From Palestine to Sudan: Solidarity with Our Students
By Nisrin Elamin (University of Toronto)
On June 3, 2024, student activists at the University of Toronto (UofT) organized an alternative graduation ceremony to honor the tens of thousands of Gazan students who would have graduated this year, had they not been killed by the Israeli state in its ongoing genocidal campaign in occupied Palestine. The ceremony was powerful. The students arranged rows of empty chairs facing away from the steps leading up to the President’s office. A group of faculty stood along those steps, as students and community members placed flowers and diplomas on each chair. The names of murdered Palestinian students were read out loud to accompany each placement. The students had asked a group of us, students, community members, and faculty to speak at the ceremony. They asked me to connect the genocide in Palestine to the war in my home country, Sudan. I was hesitant at first. I worried that my focus on Sudan would take away from the purpose of our gathering. But the students insisted that the connections between Sudan and Palestine were vital to the broader solidarity struggle they were engaged in.
What follows below is based on what I shared with them:
5 years ago, on this very day in 2019, a brutal massacre took place in my mother’s hometown of Khartoum. This massacre occurred at the site of a powerful sit-in that led to the ouster of dictator Omer Al-Bashir after 30 years in power. Because people’s demands exceeded calls for regime change, the sit-in remained in place for 2 months after Al-Bashir’s ouster, in front of the military headquarters in the capital. That night of June 3rd, while protestors were sleeping, their tents were set ablaze and dead bodies were dumped in the Nile. The massacre was authorized by military elites who had assumed power after Al-Bashir’s removal. These included the RSF militia, a paramilitary force created by Al-Bashir in 2013 as part of a coup-proofing strategy against the army. The RSF evolved from the Janjaweed militias largely responsible for the genocide in Darfur that began in 2003, killing over 300,000 and displacing millions from resource-rich lands now being used to fuel this war. Before its brutal decimation, the sit-in had created a unique microcosm of what people imagined a free Sudan could look like; a Sudan without an ethno-nationalist, violent, capitalist state.
The sit-in had medical and political education tents, food and tea stations, libraries, entertainment stages, morning and night shifts, and guardians who monitored entry as protection from state infiltrators. It was intergenerational, multi-racial and multi-class. Politically and logistically, it was held together through the labor of thousands of unions, neighborhood resistance committees, and youth formations that were the backbone of the revolution. The resistance committees in particular, which emerged in 2013, during protests against IMF-recommended austerity measures, linked the centralized sit-in to the many tentacles of the revolution, by organizing at the neighborhood level across dozens of cities and regions.
I asked the students if this sounded familiar to them in terms of what they were building, as we stood overlooking one of the largest and longest-standing student encampments for Palestine in North America. Just as the Khartoum sit-in was sometimes described as the beating heart of Sudan’s revolution, the student encampment had become the center of the alternative public university and city they were participating in building: one that divests from genocide, that operates like a space of learning and not like a corporation concerned with profit margins over student well-being; one that encourages collective action and popular dissent, instead of unleashing the police to violently suppress it. To the transitional military council that had assumed power after Al-Bashir’s ouster, the sit-in represented a threat to their power and profit-making. So, they unleashed the same RSF militia responsible for genocidal violence in Darfur, a militia that had been legitimized and funded by the European Union to serve as its externalized border patrol in southern Libya, against peaceful protesters. A few months after the June 3rd massacre, the RSF hired a Canadian public relations firm, called Dickens & Madson, to clean up its image and to expand its transnational network of support. This firm is headed by a former Israeli arms dealer and army officer named Ari Ben Menashe, an expert in counterinsurgent warfare and surveillance. Ben Menashe developed and honed this expertise by serving as a lobbyist and intelligence officer for the Israeli state in the 1970s and 80s. It is through Dickens & Madson, that the RSF managed to solidify its relationship to Emirati (and Russian) elites currently fueling the war in Sudan, by exploiting Sudan’s gold in exchange for weapons.
