Majd Al-Shihabi and Deb Cowen (University of Toronto)
As the sun set on one of the longest days of the year, we looked out over the nearly 200 tents that graced the University of Toronto’s front lawn and saw “Lubya” written in big, red, spray painted letters. This was not the hillside village in northern Palestine that was destroyed during the 1948 Nakba, but rather part of the massive “tent atlas” at the “People’s Circle for Palestine”, created to make memory material. We had just come from “Shabbat in the liberated zone”—a treasured weekly event led by Jewish groups and multi-faith friends, and one of the regular spaces of ceremony and solidarity in the Palestinian liberation encampment that had become one of the largest and longest lasting in the world.
As Majd gestured towards the tent with the red lettering that refused the erasure of his home town, he also shared stories of the colonial maps that aimed to both mark and unmake peoples through claims to jurisdiction over land. We reflected on the haunted geographies of camp life here and there (cf. Seikaly 2024); the refugee camps that may define the lives of the dispossessed for generations, and the liberation camps that came to define a global student led movement to end the genocide and demand Palestinian liberation in the spring of 2024.
Often referred to as the “Harvard of the North”, for 62 days the University of Toronto became internationally known in relation to another geographical reference point: Gaza. UofT is Canada’s largest university, ranked among the top 20 globally, as the administration reminds us with aggressive frequency. UofT has 97,678 students from 170 countries and is the largest landholder and employer in Tkaronto (Toronto), the fourth largest city on the continent. By tracking its financial investments and academic partnerships, the encampment made visible how, like other elite institutions of higher learning, UofT is complicit in Israeli apartheid, dispossession and genocide.
As we reflected on these geographies of colonial violence and anti-colonial solidarity, we recalled another story, from the encampment Shabbat service. In acknowledging the Indigenous lands we gather upon in Tkaronto and drawing connections between decolonization from Turtle Island to Palestine, a Jewish faculty member recounted “the most generous invitation” which had come from a Palestinian comrade, who proclaimed, “I can’t wait to invite you to my table in a free and liberated Palestine!”
As a pair of Palestinian (Majd) and Jewish (Deb) queer geographers who actively supported the UofT encampment, we offer these reflections on the unprecedented eight-week spatial struggle on our campus, in the context of eight decades of global struggle for a free Palestine. We attend to the powerful challenge that the People’s Circle for Palestine mounted to this colonial institution’s practice of property, ecology, infrastructure and circulation. We emphasize the ways this collective action called fundamental tenets of settler colonialism into question, both here on Turtle Island and there in Palestine, and provided radical alternatives in its demands on the University and in the models of everyday life it fostered on site. While the action itself was temporary, we suggest that its impacts are lasting on the people, the University and the city it touched. We focus our analysis on a fence.
The Bestowal of Bad Infrastructure
On April 28, 2024, the University of Toronto administration took decisive action. As mass popular movements around the world continued to demand an end to the Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people, and as South Africa led the charge at the International Court of Justice to stop the invasion of Rafah, our institution urgently worked to protect its cherished front lawn from the political speech and assembly of its own students.
Fearful of the wave of encampments appearing across North American universities, and, no doubt, the substance of their political demands for change, the administration erected an enormous metal fence around the campus’ central open space to keep potential campers out. The fence was accompanied by an email directive asserting the institution’s unilateral jurisdiction over ‘private property’ and declaring any unauthorized incursion to be “trespass”.
King’s College Circle is the historic centre of the University dating back to the colonial settlement of the city in the mid 19th century and remains its most precious real estate. The Circle is a substantial green space lined by key sites of this elite institution’s rule and reproduction; the President’s office, Governing Council Chambers, and Convocation Hall, where 30 graduation ceremonies take place over almost as many days every spring. This large circle of grass at the heart of the prestigious campus is the heavily branded view of this massive institution—literally its postcard image.
