First Person‘Solidarity had morphed into a nightmare’: A journalist goes inside the encampment at the University of British Columbia
While the pro-Palestine encampments across Canada have largely been peaceful, Hadani Ditmars describes how protesters ended up escorting her out
Ditmars, a Lebanese-Canadian journalist with a long history of covering the Middle East, describes her visit to an encampment in Vancouver. Photo by Hadani Ditmars
VANCOUVER, British Columbia — It was getting dark at the encampment when a tall man whose face was partially concealed by a kaffiyeh approached me and announced, “It’s time for you to leave.”
I’d been chatting in Arabic with some of the protesters who’d been living in tents for three days at the University of British Columbia. But when I spoke to him in Arabic — a language I only partially mastered during 30 years of working as a journalist across the Middle East — he responded in English.
“You are violating community standards,” he said. Which ones? I inquired, half remembering a hand-painted banner listing the encampment’s rules. It doesn’t matter, he said, adding, “I’ve been watching you and it’s time for you to leave.”
He wouldn’t tell me his name or what authority he had to decide who could be where, but I realized he was right. A fleeting moment of pan-Arabist solidarity had morphed into a nightmare of petty and performative politics in the face of ongoing tragedy. It was time for me to leave.
I’d come to the Gaza solidarity encampment an hour before, armed with a kaffiyeh of my own and my Canon Rebel G digital camera. In the mid 1980s, I was an undergraduate myself on this campus, and had taken part in protests calling for divestment from South Africa. So of course I wanted to get a close-up look at the activists who’d been camping out for days trying to pressure the university to divest from Israeli companies.
I arrived with a vague nostalgia for my student days only to be met by the ghosts of my time in the Middle East.
It was a surreal experience, part Kafka, part Curb Your Enthusiasm. As I approached the encampment, its fence plastered with primary-color posters declaring “People’s University for Gaza” and “No Cops,” I thought of the Palestinian refugee camps I’d visited in the occupied West Bank, Gaza Strip and Lebanon.
The people in the encampment
I was greeted at the entrance by a stern Israeli woman in a mask who told me I could only talk to official spokespeople. I bypassed her in favor of a lovely young man from Gaza named Mohammed, who told me a Jewish group had brought him to Vancouver for medical treatment last fall. I went on to chat with an anti-Zionist kippah-wearer named Ezekiel, who works at a nonprofit for refugees run by Palestinians.
Next up was an Iraqi doctoral candidate in neurology named Zeinab who wore a Palestinian dress. She told me news reports on the war in Gaza reminded her of the U.S. invasion of her own country in 2003.
Zeinab became a friendly minder of sorts — certainly a more agreeable one than those I encountered in Saddam-era Baghdad. Before I arrived, she said, there had been speeches extolling the virtues of Palestinian liberation, the ceremonial flipping of a Palestinian rice dish called maqluba, and some traditional dabke dancing.
An official spokesperson named Naisha led me on a tour of the encampment — past a library and community garden; a canteen stocked with water, fruit and dishes donated by local residents; and a shrine to Aaron Bushnell, the U.S. service member who self-immolated in February to protest the war. Naisha relented to removing her mask for a recorded interview so I could hear her properly, but expressed fear that she might be photographed by police officers monitoring the goings-on.
While more than 2,000 students and other activists have been arrested on U.S. campuses in recent weeks, the encampments here and at other Canadian schools have largely been peaceful, though some protesters were detained by the police overnight Thursday at the University of Calgary. At the Vancouver encampment a week before, I did not see any officers nearby, but Naisha said ominously: “They’re out there for sure.”
I was happily distracted from the official interview by the sight of several young men gathering for Maghrib, the fourth of the five daily Muslim prayers, recited at sunset. My mind flashed to prayers I’d observed at Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem’s Old City between the two Palestinian intifadas and in Baghdad as it suffered through international sanctions.
Afterwards, I spoke with the Egyptian student who had led the prayer in a beautiful classical Arabic. One of the others was from Morocco, and two were Tunisian. I spoke with them in French, saying I’d wanted to photograph them but was told it was not allowed.
“Are you kidding me?” one responded. “Everyone’s taking photos here all the time.”
They asked where I was from, so I told the story of my great-grandparents Najeeb and Massady Mussallem, who in 1906 fled their village in the Bekka Valley — then part of Syria, now Lebanon — because the Ottoman police were acting with impunity against Christians like themselves.
