PHOTO ESSAY | Palestine-Vancouver Solidarity March

Photographs by Mauricio Rivera

Yesterday hundreds gathered in downtown Vancouver–Coast Salish Territories to march in solidarity with Palestinians. People gathered in front of the CBC building at Hamilton and Georgia to call attention to, denounce, and organize in resistance against recent Israeli air strikes into Gaza that have killed 166 people, including 30 children.

The pretext for these attacks are the killings of three teenage Israeli settlers. “The dead Israeli teens have been eminently useful for attacking Hamas,” writes Greg Shupak. “The killings have also been useful for a media-political power configuration keen to paint Palestinians – as well as Arabs and Muslims more generally – as savages whose supposed collective barbarism is a major reason for Western support of the Zionist project.”

Yesterday’s event brought attention to the fact that Canada has maintained its support of Israel and that “MPs from across the Canadian political spectrum have been silent and complicit as the massacres continue.”

The Canadian state’s support makes sense when we identify, as Harsha Walia writes, “Israel as a settler-colonial state with deep ties to other settler-colonial states like Canada.” A recent article revealed, for instance, that “at minimum over 50 Canadian weapons makers export products to Israel directly today, a number most certainly rising as the Conservatives continue to tighten links with the Israeli state.”

Israel’s “logic of elimination,” as historian Patrick Wolfe calls it, is funded and perpetuated by those of us here in Canada. Yesterday, marching among hundreds, chanting “No Justice, No Peace”, “Free, free Palestine”, and “Gaza, Gaza don’t you cry, Palestine will never die,” Canada’s complicity in this colonial expansion felt more apparent than ever.