We are now over a 1 year into this latest phase of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and over 18 months into the war in Sudan. At times, the livestreamed images of Sudanese and Palestinians pulled from the rubble, of bodies unburied, of homes and businesses destroyed, of emaciated and injured children meld into one another in my head. The cameras tilted at the same angle, the look of horror on their faces one which I cannot unsee. And while these images circulate freely for everyone to consume, they often do so without history, without context. The same British colonizers set the stage for this counterrevolutionary state violence in both Sudan and Palestine through colonial agreements and betrayals, creating the fertile soil for ethno-nationalist, violent, extractive states to emerge; states for which the supremacy of some is predicated on the dehumanization and dispossession of others.
The images of starved Sudanese children printed on the front page of the New York Times are framed by a famine that has been decades in the making; one that was facilitated by World Bank recommended reforms that decimated the small-scale agricultural sector to attract foreign, mostly Gulf Arab investments in Sudanese land. As the RSF displaces and murders farmers, wipes out entire farming villages, loots grain storage facilities and destroys critical farming infrastructure, they do so on the heels of a much longer process, spearheaded by the former regime, of privatizing large swaths of the farming sector. In Palestine, the Israeli settler colonial project has from its very inception been predicated on Palestinian land dispossession. Amidst this current attack on Gaza, Israel is said to have “seized more Palestinian land in the West Bank than over the past 20 years combined.” The Palestinian Agricultural Development Association estimates “that nearly a quarter of northern Gaza’s farm holdings were completely destroyed by Israeli forces, which razed greenhouses and buildings and 70% of Gaza’s fishing fleets in the initial days of bombings and incursion.” In both Palestine and Sudan, militarized state violence is serving as cover to push people off their lands, destroy agricultural infrastructure and prevent farmers from planting and feeding their communities. Starvation is being used as a weapon of war against the backdrop of food insecurity that was manufactured long before the latest phases of this violence began. And in both places, it is ordinary people who are leading the critical mutual aid and relief efforts* that are helping our people survive, while international aid is being obstructed.
The historical connections between Palestine and Sudan are many, beginning with the 1948 war in which Sudanese joined Palestinians in their struggle for self-determination. Nearly two decades later, in 1967, Arab member states gathered in Sudan’s capital, agreed to a resolution calling for No Peace, No Recognition and No Negotiations with Israel. This three No’s resolution was broken in 2020 by the Abrahams accord -a normalization with Israel agreement-which was signed by Sudan during the transitional period, following states like Bahrain, the UAE and Morocco. Government elites signed the accord in exchange for being dropped from the US list of state sponsors of terrorism, along with the promise of 1 billion in annual financing from the World Bank, badly needed funds after 27 years of Clinton-era sanctions. Their willingness to sign the accord was symbolic of the ways civilian elites who participated in Sudan’s power-sharing transitional government were actively betraying the revolutionary demands of those who continued to protest on the streets and organize in their neighborhoods. Less than a year after the accord was signed, the Sudanese Armed Forces and Rapid Support Forces, now vying for political and economic control of Sudan, staged a coup and derailed the country’s transition to democratic elections. It is in the aftermath of this coup, as protesters were being brutalized by the coup regime, that the UN facilitated peace talks led by the US, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and UK, states which had legitimized and propped up the coup leaders, Generals Burhan and Hemedti, even though their war crimes span decades. The talks framed the generals as potential reformists rather than heeding the call of the resistance committees calling for their own three No’s: no negotiations, no legitimacy, and no partnership with the military. Prioritizing stability over revolutionary demands, international diplomacy was leveraged as a tool of empire. This lack of accountability is partly what paved the way for the current war.
As Sudanese policy analyst Kholood Khair points out, military elites in Sudan have negotiated and signed dozens of peace agreements, over the last few decades, becoming experts at negotiating peace without ever implementing it. In this context, peace has been used as a currency by military elites to absolve themselves of war crimes and to legitimize the continued repression or absorption of opposition forces. We have seen peace as a currency play a similar role in Palestine, if we look at the aftermath of the Oslo accords.
