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Did the Student Encampments Accomplish Anything?

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Tuesday, September 3, 2024

Mohammad Yassin’s parents had warned him away from politics. His father grew up in Lebanon during the civil war, when having the wrong opinion could get you killed. Yassin, who is Palestinian American, arrived at the University of Toronto four years ago with the intention of studying economics and statistics. He felt that Canada wasn’t his permanent home, and he distrusted existing political institutions, so he avoided involving himself in activism or student government. “I just kind of was like: Hey, I’m gonna put my head down and just study for my entire degree,” he told me, chain-smoking cigarettes in a keffiyeh and sunglasses.But when Hamas viciously attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, everything changed. Later that month, a group called U of T Conservatives organized a rally on campus to display “unwavering support for Israel against Hamas terrorism.” By then, Israel had begun its brutal war on Gaza, and word spread among Yassin’s peers that a counterprotest should be organized. Student groups supporting Palestinians were once vibrant on campus but had diminished in recent years, particularly since Covid. Yassin, who has a sardonic sense of humor and a calm demeanor, joined the counterrally, which drew around 200 people. Many were inspired to organize on an ongoing basis.After months of walkouts, rallies, and cultural events in support of Palestinians, on April 1, 26 students clad in keffiyehs and masks occupied Simcoe Hall, the seat of governance at the University of Toronto, demanding that the school divest from holdings in companies complicit in Israel’s siege. After 30 hours, they left, following an agreement to meet with the university president.The meeting, however, failed to satisfy them. A little over two weeks later, some 500 miles southeast, hundreds of protesters occupied the South Lawn of Columbia University. The pitched tents and mass of demonstrators were a lifeline for the Palestinian groups at U of T, who, like student groups around the world, took the Columbia encampments as inspiration for the next phase of their movement. Anticipating Yassin and his allies’ next move, U of T put up fencing along part of its campus called King’s College Circle, a patch of green space that had recently been renovated. But on May 2, Yassin and about 50 others with U of T Occupy for Palestine set up camp anyway, breaching the fence in the middle of the night. Soon allies just started showing up. “The first day was magical,” Yassin recalled. The group demanded that the university disclose its investments and divest from companies and universities associated with Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land. The school warned the students that they were trespassing on private property. Yassin’s group expected the university to expel them at any moment, certainly within a few days.But that didn’t happen. Toronto police declined to arrest the protesters, so at the end of May, U of T sought a court order to force the issue. For more than two months, the People’s Circle for Palestine operated as a miniature village in the heart of Canada’s largest city. Weeks after almost all encampments on campuses in the United States had been disbanded—Columbia’s lasted just under two weeks—this one continued to operate. Around 200 tents were pitched at one point or another, and many residents, like Yassin, slept there almost every night, returning home only to do some laundry or get the occasional decent rest.On July 2, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice finally granted the university’s injunction to clear out the encampment, which had lasted 62 days. Hours later, Yassin stood with other protest leaders to announce to the news cameras and journalists that they were disbanding the mini-village ahead of the deadline the next evening. That would enable them to leave on their terms and avoid being brutalized by police, he said. Behind him, tents with slogans written on them were still up. “This legal maneuver changes nothing,” he announced defiantly. “Make no mistake, our resolve is stronger than ever. We’ve said from day one that we will not leave this campus until U of T discloses, divests, and cuts ties. That commitment stands firm.”Soon after Yassin spoke, protesters began taking down the many signs on the fence surrounding the encampment. By 6 p.m. the next day, little evidence of the encampment remained, outside of people posing for photos in front of a papier-mâché olive tree with anti-Zionist slogans spray-painted on it. As the sun set, a man and a woman wearing an Israeli flag toppled the structure.The campus rallies against Israel constituted the largest protests at North American universities in the twenty-first century. According to the Crowd Counting Consortium, encampments were erected at more than 130 campuses, and many protests erupted at schools even before Columbia’s tents went up. In the United States, more than 3,600 people were arrested or detained during these campaigns. Encampments eventually spread to Australia, Western and Northern Europe, Latin America, and Asia, including even Israel itself, where some students erected a tent at Bezalel Academy, an art school.But by the summer, most of the protests had disappeared along with the tents, either removed by police or disbanded for the summer break. The Israeli government continues to kill thousands of Palestinians with little compunction, and the Biden administration continues arming it. Yassin is still worried about his family in Lebanon and his mother’s extended family in Gaza. Students who participated in the protests, allies who supported them, and critics who derided them as antisemitic are all left wondering: What did the once-in-a-generation mass protests accomplish? How will they influence the activism that may resume when the new academic year begins?Canada has typically had smooth relations with the Jewish state, but in the twenty-first century, the conservative government of Stephen Harper took it to a new level, marching in lockstep with Israel. That history of support is one reason that concern for Palestine has become commonplace on the left in Canada. And not just in Canada, obviously. Not since South Africa in the 1980s has a people captured the left-wing imagination as a symbol of global injustice. The irony is that this phenomenon is something of a reversal; Zionism was once considered a uniquely heroic cause among many of American left-liberalism’s most exalted figures. According to historian Eric Alterman, author of We Are Not One: A History of America’s Fight Over Israel, liberals and leftists from Eleanor Roosevelt (“The Jews in their own country are doing marvels and should, once the refugee problem is settled, help all the Arab countries,” she wrote) to Progressive Party leader Henry Wallace to Freda Kirchwey, editor of The Nation, saw Jews in Palestine as anti-imperialists battling the British Empire, which was manipulating the Arab states and squaring off against the Soviet Union with little care for the fate of Jews.From the 1940s until 1967, the Palestinians had few advocates in the Western world. They were still recovering after being driven out of their villages by Israel in 1947–1949 during the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” the Arabic term for the dispossession of Palestinians. “It’s very hard to organize politically when you don’t even have a roof over your head,” said Yousef Munayyer, a senior fellow at Arab Center Washington DC. Partly as a result, the myth that Palestinians left their homes voluntarily predominated in the United States.The 1967 Arab-Israeli War created a groundswell of support for Palestinians in the United States for the first time, particularly among radical Black intellectuals and activists. As Alterman explains, the Palestinians began to be seen as a “Third World nation,” deserving of sympathy like other non-Western peoples. But pro-Palestinianism remained a minority viewpoint in the civil rights movement, as more mainstream leaders like Martin Luther King and Bayard Rustin and organizations like the NAACP and the National Urban League issued statements in solidarity with Israel. In the 1970s, Palestinians garnered little institutional backing beyond the furthest left of groups, such as West German terrorists. “We have been unable to interest the West very much in the justice of our cause,” the Palestinian American literary critic and activist Edward Said lamented in his 1979 book, The Question of Palestine. That same year, when President Jimmy Carter secured a peace deal between Egypt and Israel, Palestinians’ anger at having their concerns ignored did little to dilute celebrations in the United States. But at the grassroots level, support for Palestinians had been emerging. It deepened during Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon and especially after the massacre at the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. It grew again with the first intifada, which began in 1987, and has since “grown gradually over time,” Alterman observed.Today, for people under 30 and those on the left around the world, Palestine has become a defining issue. Erin Mackey, who graduated from U of T this year, is a prime example. A Canadian American from Boston who came to Toronto because its university was cheaper than those in the states, she was active in campaigns to encourage the administration to divest from fossil fuels, which U of T announced it would do in October 2021. Mackey has the message discipline of a seasoned politician and is as polite in private as she is confrontational in public. The day we met, she was wearing overalls, her nails painted bright red. She sees a natural evolution from agitating against climate change to agitating against Israel. “I saw the links between climate justice and Palestinian liberation,” she explained, referring to Israel’s environmental destruction and its confiscation of land and water. In late October 2023, she and other activists began targeting the Royal Bank of Canada for both its funding of fossil fuel companies and its investments in the U.S. company Palantir, which sells AI surveillance technology to Israel. Once Arab and Palestinian students decided to construct the encampment, they asked Mackey, as someone trained in media outreach, for help. She soon became one of the most visible spokespeople for U of T Occupy for Palestine. “As someone who isn’t Palestinian, knowing my tuition dollars are going toward the genocide is horrifying,” she told me when we spoke at the encampment.The demographics at U of T Occupy for Palestine are suitably reflective of the changed landscape. Both Mackey and Yassin estimated that Palestinians or other Arabs made up only 60 percent of the people who were at the encampment; the remaining 40 percent were other people of color, Jews, and white leftists. A group called Jews Say No to Genocide maintained a constant presence, hosting weekly Shabbat dinners and absorbing the slurs of pro-Israel Jews who staged a counterprotest. The intellectual/activist Naomi Klein showed up once. But many of the signs and tents contained writing attesting to the personal connections individuals had with people in Gaza, citing relatives who have died or castigating Arabs for not sticking together. One encampment resident has had an unimaginable 26 members of their family killed in the Gaza Strip in the past year. “We’re not spectating,” Yassin said.If nothing else, the 2023–2024 protests showed that the constituency for the Palestinian cause has broadened significantly beyond the Arab- and Muslim-majority countries to which it was once confined. What’s more, the plight of the Palestinians has managed to push tens of thousands of people to publicly demonstrate in solidarity, sometimes at great personal risk and in violation of laws and school policies. “That signals not just a growth in the scale and scope of this thing, but also the depth of commitment to the cause, which, again, is at a new and unprecedented level,” Munayyer said. While conservatives and many Democratic Party politicians deride Palestinians as a nonexistent people, uniformly antisemitic, or congenitally prone to terrorism, such designations no longer have mass appeal beyond the right wing and an aging subset of Democrats.Younger generations, especially, see Israel’s repression as a straightforward question of right and wrong. Pew Research Center found that the number of adults under 30 who sympathized with Palestinians was twice the number who sympathized with Israelis, and the number who say the way Israel is fighting its war against Hamas is “unacceptable” is more than twice the number who say it’s “acceptable.” Young people have a more positive view of Palestinians than of Israelis, and the number who say Hamas’s reasons for fighting Israel are valid is slightly higher than the number who say they are not (notably, however, 58 percent of young people said Hamas’s October 7 massacre was unacceptable). Just 16 percent of young people favor the United States providing military aid to Israel. For Palestinians, who were once synonymous with terrorism in the Western imagination, this widespread support marks a staggering shift. The students holding signs and chanting in unison might eventually be seen as a harbinger of a changed Western approach to the role of Palestinians in the Middle East.But the levels of participation in protests over the last year should not be exaggerated either. For all the attention they received—and for all the anxiety they provoked among conservatives and in the Jewish establishment in the United States—only 8 percent of college students took part in demonstrations in support of either Palestinians or Israelis, according to a Generation Lab survey published on May 7. The Vietnam War–era protests with which the encampments have been compared far outstripped these figures and lasted for years. In May 1970 alone, more than four million students at around 900 campuses went on strike after National Guardsmen gunned down four students at Kent State University. The Gaza encampments “were really centered around student communities and the people you would be expecting to engage in these campus uprisings,” said Lisa Mueller, a political scientist at Macalester College who studies protest movements. The Vietnam antiwar movement “far transcended students and people on the left.” Moving beyond protests that are largely drawing on the left would signal to potential supporters and elites that the movement can be a force for a pressure and not just confined to a fringe, but it remains to be seen whether the pro-Palestinian elements in the West can make it happen.Similarly, while young people are more sympathetic to the plight of Palestinians than their older counterparts are, they are generally less likely to be politically active and engaged than their elders, rendering their sentiments less impactful. People who are under 30 years of age vote in smaller numbers than their elders, feel less informed about candidates and issues than others, believe they’re unqualified to participate in politics, donate less money to political campaigns, and run for office in far fewer numbers. And while young people hold far more pro-Palestinian sentiments than others, that does not necessarily translate into a concentrated bloc powerful enough to alter U.S. policy. The same polls showing the sea change in how younger generations perceive the Israeli- Palestinian conflict reveal that they care most about the same issues that older people do: the cost of living, access to good-paying jobs, and preventing gun violence. “Particularly in a democratic society, there are electoral pressures for elected leaders and candidates to heed the demands and grievances of diverse potential voters,” Mueller said. “I haven’t seen that happen so much yet.”Of course, the usual apathy and cynicism of younger voters are precisely what make the campus protests so unusual. Every organizer knows how