A note on rising up and shutting down Netanyahu in Montreal/Tiohtià:ke, Sept. 2002

written by Stefan Christoff

photos by Kevin Walsh (1977-2022), may his memory live on in his photos

On September. 9, 2002, Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR),, organized a protest to block presidential candidate and now condemned war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu from speaking at Concordia University, alongside a network of community organisations. Netanyahu was invited to the campus groups by the Concordia chapter of Hillel and the Asper Foundation. The community was upset with the invitation and responded with a massive protest, rooted in the mobilization of Palestinian students, that both responded to the urgency of the moment and built on a longstanding, intergenerational Palestinian solidarity movement in the city. This event was an important moment in the history of protest in Montreal, with a political atmosphere that was shaped by the collective power of social movements. The 2002 protest against Netanyahu was both an important event at the time and also a warning about the clear and lethal danger that Netanyahu’s politics and racist nationalist colonial policies pose to the Palestinian people and to the world.

Today, the genocidal policies of the Israeli state that continue to target the Palestinian people in Gaza are driven by the toxic and necropolitics of Netanyahu. I am proud to have been a part of the organizing efforts that shut down Netanyahu in 2002; I feel that it illustrates the persisting urgency of the creative and politically powerful role that collective direct action can play in both sounding the alarm and refusing silence in the face of injustice. – Stefan Christoff (musician, community organizer, graduate student at Concordia University)