PALESTINIAN SOLIDARITY
For as long as Palestinian solidarity has been alive on university campuses globally, WPIRG has actively participated in educating and taking action on this issue. In addition to regular events and programming dating back to the early 1980s, several related action groups have formed under WPIRG, including: the Palestine-Jewish Students Association in the early 2000s, Students for Palestinian Rights (SFPR) in 2002 (later a Feds student club), and most recently, the Palestine Solidarity Action Group (PSAG) in 2014.
Student-led rally in Uptown Waterloo, 2018.
2003
Norman Finkelstein Lecture
WPIRG action group at the time, Students for Palestinian Rights (SFPR), along with the Noam Chomsky Fan Club and the FEDS Arab Students Association, hosted Palestine Week on June 6-11 2003, featuring films, displays, music and food. SFPR invited Dr. Norman Finkelstein to UWaterloo that year for a guest lecture titled “Israel and Palestine: Roots of Conflict, Prospects for Peace”. WPIRG was co-sponsor alongside a number of other campus organizations. As the lecture prompted a great deal of debate, WPIRG organized a follow-up dialogue meeting in July.
A small clip from the recorded lecture went "viral” online, showing an impassioned Finkelstein defending the motivations of his commitment to the Palestinian struggle:
"My late father was in Auschwitz; my late mother was in Majdanek concentration camp. Every single member of my family on both sides was exterminated. Both of my parents were in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. And it is precisely and exactly because of the lessons my parents taught me and my two siblings, that I will not be silent when Israel commits its crimes against the Palestinians. I consider nothing more despicable than to use their suffering, and their martyrdom, to try to justify the torture, the brutalization, the demolition of homes, that Israel daily commits against the Palestinians.
Garnering millions of views in countless reproductions online, Dr. Finkelstein’s words have been in circulation since they first sparked interest following his 2003 lecture at UWaterloo:
2016
Ethical Collaboration
A notable chapter of Palestinian solidarity at the University of Waterloo is the Ethical Collaboration campaign by WPIRG’s Palestine Solidarity Action Group (PSAG). The campaign answered the call by Palestinian civil society for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel for their ongoing violations of the human rights of Palestinians. PSAG initiated a petition drive to call the student union to a referendum in which undergraduate students could vote on the question of severing ties with UWaterloo’s Israeli partners. While the petition to hold a referendum garnered over 4,000 signatures, the results of the referendum were ultimately not in favour of the following question:
“Do you think the University of Waterloo should sever ties with the following institutions due to their complicity in violations of the human rights of Palestinians: University of Haifa, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Tel Aviv University, and the Weizmann Institute of Science?”
While students on several campuses across Canada have endorsed similar calls for BDS, this campaign was the first of its kind nationally to take on the challenge of an academic boycott (as opposed to consumer-choice or investment-related ties). Had the referendum results been in favour of the call, UWaterloo would have joined other Canadian universities like Carleton, Concordia, McMaster, Regina, Ryerson, Windsor, and York in the shared commitment to Palestinian solidarity.