difficult it is to get people into the streets for an afternoon, let alone for days or weeks. On day 56 of the camp, Mackey told me, “I don’t think anybody thought we would get here.” After negotiating with the administration the first week, U of T Occupy for Palestine settled in for a long haul. They got trespassing notices and were threatened with expulsion and suffered through rainy nights, hail, and extreme heat. Still they stayed. “This is just a piece of a much broader movement,” Mackey said.Indeed, when Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris selected Minnesota’s Tim Walz as her running mate in August, there was wide speculation that she had passed over Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro because of his insulting comments about the protesters and his arguably greater fondness for Israel. If this calculation played a role in Harris’s choice, it would mean the students had influenced politics at the highest level.At U OF T Occupy for Palestine, five people sat on chairs at the entrance, screening people going in and out. “You Are Entering The People’s Circle For Palestine,” a sign read. One tent held a library with a few hundred books; other tents served variously as the kitchen, a space for art, and a prayer room. Solar panels generated energy for phone chargers. The camp lasted so long that some participants left for trips abroad and returned to a still ongoing project. At the final rally after the encampment was dismantled, about 2,000 Torontonians marched downtown to celebrate and mourn what had unexpectedly lasted for two months. “We galvanized an entire city,” Yassin told me. “We opened a lot of people’s eyes.” Mackey, similarly, believes that the protests persuaded some students who were either indifferent or hostile to the Palestinian cause. “I’ve seen it in my own life,” she told me. “The divide is definitely closing against genocide.”The Gaza encampments garnered copious media attention. As University of California at Berkeley political scientist Omar Wasow said, the “campus protests elevated the issue of the war in Gaza and some of the inequities in the war onto the national agenda.” This is no small thing, because even as Israel kills unfathomable numbers of Palestinians—more than 40,000 at the time of this writing—it is easy to imagine the slaughter falling off the front pages. “They’ve succeeded in raising consciousness broadly in America and Canada among everyday citizens who may not be following the war in Israel and Palestine closely,” argued Mira Sucharov, a political scientist at Carleton University in Ottawa.But attracting attention to a cause is not the same thing as persuading people of its justice, let alone its urgency. On the level of broader public opinion, the number of Americans who opposed the Gaza student protests was twice the number who supported them, and the vast majority of survey respondents backed Israel over Hamas. Even worse, a poll conducted in mid-June found that Americans were as likely to say the protests made them sympathize less with the Palestinians than to say the opposite. In March, the Canadian government halted arms sales to Israel after Parliament passed a nonbinding resolution, but this was before the U of T encampment began. Canadians were no friendlier to the campus protests than Americans were. Generally speaking, the encampments raised public awareness of the huge numbers of deaths in Gaza, but that didn’t translate into encouragement or assistance to the cause.Of course, protests can galvanize change even when unpopular. But they can just as easily be ignored, contained, or trigger a backlash. That reality is one of the risks protesters take when they employ maximalist rhetoric. U of T Occupy for Palestine was constructed to accommodate small tents, but it was unconcerned with building a larger one. The fence that encircled King’s College Circle was plastered with signs, some of which testified to the immense violence that Israel has unleashed in Gaza, quoting Palestinian children who have been orphaned, or referencing mothers who have been made childless. Other posters simply had drawings of Palestinian flags or declarations of solidarity from non-Palestinians. Such placards might be divisive, but they can’t reasonably be perceived as dangerous.Other signs were more ambiguous, praising Palestinian “martyrs” and calling for a “student intifada.” These could be read as calls for indiscriminate violence of the kind Hamas perpetrated on October 7, or they could be considered, as organizers claim they are intended, as general (but not necessarily violent) cheers for rebellion. And indeed, polls showed that slogans were heard differently by different audiences. Two-thirds of Jewish university students heard the ubiquitous chant “From the River to the Sea” as calling for the expulsion and genocide of Israeli Jews, while only 14 percent of Muslim students heard it that way, according to a University of Chicago poll. The Muslim students believed it was a chant for the equality of Jews and Palestinians in one state, or for a two-state solution. While the forcefulness and vagueness of these pro-Palestine slogans may seem sinister to some, the reality may be more banal. “It’s a matter of wanting to be concise,” Sucharov told me. “It’s a matter of wanting to center the Palestinian experience.” In the same way that some people incorrectly perceive the slogan “Black Lives Matter” as suggesting that other human lives are less valuable, so do Palestinians use slogans with meanings they understand but that may be unclear or offensive to others, she said.Of course, one difference is that some elements of Hamas do mean the slogans in the darkest possible sense, hoping for more violence against Israeli civilians to the point that the state itself is destroyed and its people either subjugated, expelled, or killed. In his ruling granting the University of Toronto the injunction to remove the encampment, the Ontario Superior Court judge absolved the organizers of antisemitism. “The automatic conclusion that those phrases are antisemitic is not justified,” he wrote about the ambiguous phrases. These determinations by the court were greatly appreciated by U of T Occupy for Palestine, which had routinely been accused of being a hate-fest. (One professor had written in Canada’s National Post newspaper that “the encampments are led by pro-Hamas advocates who are seeking to justify Islamist terrorism by normalizing antisemitism.”)But while the ruling absolved the organizers of antisemitism, it also clarified that at rallies where pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel protesters squared off, unambiguously antisemitic phrases were directed at Jews. These included comments such as “Death to the Jews,” “We need another holocost [sic],” and “Jews belong in the sea.” The judge noted that none of those comments were uttered by organizers like Yassin or Mackey, nor even any of the encampment occupants, but community members who were adjacent to the encampment. Organizers erased antisemitic phrases when they were written in chalk outside the camp. But the reality is that excising antisemitic elements is a constant requirement for pro-Palestinian activists and will grow increasingly important as the movement attracts new adherents, some of whom will inevitably want to target Jews. Again and again at protests against Israel’s destruction of Gaza, antisemitism reared its ugly head. The presence of bigotry at these events suggests how easily demands for unnamed forms of rebellion can shade into justifications for violence.Antisemitic acts skyrocketed in Canada in late 2023 and 2024, as they did in the United States and around the world. In Toronto, synagogues, businesses, and day schools were defaced with graffiti, a synagogue was set on fire, and Jewish students reported rampant antisemitism at U of T and other schools. U of T Occupy for Palestine wasn’t responsible for these acts, which terrified much of the Jewish community and influenced how the public perceived the protests, and the organizers didn’t seem to care much about any of that. The tents inside the encampment had catchphrases like FUCK ALL ZIOS written on them, short for “Zionists.” But there is a thin line between opposing Zionism and cultivating hatred against Zionists, and such rhetoric thins the line even more. In our conversation, Yassin spoke fondly of the Jews who joined him in supporting Palestinian liberation, as did other organizers. But he pushed back against the idea that the protesters should modify their rhetoric to appeal to anyone doubtful of the Palestinian cause or fearful for Zionist Jews. “It’s more important to maintain the purity of the message,” he said. He cited boxing legend Muhammad Ali’s refusal to participate in the Vietnam War when drafted (“I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong,” he famously said as U.S. troops were fighting them) as an example of how a once-shocking message can later be seen as prescient. In the coming years, Yassin argued, it will become more acceptable to publicly castigate Zionism and Zionists. “Calls for justice are not hatred,” he said.One way in which the pro-Palestinian movement differs from activism against South African apartheid, the Vietnam War, and discrimination against African Americans is that its target, Israel, is also a refuge for a persecuted people and their lone nation-state. Another way is that, so far at least, organizers appear indifferent to how their rhetoric and actions are interpreted by the broader public. Yassin and others are convinced that history is on their side, and that public opinion—and government policy following it—will inevitably swing their way. As Mackey put it about the university divesting from Israel, “It’s when, not if.”This line of thinking absolves activists of pursuing alternative strategies that might be more beneficial, such as allying with Israel’s leftists, clarifying the place of Jews in a free Palestine, denouncing all deliberate attacks on civilians, or engaging in self-criticism that could perhaps help propel the movement forward. Mackey observed that the divestment campaign at the University of Toronto began in 2006. But in 2024, the school is no closer to meeting the movement’s demands than it was 18 years ago. The U of T encampment disbanded without compelling the school to make any changes.Some campuses had victories. At Brown University, students took down their tents when the school’s governing body agreed to vote on a proposal to divest the school’s $6.6 billion endowment from companies affiliated with Israel. “Not only did we force the administrators to come to the table, but we also forced them into accepting a really historic vote,” a Brown encampment participant told reporters at the end of April. “Today we’re seeing the results of negotiations that didn’t seem possible even a week ago.” As far away as Ireland, student protesters caused Trinity College Dublin to divest from Israeli firms. At Macalester College in Minnesota, where Mueller teaches, a task force has been organized to deal with the long-term grievances of students. “Putting campus investment practices on the long-term agenda is probably going to have a decent tail,” she said.But these were the exceptions. From Columbia University and other Ivy League schools to smaller campuses in the United States and around the world, by and large, the students failed in their basic objectives of ending U.S. support for Israel or forcing most universities to divest from it.For now.When students return for the 2024–2025 academic year, activism may resume at a high level, after organizers have licked their wounds and recharged their energies. Mackey and Yassin are adamant that their struggle is far from over, and that they are inspired by their successes, such as they were. “I don’t think that this moment of heightened student protest, for Palestinian freedom on college campuses, has ended yet,” Munayyer of the Arab Center Washington DC agreed. The day after the judge issued the injunction that finished the U of T encampment, one spokesperson said at a press conference, “We are just getting started. This encampment is one of many tactics.”Ultimately, the most concrete impact of the Gaza protests may be in educating a new generation of activists. Tens of thousands of students participated in mass demonstrations against Israel, encounters that may be formative for decades to come. Mackey’s experiences in climate activism contrasted with her pro-Palestinian activism. In April 2023, she and 200 other student activists occupied a building on campus demanding U of T divest from fossil fuel companies; the students stayed for 18 days. But authorities handled that situation very differently. “We weren’t threatened by police,” she said. At U of T Occupy for Palestine, individuals hurled slurs at her and the other students and played music at night to disrupt their sleep. She, Yassin, and other organizers were physically exhausted by showing up each day for two months to arrange logistics for hundreds of people: providing food, disposing of waste, cleaning, dealing with press, negotiating with lawyers and the school administration, dealing with hostile counterprotesters, and hosting community meetings. A tent where coffee was served blew away in the wind at one point. It was draining and stressful to manage these tasks, but the experience was also indispensable in training a generation of activists. Mackey said the connections that Palestinian solidarity groups have made with labor and faculty organizations will be lasting. Research shows that individuals who participate in protests can be profoundly changed by the experience, altering their family and career choices, along with their political trajectories and voting patterns. A study from Tufts University’s Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement found that large-scale protests of the kind following George Floyd’s murder by police in 2020 brought new people into the political process at a higher rate than smaller-scale demonstrations.Yassin told me that he has been emboldened to pursue a career in humanities rather than the safer choice in finance to which he had resigned himself. The support and media attention the encampment received were far greater than anything he or his allies expected, convincing him to envision a better future for himself personally as well. He plans to continue in political organizing in some fashion. “If I learned anything from the camp, it’s that anything is possible,” he said. Mackey has likewise been encouraged by her two months in the encampment. She starts a job soon at an environmental nonprofit and will continue to be involved in organizing on and off. Seeing so many people show up in solidarity with Palestinians “was a very profound and transformational moment,” she said. At the rally sending off the encampment, she was in tears.On a rainy day in mid-July, a visibly more relaxed Yassin visited King’s College Circle for the first time since the encampments were dismantled two weeks prior. All traces of the protests were long gone: the tents, the tarps, the Palestinian flags. An orange plastic fence had replaced the wall that ringed the area, and the grass was growing back where it had been trampled by tents and foot traffic. “God, this is strange,” he said, gazing at the empty space where the small village existed for two months.Yassin’s parents worried once he became an activist. But they grew proud of their outspoken son. When his mother visited the encampment, she cried, moved to see so many Palestinian flags displayed in one place. Yassin told me that he’s heartened that the Palestinian cause has gained acceptance over decades; he knows it has the potential to reach many more people. Even if the encampments don’t recur, other protests will follow in their wake. A religious man, he believes that in the long sweep of history, justice for Palestinians is likely. Even if Israel kicks every Palestinian out of their homeland, still they will not give up on returning. And, eventually, they will return. “All of this is still possible,” he said, walking on the grass.

