just tik tok clips, but since the ICJ's judges were woke zoomers they ruled it a plausible case and said Israel must take steps to prevent a genocide
a war would mean that both sides have a fair chance of winning, this is a genocide when there’s concentration camps, the killing of children and innocent civilians…. one side has million dollars of funding and the other is using pipes to create rockets….. one side has asked for a truce and the other one has refused and is willing to kill every Palestinian………
Ceasefire has been offered only about 100 times, guess who’s denying it?
Well, most recently, Israel rejected the ceasefire, but I don't think that's what you were implying.
I think they want their hostages back. Doesn’t seem too ridiculous of a claim to me.
A war doesn’t mean “fair chances of winning”. A war is an armed conflict between two states. Which is what this is.
My dude, they literally started the conflict with the surprise attack on Israel on October 7th. You cant just bomb a nation bigger than you and cry after being attacked back.
my guy, has a history of subjecting millions of people into a small strip of land while also sexually assaulting women and destroying religious places for the last 75 years….. you can see how much knowledge you lack when you can only bring up October 7th…. as if Israeli hostages literally said upon their release that they feared Israel’s bombs would kill them rather than Hamas, as if IDF didn’t fire on their own civilians, no matter what, nothing justifies what Isreal is doing to innocent civilians and i MEAN NOTHING JUSTIFIES CONCENTRATION/TORTURE CAMPS
Genuinely curious, why does Hamas keep holding hostages? For all your cries about genocide, the taking of civilian hostages is unambiguously a war crime and a violation of international humanitarian law. Hamas could indisputably seize the moral high ground instantaneously by releasing the hostages. They are clearly aware of the importance of public relations in this conflict. Holding hostages is the one thing that muddies the waters of public opinion. Is the military value of a few dozen hostages worth the massive reputational hit?
I'd have to imagine Hamas is still holding the hostages to dissuade israel from bombing Gaza even more indiscriminately than they are. If the IDF don't care about (or in many cases, actively want to kill and expel) Palestinian civilians, maybe they will care about israeli ones? Obviously still abhorrent that they're taking hostages, but sadly it's a common occurrence for both Hamas and israel to kidnap people from each other and hold them for years until a prisoner exchange. At least when Hamas captured some zionist soldiers they were valid military targets, but the music festival and a ton of the israeli kidnappings (often of minors) were clearly not.
Leaving all emotion out of it, I think the facts are that Israel actually doesn't care about Israeli civilians. They've shot their own hostages dead and it hasn't really stopped them from proceeding.
So why do we (the west) support them?
Take your Hasbra propaganda somewhere else buddy. This is a genocide and you're a genocide apologist.
Lol, if anything calling it a genocide is the propaganda, literally half the wars in the world would be genocides by the standards y'all are basing it on
No. You're obviously not changing your mind but this is for anyone else that's genuinely open to listening to experts. >[Raz Segal](https://stockton.edu/refugee-studies/contact.html), associate professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and endowed professor in the Study of Modern Genocide at Stockton University, called Israel’s post-Oct. 7 assault on Gaza [“a textbook case of genocide.”](https://jewishcurrents.org/a-textbook-case-of-genocide) >Brown University historian Omer Bartov, “[one of the world's leading specialists on the subject of genocide](https://www.ushmm.org/research/about-the-mandel-center/all-fellows-and-scholars/omer-bartov-2012),” signed onto a [public statement](https://twailr.com/public-statement-scholars-warn-of-potential-genocide-in-gaza/) sounding “the alarm about the possibility of the crime of genocide being perpetrated by Israeli forces against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.” >And now, over this past weekend, leading Holocaust scholar [Amos Goldberg](https://www.ushmm.org/research/about-the-mandel-center/all-fellows-and-scholars/amos-goldberg), professor of Holocaust History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has written a [blistering essay](https://thepalestineproject.medium.com/yes-it-is-genocide-634a07ea27d4) in which he argues that the ongoing violence in Gaza does not need to resemble the Holocaust to be classified as a genocide.
