Western students hold an emergency rally to support Palestine as airstrikes shatter fragile ceasefire
By Qinglang Wu March 20, 2025
*This article is published in Western Journalism Studio.
An emergency rally organized by the Western Divestment Coalition was held on the Western campus at 5 p.m. Tuesday.
The rally was in response to Israeli airstrikes on the Gaza Strip early Tuesday, which killed at least 436 people, including at least 183 children, 94 women, 34 elderly people, and 125 men, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.
An anonymous Western alumnus who attended the rally said approximately 75 to 80 people were there. Participants were carrying loudspeakers, holding microphones, waving Palestinian flags, and saying loudly, “Free, Free, Palestine!”
The Western alumnus said she felt very shocked, but not surprised after learning about the airstrikes in Gaza yesterday. “We did think that the ceasefire had an effect, but we know there have been violations since the day the ceasefire was reached. But this sort of escalation was very sudden and very out of the blue,” she said.
Divestment rallies have been held in the past, but Western University hasn’t divested from the Israeli companies that it’s funding, said the alumnus who spoke on condition of anonymity, citing safety.
Dr. Dorotea Gucciardo, who runs a medical organization in Gaza, said this rally is a signal to the wider community that there are a group of people here who are “fighting against the illegal occupation and apartheid seen in Palestine, and even against the idea of a settler colonial state displacing and eliminating local populations.”
“I think it's useful to think of those resistance movements happening in different areas…these rallies are coming together to tell the political leaders, any kind of inaction on your part is complicity in the violence that's happening inside Gaza,” Gucciardo said.
She linked protests on campus to what she called a broader struggle for justice. “It’s not just for Palestinians, but justice for anybody that is subject to war crimes.”
Ben Sissman, a Western alumnus and a current fellow of StandWithUs, an organization dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism, had his own opinions on the rally.
Sissman thinks rallies should bring up a topic to debate, but from his personal experience, those rallies shut down dialogues. When he went to previous rallies and tried to talk to the people there, he said he was immediately hit by the same rhetoric: “You’re a Zionist, we don’t talk to Zionists.”
“And we are talking about a university setting, where dialogue should be flourishing. And it should be a setting for education, for opening up for discussion, for being both sides,” Sissman said.
Sissman says he believes that any Jewish student would be happy to discuss the intricacies of their own experiences. As a result, he believes that what they need most is a bigger platform in current discussions about the Middle East, which they currently lack.
At the start of the school year, the Palestinian Culture Club at Western publicly announced that a total of 203 of their family members were killed in Gaza. The Western Divestment Coalition is planning to hold another rally on the Western campus this Saturday on March 22 as airstrikes continue.