Mohammad Yassin’s parents had warned him away from politics. His father grew up in Lebanon during the civil war, when having the wrong opinion could get you killed. Yassin, who is Palestinian American, arrived at the University of Toronto four years ago with the intention of studying economics and statistics. He felt that Canada wasn’t his permanent home, and he distrusted existing political institutions, so he avoided involving himself in activism or student government. “I just kind of was like: Hey, I’m gonna put my head down and just study for my entire degree,” he told me, chain-smoking cigarettes in a keffiyeh and sunglasses.But when Hamas viciously attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, everything changed. Later that month, a group called U of T Conservatives organized a rally on campus to display “unwavering support for Israel against Hamas terrorism.” By then, Israel had begun its brutal war on Gaza, and word spread among Yassin’s peers that a counterprotest should be organized. Student groups supporting Palestinians were once vibrant on campus but had diminished in recent years, particularly since Covid. Yassin, who has a sardonic sense of humor and a calm demeanor, joined the counterrally, which drew around 200 people. Many were inspired to organize on an ongoing basis.After months of walkouts, rallies, and cultural events in support of Palestinians, on April 1, 26 students clad in keffiyehs and masks occupied Simcoe Hall, the seat of governance at the University of Toronto, demanding that the school divest from holdings in companies complicit in Israel’s siege. After 30 hours, they left, following an agreement to meet with the university president.The meeting, however, failed to satisfy them. A little over two weeks later, some 500 miles southeast, hundreds of protesters occupied the South Lawn of Columbia University. The pitched tents and mass of demonstrators were a lifeline for the Palestinian groups at U of T, who, like student groups around the world, took the Columbia encampments as inspiration for the next phase of their movement. Anticipating Yassin and his allies’ next move, U of T put up fencing along part of its campus called King’s College Circle, a patch of green space that had recently been renovated. But on May 2, Yassin and about 50 others with U of T Occupy for Palestine set up camp anyway, breaching the fence in the middle of the night. Soon allies just started showing up. “The first day was magical,” Yassin recalled. The group demanded that the university disclose its investments and divest from companies and universities associated with Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land. The school warned the students that they were trespassing on private property. Yassin’s group expected the university to expel them at any moment, certainly within a few days.But that didn’t happen. Toronto police declined to arrest the protesters, so at the end of May, U of T sought a court order to force the issue. For more than two months, the People’s Circle for Palestine operated as a miniature village in the heart of Canada’s largest city. Weeks after almost all encampments on campuses in the United States had been disbanded—Columbia’s lasted just under two weeks—this one continued to operate. Around 200 tents were pitched at one point or another, and many residents, like Yassin, slept there almost every night, returning home only to do some laundry or get the occasional decent rest.On July 2, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice finally granted the university’s injunction to clear out the encampment, which had lasted 62 days. Hours later, Yassin stood with other protest leaders to announce to the news cameras and journalists that they were disbanding the mini-village ahead of the deadline the next evening. That would enable them to leave on their terms and avoid being brutalized by police, he said. Behind him, tents with slogans written on them were still up. “This legal maneuver changes nothing,” he announced defiantly. “Make no mistake, our resolve is stronger than ever. We’ve said from day one that we will not leave this campus until U of T discloses, divests, and cuts ties. That commitment stands firm.”Soon after Yassin spoke, protesters began taking down the many signs on the fence surrounding the encampment. By 6 p.m. the next day, little evidence of the encampment remained, outside of people posing for photos in front of a papier-mâché olive tree with anti-Zionist slogans spray-painted on it. As the sun set, a man and a woman wearing an Israeli flag toppled the structure.The campus rallies against Israel constituted the largest protests at North American universities in the twenty-first century. According to the Crowd Counting Consortium, encampments were erected at more than 130 campuses, and many protests erupted at schools even before Columbia’s tents went up. In the United States, more than 3,600 people were arrested or detained during these campaigns. Encampments eventually spread to Australia, Western and Northern Europe, Latin America, and Asia, including even Israel itself, where some students erected a tent at Bezalel Academy, an art school.But by the summer, most of the protests had disappeared along with the tents, either removed by police or disbanded for the summer break. The Israeli government continues to kill thousands of Palestinians with little compunction, and the Biden administration continues arming it. Yassin is still worried about his family in Lebanon and his mother’s extended family in Gaza. Students who participated in the protests, allies who supported them, and critics who derided them as antisemitic are all left wondering: What did the once-in-a-generation mass protests accomplish? How will they influence the activism that may resume when the new academic year begins?Canada has typically had smooth relations with the Jewish state, but in the twenty-first century, the conservative government of Stephen Harper took it to a new level, marching in lockstep with Israel. That history of support is one reason that concern for Palestine has become commonplace on the left in Canada. And not just in Canada, obviously. Not since South Africa in the 1980s has a people captured the left-wing imagination as a symbol of global injustice. The irony is that this phenomenon is something of a reversal; Zionism was once considered a uniquely heroic cause among many of American left-liberalism’s most exalted figures. According to historian Eric Alterman, author of We Are Not One: A History of America’s Fight Over Israel, liberals and leftists from Eleanor Roosevelt (“The Jews in their own country are doing marvels and should, once the refugee problem is settled, help all the Arab countries,” she wrote) to Progressive Party leader Henry Wallace to Freda Kirchwey, editor of The Nation, saw Jews in Palestine as anti-imperialists battling the British Empire, which was manipulating the Arab states and squaring off against the Soviet Union with little care for the fate of Jews.From the 1940s until 1967, the Palestinians had few advocates in the Western world. They were still recovering after being driven out of their villages by Israel in 1947–1949 during the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” the Arabic term for the dispossession of Palestinians. “It’s very hard to organize politically when you don’t even have a roof over your head,” said Yousef Munayyer, a senior fellow at Arab Center Washington DC. Partly as a result, the myth that Palestinians left their homes voluntarily predominated in the United States.The 1967 Arab-Israeli War created a groundswell of support for Palestinians in the United States for the first time, particularly among radical Black intellectuals and activists. As Alterman explains, the Palestinians began to be seen as a “Third World nation,” deserving of sympathy like other non-Western peoples. But pro-Palestinianism remained a minority viewpoint in the civil rights movement, as more mainstream leaders like Martin Luther King and Bayard Rustin and organizations like the NAACP and the National Urban League issued statements in solidarity with Israel. In the 1970s, Palestinians garnered little institutional backing beyond the furthest left of groups, such as West German terrorists. “We have been unable to interest the West very much in the justice of our cause,” the Palestinian American literary critic and activist Edward Said lamented in his 1979 book, The Question of Palestine. That same year, when President Jimmy Carter secured a peace deal between Egypt and Israel, Palestinians’ anger at having their concerns ignored did little to dilute celebrations in the United States. But at the grassroots level, support for Palestinians had been emerging. It deepened during Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon and especially after the massacre at the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. It grew again with the first intifada, which began in 1987, and has since “grown gradually over time,” Alterman observed.Today, for people under 30 and those on the left around the world, Palestine has become a defining issue. Erin Mackey, who graduated from U of T this year, is a prime example. A Canadian American from Boston who came to Toronto because its university was cheaper than those in the states, she was active in campaigns to encourage the administration to divest from fossil fuels, which U of T announced it would do in October 2021. Mackey has the message discipline of a seasoned politician and is as polite in private as she is confrontational in public. The day we met, she was wearing overalls, her nails painted bright red. She sees a natural evolution from agitating against climate change to agitating against Israel. “I saw the links between climate justice and Palestinian liberation,” she explained, referring to Israel’s environmental destruction and its confiscation of land and water. In late October 2023, she and other activists began targeting the Royal Bank of Canada for both its funding of fossil fuel companies and its investments in the U.S. company Palantir, which sells AI surveillance technology to Israel. Once Arab and Palestinian students decided to construct the encampment, they asked Mackey, as someone trained in media outreach, for help. She soon became one of the most visible spokespeople for U of T Occupy for Palestine. “As someone who isn’t Palestinian, knowing my tuition dollars are going toward the genocide is horrifying,” she told me when we spoke at the encampment.The demographics at U of T Occupy for Palestine are suitably reflective of the changed landscape. Both Mackey and Yassin estimated that Palestinians or other Arabs made up only 60 percent of the people who were at the encampment; the remaining 40 percent were other people of color, Jews, and white leftists. A group called Jews Say No to Genocide maintained a constant presence, hosting weekly Shabbat dinners and absorbing the slurs of pro-Israel Jews who staged a counterprotest. The intellectual/activist Naomi Klein showed up once. But many of the signs and tents contained writing attesting to the personal connections individuals had with people in Gaza, citing relatives who have died or castigating Arabs for not sticking together. One encampment resident has had an unimaginable 26 members of their family killed in the Gaza Strip in the past year. “We’re not spectating,” Yassin said.If nothing else, the 2023–2024 protests showed that the constituency for the Palestinian cause has broadened significantly beyond the Arab- and Muslim-majority countries to which it was once confined. What’s more, the plight of the Palestinians has managed to push tens of thousands of people to publicly demonstrate in solidarity, sometimes at great personal risk and in violation of laws and school policies. “That signals not just a growth in the scale and scope of this thing, but also the depth of commitment to the cause, which, again, is at a new and unprecedented level,” Munayyer said. While conservatives and many Democratic Party politicians deride Palestinians as a nonexistent people, uniformly antisemitic, or congenitally prone to terrorism, such designations no longer have mass appeal beyond the right wing and an aging subset of Democrats.Younger generations, especially, see Israel’s repression as a straightforward question of right and wrong. Pew Research Center found that the number of adults under 30 who sympathized with Palestinians was twice the number who sympathized with Israelis, and the number who say the way Israel is fighting its war against Hamas is “unacceptable” is more than twice the number who say it’s “acceptable.” Young people have a more positive view of Palestinians than of Israelis, and the number who say Hamas’s reasons for fighting Israel are valid is slightly higher than the number who say they are not (notably, however, 58 percent of young people said Hamas’s October 7 massacre was unacceptable). Just 16 percent of young people favor the United States providing military aid to Israel. For Palestinians, who were once synonymous with terrorism in the Western imagination, this widespread support marks a staggering shift. The students holding signs and chanting in unison might eventually be seen as a harbinger of a changed Western approach to the role of Palestinians in the Middle East.But the levels of participation in protests over the last year should not be exaggerated either. For all the attention they received—and for all the anxiety they provoked among conservatives and in the Jewish establishment in the United States—only 8 percent of college students took part in demonstrations in support of either Palestinians or Israelis, according to a Generation Lab survey published on May 7. The Vietnam War–era protests with which the encampments have been compared far outstripped these figures and lasted for years. In May 1970 alone, more than four million students at around 900 campuses went on strike after National Guardsmen gunned down four students at Kent State University. The Gaza encampments “were really centered around student communities and the people you would be expecting to engage in these campus uprisings,” said Lisa Mueller, a political scientist at Macalester College who studies protest movements. The Vietnam antiwar movement “far transcended students and people on the left.” Moving beyond protests that are largely drawing on the left would signal to potential supporters and elites that the movement can be a force for a pressure and not just confined to a fringe, but it remains to be seen whether the pro-Palestinian elements in the West can make it happen.Similarly, while young people are more sympathetic to the plight of Palestinians than their older counterparts are, they are generally less likely to be politically active and engaged than their elders, rendering their sentiments less impactful. People who are under 30 years of age vote in smaller numbers than their elders, feel less informed about candidates and issues than others, believe they’re unqualified to participate in politics, donate less money to political campaigns, and run for office in far fewer numbers. And while young people hold far more pro-Palestinian sentiments than others, that does not necessarily translate into a concentrated bloc powerful enough to alter U.S. policy. The same polls showing the sea change in how younger generations perceive the Israeli- Palestinian conflict reveal that they care most about the same issues that older people do: the cost of living, access to good-paying jobs, and preventing gun violence. “Particularly in a democratic society, there are electoral pressures for elected leaders and candidates to heed the demands and grievances of diverse potential voters,” Mueller said. “I haven’t seen that happen so much yet.”Of course, the usual apathy and cynicism of younger voters are precisely what make the campus protests so unusual. Every organizer knows how difficult it is to get people into the streets for an afternoon, let alone for days or weeks. On