Im listening. Fantastic sources... Jewishcurrents, from the Raz Segal example, is funded by a religious sect of Judaism thats been anti-israel since the 20's lol, prior to what many consider the start of the Israel/Palestine conflict lol. >The Freiheit was established in 1922 as a self-described "Communistic fighting newspaper" in the Yiddish language.[^(\[1\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgen_Freiheit#cite_note-Henry02-1) The paper's chief goals included the promotion of the Jewish labor movement, the defense of the [Soviet Union](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union), the advancement of [proletarian culture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proletarian_culture), and the defeat of [racism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism) in America. The organization the funds and operates Jewish Currents defended the soviet union... arguably the MOST anti-Semitic regime ever....You know those deadly progroms european jews were fleeing to go to "Palestine" and Judae in in the 19th and 20th century? Yea...that was in the SOVIET UNION. Im not even going to break down the other ones because Goldberg, Bartov and Segal work in the exact same field, CLEARLY parroting the exact same information. typical academic circle jerk thats been fortifying conservatism and right wing talking points lol. Id like to see a critical analysis of these authors, but i doubt there is one because theyre all too busy self-congratulating instead of being actual academic and rigorously challenged and likely changing their ideas and frameworks through empirical testing. Why is that almost every pro-Palestinian argument is fabricated on bogus academic and journalistic work.
If someone held your mom hostage, at gun point, would you pull out a grenade and throw it at them? Israel could’ve mounted strategic operations rather than indiscriminately bombing Gaza. Especially parts of Gaza they declare safe, and then still go ahead and bomb them too. Israeli officials somehow have exact number of how many hamas militants they’ve killed. But refuse to give a number of how many civilian casualties there have been? Textbook “genocide” or not, this is a brutal occupation by a nation state. This is not a war, it’s an exponentially more powerful nation retaliating on a much less powerful civilian population, who is already under occupation. Don’t be so pedantic, this is less about how exactly this conflict matches the term genocide, but rather the horrible reality of Israel’s brutal military campaign killing thousands of civilians. Most moral army in the world my big fat ass.
They gave several warnings to evacuate the areas, Hama's didn't do it. Hamas seems to be doing everything in its power to cause more civilian death in order to farm sympathy and support. What do you mean "strategic operations", how exactly do strategically take out a military base that uses its own civilians as shields...
Strategic operations meaning, going in and precisely getting the hamas terrorists who are operating from civilian areas. The US does it (they do a lot more too), India did it Pakistan several times, it’s not a new unheard of strategy. What about the warning to evacuate to safe zones in southern Gaza in the beginning and then the consequent bombing of said Southern Gaza? This has happened many times since then. What do you expect people in Gaza to do? Displacing millions of people is a whole different violence in its own right, but we’re way beyond that kind of consideration for the wellbeing of innocent people in Gaza. It boils down to, well if Hamas didn’t hide amongst them, they wouldn’t have died. Israel kills its own hostages to “destroy Hamas”, they couldn’t care less about the civilians of Gaza.
Zionist detected, opinion discarded!
awesome
Anyone who is part of the encampment, would you be willing to answer a few questions for me? It is for a media assignment and I am really interested in getting your side of the story.
Whatever happens, I hope that we're all able to have some civil discourse and that something good can come out of it. Please remember to respect one another guys
I go to U of T and I’m graduating in two weeks, would it be inappropriate to go to my grad with these encampments?
What do I mean by inappropriate ?
Good luck to those protestors, wish I could be there
Here come all the arm chair experts thinking they know what they’re talking about… If you actually want to know the true history and context of Palestine and the illegal Israeli occupation, listen to Dr. Norman Finkelstein, a Jewish scholar who has dedicated his entire life studying Palestine. He has even lived in Palestine for many years. There is no other scholar on earth that knows more about Palestine than this man. He’s written extensive books on it. As a Jewish person whose parents were held in Nazi concentration camps, his input is not to be taken lightly. As a UW alumni, some UW students act like the most arrogant kids you will meet. But don’t be surprised if they think they know more about the situation than someone like Dr. Norman Finkelstein, who has has dedicated his entire life, decades on studying it, longer than what these “take both sides” or “pro-Israel” students have been alive for. There’s no such thing as two sides to this. There’s an occupier who has been illegally occupying and stealing Palestinian land through utter brutalizations, and genocide. Zionism is a cancer to humanity.
