Tensions linked to the war in the Middle East, between Israel and Hamas, are reaching Canadian campuses. Violent incidents pitted students from the Jewish community against other students, defenders of the Palestinian cause, on Wednesday, November 8. They took place on the grounds of Concordia University, an English-speaking university located in downtown Montreal and required the intervention of the police to restore calm. Three people were injured, including two security guards and a 23-year-old student; a young woman arrested.
In videos broadcast on the social network X (formerly Twitter), two groups of a few dozen people insult each other before coming to blows. Some, at the call of the Jewish student association Startup Nation Hillel, are gathered around a table surrounded by empty chairs, to honor the hostages held by Hamas since October 7. The others, more numerous, brandish portraits of children from Gaza, topped with the words “Murdered by Israel”. Versions of the circumstances of these clashes diverge, with each group accusing the other of having been at the origin of the clashes.
A young woman quoted by the Canadian channel CBC, without revealing her identity, claimed that she was buying a scarf from a kiosk set up in a Concordia room to raise funds for a Palestinian charity, when a group of people pro- Israelis, burst in and insulted them. Also present on the scene, Ora Bar, 25, a journalism student at Concordia, denies this version of the facts. This young Israeli who arrived with her parents in Canada in 2009 lost a friend in the Hamas attacks against the Reïm music festival; she has no news of another, detained in Gaza.
She assures, however, that she has never given up on holding an opening dialogue with her Palestinian friends. “ One of our signs placed around the table yesterday said that we too were crying, the babies of Gaza.she says. But in front, they were immediately very aggressive. I heard them shouting “Jews, you can’t hide, go back to Poland”. One of them personally threatened me, telling me that he now knew my face. »
Still in shock, she is convinced that this “surge of hatred” within his university will spill over throughout the country. In less than forty-eight hours, a synagogue and a Jewish community center on the island of Montreal were targeted by incendiary devices, and two Jewish schools in the Quebec metropolis were targeted by gunfire, without causing any injuries.
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