day 56 of the camp, Mackey told me, “I don’t think anybody thought we would get here.” After negotiating with the administration the first week, U of T Occupy for Palestine settled in for a long haul. They got trespassing notices and were threatened with expulsion and suffered through rainy nights, hail, and extreme heat. Still they stayed. “This is just a piece of a much broader movement,” Mackey said.Indeed, when Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris selected Minnesota’s Tim Walz as her running mate in August, there was wide speculation that she had passed over Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro because of his insulting comments about the protesters and his arguably greater fondness for Israel. If this calculation played a role in Harris’s choice, it would mean the students had influenced politics at the highest level.At U OF T Occupy for Palestine, five people sat on chairs at the entrance, screening people going in and out. “You Are Entering The People’s Circle For Palestine,” a sign read. One tent held a library with a few hundred books; other tents served variously as the kitchen, a space for art, and a prayer room. Solar panels generated energy for phone chargers. The camp lasted so long that some participants left for trips abroad and returned to a still ongoing project. At the final rally after the encampment was dismantled, about 2,000 Torontonians marched downtown to celebrate and mourn what had unexpectedly lasted for two months. “We galvanized an entire city,” Yassin told me. “We opened a lot of people’s eyes.” Mackey, similarly, believes that the protests persuaded some students who were either indifferent or hostile to the Palestinian cause. “I’ve seen it in my own life,” she told me. “The divide is definitely closing against genocide.”The Gaza encampments garnered copious media attention. As University of California at Berkeley political scientist Omar Wasow said, the “campus protests elevated the issue of the war in Gaza and some of the inequities in the war onto the national agenda.” This is no small thing, because even as Israel kills unfathomable numbers of Palestinians—more than 40,000 at the time of this writing—it is easy to imagine the slaughter falling off the front pages. “They’ve succeeded in raising consciousness broadly in America and Canada among everyday citizens who may not be following the war in Israel and Palestine closely,” argued Mira Sucharov, a political scientist at Carleton University in Ottawa.But attracting attention to a cause is not the same thing as persuading people of its justice, let alone its urgency. On the level of broader public opinion, the number of Americans who opposed the Gaza student protests was twice the number who supported them, and the vast majority of survey respondents backed Israel over Hamas. Even worse, a poll conducted in mid-June found that Americans were as likely to say the protests made them sympathize less with the Palestinians than to say the opposite. In March, the Canadian government halted arms sales to Israel after Parliament passed a nonbinding resolution, but this was before the U of T encampment began. Canadians were no friendlier to the campus protests than Americans were. Generally speaking, the encampments raised public awareness of the huge numbers of deaths in Gaza, but that didn’t translate into encouragement or assistance to the cause.Of course, protests can galvanize change even when unpopular. But they can just as easily be ignored, contained, or trigger a backlash. That reality is one of the risks protesters take when they employ maximalist rhetoric. U of T Occupy for Palestine was constructed to accommodate small tents, but it was unconcerned with building a larger one. The fence that encircled King’s College Circle was plastered with signs, some of which testified to the immense violence that Israel has unleashed in Gaza, quoting Palestinian children who have been orphaned, or referencing mothers who have been made childless. Other posters simply had drawings of Palestinian flags or declarations of solidarity from non-Palestinians. Such placards might be divisive, but they can’t reasonably be perceived as dangerous.Other signs were more ambiguous, praising Palestinian “martyrs” and calling for a “student intifada.” These could be read as calls for indiscriminate violence of the kind Hamas perpetrated on October 7, or they could be considered, as organizers claim they are intended, as general (but not necessarily violent) cheers for rebellion. And indeed, polls showed that slogans were heard differently by different audiences. Two-thirds of Jewish university students heard the ubiquitous chant “From the River to the Sea” as calling for the expulsion and genocide of Israeli Jews, while only 14 percent of Muslim students heard it that way, according to a University of Chicago poll. The Muslim students believed it was a chant for the equality of Jews and Palestinians in one state, or for a two-state solution. While the forcefulness and vagueness of these pro-Palestine slogans may seem sinister to some, the reality may be more banal. “It’s a matter of wanting to be concise,” Sucharov told me. “It’s a matter of wanting to center the Palestinian experience.” In the same way that some people incorrectly perceive the slogan “Black Lives Matter” as suggesting that other human lives are less valuable, so do Palestinians use slogans with meanings they understand but that may be unclear or offensive to others, she said.Of course, one difference is that some elements of Hamas do mean the slogans in the darkest possible sense, hoping for more violence against Israeli civilians to the point that the state itself is destroyed and its people either subjugated, expelled, or killed. In his ruling granting the University of Toronto the injunction to remove the encampment, the Ontario Superior Court judge absolved the organizers of antisemitism. “The automatic conclusion that those phrases are antisemitic is not justified,” he wrote about the ambiguous phrases. These determinations by the court were greatly appreciated by U of T Occupy for Palestine, which had routinely been accused of being a hate-fest. (One professor had written in Canada’s National Post newspaper that “the encampments are led by pro-Hamas advocates who are seeking to justify Islamist terrorism by normalizing antisemitism.”)But while the ruling absolved the organizers of antisemitism, it also clarified that at rallies where pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel protesters squared off, unambiguously antisemitic phrases were directed at Jews. These included comments such as “Death to the Jews,” “We need another holocost [sic],” and “Jews belong in the sea.” The judge noted that none of those comments were uttered by organizers like Yassin or Mackey, nor even any of the encampment occupants, but community members who were adjacent to the encampment. Organizers erased antisemitic phrases when they were written in chalk outside the camp. But the reality is that excising antisemitic elements is a constant requirement for pro-Palestinian activists and will grow increasingly important as the movement attracts new adherents, some of whom will inevitably want to target Jews. Again and again at protests against Israel’s destruction of Gaza, antisemitism reared its ugly head. The presence of bigotry at these events suggests how easily demands for unnamed forms of rebellion can shade into justifications for violence.Antisemitic acts skyrocketed in Canada in late 2023 and 2024, as they did in the United States and around the world. In Toronto, synagogues, businesses, and day schools were defaced with graffiti, a synagogue was set on fire, and Jewish students reported rampant antisemitism at U of T and other schools. U of T Occupy for Palestine wasn’t responsible for these acts, which terrified much of the Jewish community and influenced how the public perceived the protests, and the organizers didn’t seem to care much about any of that. The tents inside the encampment had catchphrases like FUCK ALL ZIOS written on them, short for “Zionists.” But there is a thin line between opposing Zionism and cultivating hatred against Zionists, and such rhetoric thins the line even more. In our conversation, Yassin spoke fondly of the Jews who joined him in supporting Palestinian liberation, as did other organizers. But he pushed back against the idea that the protesters should modify their rhetoric to appeal to anyone doubtful of the Palestinian cause or fearful for Zionist Jews. “It’s more important to maintain the purity of the message,” he said. He cited boxing legend Muhammad Ali’s refusal to participate in the Vietnam War when drafted (“I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong,” he famously said as U.S. troops were fighting them) as an example of how a once-shocking message can later be seen as prescient. In the coming years, Yassin argued, it will become more acceptable to publicly castigate Zionism and Zionists. “Calls for justice are not hatred,” he said.One way in which the pro-Palestinian movement differs from activism against South African apartheid, the Vietnam War, and discrimination against African Americans is that its target, Israel, is also a refuge for a persecuted people and their lone nation-state. Another way is that, so far at least, organizers appear indifferent to how their rhetoric and actions are interpreted by the broader public. Yassin and others are convinced that history is on their side, and that public opinion—and government policy following it—will inevitably swing their way. As Mackey put it about the university divesting from Israel, “It’s when, not if.”This line of thinking absolves activists of pursuing alternative strategies that might be more beneficial, such as allying with Israel’s leftists, clarifying the place of Jews in a free Palestine, denouncing all deliberate attacks on civilians, or engaging in self-criticism that could perhaps help propel the movement forward. Mackey observed that the divestment campaign at the University of Toronto began in 2006. But in 2024, the school is no closer to meeting the movement’s demands than it was 18 years ago. The U of T encampment disbanded without compelling the school to make any changes.Some campuses had victories. At Brown University, students took down their tents when the school’s governing body agreed to vote on a proposal to divest the school’s $6.6 billion endowment from companies affiliated with Israel. “Not only did we force the administrators to come to the table, but we also forced them into accepting a really historic vote,” a Brown encampment participant told reporters at the end of April. “Today we’re seeing the results of negotiations that didn’t seem possible even a week ago.” As far away as Ireland, student protesters caused Trinity College Dublin to divest from Israeli firms. At Macalester College in Minnesota, where Mueller teaches, a task force has been organized to deal with the long-term grievances of students. “Putting campus investment practices on the long-term agenda is probably going to have a decent tail,” she said.But these were the exceptions. From Columbia University and other Ivy League schools to smaller campuses in the United States and around the world, by and large, the students failed in their basic objectives of ending U.S. support for Israel or forcing most universities to divest from it.For now.When students return for the 2024–2025 academic year, activism may resume at a high level, after organizers have licked their wounds and recharged their energies. Mackey and Yassin are adamant that their struggle is far from over, and that they are inspired by their successes, such as they were. “I don’t think that this moment of heightened student protest, for Palestinian freedom on college campuses, has ended yet,” Munayyer of the Arab Center Washington DC agreed. The day after the judge issued the injunction that finished the U of T encampment, one spokesperson said at a press conference, “We are just getting started. This encampment is one of many tactics.”Ultimately, the most concrete impact of the Gaza protests may be in educating a new generation of activists. Tens of thousands of students participated in mass demonstrations against Israel, encounters that may be formative for decades to come. Mackey’s experiences in climate activism contrasted with her pro-Palestinian activism. In April 2023, she and 200 other student activists occupied a building on campus demanding U of T divest from fossil fuel companies; the students stayed for 18 days. But authorities handled that situation very differently. “We weren’t threatened by police,” she said. At U of T Occupy for Palestine, individuals hurled slurs at her and the other students and played music at night to disrupt their sleep. She, Yassin, and other organizers were physically exhausted by showing up each day for two months to arrange logistics for hundreds of people: providing food, disposing of waste, cleaning, dealing with press, negotiating with lawyers and the school administration, dealing with hostile counterprotesters, and hosting community meetings. A tent where coffee was served blew away in the wind at one point. It was draining and stressful to manage these tasks, but the experience was also indispensable in training a generation of activists. Mackey said the connections that Palestinian solidarity groups have made with labor and faculty organizations will be lasting. Research shows that individuals who participate in protests can be profoundly changed by the experience, altering their family and career choices, along with their political trajectories and voting patterns. A study from Tufts University’s Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement found that large-scale protests of the kind following George Floyd’s murder by police in 2020 brought new people into the political process at a higher rate than smaller-scale demonstrations.Yassin told me that he has been emboldened to pursue a career in humanities rather than the safer choice in finance to which he had resigned himself. The support and media attention the encampment received were far greater than anything he or his allies expected, convincing him to envision a better future for himself personally as well. He plans to continue in political organizing in some fashion. “If I learned anything from the camp, it’s that anything is possible,” he said. Mackey has likewise been encouraged by her two months in the encampment. She starts a job soon at an environmental nonprofit and will continue to be involved in organizing on and off. Seeing so many people show up in solidarity with Palestinians “was a very profound and transformational moment,” she said. At the rally sending off the encampment, she was in tears.On a rainy day in mid-July, a visibly more relaxed Yassin visited King’s College Circle for the first time since the encampments were dismantled two weeks prior. All traces of the protests were long gone: the tents, the tarps, the Palestinian flags. An orange plastic fence had replaced the wall that ringed the area, and the grass was growing back where it had been trampled by tents and foot traffic. “God, this is strange,” he said, gazing at the empty space where the small village existed for two months.Yassin’s parents worried once he became an activist. But they grew proud of their outspoken son. When his mother visited the encampment, she cried, moved to see so many Palestinian flags displayed in one place. Yassin told me that he’s heartened that the Palestinian cause has gained acceptance over decades; he knows it has the potential to reach many more people. Even if the encampments don’t recur, other protests will follow in their wake. A religious man, he believes that in the long sweep of history, justice for Palestinians is likely. Even if Israel kicks every Palestinian out of their homeland, still they will not give up on returning. And, eventually, they will return. “All of this is still possible,” he said, walking on the grass.

