Michelle He, Co-Editor in Chief
IDF-issued evacuation order displacing Khan Yunis residents to Al-Mawasi, 19 May 2025.
Source: Abu Ayham, Khan Yunis 2025.
IT’S NOT normal for these northern lands we’re so familiar with to be nearly 40°C as I write. It’s not normal for me to cough until my throat bleeds every month. It’s not normal to watch my friends go weeks without food and water. It’s not normal for them to look up at a night sky where the only source of light pollution comes from bombs.
Since high school, I’ve been watching my friend Abu Ayham and his family tend to the land and deliver medicine to their displaced neighbors, audible detonations in the background. I’ve seen ten times more evacuation orders flutter to his feet than the smiles I’ve seen on his face. He would tell me not to worry, but then lose connection for days. I wouldn’t know until his next message whether he lived or died. When I entered university, I was already burnt out by the weight of corrupt authorities at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and mesmerized by the promise of freedom in adulthood. I weighed my options naively, believing that somehow one institution could be different from others. You can laugh now, but I bet many of us started in the same boat. The reason I came here was that my top choice had invited a guest speaker to deny the existence of residential schools, and then took no accountability when faced with backlash. I thought I was doing something tough by going elsewhere, refusing to fund such cruelty. Now, my tuition funds the lights exploding over my friend’s head in Palestine.
This June, another vigil was held in the same place at the same time as last year, to commemorate the thousands of students in Gaza who will never graduate. Our peers in the community gathered outside of Sidney Smith Hall during convocation in the sweltering heat to hold a graduation ceremony for those killed, displaced, and denied their right to education. According to the UN, 403 school buildings in the Gaza Strip were directly hit and sustained damage between October 2023 and February 2025. About 87,000 university students just like us have been affected in Palestine, and yet, the University of Toronto refuses to disclose, divest, and end its complicity in scholasticide. While organizers and attendees stood in the sun to mourn our fellow students, the campus police cracked jokes among themselves, bored of monitoring our every breath.
We’re all learning to find our place, grasp our power, and understand collective grief. I bring this up now because grief and suffering did not just begin when we finally chose to notice. Scientists have warned about climate change for more than a century, and genocides don’t spontaneously generate from the moment they’re broadcast online. What you’re reading right now is our 46th issue: Contagion, ranging from sensationalism to prejudice against rats. I hope you’ll stay for the work that we do and stand in solidarity with our friends who deserve not just to survive but to live with dignity. Out of known contagious diseases, apathy is what I truly fear most.
