How a Pro-Palestinian letter led to crisis at TMU law school

The school, founded in 2020 and branded as “a different kind of law school” focused on equity and inclusion, now seemed riven with betrayal and fear.

The mounting crisis was “like a snowball,” said James Noronha, president of the law students’ society. “It didn’t seem like you could catch your breath for long enough to actually deal with it.”

Students felt profoundly misunderstood. Professors were divided over whether the petition’s words were antisemitic. Prominent lawyers were outraged, condemning the petition as a dangerous justification of Hamas’s Oct. 7 deadly incursion into Israel.

The law school, meanwhile, is grappling with what one major donor, who is considering cancelling a $1-million endowment, described as “an existential threat.” Four other Jewish donors told the Star they have suspended or cancelled their scholarships, which range from roughly $15,000 to $75,000, with some citing a climate they say is hostile to Jewish students.

“The impact of everything that has happened at this school … has just created such sharp divisions, such a break in trust between people … who are struggling to talk, and, most importantly, to listen to the hurt that each other is feeling,” Noronha said. “All of us need to figure out how to have these conversations in ways that are not absolutes.”

The controversy at TMU is a potent illustration of the collapse of civil discourse over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that is tearing apart friendships, workplaces and public institutions. Against the backdrop of unthinkable violence, where two peoples carry the trauma of persecution, every word has become a battleground.

The stew of grief, fear and loathing has been particularly combustible on college campuses. From Harvard to York University, administrators are being called upon to adjudicate thorny debates about where anti-Israel sentiment crosses over into antisemitism, and the boundaries of acceptable political advocacy.

At TMU’s law school, administrators are caught between some members of the Jewish community, who warn that contempt for Israel is slipping into something uglier, and those loudly protesting mass displacement and death in Gaza, who say spurious allegations of antisemitism are being used to silence their voices. For the young people that signed the petition, the experience is a harsh reminder that, in the age of social media, even a brief foray into student activism threatens to follow you for the rest of your life.

The school did not directly address many of the Star’s questions. In a written response, a spokesperson said the Star’s queries, which reflected a “range of demands, expectations, and requests from a very diverse group of people,” were “an excellent summation of challenges facing so many universities and other organizations during these challenging times.”

In the days following the Hamas attack, senior leaders at TMU’s law school did not explicitly pick a side. They wrote in emails to students and staff that they were “deeply troubled by the escalating violence.” And they urged the school community to “reconcile deep empathy for Palestinian and Israeli statehood while condemning atrocious attacks against innocent civilians.”

This upset some students. So did the school’s prior silence on Israel’s conduct in the Palestinian Territories, said Jessica Gadea Hawkins, who teaches the school’s legal clinic course.

“Their silence, that says something about whose experiences are being erased,” she said. “Students expect a high level of critical awareness of the diverse experiences of Jewish life and Arab life … And when this was not the case, and their sense of belonging and sense of justice was challenged, students spoke up.”

The Oct. 20 petition was written by the Abolitionist Organizing Collective, a student group whose Instagram profile features a picture of a Palestinian flag and lists its location as Tkaronto — the Mohawk word for the city, which is often used in solidarity with Indigenous Peoples in Canada against settler-colonialism.

Signed by more than 70 law students, the letter stated: “‘Israel’ is not a country, it is the brand of a settler colony … We stand in solidarity with Palestine and support all forms of Palestinian resistance and efforts toward liberation.”

The petitioners condemned institutions that had only denounced Hamas’s “recent war crimes” without also denouncing “the historic and ongoing war crimes committed by Israel,” and gave administrators a week to respond publicly.

The opening line denying that Israel is a country is taken from an Instagram post by a Palestinian social media strategist, according to a draft version of the petition. The strategist advises followers how to counter the messaging coming out of Israel, which he said “is able to pay to push propaganda.”

The petition’s authors invited students to sign anonymously, “to protect their own safety,” given the “documented patterns of retaliation against individuals who advocate for Palestinian human rights.” About half of them did.