Mohammad Yassin’s parents had warned him away from politics. His father grew up in Lebanon during the civil war, when having the wrong opinion could get you killed. Yassin, who is Palestinian American, arrived at the University of Toronto four years ago with the intention of studying economics and statistics. He felt that Canada wasn’t his permanent home, and he distrusted existing political institutions, so he avoided involving himself in activism or student government. “I just kind of was like: Hey, I’m gonna put my head down and just study for my entire degree,” he told me, chain-smoking cigarettes in a keffiyeh and sunglasses.

But when Hamas viciously attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, everything changed. Later that month, a group called U of T Conservatives organized a rally on campus to display “unwavering support for Israel against Hamas terrorism.” By then, Israel had begun its brutal war on Gaza, and word spread among Yassin’s peers that a counterprotest should be organized. Student groups supporting Palestinians were once vibrant on campus but had diminished in recent years, particularly since Covid. Yassin, who has a sardonic sense of humor and a calm demeanor, joined the counterrally, which drew around 200 people. Many were inspired to organize on an ongoing basis.

After months of walkouts, rallies, and cultural events in support of Palestinians, on April 1, 26 students clad in keffiyehs and masks occupied Simcoe Hall, the seat of governance at the University of Toronto, demanding that the school divest from holdings in companies complicit in Israel’s siege. After 30 hours, they left, following an agreement to meet with the university president.

The meeting, however, failed to satisfy them. A little over two weeks later, some 500 miles southeast, hundreds of protesters occupied the South Lawn of Columbia University. The pitched tents and mass of demonstrators were a lifeline for the Palestinian groups at U of T, who, like student groups around the world, took the Columbia encampments as inspiration for the next phase of their movement. Anticipating Yassin and his allies’ next move, U of T put up fencing along part of its campus called King’s College Circle, a patch of green space that had recently been renovated. But on May 2, Yassin and about 50 others with U of T Occupy for Palestine set up camp anyway, breaching the fence in the middle of the night. Soon allies just started showing up. “The first day was magical,” Yassin recalled. The group demanded that the university disclose its investments and divest from companies and universities associated with Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land. The school warned the students that they were trespassing on private property. Yassin’s group expected the university to expel them at any moment, certainly within a few days.

But that didn’t happen. Toronto police declined to arrest the protesters, so at the end of May, U of T sought a court order to force the issue. For more than two months, the People’s Circle for Palestine operated as a miniature village in the heart of Canada’s largest city. Weeks after almost all encampments on campuses in the United States had been disbanded—Columbia’s lasted just under two weeks—this one continued to operate. Around 200 tents were pitched at one point or another, and many residents, like Yassin, slept there almost every night, returning home only to do some laundry or get the occasional decent rest.

On July 2, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice finally granted the university’s injunction to clear out the encampment, which had lasted 62 days. Hours later, Yassin stood with other protest leaders to announce to the news cameras and journalists that they were disbanding the mini-village ahead of the deadline the next evening. That would enable them to leave on their terms and avoid being brutalized by police, he said. Behind him, tents with slogans written on them were still up. “This legal maneuver changes nothing,” he announced defiantly. “Make no mistake, our resolve is stronger than ever. We’ve said from day one that we will not leave this campus until U of T discloses, divests, and cuts ties. That commitment stands firm.”

Soon after Yassin spoke, protesters began taking down the many signs on the fence surrounding the encampment. By 6 p.m. the next day, little evidence of the encampment remained, outside of people posing for photos in front of a papier-mâché olive tree with anti-Zionist slogans spray-painted on it. As the sun set, a man and a woman wearing an Israeli flag toppled the structure.

The campus rallies against Israel constituted the largest protests at North American universities in the twenty-first century. According to the Crowd Counting Consortium, encampments were erected at more than 130 campuses, and many protests erupted at schools even before Columbia’s tents went up. In the United States, more than 3,600 people were arrested or detained during these campaigns. Encampments eventually spread to Australia, Western and Northern Europe, Latin America, and Asia, including even Israel itself, where some students erected a tent at Bezalel Academy, an art school.

Mohammad Yassin, a student organizer at the University of Toronto, speaks during a campus rally in support of Palestine.

But by the summer, most of the protests had disappeared along with the tents, either removed by police or disbanded for the summer break. The Israeli government continues to kill thousands of Palestinians with little compunction, and the Biden administration continues arming it. Yassin is still worried about his family in Lebanon and his mother’s extended family in Gaza. Students who participated in the protests, allies who supported them, and critics who derided them as antisemitic are all left wondering: What did the once-in-a-generation mass protests accomplish? How will they influence the activism that may resume when the new academic year begins?


Canada has typically had smooth relations with the Jewish state, but in the twenty-first century, the conservative government of Stephen Harper took it to a new level, marching in lockstep with Israel. That history of support is one reason that concern for Palestine has become commonplace on the left in Canada. And not just in Canada, obviously. Not since South Africa in the 1980s has a people captured the left-wing imagination as a symbol of global injustice. The irony is that this phenomenon is something of a reversal; Zionism was once considered a uniquely heroic cause among many of American left-liberalism’s most exalted figures. According to historian Eric Alterman, author of We Are Not One: A History of America’s Fight Over Israel, liberals and leftists from Eleanor Roosevelt (“The Jews in their own country are doing marvels and should, once the refugee problem is settled, help all the Arab countries,” she wrote) to Progressive Party leader Henry Wallace to Freda Kirchwey, editor of The Nation, saw Jews in Palestine as anti-imperialists battling the British Empire, which was manipulating the Arab states and squaring off against the Soviet Union with little care for the fate of Jews.

From the 1940s until 1967, the Palestinians had few advocates in the Western world. They were still recovering after being driven out of their villages by Israel in 1947–1949 during the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” the Arabic term for the dispossession of Palestinians. “It’s very hard to organize politically when you don’t even have a roof over your head,” said Yousef Munayyer, a senior fellow at Arab Center Washington DC. Partly as a result, the myth that Palestinians left their homes voluntarily predominated in the United States.

The 1967 Arab-Israeli War created a groundswell of support for Palestinians in the United States for the first time, particularly among radical Black intellectuals and activists. As Alterman explains, the Palestinians began to be seen as a “Third World nation,” deserving of sympathy like other non-Western peoples. But pro-Palestinianism remained a minority viewpoint in the civil rights movement, as more mainstream leaders like Martin Luther King and Bayard Rustin and organizations like the NAACP and the National Urban League issued statements in solidarity with Israel. In the 1970s, Palestinians garnered little institutional backing beyond the furthest left of groups, such as West German terrorists. “We have been unable to interest the West very much in the justice of our cause,” the Palestinian American literary critic and activist Edward Said lamented in his 1979 book, The Question of Palestine. That same year, when President Jimmy Carter secured a peace deal between Egypt and Israel, Palestinians’ anger at having their concerns ignored did little to dilute celebrations in the United States. But at the grassroots level, support for Palestinians had been emerging. It deepened during Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon and especially after the massacre at the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. It grew again with the first intifada, which began in 1987, and has since “grown gradually over time,” Alterman observed.

Today, for people under 30 and those on the left around the world, Palestine has become a defining issue. Erin Mackey, who graduated from U of T this year, is a prime example. A Canadian American from Boston who came to Toronto because its university was cheaper than those in the states, she was active in campaigns to encourage the administration to divest from fossil fuels, which U of T announced it would do in October 2021. Mackey has the message discipline of a seasoned politician and is as polite in private as she is confrontational in public. The day we met, she was wearing overalls, her nails painted bright red. She sees a natural evolution from agitating against climate change to agitating against Israel. “I saw the links between climate justice and Palestinian liberation,” she explained, referring to Israel’s environmental destruction and its confiscation of land and water. In late October 2023, she and other activists began targeting the Royal Bank of Canada for both its funding of fossil fuel companies and its investments in the U.S. company Palantir, which sells AI surveillance technology to Israel. Once Arab and Palestinian students decided to construct the encampment, they asked Mackey, as someone trained in media outreach, for help. She soon became one of the most visible spokespeople for U of T Occupy for Palestine. “As someone who isn’t Palestinian, knowing my tuition dollars are going toward the genocide is horrifying,” she told me when we spoke at the encampment.

The demographics at U of T Occupy for Palestine are suitably reflective of the changed landscape. Both Mackey and Yassin estimated that Palestinians or other Arabs made up only 60 percent of the people who were at the encampment; the remaining 40 percent were other people of color, Jews, and white leftists. A group called Jews Say No to Genocide maintained a constant presence, hosting weekly Shabbat dinners and absorbing the slurs of pro-Israel Jews who staged a counterprotest. The intellectual/activist Naomi Klein showed up once. But many of the signs and tents contained writing attesting to the personal connections individuals had with people in Gaza, citing relatives who have died or castigating Arabs for not sticking together. One encampment resident has had an unimaginable 26 members of their family killed in the Gaza Strip in the past year. “We’re not spectating,” Yassin said.

If nothing else, the 2023–2024 protests showed that the constituency for the Palestinian cause has broadened significantly beyond the Arab- and Muslim-majority countries to which it was once confined. What’s more, the plight of the Palestinians has managed to push tens of thousands of people to publicly demonstrate in solidarity, sometimes at great personal risk and in violation of laws and school policies. “That signals not just a growth in the scale and scope of this thing, but also the depth of commitment to the cause, which, again, is at a new and unprecedented level,” Munayyer said. While conservatives and many Democratic Party politicians deride Palestinians as a nonexistent people, uniformly antisemitic, or congenitally prone to terrorism, such designations no longer have mass appeal beyond the right wing and an aging subset of Democrats.

Younger generations, especially, see Israel’s repression as a straightforward question of right and wrong. Pew Research Center found that the number of adults under 30 who sympathized with Palestinians was twice the number who sympathized with Israelis, and the number who say the way Israel is fighting its war against Hamas is “unacceptable” is more than twice the number who say it’s “acceptable.” Young people have a more positive view of Palestinians than of Israelis, and the number who say Hamas’s reasons for fighting Israel are valid is slightly higher than the number who say they are not (notably, however, 58 percent of young people said Hamas’s October 7 massacre was unacceptable). Just 16 percent of young people favor the United States providing military aid to Israel. For Palestinians, who were once synonymous with terrorism in the Western imagination, this widespread support marks a staggering shift. The students holding signs and chanting in unison might eventually be seen as a harbinger of a changed Western approach to the role of Palestinians in the Middle East.

But the levels of participation in protests over the last year should not be exaggerated either. For all the attention they received—and for all the anxiety they provoked among conservatives and in the Jewish establishment in the United States—only 8 percent of college students took part in demonstrations in support of either Palestinians or Israelis, according to a Generation Lab survey published on May 7. The Vietnam War–era protests with which the encampments have been compared far outstripped these figures and lasted for years. In May 1970 alone, more than four million students at around 900 campuses went on strike after National Guardsmen gunned down four students at Kent State University. The Gaza encampments “were really centered around student communities and the people you would be expecting to engage in these campus uprisings,” said Lisa Mueller, a political scientist at Macalester College who studies protest movements. The Vietnam antiwar movement “far transcended students and people on the left.” Moving beyond protests that are largely drawing on the left would signal to potential supporters and elites that the movement can be a force for a pressure and not just confined to a fringe, but it remains to be seen whether the pro-Palestinian elements in the West can make it happen.