There are many other connections that link Sudan’s counterrevolution to Israel and to the broader role it has played on the African continent as a destabilizing and counterinsurgent force. Since the 1960s, political elites across the African continent have used the counterinsurgency tools, expertise, and financial support of the Israeli state to suppress dissent and consolidate their power. In the early 60s, Israel also played a critical role in perpetuating the colonial division between North Africa and the rest of the continent in an effort to “brand itself as a legitimate member of the postcolonial Afro-Asian world” and more significantly, to weaken African solidarity and support for Palestinian self-determination.
As universities across N. America continue to roll out new and improved DEI measures and initiatives, branding themselves as “inclusively excellent”, student encampment organizers have exposed the ways university administrations and boards often willingly operate like repressive states: Universities have deployed state troopers and police forces to violently break up encampments and suppress student and staff dissent. Where police forces have not been unleashed in an impromptu fashion, universities have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars securing injunctions, authorizing police to do the same. Students have faced criminal trespass charges, suspensions and other disciplinary consequences that could impact their academic trajectories and livelihoods. A tenured colleague and friend was recently fired by her college "for speech in support of Palestinian freedom.” University Presidents dismissed during this period, are being quietly replaced without formal search processes.
Last Fall, I participated in a meeting between Sudanese students advocating for tuition remission and more robust forms of academic and mental health support and a relatively high-ranking administrator. The administrator, while appearing quite sympathetic, explained to us that the university mirrors the Canadian state, which had yet to acknowledge the magnitude of the crisis in Sudan in the ways it has recognized the crisis in Ukraine. Canada has for instance, failed to create a refugee visa program for Sudanese citizens, despite Sudan constituting the world’s largest displacement crisis. The university, he revealed, was choosing to mirror the state in its inaction and neglect towards Sudanese students, contradicting the commitments made in its "anti-black racism task force report.” It would have cost the university very little to fulfill their students’ demands and yet inaction in this context meant the institution didn’t need to spend ’unnecessary’ funds on the hundreds of Sudanese students whose tuition dollars line their budgets.
We left the meeting ”empty-handed” that day, with no commitments or accommodations. Instead, this administrator gifted us the analytical framework for understanding the relationship between our university and the settler-colonial state in and beyond North America. Tertiary institutions are, as he admitted, mirroring the states they operate in, in their refusal to divest from genocide and in their deliberate prioritization of profit over student demands and well-being. The same universities that have cracked down brutally on Pro-Palestinian student organizers, have failed all members of their community directly impacted by war, occupation, and state violence by refusing to divest from the global military industrial complex that Israel, Canada and the US profit from as major arms producers and exporters. To them, investing in death appears to be more profitable than investing in life.
Half a century ago, in 1968, Black students at Columbia University linked the university’s harmful role as a gentrifying force in upper Manhattan to its connection to the global military industry. As they occupied an administrative building, they demanded that the university stop the construction of a segregated gym in nearby Harlem while also demanding that Columbia cut ties to the Institute of Defense Analysis “a forum where leading research universities and government agencies that funded military research could discuss issues of mutual interest.” Both issues exposed the university’s willingness to place profit over people and to participate in research that has fueled and facilitated state violence for decades.
In the years since 1968, it has become clear that universities have not only failed to divest, they have deepened these connections. Organizing efforts to expose and challenge these practices and investments, have mostly been met with police and by extension state repression and punitive measures. As such, the current struggle for disclosure, divestment and cutting ties with Israel, echoes a long history of anti-militarist organizing on university campuses ranging from anti-Vietnam war protests to the more recent campaign to get cops off campuses. Ultimately, these struggles converge around the desire to divest entirely from the current model of the university and state.
*If you would like to support grassroots mutual aid efforts in Sudan, please go to www.sudansolidarity.com. You can donate to the Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committees and other Palestinian-led organizations through www.grassrootsonline.org.