Just a few days later, at 4am in the morning on May 2, 2024, over a hundred members of the University community, coordinated by a student group called “Occupy UofT”, established the “People’s Circle for Palestine”. The fence that had first stood as the stern face of the institutional elite in its pro-Israel alignment was swiftly transformed into media for the protection of a multi-racial and multi-faith space of collaboration, co-resistance and creative action for Palestinian liberation. Erected to protect the institution from internal demands for change, this large, linear metal structure was repurposed as critical infrastructure for the encampment’s collective experimentation in otherwise world building.
Fence as Infrastructure, Jurisdiction and Ecology
A fence is neither a border nor a wall, even as it has resonances with both. While fences remain marginal in the study of linear infrastructure, they are “one of the most ubiquitous products of human civilization” (McInturff et al. 2020). Borders and walls enact a forceful assertion of state sovereignty and the control of space, whereas “fences are often framed as a management tool rather than a globally significant ecological feature”. Nevertheless, fences assert an everyday spatial and political order of things such that the “construction of new fences also frequently accompanies shifting systems of land tenure” (ibid.).
It was upon the transgression of the fence that “King’s College Circle” could be renamed from within as the newly liberated “People’s Circle for Palestine”. The physical fence was almost instantly transformed into a canvas of visual and textual expression. Within hours, thousands of community members rushed to rally at the encampment, with many affixing banners and placards to the fence to proclaim the Circle’s new identity and political order. The fence became a media for demands for disclosure, divestment and cutting ties with Israeli academic institutions that operate in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and to make visible the solidarity of campus, labour and community groups including: Queers 4 Palestine, Canadian Union of Public Employees, Black Faculty for Palestine, Health Workers 4 Palestine, UofT Alum 4 Palestine, Faculty 4 Palestine, Jewish Faculty Network. The new form of the fence reminded local and wider publics that the Circle was always already Indigenous land, proclaimed solidarity with the people of Gaza, demanded arms embargoes against Israel, asked, “You think an encampment is more offensive than a genocide?” and insisted that “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free“.
Beyond its significance as communications media, the fence also served as infrastructure of circulation and so too, jurisdiction. Fences are “differentially permeable to species and processes, and may be quickly constructed and deconstructed by people” (McInturff et al. 2020). Control of the fence allowed the camp to assert authority over the contours of that permeability. The camp established a system of managing access to the site and so the integrity of the social life within. As Doreen Massey (1993) insists, the specificity of a place “is constructed out of a particular constellation of social relations, meeting and weaving together at a particular locus … each place can be seen as a particular, unique, point of their intersection”. Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer, musician and academic, Leanne Betasamasoke Simpson (2021) adds further depth to the relationship between circulation and placemaking through her engagement with the political tactic of the blockade and Anishinaabe stories of the beaver. For Simpson, “beaver infrastructure” can teach us about how blocking flows is not only disruptive but also fundamentally generative. The Amik (beaver) builds dams that constrain flows, but these dams create wetlands teeming with life by reorganizing circulation. Emphasizing the generative capacities of managing circulation, Simpson (2021: 14) explains “Amik is a world builder”. In other words, place is made particular by the unique combinations of flows that come together in a specific space over time, and those flows are the product of struggle, collaboration, and infrastructures that enable or constrain movement(s).
Volunteer marshals trained in de-escalation provided around-the-clock protection at the camp’s front gate. Campus and wider communities were invited to contribute to the experimentation underway in daily teach-ins, arts activities, prayer services, discussion groups, concerts, film screenings, and dance lessons. In this way, the fence was also fundamental to recasting the meaning of “security”. Working from the knowledge and experience of Black and Indigenous people on the violence of colonial carceral systems, layered with the acute exposure to police violence against pro-Palestinian protesters, the Circle rejected these forms of “security” outright. The management of the fence’s permeability ensured that the Circle could honor principles of non-violence, anti-racism, and gender and sexual diversity. The camp’s appropriation of the fence allowed for protection from counter-protests—the source of aggressive anti-Palestinian racism, anti-Indigenous racism, antisemitism, homo- and transphobia.