Similarly, while young people are more sympathetic to the plight of Palestinians than their older counterparts are, they are generally less likely to be politically active and engaged than their elders, rendering their sentiments less impactful. People who are under 30 years of age vote in smaller numbers than their elders, feel less informed about candidates and issues than others, believe they’re unqualified to participate in politics, donate less money to political campaigns, and run for office in far fewer numbers. And while young people hold far more pro-Palestinian sentiments than others, that does not necessarily translate into a concentrated bloc powerful enough to alter U.S. policy. The same polls showing the sea change in how younger generations perceive the Israeli- Palestinian conflict reveal that they care most about the same issues that older people do: the cost of living, access to good-paying jobs, and preventing gun violence. “Particularly in a democratic society, there are electoral pressures for elected leaders and candidates to heed the demands and grievances of diverse potential voters,” Mueller said. “I haven’t seen that happen so much yet.”

Of course, the usual apathy and cynicism of younger voters are precisely what make the campus protests so unusual. Every organizer knows how difficult it is to get people into the streets for an afternoon, let alone for days or weeks. On day 56 of the camp, Mackey told me, “I don’t think anybody thought we would get here.” After negotiating with the administration the first week, U of T Occupy for Palestine settled in for a long haul. They got trespassing notices and were threatened with expulsion and suffered through rainy nights, hail, and extreme heat. Still they stayed. “This is just a piece of a much broader movement,” Mackey said.

Indeed, when Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris selected Minnesota’s Tim Walz as her running mate in August, there was wide speculation that she had passed over Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro because of his insulting comments about the protesters and his arguably greater fondness for Israel. If this calculation played a role in Harris’s choice, it would mean the students had influenced politics at the highest level.


At U OF T Occupy for Palestine, five people sat on chairs at the entrance, screening people going in and out. “You Are Entering The People’s Circle For Palestine,” a sign read. One tent held a library with a few hundred books; other tents served variously as the kitchen, a space for art, and a prayer room. Solar panels generated energy for phone chargers. The camp lasted so long that some participants left for trips abroad and returned to a still ongoing project. At the final rally after the encampment was dismantled, about 2,000 Torontonians marched downtown to celebrate and mourn what had unexpectedly lasted for two months. “We galvanized an entire city,” Yassin told me. “We opened a lot of people’s eyes.” Mackey, similarly, believes that the protests persuaded some students who were either indifferent or hostile to the Palestinian cause. “I’ve seen it in my own life,” she told me. “The divide is definitely closing against genocide.”

The Gaza encampments garnered copious media attention. As University of California at Berkeley political scientist Omar Wasow said, the “campus protests elevated the issue of the war in Gaza and some of the inequities in the war onto the national agenda.” This is no small thing, because even as Israel kills unfathomable numbers of Palestinians—more than 40,000 at the time of this writing—it is easy to imagine the slaughter falling off the front pages. “They’ve succeeded in raising consciousness broadly in America and Canada among everyday citizens who may not be following the war in Israel and Palestine closely,” argued Mira Sucharov, a political scientist at Carleton University in Ottawa.

But attracting attention to a cause is not the same thing as persuading people of its justice, let alone its urgency. On the level of broader public opinion, the number of Americans who opposed the Gaza student protests was twice the number who supported them, and the vast majority of survey respondents backed Israel over Hamas. Even worse, a poll conducted in mid-June found that Americans were as likely to say the protests made them sympathize less with the Palestinians than to say the opposite. In March, the Canadian government halted arms sales to Israel after Parliament passed a nonbinding resolution, but this was before the U of T encampment began. Canadians were no friendlier to the campus protests than Americans were. Generally speaking, the encampments raised public awareness of the huge numbers of deaths in Gaza, but that didn’t translate into encouragement or assistance to the cause.

An aerial view of the remnants of an encampment on a University of Toronto lawn.

Of course, protests can galvanize change even when unpopular. But they can just as easily be ignored, contained, or trigger a backlash. That reality is one of the risks protesters take when they employ maximalist rhetoric. U of T Occupy for Palestine was constructed to accommodate small tents, but it was unconcerned with building a larger one. The fence that encircled King’s College Circle was plastered with signs, some of which testified to the immense violence that Israel has unleashed in Gaza, quoting Palestinian children who have been orphaned, or referencing mothers who have been made childless. Other posters simply had drawings of Palestinian flags or declarations of solidarity from non-Palestinians. Such placards might be divisive, but they can’t reasonably be perceived as dangerous.

Other signs were more ambiguous, praising Palestinian “martyrs” and calling for a “student intifada.” These could be read as calls for indiscriminate violence of the kind Hamas perpetrated on October 7, or they could be considered, as organizers claim they are intended, as general (but not necessarily violent) cheers for rebellion. And indeed, polls showed that slogans were heard differently by different audiences. Two-thirds of Jewish university students heard the ubiquitous chant “From the River to the Sea” as calling for the expulsion and genocide of Israeli Jews, while only 14 percent of Muslim students heard it that way, according to a University of Chicago poll. The Muslim students believed it was a chant for the equality of Jews and Palestinians in one state, or for a two-state solution. While the forcefulness and vagueness of these pro-Palestine slogans may seem sinister to some, the reality may be more banal. “It’s a matter of wanting to be concise,” Sucharov told me. “It’s a matter of wanting to center the Palestinian experience.” In the same way that some people incorrectly perceive the slogan “Black Lives Matter” as suggesting that other human lives are less valuable, so do Palestinians use slogans with meanings they understand but that may be unclear or offensive to others, she said.

Of course, one difference is that some elements of Hamas do mean the slogans in the darkest possible sense, hoping for more violence against Israeli civilians to the point that the state itself is destroyed and its people either subjugated, expelled, or killed. In his ruling granting the University of Toronto the injunction to remove the encampment, the Ontario Superior Court judge absolved the organizers of antisemitism. “The automatic conclusion that those phrases are antisemitic is not justified,” he wrote about the ambiguous phrases. These determinations by the court were greatly appreciated by U of T Occupy for Palestine, which had routinely been accused of being a hate-fest. (One professor had written in Canada’s National Post newspaper that “the encampments are led by pro-Hamas advocates who are seeking to justify Islamist terrorism by normalizing antisemitism.”)

But while the ruling absolved the organizers of antisemitism, it also clarified that at rallies where pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel protesters squared off, unambiguously antisemitic phrases were directed at Jews. These included comments such as “Death to the Jews,” “We need another holocost [sic],” and “Jews belong in the sea.” The judge noted that none of those comments were uttered by organizers like Yassin or Mackey, nor even any of the encampment occupants, but community members who were adjacent to the encampment. Organizers erased antisemitic phrases when they were written in chalk outside the camp. But the reality is that excising antisemitic elements is a constant requirement for pro-Palestinian activists and will grow increasingly important as the movement attracts new adherents, some of whom will inevitably want to target Jews. Again and again at protests against Israel’s destruction of Gaza, antisemitism reared its ugly head. The presence of bigotry at these events suggests how easily demands for unnamed forms of rebellion can shade into justifications for violence.

Antisemitic acts skyrocketed in Canada in late 2023 and 2024, as they did in the United States and around the world. In Toronto, synagogues, businesses, and day schools were defaced with graffiti, a synagogue was set on fire, and Jewish students reported rampant antisemitism at U of T and other schools. U of T Occupy for Palestine wasn’t responsible for these acts, which terrified much of the Jewish community and influenced how the public perceived the protests, and the organizers didn’t seem to care much about any of that. The tents inside the encampment had catchphrases like FUCK ALL ZIOS written on them, short for “Zionists.” But there is a thin line between opposing Zionism and cultivating hatred against Zionists, and such rhetoric thins the line even more. In our conversation, Yassin spoke fondly of the Jews who joined him in supporting Palestinian liberation, as did other organizers. But he pushed back against the idea that the protesters should modify their rhetoric to appeal to anyone doubtful of the Palestinian cause or fearful for Zionist Jews. “It’s more important to maintain the purity of the message,” he said. He cited boxing legend Muhammad Ali’s refusal to participate in the Vietnam War when drafted (“I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong,” he famously said as U.S. troops were fighting them) as an example of how a once-shocking message can later be seen as prescient. In the coming years, Yassin argued, it will become more acceptable to publicly castigate Zionism and Zionists. “Calls for justice are not hatred,” he said.

One way in which the pro-Palestinian movement differs from activism against South African apartheid, the Vietnam War, and discrimination against African Americans is that its target, Israel, is also a refuge for a persecuted people and their lone nation-state. Another way is that, so far at least, organizers appear indifferent to how their rhetoric and actions are interpreted by the broader public. Yassin and others are convinced that history is on their side, and that public opinion—and government policy following it—will inevitably swing their way. As Mackey put it about the university divesting from Israel, “It’s when, not if.”

This line of thinking absolves activists of pursuing alternative strategies that might be more beneficial, such as allying with Israel’s leftists, clarifying the place of Jews in a free Palestine, denouncing all deliberate attacks on civilians, or engaging in self-criticism that could perhaps help propel the movement forward. Mackey observed that the divestment campaign at the University of Toronto began in 2006. But in 2024, the school is no closer to meeting the movement’s demands than it was 18 years ago. The U of T encampment disbanded without compelling the school to make any changes.

Some campuses had victories. At Brown University, students took down their tents when the school’s governing body agreed to vote on a proposal to divest the school’s $6.6 billion endowment from companies affiliated with Israel. “Not only did we force the administrators to come to the table, but we also forced them into accepting a really historic vote,” a Brown encampment participant told reporters at the end of April. “Today we’re seeing the results of negotiations that didn’t seem possible even a week ago.” As far away as Ireland, student protesters caused Trinity College Dublin to divest from Israeli firms. At Macalester College in Minnesota, where Mueller teaches, a task force has been organized to deal with the long-term grievances of students. “Putting campus investment practices on the long-term agenda is probably going to have a decent tail,” she said.

But these were the exceptions. From Columbia University and other Ivy League schools to smaller campuses in the United States and around the world, by and large, the students failed in their basic objectives of ending U.S. support for Israel or forcing most universities to divest from it.

For now.


When students return for the 2024–2025 academic year, activism may resume at a high level, after organizers have licked their wounds and recharged their energies. Mackey and Yassin are adamant that their struggle is far from over, and that they are inspired by their successes, such as they were. “I don’t think that this moment of heightened student protest, for Palestinian freedom on college campuses, has ended yet,” Munayyer of the Arab Center Washington DC agreed. The day after the judge issued the injunction that finished the U of T encampment, one spokesperson said at a press conference, “We are just getting started. This encampment is one of many tactics.”

Ultimately, the most concrete impact of the Gaza protests may be in educating a new generation of activists. Tens of thousands of students participated in mass demonstrations against Israel, encounters that may be formative for decades to come. Mackey’s experiences in climate activism contrasted with her pro-Palestinian activism. In April 2023, she and 200 other student activists occupied a building on campus demanding U of T divest from fossil fuel companies; the students stayed for 18 days. But authorities handled that situation very differently. “We weren’t threatened by police,” she said. At U of T Occupy for Palestine, individuals hurled slurs at her and the other students and played music at night to disrupt their sleep. She, Yassin, and other organizers were physically exhausted by showing up each day for two months to arrange logistics for hundreds of people: providing food, disposing of waste, cleaning, dealing with press, negotiating with lawyers and the school administration, dealing with hostile counterprotesters, and hosting community meetings. A tent where coffee was served blew away in the wind at one point. It was draining and stressful to manage these tasks, but the experience was also indispensable in training a generation of activists. Mackey said the connections that Palestinian solidarity groups have made with labor and faculty organizations will be lasting. Research shows that individuals who participate in protests can be profoundly changed by the experience, altering their family and career choices, along with their political trajectories and voting patterns. A study from Tufts University’s Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement found that large-scale protests of the kind following George Floyd’s murder by police in 2020 brought new people into the political process at a higher rate than smaller-scale demonstrations.

