“You can’t say anything but genocide”

Educating students on “the architecture of genocide”

At Monday’s student-led event on the conflict in Gaza,“Marking Two Years: The Architecture of Genocide in Gaza,” the focus, for organizers, was clear.

“I think top priority is education right now because of what is going on in the genocide in Gaza,” said Bayan Abuarqoub, a cultural analysis and social theory masters student at Wilfrid Laurier University (WLU) with Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) Local 902 and the Palestinian Youth Movement of Kitchener-Waterloo (PYM KW). “It’s been over two years now and … our government is complicit, and so beyond knowing just what’s going on, we should also know what our role is here and how to take action to help stop the genocide.”

Since the start of the conflict, protests have taken place across Canada against various organizations with connections to or involvement in the conflict. In February 2024, a protest took place outside the Colt Canada plant in Kitchener, with protesters alleging that guns made by the company were being used by the Israeli military in the conflict.

Monday’s event was hosted by WLU Palestinian Justice Club alongside Laurier Students’ Public Interest Research Group, UW Voices for Palestine, and PSAC 902.

In September, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Palestinian Territory found that Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip since 2023, which have killed over 64,000 Palestinians, amount to genocide against Palestinians. The current conflict was sparked by Hamas’ attacks on an Israeli music festival that killed about 1,200 people and took 251 hostages.

The event featured a panel with a Palestinian journalist and an “Architecture of Genocide” workshop which ran several times throughout the day. The workshop featured two large-scale replica maps of Gaza, displaying the city before and after the conflict accompanied by a legend displaying the location of key cities, roads, hospitals, and more. Over roughly an hour and a half, speaker Shatha Mahmoud, a master’s student at WLU and head of the PSAC 902 board, broke down the destruction of Gazan infrastructure.

“You can’t say anything but genocide,” Mahmoud said referring to the maps. “The conditions are so deplorable that you don’t even need this presentation anymore. But it still is helpful as a visual aid for people to be able to visualize everything, especially when [the] media continues to whitewash or under-report, or not report at all what is happening.”

During the presentation, Mahmoud traced events from before Oct. 7 to the present day. In chronological order, the presentation covered attacks on universities, energy sources, healthcare, and key infrastructure, interspersing footage and social media posts from Israeli military personnel and Palestinians.

Towards the end of the presentation, Mahmoud showed videos of released Palestinian prisoners reuniting with their families, including one of a male prisoner reuniting with his mother. “I show these videos to also humanize the Palestinian men,” she said. “We refuse to uphold this narrative that it’s just the women and the children — no, it’s the men. They’re also worthy of life.”

Coverage of the conflict has been criticized by some, like Palestinian journalist Mohammed El-Kurd, for “failing to frame stories about Palestine in the land’s proper context.”

Despite the current ceasefire, Mahmoud warned attendees to not be “placated,” referencing the publication of a study in the journal Lancet in July 2024 that said if the conflict were to end at that time, the death toll would rise to over 180,000 Palestinians because of continuing conditions as a result of the conflict, including starvation and illness.

The space also featured a Martyrs Exhibit, where memorials of Palestinians killed in the conflict along with pictures and descriptions of them were set up, as well as a Student Exhibit, which detailed student advocacy on UW campus.

Ali Azmi, a Somalian political science global studies student at WLU, said he learned about UW guest scholar Sufyan Tayeh’s death from the Martyrs Exhibit, which he said showed him how close the impact of the conflict could be. Azmi noted the importance of education on and discussion about these topics, citing violence inflicted by the civil war on his home country and its ethnic minorities. “There isn’t any dialogue going on right now,” he said.

Abuarqoub said the progress the event represents has been “great to see.”

“I was an undergrad here, at Laurier. And I would have never even worn my kuffiyeh here in the halls, to be honest,” she said. “But whereas now we’re having an event that’s outwardly for Palestine and about Palestine… I hope it continues to grow and hopefully we can keep having bigger events here.”

Additionally, the event featured a market with vendors and local organizations like Neighbours for Palestine: Waterloo Region.

Alison Feuerwerker, a member of Neighbours for Palestine and constituent of Chagger, explained that the group has been working to call on local MPs to officially support an arms embargo against Israel. She said that although the group has collected about 5,000 constituents’ signatures, in conversations with Chagger, “she usually has a story about how she’s doing a lot of work behind the scenes for Palestinians… but we don’t know what that work is. And that also she feels like her job is to represent her constituents, which makes it sound like she feels that she can represent her constituents best by not taking a stand.”

Imprint has reached out to Chagger’s office for comment.

In her last comments, Abuarqoub highlighted the message from the journalist at the day’s panel. “He wanted to thank all the supporters and just to let us know that people in Gaza do see the support and they see our rallies and they see our events for them … all he wants is for the genocide to stop and for children and women and men to stop being murdered. So I really think that it’s as simple as that.”