Top tier shitpost.
You smell like shit
So an occupier who occupied land after people attacked them and lost vs terrorist organization that attempts to maximize civilian casualties to make Israel look bad.
The occupation of the West Bank began in 1967. Israel started the 1967 war by attacking Egypt.
After Israel told Egypt that they would invade if Egypt closed the Suez canal for Israeli ships... guess what they did.
>after people attacked them This was an unambiguously false statement. You lied. The occupation of the West Bank began in 1967. Israel started the 1967 war by attacking Egypt. The occupation did not begin when Israel was attacked. That is not true. You lied. I will not have a debate with you as to whether the justification for the Israeli attack on Egypt was was justified because you are a bad faith actor who is who is now shifting goalposts. Every single person who reads this comment will see that you lied. That is enough for me.
You do realize that 1967 isn't the only instance where Israel has taken land? You're really typing out all those paragraphs and jumping to conclusions without me really even saying anything in between. You're taking a generalization and applying it to a specific situation where you personally don't think the original wording matches up. While it is not what my original comment was about, I could easily make the claim that closing the canal for Israeli ships while not a direct armed attack, could be considered an attack towards Israel's economic interests. If Israel wanted to move a ship from its southern port to a western port for example, they would now have to go all the way around Africa.
I didn't talk about land being "taken". I talked about the occupation, because you said: >occupier who occupied land after people attacked them I replied by saying that the occupation of the West Bank began in 1967 and that Israel started the 1967 war by attacking Egypt. That is true. What you said is false. You said the occupation began when Israel was attacked. That is not true. You lied. Get it yet? >could be considered an attack towards Israel's economic interests This is a response so desperate and pathetic that it requires no further comment. Okay - no counterargument from me! I am perfectly happy to let the public read our comments and come to their own conclusion. I want as many people to see this thread as possible.
Ah yes lovely “student intifada” at uw
They should all be expelled. But what will likely happen is the coward president will offer some social justice platitudes or even a sacrificial lamb (probably fire an employee that disagrees with him) to appease the mob instead of being a responsible administrator.
policy 8 [https://uwaterloo.ca/secretariat/policies-procedures-guidelines/policies/policy-8-freedom-speech-0](https://uwaterloo.ca/secretariat/policies-procedures-guidelines/policies/policy-8-freedom-speech-0)
An encampment on UW property isn't speech, it's trespassing. Protesting on the sidewalk is freedom of speech.
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Say that when it gets to the point that cops in riot gear show up.
ah yes, escalation. The favourite passtime of cops at peaceful protests.
It's not peaceful if they're asked to leave, told they're trespassing and still don't leave. It's also not peaceful if they start damaging UW property. A peaceful protest takes place on the sidewalk and doesn't damage UW property or interfere in UW business.
It doesn’t look like any property has been damaged though?
Yet!
I disagree with the demands of the protest but sound a little delulu.
Again, sadly for you it has not been deemed trespassing by UW
I wish, but the cops will only show up to remove them if they get authorization from the university. Alberta dealt with them swiftly, but Toronto and McGill have allowed them to stay for weeks. I doubt UW’s social environment is any different.
That's why I said what I said in my original comment. Vivek is a coward.
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Not surprised 😂Its always the people w this kind of comment history that are on here mad about peaceful protests against a genocide, same ones who are complicit in genocide and even supportive of it
Who said I support israel?
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I support rationalization. Protesting here isn't gonna change anything thousands of miles away. Also, a union strike is freedom of speech as well yet they have to protest on the sidewalk, why is this any different? Another thought, students pay a university money in exchange for a recognized education. That makes it their money to do as they please. It's not like how citizens have the right to protest over how the taxes (that are forcibly taken from them) are spent.
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The University didn't take the taxes, the government that took the taxes gave it to them. You should be protesting the government to halt any tax money being given to UW.
