On Monday, April 29, 2024, student organizers at the University of British Columbia constructed a solidarity encampment for Gaza, the “People’s university for Gaza at UBC.” Their demands were and remain for UBC to divest from Israel’s settler colonial occupation, to participate in a global academic boycott of Israeli universities, to take steps to end the genocide in Gaza, and to keep police presence off UBC campus.

Within a week, multiple departments and programs at UBC joined in solidarity with the students and echoed their demands, including the Social Justice Institute, the Centre for Climate Justice, the Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Program, and others. Petitions and open letters came from UBC Alumni and Workers, BC University Faculty, and Faculty at UBC-Okanagan. Throughout the encampment, student protestors and their supporters have been subjected to harassment, abuse, hate mail, threats, and physical violence. Zionist counter-protestors have thrown smoke bombs into the encampment, tried to barge in and dismantle equipment, sent poisoned food to nearby encampments, recorded protestors in attempts to dox and threaten them, and much more. After nearly two weeks, the UBC encampment has remained strong, in solidarity with student encampments in North America and worldwide who have been subjected to extensive and repeated police and zionist violence.  

This special e-zine seeks to express the creative energies that activism activates. We seek to gather the musings, notes, and missives created within an encampment devoted to ending Israeli-state violence against civilians in Gaza and the West Bank: the occupation and dispossession of land, as well as the debilitation, arrest, and genocide of Palestinian people. We ask for submissions of anything from the encampment or inspired by the encampment that can be digitized upon our website. This includes:

• video, songs, and photos from the encampment (not portraits).

• Social media campaign artwork promoting the demands of the encampment.

• Photographs of art objects from the encampment.

• poetry, flash fiction, or short stories inspired by the encampment. 

• speeches, chants, or other written materials from the encampment.

• artistic responses to media depictions of the encampment (parody, queering, refusing).

We ask that you do not provide any identifiable people in your artwork, or any valuable information that might help anyone seeking to destroy or disparage the encampment, and we encourage the use of pen names. In the event that you feel your artwork may reveal sensitive information, we can hold off on publishing it until we can confirm the absence of any risk to the encampment or anyone involved with it. We will also honor any request to take your work off our website, and we encourage work that has been previously published or shared on social medias and other websites.

This special e-zine will be edited and curated by participants within the camp who play multiple roles within it. We offer this digital space in solidarity with student encampments and the people of Gaza who are undergoing an extreme and violent genocide perpetrated by Israel and enabled by the Global North. To declare the inhumanity of this genocide, we intrude into the spaces where “humanity” itself is produced, until Palestine is free.

SUBMIT HERE