Encampments
These rainy days leave me wondering about the people camped out in front of the University of Winnipeg. What are they dealing with on a night like tonight?
Let alone what they must have feared those first nights and maybe every night since. They’re not exactly in the greatest part of the city. Any recount of downtown Winnipeg I’ve ever heard didn’t mention anything you’d want to be camping next to. When I worked in fine dining I got out of work around midnight and waited for my bus near to where they’re camped and I’ll tell you it only gets worse when the sun goes down. People wandering around talking to themselves or screaming at others. The police are around but there’s only so many. Not to suggest either party is to blame, just nothing I’d want to set a tent nearby.
When October 7th happened I was horrified. It seemed too gruesome to be real. The stories were plentiful and graphic. Children, grandmothers, piled atop one another is lifeless heaps in the streets of Israel. When the stories of people being sexually assaulted before being murdered came to light it was enough to make you sick. How could this happen? What was worse was seeing the celebrations of hostages coming back across the border into Gaza in pickup trucks.
What’s followed has been relentless. There were bound to have been members of Hamas killed in the bombings, there must have been. But while those unknown actors have died two million have suffered the total destruction of what little they had. No food, no water, surrounded by buildings turned to rubble. Children, grandmothers, everyone punished the same as the perpetrators of October 7th.
In Winnipeg, and surely elsewhere too, protests and marches were fast to start in support of Palestine. In those first days and weeks I didn’t know what to make of it because of how much antisemitism I saw coming about after October 7th. Now there are encampments at each University in the city. I haven’t seen or heard anything antisemitic from protestors or encampments, nothing. This isn’t to say there is none at all, but my own eyes and ears haven’t picked up anything of the sort. What I did see in the wake of October 7th was all online. Not to dismiss the existence of antisemitism in Winnipeg but the internet is certainly a well-kept catalogue of the most repugnant thoughts and ideas.
Surely something was to be done in response of 1,200 dead Israelis but there were other ways to have done this. Some argue Israel will have been judged regardless of how they responded, judged for simply having responded at all. That I see as a senseless point. The endless bombs, the death of 35,000 Palestinians, this is not a response it is a failure. With the backing of the most expensive military in the world there was room in the budget for something better thought out. Something more tactile and definitive.
But they would have been accused of invading or X Y Z.
Maybe. But the blind slaughter of 35,000 people is no accusation. The world sees this horror, the people of Israel see this horror. Every other Middle Eastern country sees this atrocity. October 7th was a tragedy but Benjamin Netanyahu and his generals have only worsened the life of Israelis in the long term.