Carmella Gray-Cosgrove is a writer, a UBC grad student and a member of Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights, Independent Jewish Voices and the Apartheid Free UBC coalition. She is the managing editor of Riddle Fence Magazine, which is a PACBI signatory, and lives with her partner and children as an uninvited guest on the unceded territory of the Musqueam Nation. She submitted this essay on behalf of the Apartheid Free UBC coalition.
Despite encampments, student strikes and referendums, UBC has remained complicit in Israel’s invasion, annexation and genocide in Palestine.
Beyond these horrific crimes, Israel has been found by the International Court of Justice to be guilty of “inhuman acts” constituting apartheid. Specifically, Israel has violated the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, the same UN resolution violated by South Africa in 1971.
Between UBC’s refusal to engage with the student movement, enact a financial or academic boycott or directly acknowledge its abetment, we have been left with no choice but to move through the university’s bureaucratic channels. Despite our lack of familiarity with university governance, we felt it was the only way UBC would be amenable to student-led change.
In 2022, UBC Vancouver Senate — the highest academic governing body at UBC — resolved that it “condemns the illegal invasion of any sovereign territory by another power and human rights violations involving civilians.” Under this justification, Senate directed the university to end partnerships with Russian universities because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Israel is invading not just one but four sovereign territories: Palestine, Lebanon, Iran and Syria. Israel is annexing land from three of those states (Palestine, Lebanon and Syria). Israel is, most horrifically, exacting genocide in Palestine, which is recognized by human rights experts in the United Nations and Israel’s leading human rights organization, B’Tselem. The Senate is doing nothing.
Students want Senate to act consistently with this 2022 decision and acknowledge the impact of apartheid via the termination of partnerships with Israeli institutions. This includes Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and Tel Aviv University, which limit free speech, act at the forefront of military technology development and actively colonize Palestinian land. To prove students oppose this, our coalition organized a referendum asking the AMS to write a letter to Senate, demanding UBC end these institutional partnerships. This March, 8,894 UBC students voted in favour of this referendum — 83.5 per cent of voters. It was further endorsed by both AMS and GSS Councils.
Fuelled by the overwhelming student support for this initiative, we worked with student senators to bring a motion forward to Senate. We consulted with lawyers and faculty. We workshopped the content of the motion. We met with a range of senators, hoping to convince them of its importance for the university. Through our collaboration with Student Senator At-Large Drédyn Fontana, we decided to bring the motion forward this spring.
Fontana’s motion calls to end UBC’s institutional partnerships in Israel and describes how Palestinian and Arab students are discriminated against on the basis of characteristics protected under both UBC’s discrimination policy and the BC Human Rights Code. (When visiting Israel, Palestinian and Arab students and faculty must land in a separate airport, drive on segregated roadways, use segregated checkpoints and pass through segregated neighbourhoods. UBC students and faculty are not exempt from Israel’s apartheid system.)
Senate’s Agenda Committee proposed a special meeting in June to discuss Fontana’s anti-apartheid motion. We supported this special meeting because it would give senators time to have a comprehensive discussion of the motion and deeply consider the student body’s call to action. Despite our attempts to work within the system, UBC’s administration ultimately refused us this opportunity.
During Senate’s debate on whether to hold the special meeting, procedure was unclear and disadvantaged our motion. Typically, calling a special meeting requires a simple majority — provided it is scheduled within three weeks. However, since the proposed special meeting would occur in June — outside this time frame — a two-thirds majority was required to call the meeting.
The Chair, President Benoit-Antoine Bacon rushed the proceedings by repeatedly requesting senators keep their comments short — despite over 100 minutes remaining until the meeting’s adjournment.
Bacon also asked all members to debate only the special meeting and to refrain from debate about the contents of the anti-apartheid motion. Student senators respected this request — electing not to read letters they had received from coalition members that referenced the contents of the motion. Faculty Senator Joanne Fox ignored Bacon’s request and spent nearly three minutes calling the motion “politically motivated” and outside the purview of the Senate. The fact that UBC students and faculty on academic exchange programs in Israel are subject to racial segregation should be within Senate’s purview. Student senators, continuing to respect Bacon’s directive, did not refute Senator Fox’s opinions.