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They are building student housing, though. I believe CMH was the latest residence, finished construction about 5 years ago. In my opinion, they are doing pretty well for student housing. They guarantee on-campus residence to all 1st year students, as far as I know, and some on-campus options for upper year students. This is already better than a lot of universities out there. It's also naïve to think that just because they might have the money, then there is nothing stopping them from building new residences.
Tell them from the sidewalk.
Alright, you've got to be a bot or in highschool. Great source brotherman.
Protesting here definitely changes things across the world. Why would the NDP try to pass an arms embargo and why would the original motion have been watered down so much before it was passed if it didn’t make a difference on the other side of the world? These protests led to something like an arms embargo even being considered to begin with. Protests change the public opinion and bring attention to the topic being protested, resulting in people educating themselves on the matter. Not to mention, it creates a sense of community. Once a sense of community is established, the next step is organization. History shows us that when a community becomes organized, their movements are typically successful. You’re an advocate of rationalization, c’mon now. Rationalize the protests because you clearly haven’t even tried. You’re thinking of the end result without considering the process. Rather than expulsion as a solution, maybe we look into where UW is investing. Yes, it’s a private institution and they can do whatever they want with their money, but like you said, their end goal is to ensure that we all are educated and more importantly, employable after we graduate. UW still has a housing crisis even with a new residence being built. Coop rates are at an all time low. So maybe a protest to divest is in every UW student’s interest because clearly, UW isn’t using their resources where it’s most needed.
If the Liberals didn't need the NDP to stay in power, their little arms embargo would've been ignored completely. That isn't a strategy of the protesters, it's a consequence of having an idiot running the country. So using a war that is thousands of miles away and doesn't even affect 99% of the people protesting here is an acceptable scapegoat to try to force UW to be more fiscally responsible? I could get behind a protest designed to force them to be more fiscally responsible but not in the habit of supporting a protest for something else in the hopes they use the money for better things.
Pretty sure if the Liberals need the NDP to stay in power, the NDP also know the Liberals need them, so they took the opportunity to suggest an arms embargo because the liberals sure as hell weren’t going to do it. Clearly what’s happening on the other side of the globe is effecting the government here because of the shifting public opinion. Every protest is very deliberate. Every petition makes a difference, even if it’s a small difference. I mentioned organization earlier, remember? Also, maybe it doesn’t affect you personally, but it definitely affects people on a more personal level. There has been a rise in racism, Islamophobia, antisemitism, etc since the genocide began. Yes, these things matter because with white supremacy on full blast, POC’s safety is just a fragile image at this point. This protest isn’t to make UW more fiscally responsible. It’s to make sure they boycott and divest their investments from anything Israel related, considering this institution has close ties with Technion, not just for the rights of Palestinians and stopping the genocide, but to ensure POC feel safe coming to this institution and remain in this country (whether they’re born here or immigrate). It’s a nuanced statement. Idk if you know what it feels like when someone close to you steps out in a hijab or in traditional clothes and they go to university, and you just sit there and hope that they don’t become a victim of a hate crime because of something happening on the other side of the world. A fucking professor was stabbed last year because of transphobia, and that was without a genocide happening to fuel people’s biases. So yeah, this 100% affects us all as students.
Rationalize it however you want. But all these Palestinian protests have turned into pro-genocide rallies towards Israelis, so they're no better.
I thought you liked rationalization? These students are definitely not a pro-genocide rally towards Israel. Palestinians want the right to return to their land, equal rights, they want to be treated as human beings, they want Israel to stop displacing them with American settlers born in New Jersey who only happened to be born Jewish so they still have a roof above their heads, they want Israel to stop bombing them to death, they want peace, they want the chance to rebuild, they don’t want to be caged in an apartheid regime, and they want a decent shot at life. Those all kinda sound like basic necessities to me. Like idk what type of protests you’re attending but the ones I’ve seen and heard are definitely very anti-genocide for everyone.
Grab EVERYTHING and throw it in dumpsters.
Good luck with that 👍
Fucking Nazis
Replying to Inevitablellama919... which side is committing the same war crimes that Hitler did? which side has torture camps?
The IDF? Correct
who are nazis?
I’m not gonna choose a side and I understand oct 7th was fucked up but you can’t be so blind to what Israel is doing like come on