At 4:00 pm on October 8, the U of T Occupy for Palestine, the Palestinian Culture Club, the Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions (BDS) Caucus, and Tkarón:to Students for Palestine (TSSP) student rally marched from Sidney Smith Hall to Simcoe Hall, stopping traffic on St. George St. and Hoskin Ave. along the way.
The student groups are demanding that U of T cut ties with Israeli post-secondary institutions such as the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI), Tel Aviv University, and Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.
The rally was one of four events held during TSSP’s “Week of Rage,” which took place from October 7–10.
The rally
Campus security arrived on the scene at 4:41 pm and followed the rally from St. George Street to Convocation Hall. Organizers led the procession with a banner that read “U of T Partners with Genocidal Universities – Drop HUJI,” while students carried signs such as “Jews for Palestine” and “Stop Starving Gaza.”
In an opening address at Sidney Smith Hall, TSSP called on the University to divest from Israeli academic partnerships.
“Research partnerships, donor money, exchange programs — they’re not just academic footnotes, they are part of an infrastructure that legitimizes and nourishes occupation and violence. If our schools remain partners with these institutions, they become part of the problem.”
Amid honking cars, the rally walked down Hoskin Ave. and stopped in front of the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, the Temerty Faculty of Medicine, and concluded at Simcoe Hall. After bannering outside Simcoe Hall, the protest’s crowd joined the People’s Rally in solidarity with the Freedom Flotilla.
TSSP’s demands
TSSP is calling on U of T to sever institutional ties to Israeli academic institutions that either operate in settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories or “support or sustain the apartheid policies of the state of Israel and its ongoing genocide in Gaza.”
TSSP noted U of T’s history of collaborative research with HUJI, claiming that U of T and HUJI published over 300 joint research papers between 2018–2020. In a petition demanding an academic boycott of Israel, TSSP added that over 50 students have gone on to exchange in HUJI over the past five years.
In April 2024, then President Meric Gertler formally responded to Occupy for Palestine’s demand that the university “terminate all partnerships with Israeli academic institutions that operate in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, or sustain the apartheid policies, occupation and illegal settlement of these territories.” Gertler said that “this demand is at odds with the University’s longstanding opposition to academic boycotts.”
When asked whether the university’s stance on divesting from Israeli institutions has changed under President Melanie Woodin, a university spokesperson wrote to The Varsity that “claims connecting the university to Israeli military action and assertions regarding research partnerships, donor money and student exchange trips have no basis in fact” and that the university continues to follow its policies on divestment and academic boycotts.
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