Welcome to Concordia: Palestinian Activism Now Part of the Orientation Experience

By Howie Silbiger

After nearly three years of anti-Israel protests, occupations, vandalism, student strikes and slogans that have crossed repeatedly into open Jew hatred, including “Kill the Jews” graffiti and a protester telling Jewish and pro-Israel demonstrators that the “Final Solution is coming your way,” apparently one thing Concordia University students still require is an introduction to Palestinian activism.

Students arriving at Concordia for the new academic year are being offered a “DisOrientation” program that includes a Sept. 2 workshop devoted to “Solidarity with Palestinian Human Rights at Concordia,” presented with Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights Concordia. It is part of several days of alternative orientation programming running from Aug. 29 through Sept. 3, with a schedule that mixes fairly conventional student activities such as brunches, pizza, a campus tour and a barbecue with workshops on student strikes, “Life Under Capitalism & the War on Drugs,” queer antifascist resistance and Palestinian activism.

The Palestinian workshop begins at 11 a.m. at the Concordia Student Union lounge in the Hall Building. Students then get a 15-minute break before moving directly into “A Guide to Student Strikes” with Concordia Student Union campaigns, a subject for which Concordia has accumulated plenty of practical experience over the past few years.

Since the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, Concordia has been one of the centres of Montreal’s increasingly ugly anti-Israel protest movement. In November of that year, a confrontation between pro-Palestinian demonstrators and Jewish students inside the Hall Building required police intervention.

The dispute erupted as Jewish students were drawing attention to the Israeli hostages while Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights was holding a keffiyeh sale nearby.

The confrontations and demonstrations continued.

In November 2024, thousands of Concordia students participated in a strike and hundreds demonstrated outside the Hall Building, with protesters eventually entering the building and graffiti being left throughout it.

During the demonstration, a woman confronted pro-Israel demonstrators, gave a Nazi salute and told them the “Final Solution is coming your way.” Montreal police investigated incidents connected to the demonstration and Concordia condemned what it called antisemitic events.

By November 2025, there wasn’t much interpretation required when the words “Kill the Jews” were discovered written inside a Concordia building. The university condemned the graffiti as anti-Jewish, adding another incident to a campus climate in which Jewish students had already spent two years watching the line between anti-Israel activism and straightforward Jew hatred become increasingly difficult to locate.

That atmosphere has continued into 2026. This spring, student groups including Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights Concordia pushed for an academic boycott of Concordia’s Azrieli Institute of Israel Studies. The institute had previously been vandalized, its entrance spray-painted with the words “genocide institute” and a window broken.

Montreal’s broader anti-Israel protest movement added another image to that climate over the summer when demonstrators displayed politicians hanging from nooses during a protest. One of the figures, wearing a kippah, depicted Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and was initially widely condemned as the image of a Jew being hanged. Organizers said the figures represented Ben-Gvir, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Donald Trump and denied that Jews were being targeted, while Montreal police’s hate crimes unit opened an investigation into the display.

It is against that backdrop that incoming Concordia students can begin the 2026-27 academic year with a workshop on Palestinian solidarity. The session is part of DisOrientation programming associated with QPIRG Concordia and the Arts and Science Federation of Associations, and is followed the same afternoon by workshops teaching students about student strikes, the war on drugs and capitalism, and queer antifascist resistance in Quebec.

What is noticeably absent from the published itinerary is any workshop devoted to anti-Jew hatred on campus, despite organizers having accumulated enough local material over the past three years to fill considerably more than an hour.

There is no session examining what Jewish students at Concordia have experienced since Oct. 7, no discussion of how a Nazi salute and a warning about the “Final Solution” became part of a Montreal university protest, and apparently no workshop examining how the words “Kill the Jews” ended up written inside a university building.

Instead, students beginning their university careers are being offered a workshop on Palestinian solidarity, followed 15 minutes later by instructions on student strikes. There will also be brunch, a barbecue, free pizza, banner painting, puppet making and a six-hour evening at Reggie’s student bar, so at least organizers have made certain the incoming class receives a well-rounded introduction to university life.

After three years of protests, occupations, vandalism and increasingly explicit anti-Jewish rhetoric, Concordia’s alternative orientation program has arrived just in time to introduce another group of students to Palestinian activism.

At this point, the only surprising thing on the schedule might be that organizers believe Concordia students still need an introduction.