The 'People’s University for Gaza' has an air of slight embarrassment about it, like the subdued defiance of a child
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It’s late May at the University of British Columbia’s Point Grey campus, and sunbathers dot the unoccupied Astroturf adjacent to the pro-Palestinian encampment that was erected on MacInnes Field a month ago. It’s quiet. There’s not a security guard or police officer in sight. Less than a block away, graduates in cap and gown pose for photos in front of a water fountain.
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Campus life moves around the protest site like a river flowing past a rock: briefly diverted, but ultimately heading in the same direction.
You can make your way around the perimeter of the encampment unnoticed. I did. The makeshift walls are piles of junk: an umbrella here, a dresser drawer there and loose pieces of fibreboard with small finishing nails hammered into the ends. Are the nails meant to intimidate? They don’t — they’re protest kitsch, at worst. I’m reminded of the spooky graveyard Halloween displays my neighbour would fashion when his kids were younger; sure enough, if you peek through a hole in the wall, there’s a blue rubber bin with “Halloween” scrawled on the side in black Sharpie. It must have come from some university kid’s parents’ basement. I wonder if they’re paying tuition for their child to sleep in one of the dozens of tents on the sports field, with a keffiyeh to help stay warm at night.
The encampment group calls itself the “People’s University for Gaza at UBC” and is allegedly student-led. Their demands include forcing UBC to: publicly condemn “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” in Gaza, remove police from campus, have no relationships with Israeli universities, divest from named Israeli companies and provide $2 million “to enable the funding........