On Oct. 16, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), the Palestinian Youth Movement and a host of other organizations world-wide announced an appeal for an international university strike day on Nov. 21.
This is a fantastic development and the RCP wholeheartedly supports this initiative! This is exactly what the movement to free Palestine needs.
We appeal to all groups, unions and student associations to unite and answer the call to mobilize for a strike.
In Canada and Quebec the Student Strike for Palestine (SS4P) campaign has already answered the call. Thousands of activists on over 40 campuses are mobilizing to shut down universities and colleges on Nov. 21.
For the last year millions have protested week after week, signed countless petitions and wrote letters to politicians asking them to find their humanity. The rich and powerful have ignored us.
Worse still, the Western-backed war has only escalated, now hitting Lebanon. There are no clearer demonstrations of the rottenness of the capitalist system than the horrors of the past year in Gaza and the Middle East.
In order to put an end to this, we need to escalate our tactics and organize mass actions that they can’t ignore.
For the last two months SS4P activists have been laying the groundwork for a nation-wide student strike by postering, organizing walkouts and teach-ins, and discussing with students and workers on their campuses.
Tens of thousands of students across the country know what a student strike is and are in favor of it.
The time has come for all pro-Palestine groups to unite and organize for a Canada-wide strike on Nov. 21.
Organizing strike assemblies
Small groups of activists cannot unilaterally decide to shut down an entire campus. For the international strike appeal to materialize into a genuine strike, we need to broaden the movement by proactively involving as many students as possible.
For this to happen, rank-and-file democracy is needed. On every campus, there needs to be strike assemblies at the earliest opportunity and promote them widely. All pro-Palestine groups should unite and mobilize for such assemblies. We need to pressure every student union that has verbally supported Palestine to put their words into action by endorsing and helping to organize assemblies.
At these assemblies students will vote on whether to strike on Nov. 21, what their demands will be and other key questions. The success of such assemblies is critical to the success of Nov. 21.
Already, student unions at Concordia and Cégep Maisonneuve in Montreal have committed to organizing assemblies for a student strike in November! The movement also coincides with a meeting of the Parliamentary Assembly of NATO happening on Nov. 22-25 in Montreal. In a context where the countries of this Western military alliance support the Israeli genocidal campaign, no doubt many will want to strike and protest these criminals.
If the movement for Palestinian liberation unites and rallies around a nation-wide student strike on Nov. 21, we are fully capable of shutting down every university and college campus in this country.
It is up to US!
This is the potential that exists, but none of this can happen without your active involvement.
If you agree that a nation-wide student strike is the next logical step for the movement, you need to help make it happen.
Tens of thousands of students are in favor of a student strike, but it will not happen just because we want it to.
The movement needs YOU to talk to your friends, classmates, and professors; to put up posters, hand out flyers, and get more people involved.
The movement needs YOU to help shut down every campus in this country and free Palestine.
Together, we will make history.