For some students, grief turned to rage

That Friday afternoon, Taylor was at home, scrolling through their phone, when another student from the law school shared it in a group chat.

For Taylor, who is Jewish, the preceding days had been a blur of grief and worry, as they waited on word from relatives, whose village had been stormed by Hamas. When Taylor read the words their classmates had written, rage took over.

The petition asserts that Hamas’s attack “was a direct result of Israel’s 75-year-long systemic campaign to eradicate Palestinians.” It blames “Israel’s apartheid regime” for all loss of life on both sides.

Sam, another Jewish student, felt as if the signatories were “basically telling me that the people I know who have lost their lives, it’s fine.” Sam thought about those who signed, and wondered, “What if that was me (who was killed) in Israel … Would you still feel that way?”

To these students, reducing Israelis to colonizers denies their people’s indigeneity and connection to the land, as well as the history of genocide and expulsion that led to Israel’s creation.

Sam felt as though their classmates, whom they had previously regarded as friends, were “stripping us of our identity”; like they were “making us not even human.”

As Taylor saw the list of signatories on the Google document grow, they said they reached out to administrators and pleaded for them to “shut it down.”

The Star is identifying Taylor, Sam and other Jewish students using pseudonyms and gender neutral pronouns. They requested anonymity, citing the backlash they say they have faced from classmates over the fallout from the letter. The Star is choosing not to name the petitioners, out of concern about exposing them to further online harassment.

The petition didn’t mention Jews. But the four Jewish students said they experienced it as hateful. As one put it: “academic rhetoric has been used under the guise of ‘anti-Zionism’ to make Jewish people feel alienated and targeted.”

It is widely accepted that conflating Jews with Israel or blaming Jews in general for Israel’s actions is antisemitic. However, there is debate over whether anti-Zionism — which generally holds that the movement to create Israel was unjust and which challenges the legitimacy of the state — is discriminatory toward Jews.

That debate has intensified since Oct. 7, with the largest mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust, by a group whose senior official pledged to repeat the attacks until Israel is “annihilated.” Israel’s right-wing prime minister has framed his retaliatory campaign against Hamas in equally stark terms, invoking a biblical reference that has been interpreted as a call to exterminate the enemy — men, women and children.

Roughly 1,200 people were killed in the Hamas-led raids, with another 240 taken hostage, Israeli officials say. Israel’s offensive has so far killed more than 23,000 people in Gaza, according to the Hamas-controlled health ministry.

Joshua Sealy-Harrington, an assistant professor at the law school who identifies as “avowedly pro-Palestinian” and has been supporting the signatories, said “the students who wrote this letter are not anti-Jewish, they’re anti-occupation.”

Both Sealy-Harrington and Gadea Hawkins dispute that the signatories were justifying violence against civilians. They note that the petition characterizes the Hamas attacks as “war crimes,” and say it uses language that seeks to disrupt colonial thinking and recognizes that resistance can take many forms.

The Abolitionist Organizing Collective and the students that signed the petition either declined or did not respond to interview requests for this story.

The petition was delivered to the law school’s dean, Donna Young, that day. Sam and Taylor said they immediately started sending it outside the school community, to sound the alarm about what they perceived to be hateful rhetoric on campus.

Public reaction was vicious. On social media, signatories were mocked and insulted in posts featuring their LinkedIn profiles, with photos of their faces. The Jewish advocacy group B’nai Brith put out a press release, calling on the school to “expel terrorist apologist students.” Some members of the legal community advocated for blacklisting all TMU students from the profession.

“I certainly wouldn’t hire any of these students,” one Toronto lawyer posted on X, “and the fact that some choose to ‘show’ their solidarity by keeping their names hidden means I’d have to write off hiring anyone from … the current crop at @LincAlexLawTMU.”

Under intense pressure from all sides, the institution waded in. What school leaders did would only further fan the flames.

The law school issued a statement that “unequivocally” condemned the “sentiments of Antisemitism and intolerance” the petition expressed, but made no mention of any possible action to address the conduct of signatories. That fell short in the eyes of two Jewish criminal defence lawyers. They penned a letter urging the school to impose consequences to “illustrate in no uncertain terms that hate speech and incitements to violence are utterly unacceptable.”