I thought of telling them about my Palestinian cousin who was once the mayor of the West Bank city of Jericho, and how I’d lived in the Old City of Jerusalem in 1994, writing for the first post-Oslo joint Israeli-Palestinian magazine in English, the New Middle East.
I considered explaining how Israeli Jews always thought I was Israeli and Palestinians thought I was Palestinian — except when it was the opposite, like if I wore the wrong hat as I crossed from East to West Jerusalem.
“I love coming here,” the Moroccan said of the encampment. “It feels like home.” The Egyptian who had led the prayers said, “It feels like a family picnic.”
I flashed back to picnics I’d attended as a child with my grandmother, where enthusiastic Arabs would take over a Vancouver park in an otherwise Anglo-Saxon enclave, roasting lamb over a pit and dancing dabke.
That’s what I was thinking about when the tall man in the kaffiyeh came to say I was making people uncomfortable.
My new companions, who all hailed from police states, disappeared into the night. The self-appointed security guard followed me as I moved toward Ezekiel, who was eating a homemade dinner of rice and vegetables at the canteen.
Ezekiel asked the security guy what offense I had committed. He repeated: “You are making people uncomfortable.”
He was certainly making me feel uncomfortable, and I tried unsuccessfully to lose him in the crowd.
‘Before you could say counterrevolutionary’
Within seconds, I found myself surrounded by a group of young, masked activists, shouting accusations of “inappropriate behavior,” “violating community standards” and “aggressive stance.” The stern Israeli woman reappeared and said she’d been listening to my interactions with people at the encampment, but would not explain how they offended.
I looked around and realized that most of these protesters had not been born when I first went to Gaza, in 1994, and witnessed Yasser Arafat’s triumphant return after signing the Oslo Peace Accords at the White House.
I remembered standing on the back of a pick-up truck with my old Nikon 401x to get a shot of Arafat; two Palestinian police officers pulled me down from the truck, and the next day, I had bruises all over my arms, neck and torso.
I remembered, too, nights in Tehran when I encountered armed members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, young men wearing cracked plastic shoes and bearing kalashnikovs. How many times had Iraqi police tried to confiscate my camera when I took a picture of a marketplace a tad too close to a tank?
I recalled getting hate mail from Israel supporters whenever I wrote almost anything on Palestine — and being fired by an aging white male Canadian editor during the Second Intifada for what he called my “obsession with the Middle East.”
And I remembered being strip-searched and having my laptop confiscated at Ben-Gurion International Airport as I was leaving after a reporting trip to Ramallah.
I thought about my great-grandparents escaping Turkish gun boats at night to board the freighter to freedom. I thought about all my friends who had fled Gaza and those who were still trapped there.
I thought about all of this as the student activists stared at me, practically chanting in unison about my having violated some unspecified community standard. I mentioned Naisha, the woman who had given me the tour, but nobody knew who she was. No one was in charge and everyone was in charge.
All this on the eve of Press Freedom Day. For a moment I found it absurdly funny and considered breaking out in dabke to prove my Arab bona fides.
I almost laughed out loud as I thought of Shakir, the head minder at the old Press Center in Baghdad, who had one slow eye and a perfectly coiffed Saddam-era moustache and once warned me, “No more dancing.”
But the crowd was not with me, as they say. No one had time for a middle-aged journalist with an arsenal of ancient Saddam and Arafat jokes and war stories.
I made my way out of the weird encampment that had somehow managed to recreate the Middle Eastern experience for better and for worse: the fleeting solidarity and the paranoia; the communal prayer and the feasting; the sharing of stories and the tribalism — all on a tiny slice of the traditional lands of the indigenous Coast Salish people that was now a football field. A friend of Ezekiel’s escorted me to the bus stop, which I mistook as an act of kindness rather than surveillance.
Well, that was weird, I told him. I kind of felt like the Jew in the crowd, if you know what I mean.
The friend of Ezekiel did not. No, he said; like the Zionist in the crowd.
Before you could say counterrevolutionary, I was on the No. 4 bus, lurching homeward in the dark. I watched the news on my phone, Gaza burning and with it all kinds of community standards. It certainly made me uncomfortable. I had left the camp, but the camp had not left me.
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