In other words, the capture and recasting of perimeter control was thus vital to the practice of abolitionist politics in its refusal to allow police into the site or the logics of policing into camp consciousness. Control of circulation into the site was fundamental to asserting jurisdiction over the site and, at least temporarily, wresting it from the assumed authority of a settler institution and legal regime.
The People’s Fence?
The People’s Circle for Palestine was a space from which to make urgent demands for terminating institutional complicity in genocide, but at once became a precious place of creativity, learning and experimentation. The Circle offered refreshing answers to questions that are at the core of institutions of higher learning regarding how and what we know. After visiting the Circle, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, commented on this courageous and creative pedagogy:
I came away recognizing that these students are embodying everything I’d ever taught in my classes, everything I’d written about in my books about resistance and generative refusal … The encampment community was everything I’d ever dreamed a university could be. Engaged students studying, dreaming and making otherwise, with care and thoughtfulness as their foundation, supported by their professors.
Colonial relations locally in Tkaronto and across Turtle Island were challenged in this stand against colonial violence in Palestine, and here too, the fence was centrally implicated. A sacred fire tended by Anishinaabe fire keepers and aunties buoyed the action from its earliest days. Campers quickly covered the nearby sections of the fence in tarp to give privacy to those coming to participate in ceremony and healing. The fence was modified out of efforts to respect Indigenous sovereignty, which also entailed prioritizing Indigenous peoples’ movements. City-wide marches often culminated at the Circle but were kept outside the camp to protect from counter-protester violence. The singular exception to this rule was the march for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, which was invited into the encampment in a powerful display of Indigenous feminist solidarity.
The commitment to be in good relation with Indigenous peoples and lands entailed a practice of care for the wider ecologies of the site. The camp built sustainable systems for composting and other waste management, and for solar energy to power the Circle’s activities, while litter was nowhere to be seen. This ethic of care for ecologies extended to more than human life. The excited activity of a pair of red-tailed hawks adjacent to the main gate at the inauguration of the camp and their persistent presence for its duration were seen as signs of solidarity. When an arborist explained that the oldest oak tree on campus that stood at the camp entrance was ailing and vulnerable, campers re-organized circulation to protect its roots, shifting the entrance further east and surrounding the tree with a banner that read “protect this tree”.
Within the Circle, students, staff and faculty who are governed by the University as individual consumers and producers of courses and degrees, practiced relating to each other and the land differently. Hardened categories of social experience became permeable at their tired edges. Dialogue unfolded that recalibrated assumptions and identities. Rigorous, nuanced and intimate debate was everywhere to be heard. In precious moments, learners became leaders, taken-for granted hierarchies were challenged if not transgressed, and the campus community was transformed in humble ways.
“Welcome to the Liberated Zone”, announced the banner at the information tent close to the entrance, where new campers were equipped with a tent, a sleeping bag, thermal pads, blankets, and other essentials. A commitment to provisioning new ways of being together, of learning about each other, and of struggling together was an unspoken ethos of camp life, and one that many were hungry for in this ghastly time of genocide. This was not a simple or seamless process; the often messy and painful work of coalition sometimes erupted in the camp in deeply trying ways.
The camp was successful in materially provisioning the Circle, but was not well prepared for the inevitable conflicts that are bound to emerge within collectives. If racial capitalism and settler colonialism produce carceral societies that reduce our capacity for addressing conflict in generative ways, often leaving us without alternative instincts or skills, then anticipating dissonance within our movements and rebuilding these capacities becomes vital to the revolutionary work of worldbuilding (Hayes 2023; Hayes and Kaba 2023).[1] Within the boundaries of the fence, the camp convened a coalition, a community of communities, some of whom interpreted the promise of liberation literally, while others saw it as an aspiration. Conflicts inevitably arose as hundreds of young people collectively embarked on an ambitious project of political education, and experimented with the complexity of enacting non-carceral and abolitionist forms of community life. Identifying Palestine’s land and people as the qibla of the camp informed the struggle of maintaining coalitional relationality through difference, affect, and power.