One of several non-Jewish signatories was former Ontario Court of Appeal Justice Harry LaForme, who is an Anishinabe from the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation. LaForme read the aspiring lawyers’ petition as a justification for what happened on Oct. 7, which, he said, disregards the rule of law, and is “completely anathema to Indigenous Peoples.”

LaForme hoped the school would create a safe space internally for signatories to distance themselves from the petition. “They (the students) have to be able to change their minds,” he said.

‘New McCarthyism’ decried by lawyers

In November, TMU hired a retired judge to conduct an external review. Former Chief Justice of Nova Scotia J. Michael MacDonald will meet signatories this month to determine whether their words breached the student code of conduct, which sets expectations for how students interact and communicate.

The school’s decision to outsource the job stoked acrimony, both from those who had been pushing administrators to quickly confront what seemed to them to be clear policy violations, as well as those who believed students were now being subjected to a witch hunt.

“A new McCarthyism” is how the response to the student petition was characterized in an open letter, signed by hundreds of members of the legal community, including Sealy-Harrington, Gadea Hawkins and other TMU professors.

Dania Majid, a Palestinian activist and head of the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association, signed that open letter. Majid, who faced intense Islamophobia as a young lawyer in the aftermath of 9/11, said the school’s characterization of the petition as antisemitic is “textbook anti-Palestinian racism.”

Majid said the students are being treated “as criminals.”

The fallout also highlighted divisions within the Jewish community, including at TMU. Shiri Pasternak, an assistant professor in criminology, is part of a group of Jewish instructors who don’t believe the petition was antisemitic and are concerned about the implications of the external review on academic freedom on campus.

“We didn’t necessarily all endorse the letter that the law students wrote,” Pasternak said. “But … we strongly believe that students should have a right to express, even imperfectly, their sense of injustice, and raise their collective voices to intervene when they see injustices.”

On campus, the atmosphere turned tense, students say. For the rest of the term, fewer classmates showed up for lectures; when they did, people who used to intermingle seemed to be sitting apart. Sam and Taylor said they felt ostracized by some of their peers, and uncomfortable coming to class.

One law school instructor, who is Jewish, moved her classes online after reading the petition. In a complaint to the university, she alleged the petition violated school policies, and had caused her to “worry for my physical safety as a result of my faith.”

Some of the law school’s roughly 450 students were upset by the timing of the petition, which dropped the week before on-campus interviews for placements at law firms.

At least one Bay Street firm asked TMU students whether they signed the petition, and refused to grant interviews to those who did. Ontario’s Ministry of the Attorney General also required law students working for the province to sign an attestation confirming they weren’t among the signatories, according to a memo from the deputy minister.

Noah Lister-Stevens, a second-year student who participated in interviews that week, was “disappointed” with his classmates for not better contemplating how their words would land. But he said the response of some law firms that seemed to be waging “a scorched-earth campaign,” was “disturbing.”

“None of the students in my school that I’ve ever spoken to are hateful people,” he said. “Everyone that I know who signed that letter is a kind person who deserves to be in that school.”

Sealy-Harrington shared with the Star several statements that he said had been provided to him by anonymous signatories. The statements accuse the administration of defaming the signatories by wrongly characterizing their petition as antisemitic, and of ignoring their pleas for help as they endured Islamophobia and racism from students, staff and the public.

“Nobody condemned the people calling us terrorists, or telling us to die, or describing in extreme detail the vile ways they would harm us or our families,” one statement said. “The school, named for an incredible justice-seeking Black man, acts only when white students complain, not when people of colour are tormented.”

The law school was renamed in 2021 for Lincoln Alexander, who was a lawyer and champion of racial equity. As Ontario’s lieutenant governor, he became the first Black Canadian to serve as a representative of the British monarchy in Canada.

A TMU spokesperson said “we respectfully disagree” with the claims of the signatories.

