CCJ statement of solidarity with the People’s University for Gaza encampment at UBC

The UBC Centre for Climate Justice fully supports the free speech and assembly rights of students, faculty, staff, and community members participating in the “People’s University For Gaza” encampment. After months of witnessing Israel’s cataclysmic and unending attacks on Palestinian civilians, including the destruction of every university and the majority of schools and hospitals in Gaza, countless groups and individuals around the world have engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience. This impulse is core to our own mission at the CCJ, knowing that climate justice is impossible while militarism, apartheid, occupation, and colonization escalate.

Universities exist to cultivate democratic values of disagreement and dissent, including criticism directed at the university itself. By leading with passion and solidarity, students are enacting UBC’s own expressed purpose to “foster global citizenship and advance a sustainable and just society across British Columbia, Canada and the world.” There is no greater obligation of global citizenship, and no greater expression of justice, than to protest ongoing war crimes and a plausible genocide.

One does not need to agree with every one of the students’ demands in order to vocally defend their right to make those demands, or to recognize that they are acting based on their ethics and consciences. Organizers of the encampment have been explicit in their opposition to behaviours that are discriminatory, violent or harassing. We therefore reject unequivocally any move to punish students and their supporters, whether academically, professionally or criminally. Having already witnessed shocking displays of police brutality against similar encampments on campuses across North America, we are extremely alarmed that our university, in its first communication about the peaceful protest, mentioned liaising with the RCMP. Universities have a profound duty of care towards their students that must shape UBC’s response. Police involvement is not only unnecessary but highly dangerous for our most vulnerable students and community members, including international students.

We speak in support of the encampment’s right to expression and assembly because the CCJ itself exists, in large part, because of this kind of mobilization. In 2018 and 2019, UBC’s campuses surged with student-led climate protests and civil disobedience, which included building occupations and hunger strikes. Partly in response to these principled collective actions, the university agreed to a series of demands, including the passing of a historic Climate Emergency Declaration in 2019 and limited divestment from fossil fuels. As part of the university’s commitments under the climate emergency declaration, the CCJ was born.

The students speaking out for Palestine and calling for divestment are part of this legacy, one that includes many righteous mobilizations of the past – against Apartheid in South Africa, against the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, and against colonial dispossession and genocide on these unceded Indigenous lands. We are grateful for their courage and will stand with them in the face of repression.

This statement was drafted by CCJ leadership and staff. It does not reflect the official views of the University of British Columbia or all faculty associated with the CCJ.