Decades ago, Cathy J. Cohen offered a powerful Black feminist critique of the promise of queer coalition across racial unevenness. Cohen (1997: 445) interrogated the ways that racial privilege can underpin foundational assumptions of political life, including within supposedly radical movements, but still emphasizes the possibility for profound transformation when movements attend to these challenges. “By transformational,” Cohen writes, “I mean a politics that does not search for opportunities to integrate into dominant institutions and normative social relationships, but instead pursues a political agenda that seeks to change values, definitions, and laws which make these institutions and relationships oppressive.”
While divisions no doubt took shape along familiar and systemic lines of anti-Blackness, anti-Palestinian racism, transphobia, and anti-Indigenous racism, the pursuit of the kind of agenda for change that Cohen points to was also evident. As Leanne Betasamosake Simpson recounts:
A careful considered practice of living communally that at its foundation is based on relationality. The evidence for this was everywhere in the People’s Circle for Palestine and in particular, in the encampments community programming and care team. Each day, there is programming that centers the experiences of Gazans and Palestinians while making the links to other movements and communities. Shabbat Rituals on Friday. Jummah Prayers. Teach-ins on Kashmir; Black Lives, Memory and Genocides, and Queer and Trans Solidarity. Yoga, art therapy and mindfulness sessions. Film screenings. Creative writing. Peer support and regular sessions with counselors onsite. Graduation ceremonies for students in Gaza who are unable to graduate because the physical buildings of their universities have been destroyed. Vigils for those murdered in the recent bombing of the tent community in Rafah.
To the Barricades
The UofT encampment remade a long stretch of metal from an infrastructure of unilateral authority of an elite settler institution, to the negotiated authority of a multi-faith and multi-racial movement. As Winona LaDuke and Deb have argued, “Infrastructure is not inherently colonial.” In fact, they insist that “effective initiatives for justice, decolonization, and planetary survival must center infrastructure in their efforts” (LaDuke and Cowen 2020). The appropriation of the fence and the inversion of its effects and affect was a key to a larger refusal and inversion of imperial lifeworlds.
The fence became critical infrastructure in the encampment’s answer to a political question that African Guyanese feminist, Andaiye (2020), repeatedly posed throughout her life and her writing: “How will we organize to live?” The perimeter fence was so profoundly implicated in how space and sociality could be organized that campers practiced extraordinary care for this precious infrastructure. They worked on it, changed it, and made it into an asset rather than an obstacle. With an implicit recognition that fences, as infrastructures of managing movement, “have the ability to both benefit and harm the ecosystems in which they occur” (McInturff et al. 2020), the People’s Circle for Palestine participated in a sophisticated politics of mobility (cf. Sheller 2018).
It was precisely this occupation of infrastructure and the power it provided to challenge the institution’s authority over the site that came to define the final chapter of the political action—this time in the courts. As efforts to negotiate the camp’s demands stalled, with campers demands for “commitments” met with the institution’s offers of “committees”, the administration filed an injunction to have the encampment forcibly cleared. Their legal team presented arguments before a judge and a packed courtroom, bolstered by over 1,000 pages of evidence and affidavits. Ironically, it was the appropriation of the fence—first erected by the administration—that became the hinge for their arguments for forcible clearance of the camp.
The administration’s legal team argued that the camp was unlawful as it usurped the private property rights of the “owner”. They pointed to the camp’s control and renaming of the site and the Circle’s community guidelines on anti-racism as evidence of this theft of jurisdiction. In his 100-page decision, Justice Koehnen summarized these claims:
Since the encampment began, the occupants have implemented a controlled entry system to the fenced area surrounding Front Campus. Entry is controlled by a “gate team”, “marshals”, and an “onboarding” team. They regulate access to the encampment in accordance with the encampment’s community guidelines and entry policy … If the visitor is permitted to continue, they proceed to the “onboarding” desk attended by members of the “onboarding team”. The desk is affixed with posters setting out the “community guidelines” that govern the encampment. The guidelines are also posted on Instagram. Those guidelines prohibit aggressive behaviour, racism or discrimination of any kind.
