Intersectionality and Palestine Solidarity

Beginning in the US and spreading across Canadian campuses and beyond, students, faculty, and other publics are building new Palestine solidarity encampments and movements committed to a model of coalition politics that resonates deeply with feminist intersectional praxis.

Student-led coalitions like the People's University for Palestine, which sprang up on the grassy quad at the University of Alberta on Thursday, May 9, are consciously inter-community and non-violent. These coalitions bring together diverse members of our community to call for dialogue about our University's institutional investments and partnerships that make occupation and war possible. Community-led and justice-orientated coalitions prioritizing inclusion, dialogue and a culture of care which are at the heart of transformative intersectional politics.

While the proliferation of peace encampments across our places of learning and work fills me with optimism, I remain deeply worried. These sites have faced violence from campus security and heavily armed police forces. At the University of Alberta, police in riot gear descended on the small encampment -- just hours after their first Shabbat meal together and not more than two days since the encampment was established -- with batons and other weapons to beat the participants and break up tents, a make-shift library, and the fledgling community space.

As the director of a research and learning institute committed to intersectional analysis and praxis, I stand in solidarity with students, colleagues, and community members in denouncing settler colonialism, anti-Palestinian racism, and militarized police violence on our campus and in our community. I support the call of the Student Movement for Palestine for the University to disclose and divest from institutions and partnerships implicated in the occupation, to defend our right to protest, and to publicly condemn the genocide.

Siobhan Byrne
Director of the Institute for Intersectionality Studies