Yassin told me that he has been emboldened to pursue a career in humanities rather than the safer choice in finance to which he had resigned himself. The support and media attention the encampment received were far greater than anything he or his allies expected, convincing him to envision a better future for himself personally as well. He plans to continue in political organizing in some fashion. “If I learned anything from the camp, it’s that anything is possible,” he said. Mackey has likewise been encouraged by her two months in the encampment. She starts a job soon at an environmental nonprofit and will continue to be involved in organizing on and off. Seeing so many people show up in solidarity with Palestinians “was a very profound and transformational moment,” she said. At the rally sending off the encampment, she was in tears.

On a rainy day in mid-July, a visibly more relaxed Yassin visited King’s College Circle for the first time since the encampments were dismantled two weeks prior. All traces of the protests were long gone: the tents, the tarps, the Palestinian flags. An orange plastic fence had replaced the wall that ringed the area, and the grass was growing back where it had been trampled by tents and foot traffic. “God, this is strange,” he said, gazing at the empty space where the small village existed for two months.

Yassin’s parents worried once he became an activist. But they grew proud of their outspoken son. When his mother visited the encampment, she cried, moved to see so many Palestinian flags displayed in one place. Yassin told me that he’s heartened that the Palestinian cause has gained acceptance over decades; he knows it has the potential to reach many more people. Even if the encampments don’t recur, other protests will follow in their wake. A religious man, he believes that in the long sweep of history, justice for Palestinians is likely. Even if Israel kicks every Palestinian out of their homeland, still they will not give up on returning. And, eventually, they will return. “All of this is still possible,” he said, walking on the grass.

Read the full story here.
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Freedom of Voice: A Newcomer’s Guide to Safe and Effective Protesting

How to participate in causes you believe in — in a manner that will be noticed, respected, and heard. The post Freedom of Voice: A Newcomer’s Guide to Safe and Effective Protesting appeared first on The Revelator.

The “No Kings” protests in June drew an estimated 4-6 million people to more than 2,000 events around the country — making it one of the largest protest turnouts in history. Many attendees interviewed during “No Kings” revealed that they had never attended a protest before. This continues two trends we’ve seen since the Women’s March in 2017: More and more people are protesting, and every event is someone’s first protest. Environmental causes have been a big part of this. The 2019 Global Climate Strike was the largest climate protest to date. And a recent survey found that 1 in 10 people in the United States attended environmental protests between June 2022 and June 2023. But protesting for the planet (or against oppressive government actions) poses risks that newcomers should understand. Protesting itself can be physically demanding. Meanwhile, legislatures around the country (and the world) have taken steps to criminalize protest, and right-wing agitators have increasingly used violence to harm or intimidate protestors. With all of that in mind, The Revelator has launched a multipart series on protest safety, especially geared toward first-timers. After all, it’s going to be a long, hot summer for environmental advocates seeking to make their voices heard in public across America and the globe. Before the Protest Are there meetings, including virtual meetings, from the organizing entity? Attend if you can; they’ll help you to understand the specific protest messaging so everyone is on the same page before the protest. Learn if there’s a check-in process: Will there be signs, T-shirts, hats, or other identifying items to receive while registering or when you show up for this protest? Make sure you sign up for text lists and other communications in case of inclement weather, parking issues, and other last-minute changes for the location and presentation of the protest. Know who to contact and what to do if you run into trouble while protesting. Decide how you’re getting there (in an eco-friendly way, if possible): Find out if public transportation or carpools are available, or organize your own rideshares. What to Bring to a Protest — and What NOT to Bring Plan ahead: Bring the right supplies for a day of protesting. What to Bring: A backpack and belt bag that are durable and not bulky. The belt pack keeps your hands free. Comfortable, quality walking shoes. This is non-negotiable. Wear closed-toe shoes that are broken-in and for walking long distances. Protest signs that clearly display your message in big, bold letters and can be easily read from far away. Make sure your signs are made with sturdy, bright, durable boards, with a comfortable handle. Short messages are better than a block of text. Stay hydrated. Bring a lot of water — which may also prove useful for clearing eyes and face of tear gas and pepper spray. (Milk has been disproven as tear-gas relief.) Lightweight, nutritious, protein-rich snacks: energy bars, nuts, etc. A face mask and safety goggles for smoke and tear gas. These can also hide your identity from cameras and police surveillance. A hat, sunglasses, jacket, umbrella…Clothing should be appropriate for changing weather conditions and can perform double duty as cover for any identifying skin markings. These items can also obscure your face from facial recognition technology. A change of clothes (just in case). Hand sanitizer and wipes. A first-aid kit if the organization does not provide a medical station or personnel that can be easily identified as first aid providers in the crowd. Your ID in case you’re detained. Your phone. (Essential for staying connected, but digital privacy may be a concern. See our resources section below for some guidance.) A power bank to charge devices. Other items might include a cooling towel; flashlight or headlamp; and a lanyard with a list of emergency contacts, medical conditions and medications. Things Not to Bring for a Demonstration: Alcohol or drugs. Spray paint. Firearms, knives, mace, pepper spray, tasers or weapons of any sort, even items that might be construed as weapons (such as a small Swiss army knife, metal eating utensils, etc.). Firecrackers or fireworks or anything explosive. Flammable liquids. Flares and smoke bombs. Torches (flashlights are okay). While You’re at the Protest The late civil rights icon John Lewis said, “Get in good trouble, necessary trouble,” encouraging people to challenge the status quo. Do: engage in group activities, meet and greet people. This is a great opportunity to forge friendships behind a greater cause, and for future protests or community organizing. Help those around you. Study your surroundings and people around you. Stay alert and be aware of the people in your group: Is there someone who has joined the demonstration who seems too aggressive and appears to be carrying firearms, weapons, and other tools of violence? If you get triggered and feel overly emotional with what’s happening, take that as your cue to head home. Empirical research shows that the most effective protests are non-violent. Political scientist Omar Wasow saw this in a study of the 1960s U.S. Civil Rights movement, finding that when protesters were violent, it prompted news stories focused on crime and disorder, and lent more sympathy to the opposition, who then become viewed as promoting law and order. In contrast, peaceful demonstrations that are violently repressed by the state make media coverage sympathetic to the protesters and strengthen peaceful movements. Remember that you’re not protesting in a vacuum. Don’t take actions that feed the opposition news media. Your behavior, attire, and reactions to provocative actions by the opposition and the police, National Guard, or military could be recorded by smart phones or the media, especially social media. Assume you’re being watched and that your words are being listened to. Don’t taunt or antagonize the opposition and de-escalate any confrontations that are becoming heated or aggressive. Stay calm and focused. Don’t rise to the bait of police or military force. Don’t throw things at them. Be passive but firm in your presentation. If you are arrested, don’t struggle or fight. Be polite and compliant — and the only word coming from your mouth should be, “lawyer.” Staying calm and respectful can be challenging when participating in a protest demonstration. Emotions run high, especially in the hot summer months. However, being a “peaceful protester” with resolute calm and dignity makes a greater impression on the public, many of whom sit on the fence about current issues and events. These are people who may be getting inaccurate information and have become dismissive of our endeavors as “unserious” activism. Screaming, yelling, and deriding don’t win them over but reinforce their opinion of us as obnoxious troublemakers. Opposition media outlets will cherry-pick video footage of “bad actors” and edit these bits of footage in loops that will play constantly in the media. As a result, your protest message will be ignored over the more inflammatory messaging about your cause. Coming Up: This series will continue with a look at the history of peaceful protesting and tips on how to organize a protest. And we want to hear from you. What questions do you have about protesting? What advice would you share? Send your comments, suggestions, questions, or even brief essays to comments@therevelator.org. Sources and Resources: Summer of Change: New Books to Inspire Environmental Action The Activist Handbook and other sources below provide practical guides and resources so you can plan your demonstration successfully. Indivisible  and No Kings offer training and education on protesting safely and effectively, as well as new and upcoming protest events. The Human Rights Campaign: Tips for Preparedness, Peaceful Protesting, and Safety ACLU Guide: How to Protest Safely and Responsibly Amnesty International Protest Guide Wired: How to Protest Safely: What to Bring, What to Do, and What to Avoid Infosec 101 for Activists “The New Science of Social Change: A Modern Handbook for Activists”  by Lisa Mueller “Agenda Seeding: How 1960s Black Protests Moved Elites, Public Opinion and Voting”  by Omar Wasow “Non-Violent Resistance (Satyagraha)”  by M. K. Gandhi Republish this article for free! Read our reprint policy. Previously in The Revelator: Saving America’s National Parks and Forests Means Shaking Off the Rust of Inaction The post Freedom of Voice: A Newcomer’s Guide to Safe and Effective Protesting appeared first on The Revelator.

Summer of Change: New Books to Inspire Environmental Action

America’s summer celebrations are upon us, and these eight books will inspire environmentalists to act for our country and our planet. The post Summer of Change: New Books to Inspire Environmental Action appeared first on The Revelator.

