Concordia students gather to learn how to best fight for Palestine
The CSU Get Radical workshop featured two speakers from PYM Montreal
The second instalment of the Concordia Student Union (CSU)’s Get Radical workshop series, Intro to Palestinian Led Organizing, was held at Le Frigo Vert on Sept.30 from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.
The workshop offered students a crash course on the key steps to creating a successful activist movement.
“The point is to get [students] involved in taking action politically, whatever that action is,” said CSU external affairs and mobilization coordinator Danna Ballantyne, one of the event’s organizers.
Boutaїna Chafi and Rand Addasi from the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) Montreal led the workshop. Chafi and Addasi sought to help students better understand how to critically analyze their position within the movement for Palestinian liberation.
Chafi and Addasi discussed the importance of understanding the different fronts of the resistance movement and knowing which one activists fit into. These fronts include groups like students, members of the Palestinian and Arab communities, and student unions. Once a person understands what front they fit into, they can seek out their community and it becomes much easier to get people mobilized.
“It’s super important to understand how the overall Montreal community can be organized to advance the struggle for national liberation,” Chafi said. “Once you’ve identified a front, you know what your ceiling is and you know what your overarching strategy can be.”
Speakers explained that in social justice movements, strategies can be defined as goals that certain fronts work towards in order to advance the movement, while tactics refer to the actions taken to achieve those goals.
Within the Palestinian liberation movement specifically, the student front’s main strategy is divestment with tactics like walkouts, protests and the establishment of encampments. These tactics are designed to help politicize people in the student population who can then help apply pressure to their administration to divest from Israel.
During her time as a Palestinian organizer, Chafi often had to deal with people who opposed protest tactics, claiming that demonstrations have no real effect on the liberation of Palestine. However, she refuted those claims, saying that they stem from people who do not fully understand the student front’s strategy.
“We are not going to be liberating Palestine through just student organizing, and [understanding] those limitations and the ceiling of where we can go is how we move forward,” Chafi said. “We mobilize and organize with strategies that take into account the potential reach of each of our locales and each of our local contexts.”
Hours before the workshop began, Concordia students received an email from the Office of the President and Vice-Chancellor condemning the “violent escalation of recent protests.”
The email referenced the student walkout on Sept. 25 where three people were arrested, and the demonstration in the evening of Sept. 29 where demonstrators shattered windows of the lobby of the Henry F. Hall Building. According to Ballantyne, Concordia’s continued lack of action for Palestinian liberation has left students desperate.
“Students have been going through every channel available to them for nearly a year with no results, and they are getting desperate and they are getting angry,” Ballantyne said. “They are watching their friends be brutalized on campus by CSPS (Campus Safety and Prevention Services) and by the police for asking a very simple demand.”
Despite police and CSPS efforts, students show no signs of surrender.
“If these demands continue to not be met, the administration has to be aware of the fact that the consequences and the response of the students is going to continue to escalate,” Ballantyne said.
The CSU will host its Get Radical workshop series every Monday evening at Le Frigo Vert until Dec. 2. The next event, Recruitment and Mobilization: How to have a 1-on- Conversation, will take place on Oct. 7.