Second, Faculty Senator Wendy Norman attempted to minimize the AMS referendum results of 83.5 per cent by considering abstentions in a recalculation of the results. Vote percentages do not usually include abstentions — in fact, Senator Norman participated in such a vote less than half an hour before her comments. And lastly, a convocation senator participating online reiterated his ‘no’ vote several times in the rollcall — he ended the meeting with a wine glass in hand. It is unclear if he was aware of the optics of his actions while voting against student senators, contributing to the suppression of student participation in the Senate.
Ultimately, the proposed special meeting missed the two-thirds requirement by five votes, with a final vote of 43 in favour (64 per cent) and 24 opposed (36 per cent). The narrow margins of the loss stung all the more for the notable abstention of four student senators: incoming AMS President Dylan Evans, VP AUA Zarifa Nawar, incoming VP AUA Jaiya Panchi and a fourth student senator who lost connection to the Zoom call just before the vote. By abstaining, these four betrayed over 60,000 students represented by the AMS letter to the Senate regarding the referendum to cut ties. We don’t know why these senators abstained, but we do know that McGill University terminated its Memorandum of Understandings with McGill’s student union, citing union-supported advocacy for Palestine. Are similar threats being made at UBC?
The university certainly has leverage. One glaring pressure point in the AMS budget is UBC’s Food Security Initiatives (FSI) funding, which supports the AMS Food Bank. In the 2024/25 fiscal year, the AMS Food Bank saw 27,329 visits from 2,366 UBC students during just 80 open days. The AMS has already cut food bank access for staff which has been devastating for university workers. This vital service is primarily funded by UBC, which will dedicate $1.2 million across all the university’s food security initiatives next year.
A week after the Senate meeting, our coalition asked AMS Council for a clear and definitive picture of what discretionary funding UBC provides the AMS. Council was unable to provide an answer. In this meeting, we also asked Evans and Nawar if UBC administrators had leveraged discretionary funding for their abstentions in the Senate vote. Despite prompting by another AMS executive, neither Evans nor Nawar answered these questions. (Nawar resigned shortly before the meeting started, thus she was unable to speak during the response period. Panchi’s term as VP AUA had not yet started, so she wasn’t at Council.)
We doubt the AMS can independently represent the student body if its purse strings are held by a system more vested in administrative functions than student interests. The anti-apartheid motion is premised on the fact that without equal human rights, students and faculty who participate in UBC programs in apartheid Israel are denied access to the most fundamental of academic freedoms. How can students challenge UBC's policies when UBC could pull a million dollars of food security funding on a whim?
The student-led motion to cut ties with apartheid has been referred back to the Agenda Committee, which will meet with the Global Engagement & Partnerships Working Group in early May to decide its fate. We’re worried that pressure from Provost Gage Averill’s Global Partnerships working group will prevent this important motion from being considered by Senate.
What would it look like for the university to engage in good faith with the student body and take action to protect UBC students and faculty from discrimination?
Rather than sidelining the motion to a working group (which we know leads nowhere from previous task forces on tuition costs and food security), the Senate could form an Anti-Apartheid ad hoc committee with student advocates as guests. We know that this issue is not going away, so having a clear and consistent governance structure to protect UBC students from racial discrimination in institutional partnerships abroad is paramount.
Additionally, food security funding must be permanent, not discretionary. No student senator should be forced to choose between keeping essential funding for students experiencing food insecurity and protecting UBC students and faculty from discrimination in UBC’s partnerships.
Members of the Senate must be given the opportunity to listen to students and end UBC’s partnerships with apartheid Israel. As universities restrict students’ rights to protest genocide and apartheid, student representatives must be able to express their constituents' wishes without fear of reprisal and loss of food security funding. After all, what use is a student union or student senators when they have no ability to advocate for students?
We hope that our student senators move forward with integrity and a commitment to representing their constituents. Further, we urge the Agenda Committee to seek input directly from the Palestinian and Jewish students working on this motion, and we call for that committee to bring this motion to the floor of the Senate for a comprehensive debate. Senate must hear directly from the students and faculty most profoundly affected by continued partnerships with Israeli institutions — partnerships that violate our basic human rights. The Apartheid Free UBC coalition urges Senate to recognize the injustice and harm of continued partnerships with institutions in all states found by the International Court of Justice to be in violation of prohibitions against racial segregation and apartheid. At the moment, there is just one.
This is an opinion essay. It reflects the contributor’s views and may not reflect the views of The Ubyssey as a whole. Contribute to the conversation by visiting ubyssey.ca/pages/submit-an-opinion.