“A patriot…wants the nation to live up to its ideals, which means asking us to be our best selves. A patriot must be concerned with the real world, which is the only place where their country can be loved and sustained. The patriot has universal values, standards by which they judge their nation, always wishing it well — and wishing that it would do better.” — Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny It’s the summer season: Barbeques are firing up, the stars and stripes are in view, and people are preparing to make a difference in the second half of the year. As we look to the “patriotic threesome” of holidays celebrated across the United States — Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, and Labor Day — it’s a good time to ask how you’ll show your patriotism for the planet. It’s especially important this year, given the current wave of misappropriation and compromises facing our natural lands and resources. Eight new environmental books might offer you some ideas on how to accomplish that. They offer ideas for getting involved in politics, improving your activism, and making important changes in your homes and communities. We’ve excerpted the books’ official descriptions below and provided links to the publishers’ sites, but you should also be able to find these books in a variety of formats through your local bookstore or library. Tools to Save Our Home Planet: A Changemaker’s Guidebook edited by Nick Mucha, Jessica Flint, and Patrick Thomas The need for activism is more urgent than ever before and the risks are greater, too. Safe and effective activism has always required smart strategic planning, clear goals and creative tactics, and careful and detailed preparation. Without these, activists can end up injured, penalized, or jailed. If anything, these risks are greater today as powerful forces in government and industry resist the big changes needed to slow the climate crisis and keep Earth livable for generations to come. Tools to Save Our Home Planet: A Changemaker’s Guidebook reflects the wisdom and best advice from activists working in today’s volatile world. A go-to resource for driving change, it offers timely and relevant insights for purpose-aligned work. It is intended as a primer for those new to activism and a refresher for seasoned activists wanting to learn from their peers, a reassuring and inspirational companion to the environmental and justice movements that we desperately need as a society. When We’re in Charge: The Next Generation’s Guide to Leadership by Amanda Litman Most leadership books treat millennials and Gen Z like nuisances, focusing on older leadership constructs. Not this one. When We’re in Charge is a no-bullshit guide for the next generation of leaders on how to show up differently, break the cycle of the existing workplace. This book is a vital resource for new leaders trying to figure out how to get stuff done without drama. Offering solutions for today’s challenges, Litman offers arguments for the four-day workweek, why transparency is a powerful tool, and why it matters for you to both provide and take family leave. A necessary read for all who occupy or aspire to leadership roles, this book is a vision for a future where leaders at work are compassionate, genuine, and effective. Scientists on Survival: Personal Stories of Climate Action by Scientists for XR In this important and timely book, scientists from a broad range of disciplines detail their personal responses to climate change and the ecological crises that led them to form Scientists for XR [Extinction Rebellion] and work tirelessly within it. Whether their inspiration comes from education or activism, family ties or the work environment, the scientists writing here record what drives them, what non-violent direct action looks like to them, what led them to become interested in the environmental crisis that threatens us all, and what they see as the future of life on Earth. Public Land and Democracy in America: Understanding Conflict over Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by Julie Brugger Public Land and Democracy in America brings into focus the perspectives of a variety of groups affected by conflict over the monument, including residents of adjacent communities, ranchers, federal land management agency employees, and environmentalists. In the process of following management disputes at the monument over the years, Brugger considers how conceptions of democracy have shaped and been shaped by the regional landscape and by these disputes. Through this ethnographic evidence, Brugger proposes a concept of democracy that encompasses disparate meanings and experiences, embraces conflict, and suggests a crucial role for public lands in transforming antagonism into agonism. The State of Conservation: Rural America and the Conservation-Industrial Complex since 1920 by Joshua Nygren In the twentieth century, natural resource conservation emerged as a vital force in U.S. politics, laying the groundwork for present-day sustainability. Merging environmental, agricultural, and political history, Nygren examines the political economy and ecology of agricultural conservation through the lens of the “conservation-industrial complex.” This evolving public-private network — which united the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Congress, local and national organizations, and the agricultural industry — guided soil and water conservation in rural America for much of the century. Contrary to the classic tales of U.S. environmental politics and the rise and fall of the New Deal Order, this book emphasizes continuity. Nygren demonstrates how the conservation policies, programs, and partnerships of the 1930s and 1940s persisted through the age of environmentalism, and how their defining traits anticipated those typically associated with late twentieth-century political culture. Too Late to Awaken: What Lies Ahead When There Is No Future by Slavoj Žižek We hear all the time that we’re moments from doomsday. Around us, crises interlock and escalate, threatening our collective survival: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with its rising risk of nuclear warfare, is taking place against a backdrop of global warming, ecological breakdown, and widespread social and economic unrest. Protestors and politicians repeatedly call for action, but still we continue to drift towards disaster. We need to do something. But what if the only way for us to prevent catastrophe is to assume that it has already happened — to accept that we’re already five minutes past zero hour? Too Late to Awaken sees Slavoj Žižek forge a vital new space for a radical emancipatory politics that could avert our course to self-destruction. He illuminates why the liberal Left has so far failed to offer this alternative, and exposes the insidious propagandism of the fascist Right, which has appropriated and manipulated once-progressive ideas. Pithy, urgent, gutting and witty Žižek’s diagnosis reveals our current geopolitical nightmare in a startling new light, and shows how, in order to change our future, we must first focus on changing the past. How We Sold Our Future: The Failure to Fight Climate Change by Jens Beckert For decades we have known about the dangers of global warming. Nevertheless, greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase. How can we explain our failure to take the necessary measures to stop climate change? Why are we so reluctant to act? Beckert provides an answer to these questions. Our apparent inability to implement basic measures to combat climate change is due to the nature of power and incentive structures affecting companies, politicians, voters, and consumers. Drawing on social science research, he argues that climate change is an inevitable product of the structures of capitalist modernity which have been developing for the past 500 years. Our institutional and cultural arrangements are operating at the cost of destroying the natural environment and attempts to address global warming are almost inevitably bound to fail. Temperatures will continue to rise, and social and political conflicts will intensify. We are selling our future for the next quarterly figures, the upcoming election results, and today’s pleasure. Any realistic climate policy needs to focus on preparing societies for the consequences of escalating climate change and aim at strengthening social resilience to cope with the increasingly unstable natural world. Parenting in a Climate Crisis: A Handbook for Turning Fear into Action by Bridget Shirvell In this urgent parenting guide, learn how to navigate the uncertainty of the climate crisis and keep your kids informed, accountable, and hopeful — with simple actions you can take as a family to help the earth. Kids today are experiencing the climate crisis firsthand. Camp canceled because of wildfire smoke. Favorite beaches closed due to erosion. Recess held indoors due to extreme heat. How do parents help their children make sense of it all? And how can we keep our kids (and ourselves) from despair? Environmental journalist and parent Bridget Shirvell has created a handbook for parents to help them navigate these questions and more, weaving together expert advice from climate scientists, environmental activists, child psychologists, and parents across the country. She helps parents answer tough questions (how did we get here?) and raise kids who feel connected to and responsible for the natural world, feel motivated to make ecologically sound choices, and feel empowered to meet the challenges of the climate crisis—and to ultimately fight for change. Enjoy these summer reads throughout the holidays and get involved with activities and protests that support our environment and wildlife. Whether it’s changing the way you celebrate to more sustainable fun or joining environmental summer pursuits, we hope you’ll make good trouble this holiday season. For hundreds of additional environmental books — including several on staying calm in challenging times — visit the Revelator Reads archives. Republish this article for free! The post Summer of Change: New Books to Inspire Environmental Action appeared first on The Revelator.

Climate Activist Throws Bright Pink Paint on Glass Covering Picasso Painting in Montreal

The stunt is part of an environmental organization's efforts to draw attention to the dangerous wildfires spreading through Canada

Climate Activist Throws Bright Pink Paint on Glass Covering Picasso Painting in Montreal The stunt is part of an environmental organization’s efforts to draw attention to the dangerous wildfires spreading through Canada The activist threw paint on Pablo Picasso’s L'hétaïre (1901). Last Generation Canada A climate activist threw pink paint at Pablo Picasso’s L’hétaïre (1901) at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts last week. The 21-year-old man, identified as Marcel, is a member of Last Generation Canada, an environmental organization that works to combat climate change. After splashing Picasso’s portrait with the paint, Marcel made a speech in French to the gallery, which was captured on video and posted on social media by Last Generation Canada. “There are more than 200 wildfires in Canada at this moment, 83 of which are not protected [and] which are out of control,” he said. “There are too many problems here. There are people who are dying. … If Canada doesn’t do much, soon we will all be dying.” Quick fact: Picasso’s blue period Pablo Picasso created L’hétaïre during his famous “blue period,” when the artist painted monochromatic artworks in shades of blue and blue-green. Canada is in the midst of its wildfire season, which occurs between April and October. The blazes have consumed almost nine million acres across four Canadian provinces, report the New York Times’ Nasuna Stuart-Ulin and Vjosa Isai. This season is a particularly bad one. In early June, satellite data revealed that the number of fire hotspots was four times higher than normal, per the Associated Press’ M.K. Wildeman. Marcel’s stunt is part of a three-week “action phase” by Last Generation Canada, according to a statement from the organization. The group is demanding that the Canadian government form a “Climate Disaster Protection Agency” to aid those “whose homes, communities, lives and livelihoods have been destroyed by extreme weather, including wildfires worsened by the burning of fossil fuels.” Picasso’s L’hétaïre, which was on loan from the Pinacoteca Agnelli in Turin, Italy, was covered by a layer of protective glass, and the pink paint caused no visible damage, according to a statement from the museum. Two museum security guards confronted Marcel and turned him over to the Montreal police. Officials tell Hyperallergic’s Maya Pontone that Marcel has been released from custody and will later appear in court. “It is most unfortunate that this act carried out in the name of environmental activism targeted a work belonging to our global cultural heritage and under safekeeping for the benefit of future generations,” Stéphane Aquin, the director of the museum, says in the statement. “Museums and artists alike are allies in the fight for a better world.” In recent years, damaging the glass protecting famous artworks has become a popular method of protest among some climate change groups. However, one of the best-known groups, a British organization called Just Stop Oil, announced in March that it would start winding down such tactics after the United Kingdom decided to stop issuing new oil and gas licenses. “We value paint strokes and color composition over life itself,” Marcel says in the statement from Last Generation Canada. “A lot more resources have been put in place to secure and protect this artwork than to protect living, breathing people.” The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts was displaying L’hétaïre as part of the exhibition “Berthe Weill, Art Dealer of the Parisian Avant-Garde,” focused on the 20th-century French gallery-owner who exhibited Picasso’s early work. After the June 19 incident, the museum was closed for a short period before reopening later that day. L’hétaïre has not yet returned to the gallery. “I am not attacking art, nor am I destroying it. I am protecting it,” says Marcel in a social media post by Last Generation Canada. “Art, at its core, is depictions of life. It is by the living, for the living. There is no art on a dead planet.” Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

Measles Misinformation Is on the Rise – and Americans Are Hearing It, Survey Finds

Republicans are far more skeptical of vaccines and twice as likely as Democrats to believe the measles shot is worse than the disease.

By Arthur Allen | KFF Health NewsWhile the most serious measles epidemic in a decade has led to the deaths of two children and spread to nearly 30 states with no signs of letting up, beliefs about the safety of the measles vaccine and the threat of the disease are sharply polarized, fed by the anti-vaccine views of the country’s seniormost health official.About two-thirds of Republican-leaning parents are unaware of an uptick in measles cases this year while about two-thirds of Democratic ones knew about it, according to a KFF survey released Wednesday.Republicans are far more skeptical of vaccines and twice as likely (1 in 5) as Democrats (1 in 10) to believe the measles shot is worse than the disease, according to the survey of 1,380 U.S. adults.Some 35% of Republicans answering the survey, which was conducted April 8-15 online and by telephone, said the discredited theory linking the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine to autism was definitely or probably true – compared with just 10% of Democrats.Get Midday Must-Reads in Your InboxFive essential stories, expertly curated, to keep you informed on your lunch break.Sign up to receive the latest updates from U.S. News & World Report and our trusted partners and sponsors. By clicking submit, you are agreeing to our Terms and Conditions & Privacy Policy.The trends are roughly the same as KFF reported in a June 2023 survey. But in the new poll, 3 in 10 parents erroneously believed that vitamin A can prevent measles infections, a theory Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has brought into play since taking office during the measles outbreak.“The most alarming thing about the survey is that we’re seeing an uptick in the share of people who have heard these claims,” said co-author Ashley Kirzinger, associate director of KFF’s Public Opinion and Survey Research Program. KFF is a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News.“It’s not that more people are believing the autism theory, but more and more people are hearing about it,” Kirzinger said. Since doubts about vaccine safety directly reduce parents’ vaccination of their children, “that shows how important it is for actual information to be part of the media landscape,” she said.“This is what one would expect when people are confused by conflicting messages coming from people in positions of authority,” said Kelly Moore, president and CEO of Immunize.org, a vaccination advocacy group.Numerous scientific studies have established no link between any vaccine and autism. But Kennedy has ordered HHS to undertake an investigation of possible environmental contributors to autism, promising to have “some of the answers” behind an increase in the incidence of the condition by September.The deepening Republican skepticism toward vaccines makes it hard for accurate information to break through in many parts of the nation, said Rekha Lakshmanan, chief strategy officer at The Immunization Partnership, in Houston.Lakshmanan on April 23 was to present a paper on countering anti-vaccine activism to the World Vaccine Congress in Washington. It was based on a survey that found that in the Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Oklahoma state assemblies, lawmakers with medical professions were among those least likely to support public health measures.“There is a political layer that influences these lawmakers,” she said. When lawmakers invite vaccine opponents to testify at legislative hearings, for example, it feeds a deluge of misinformation that is difficult to counter, she said.Eric Ball, a pediatrician in Ladera Ranch, California, which was hit by a 2014-15 measles outbreak that started in Disneyland, said fear of measles and tighter California state restrictions on vaccine exemptions had staved off new infections in his Orange County community.“The biggest downside of measles vaccines is that they work really well. Everyone gets vaccinated, no one gets measles, everyone forgets about measles,” he said. “But when it comes back, they realize there are kids getting really sick and potentially dying in my community, and everyone says, ‘Holy crap; we better vaccinate!’”Ball treated three very sick children with measles in 2015. Afterward his practice stopped seeing unvaccinated patients. “We had had babies exposed in our waiting room,” he said. “We had disease spreading in our office, which was not cool.”Although two otherwise healthy young girls died of measles during the Texas outbreak, “people still aren’t scared of the disease,” said Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, which has seen a few cases.But the deaths “have created more angst, based on the number of calls I’m getting from parents trying to vaccinate their 4-month-old and 6-month-old babies,” Offit said. Children generally get their first measles shot at age 1, because it tends not to produce full immunity if given at a younger age.KFF Health News’ Jackie Fortiér contributed to this report.This article was produced by KFF Health News, a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF. It was originally published on April 23, 2025, and has been republished with permission.

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