Statement: SFU students encourage supporting UBC encampment for Gaza

UBC encampment demanding divestment from Israel on its fourth day

Preamble

We are a collective group of Simon Fraser University (SFU) students involved in campus and city politics, from labour, Indigenous and racial justice, to drug law. 

We join an international student movement and growing global consensus to ensure that more eyes are on Gaza, on Rafah, on Palestine, and we remain steadfast in pressuring complicit institutions to cut ties with the genocidal state of Israel. 

Importantly, Israel is not acting alone, but is rather supported by other nation states and institutions, including universities, such as our own. We are grateful for the Palestinian people’s movement, who in this deeply tragic time of genocide and violence have revived anti-colonial and anti-imperial movements around the world. We must heed their calls to divest from militarization, violence and carcerality. We must do our part to stop the genocide. SFU students are aware that UBC currently has deeper ties to the violent machine of Israel, and as Israel announces it plans to attack Rafah regardless of a truce deal, we call on SFU students to support the active UBC encampment rather than start a second. 

The occupation must end. And our anti-colonial work is far from done. 

SFU Students for Palestine: Why do we show up at UBC?

We share values with other movement groups, particularly the UBC students leading the encampment for Palestine, including that:

• Our universities must release an immediate statement calling for a ceasefire and an end to the genocide in Palestine – including condeming the scholasticide in Gaza.

• Our universities must divest from military assets. 

  • SFU must immediately divest university funds from war contractors and complicit institutions including Booz Allen Hamilton, BAE Systems, and CAE Inc., and relationships with Israeli companies echoing calls made by the SFU Community. 

• Our universities must formally join the global academic boycott of Israel. 

• Our universities must take initiative to proactively ensure the safety of Palestinian, Black, Arab, Muslim, Jewish and/or Indigenous students and otherwise racialized staff, domestic and international students, and faculty on campus. 

  • SFU must contract Palestinian and Jewish Mental Health Professionals; and if unable, contract an Arab mental health professional.

  • SFU must establish a Palestinian Student Support and Healing Space on campus; facilitated by said professionals.

• Our university must commit to keep cops off campus.

  • Make campuses a police-free space.

  • SFU must exclude former police officers from campus security management positions.

  • SFU must refuse to host research funding that will be allocated to research collaborations with the RCMP, Vancouver Police, and Surrey Police departments.

Moreover, we recognize that settler colonialism generates a hierarchy of power that creates inequities across our campus. For that reason, we stand in solidarity with demands of the SFU-based coalition Contract Worker Justice, behind the mission of the Teaching Support Staff Union of including all academic workers, and the vision of dismantling the drug war from SFU partner, the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition, as part of a broader anti-colonial mission. When the genocide ends, and the wall falls, our work and solidarity with these movements will continue. 

For call-outs and ways to support, follow the People’s University for Gaza - UBC.

If you are a SFU student or alumni, you can sign this open letter on The Mainlander.