OPINION: Why is McGill Fighting to be on the Wrong Side of History?

Should McGill University maintain ties with schools that are complicit in war crimes?

This isn’t a rhetorical question.

McGill has an exchange program with Tel-Aviv University (TAU) for students in law, management and engineering. But research conducted at TAU is integral to the Israeli military and arms industry.

The TAU also played a role in developing the military philosophy adopted by the Israel Defense Force (IDF) in Gaza, where it killed at least 70,000 people since the invasion began. 

The “Dahiya Doctrine” calls for the targeting of civilian infrastructure and the use of disproportionate force against the enemy, blurring the line between combatant and civilian. This philosophy was developed by the TAU’s Institute for National Security Studies.

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But when students at McGill’s law school have questioned whether to maintain a relationship with TAU, they’ve been stonewalled by the upper echelons of the university. On March 19, as law students began voting on a referendum to boycott Israeli universities, they received an urgent email from their faculty heads.

The dean and provost of McGill’s law school called the boycott campaign “objectionable” and suggested it made Jewish students feel unsafe. They also claimed the vote could trigger sanctions against the Law Students Association (LSA), which organized the referendum. The email came just 12 minutes before polls opened.

If this was an attempt by McGill to interfere in a student election, it wasn’t terribly effective. Some 57 per cent of law students voted in favour of the boycott.

But that isn’t where this story ends.

Following the referendum, the chair of McGill law school’s faculty advisory board resigned, citing an “escalating pattern of hostility towards Jewish students.” The chair, Jonathan Amiel, is also a major donor to McGill. University president Deep Saini, meanwhile, said that the referendum had an antisemitic effect on the student body. 

One Israeli student even petitioned the Superior Court for an emergency injunction to freeze the results of the referendum, arguing that it discriminated against her on the basis of ethnicity. The student, Rachel Harroche, also claimed the vote would diminish the value of her McGill degree and prevent her from going on an academic exchange with an Israeli university. 

In a ruling that injected a long overdue dose of reality into the debate, Superior Court Judge Luc Morin rejected the injunction request on March 27.

Most notably, Morin ruled that Harroche could not provide any examples of discrimination related to the referendum. Her claim about the value of her degree was “entirely unsupported by evidence.” As for complaints about losing out on academic exchange opportunities, Morin noted that Harroche had never applied for an exchange and that, as an Israeli citizen, there is nothing preventing her from attending a university in her native country.

The judge said he was also swayed by the testimony of Jewish students who helped draft the referendum question. One of the students, Rachel Banks, condemned the university’s characterization of peaceful political organizing as “objectionable,” dangerous and antisemitic.

“Discomfort is not the same as danger,” Banks wrote, in her sworn affidavit. “Individuals of Israeli national origin and Jews around the world are diverse groups with non-monolithic views about the actions of the state of Israel and the political ideology of Zionism.

“The March 19 email sent by the Dean and Provost collapses these diverse opinions into a singular characterization of a Jewish law student, which is wrong and alienating. It denies my and my anti-Zionist Jewish peers’ identity.”

Hugo-Victor Solomon, who worked on the referendum campaign, said the administration is fighting any form of speech that “challenges the prestige of McGill’s law faculty.”

“The accusations of antisemitism are a way for the university to signal that a red line has been crossed. Not that they have any evidence of discrimination, because they don’t, and no one could provide any to the court. But they only ever seem to raise the issue of antisemitism to silence pro-Palestinian voices on campus.”

Although a majority of voters cast their ballots in favour of a boycott, the university is refusing to recognize it. 

McGill claims the boycott is a modification of the LSA’s constitution, which would require a two-thirds majority to pass. The LSA, for its part, argues that the boycott isn’t a constitutional amendment and requires a simple majority to pass. If this question isn’t resolved on campus, it will go to the courts.

Academic boycotts are a longstanding tradition at McGill. In 1985, it became the first university in Canada to impose an academic boycott on South African institutions as part of the struggle against apartheid. When Russia launched a fullscale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, McGill’s faculty voted to support an academic boycott on Russian companies and institutions.

Last month’s vote wasn’t even McGill’s first academic boycott against Israel. In October, McGill’s biggest teacher’s union voted 104 to 8 in favour of an academic and cultural boycott of Israel. 

But unlike its approach to campaigns against South African and Russian institutions, McGill has fought the pro-Palestinian movement at every step. After waves of pro-Palestinian protest swept the campus in 2024 and 2025, the university filed an injunction request last fall that would have substantially limited the rights of its students to protest.

In a ruling that quashed the request, Judge Patrick Ferland wrote that granting an injunction against the protesters “would have a substantial chilling effect on freedom of speech on campus.” 

But he also conceded that the pro-Palestinian movement has been a disrupting force on campus for over two years, with protest encampments and clashes with police drawing international headlines. 

Accusations of intimidation and harassment have been levied at supporters and opponents of the movement but some of the loudest voices came from off campus. As first reported by Pivot, Liberal MP Anthony Housefather regularly wrote to Saini for updates on how the university was handling the protesters.

The university dramatically increased its security spending last year and hired agents to watch, film and photograph pro-Palestinian students. When the Student Society of McGill (SSMU) voted to strike in solidarity with the people of Gaza, McGill moved to terminate its agreement with the SSMU. 

McGill’s largest donors have also tried to squash opposition to Israel on campus. Sylvan Adams — who gave $30 million to the university in 2022 — has also demanded McGill get tough with protesters. But though Adams is rich and powerful, he represents an opinion at odds with a majority of Canadians and an overwhelming majority of genocide scholars.

We are living in a period where international law has been pushed beyond its breaking point, and our institutions could be instrumental in reigning that back in. 

Instead, they fight to be on the wrong side of history.

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