The judge asserted that the administration had not demonstrated that the encampment was either violent or antisemitic, yet they had successfully argued that the sanctity of private property had been violated. The court ruling sanctioned the use of police force to clear the camp and folded the front lawn back under the authority of the University administration by affirming Euro-Western property law:
In our society we have decided that the owner of property generally gets to decide what happens on the property. If the protesters can take that power for themselves by seizing Front Campus, there is nothing to stop a stronger group from coming and taking the space over from the current protesters. That leads to chaos. Society needs an orderly way of addressing competing demands on space. The system we have agreed to is that the owner gets to decide how to use the space.
The ruling asserted the limits of the action in its revolutionary ambition to (contribute to) end genocide and colonialism. Yet, the court ruling also confirmed the power of the protest camp as a spatial practice. Indeed, the encampment refused the property rights of the University, temporarily subordinating the economic and legal powers of the administration to the social power of the student movement (cf. Wright 2019). Fundamentally, the protest camp unsettles the power of private land ownership as the organizing principle of space. However, underlying the encampment’s challenge to the University’s private property rights lies an even more profound refusal to settler state jurisdiction that takes us directly back to the opening scene of this reflection.
The Circle’s demand for an end to the University’s colonial complicity in Palestine and on Turtle Island took shape through a refusal of jurisdiction and the production of a fierce but also fragile new order. It hinged on the assertion of the connections between settler colonialism here and there (Elia 2023). The very physical shape of the camp enacted this profound legal and political challenge. As the tents of the People’s Circle were assembled into an “atlas of Palestine”, they challenged not only the integrity of the “private property” of the University in its exclusive right to govern King’s College Circle, but so too the imperial jurisdiction of the British Crown, which is the colonial condition of possibility for both Canada and Israel as settler states. As Pasternak (2014) argues: “the state’s claims to jurisdiction over Indigenous lands assume the authority to inaugurate law where law already exists and presume the new forms that law will take. These presumptions preclude the asking of pertinent questions about which laws should apply on these lands.”
Despite the public commitments of the University, the Canadian settler state, and its courts to meaningfully redress and work to restore Indigenous culture and law through a decade-old Truth and Reconciliation process, none of this came to bear on their assertion of private property rights. The institution’s claims were animated by additional hypocrisy given the specific local geography of UofT’s front campus. Just meters away from the Circle stands Ziibiing, a new Indigenous landscape project that “grew out of the first call to action in Answering the Call: Wecheehetowin, the final report of the Steering Committee for the U of T Response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. It provides a dedicated place for Indigenous students, staff, faculty members, and librarians to gather, teach, and learn as well as to host ceremonies and celebrations”. Ziibiing had its opening celebration less than a week before the inauguration of the People’s Circle for Palestine.
We thus return to Lubya, the northern Palestinian village which was violently depopulated on the ground in 1948 and erased from colonial cartography soon thereafter, but marked again on this living, breathing map in a Palestine liberation camp on territory subject to the Dish With One Spoon Wampum, the lands of the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe and Wendat peoples (Simpson 2008). Even as the collective action was temporary, the spaces and subjectivities it touched were transformed in a manner that will long outlast the People’s Circle for Palestine’s 62 days. No doubt, we will continue to witness (and enact) insurgent practices of occupying and inverting infrastructure and making memory material until colonial jurisdiction withers, until Indigenous peoples from Turtle Island to Palestine have land back, and until we may gather to envision our collective flourishing, as Indigenous hosts and guests on liberated lands.
Acknowledgements
We are deeply grateful to Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Alissa Trotz, Shiri Pasternak and Ariel Katz for generous comments that made this brief reflection stronger. We remain responsible for any errors or omissions.
Endnote
[1] We are grateful to Leanne Betasamasoke Simpson for highlighting this lesson for us.
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