Administrators and staff have had nearly 200 meetings with students “to listen to their concerns and help them navigate the many available supports,” Karen Benner said in an email. “The university and law school categorically condemn any and all discrimination and harassment directed at our students and faculty, and have taken steps to address them.”

But the administration’s conversations with donors have been strained.

Criminal defence lawyer Brian Greenspan suspended a $50,000 scholarship. Greenspan said in a letter to the law school’s dean and the TMU president that the school’s namesake would be “appalled” by the petition.

The failure of administrators to categorically denounce the petitioners, Greenspan said, is “a derogation of the responsibility of those who support a civil society and a blemish on the legacy of Lincoln Alexander,” who believed in finding common ground.

The pulling of funding is an inappropriate response, according to Jim Turk, who is the director of TMU’s Centre for Free Expression, and says it takes away opportunities from future students.

“I don’t see how that improves anything and it undermines the whole purpose of university, where divisive ideas are to be discussed,” Turk said.

Those considerations weighed heavily on Adam Wagman, a senior partner at Howie, Sacks and Henry, as his firm contemplated whether to pull funding from the law school.

After weeks of discussion with students and others on campus, his firm reached the decision to discontinue a scholarship, worth $75,000.

“This is not about punishing anyone. It’s about making a statement, and it’s about walking a walk,” he said, adding that he has “great respect” for the law school’s dean. “We hope that our step will encourage the university to really look inward and figure out how to make things better.”

Political activism, Wagman said, is not a licence to dispense with decency, adding that his “primary concern” is what is happening on campuses in Ontario.

“We cannot ignore the pain, we cannot ignore the trauma facing any of our students,” he said. “No one’s pain trumps anyone else’s.”

But Sealy-Harrington questioned what lies at the root of some of that pain. While he is concerned about how all students on campus are feeling, Sealy-Harrington said the blurring of the lines between antisemitism and anti-Zionism means that “attacks on Israel can feel like attacks on Jewish people.”

He sees Israel as a “grief machine” — a phrase others have used after Oct. 7 and that he defines as “something which specifically draws on the idea of grief to justify the an ongoing genocide.” He believes that some of the hurt and the fear that Jewish students are expressing is a product of that.

“I don’t want any students to feel isolated or afraid or sad. I want students to have a positive experience in their studies,” he said. “But ultimately, feelings are not the end of my political analysis.”

The fact that the petition upset some members of the Jewish community shouldn’t diminish what the signatories were trying to say, Gadea Hawkins said.

“While holding space for Jewish trauma, we cannot separate that from the context of disproportionate oppression against Palestinians in this situation,” she said. “So, even though several people are feeling uncomfortable with the student letter, I would not change the letter.”

Inside TMU’s Podium Building, where the Lincoln Alexander School of Law is housed, the institution’s “pillars” are spelled out in silver block letters, and embossed on floor-to-ceiling pillars. One reads: “Equity, Diversity & Inclusion.”

But there is no longer consensus on how to implement those principles. In the aftermath of Oct. 7, the school has become a microcosm of the intractable conflict that has seized progressive institutions over whose fears and feelings should get priority.

Former allies in the fight for equity are now pitted against each other. Their competing visions for how concerns about antisemitism fit into broader racial justice efforts have left leaders at a loss.

Noronha, the student society president, describes the urgent challenge of charting a path forward as “Herculean.”

“The task ahead of us is to be able to talk about harms that we have experienced, the pain that we have felt … and also to be able to listen to what we have done,” he said.

In November, the law school created a working group of students, staff and faculty to “create opportunities for reflection and dialogue.”

Noronha, who is part of that initiative, said the initial discussions have been mostly introductory. But the commitment from a dozen members of the school community, including Muslim and Jewish students, to sit together in the same room, and try to navigate this difficult terrain, has left him feeling hopeful.

“Everyone at the school right now is dealing with a certain level of apprehension — is this going to be the thing that helps or will it make it worse?” he said. “I don’t think it’ll make it worse.”

Editor’s note – Jan. 14, 2024

This story has been updated to correct the name of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation.

With files from Stephanie Levitz and Janet Hurley