Dr. Tarek Loubani took the stage alongside his two young children, addressing nearly 200 people about Palestinian healthcare and statehood. While unintentionally forming a dynamic where the audience could witness the lives of children in a safe and comfortable environment, Dr. Loubani shared stories about the atrocities faced by children in Gaza due to Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians.
“An evening with Dr. Tarek Loubani” was intended to be an opportunity for academic discussion and awareness about the genocide in Palestine with Dr. Loubani sharing his experiences. Yet, before the event had even begun, it became a site of political controversy after The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) attempted to have the event cancelled.
Loubani is a Palestinian-Canadian physician who has spent years working as an emergency physician on the frontlines in Ukraine and Palestine. He also founded Glia, a global initiative creating open-source, locally manufacturable medical devices for conflict zones.
Loubani shared his stories, describing a nation in which medics operated and sutured men, women and children without anesthetics due to blockade-related shortages. In Palestine, medics operate alongside routine obstructions and monitoring as well as attacks against medical sites and personnel in Gaza.
One of the stories discussed during the event was that of 24-year-old Muhammed Bhar, a Palestinian man with down syndrome and autism from Shejaiya. His case has also been reported by the BBC, which documented his story in a detailed investigation.
Bhar lived his life largely dependent on family — unable to eat, dress or move without help. When Israeli forces raided his family home on Jul. 3, soldiers brought a combat dog used to search buildings. Despite his mother’s pleas — “he’s disabled, have mercy on him” — the soldiers released the dog to attack, biting his chest and arm.
Terrified and bleeding, Bhar reportedly patted the dog’s head and said, “enough, my dear, enough.”
Soldiers later moved him into another room and applied a tourniquet. A military doctor briefly attempted care. Then, as combat intensified elsewhere, the troops left. The family was forced to evacuate at gunpoint, leaving him behind.
A week later, they found his body.
“He had been bleeding and left alone all this time,” his brother told the BBC. “Of course the army left him.”
Loubani continued his talk sharing several firsthand accounts from his time of working in Gaza’s hospitals. The first story he shared was of a man who arrived with two badly injured children after being attacked by Israeli forces. Immediately after seeing the children, he knew one of them would not survive. Loubani recalled having to tell the father: “your child is going to die, but the other one will live.”
Since October 2023, more than 50,000 children have been reportedly killed or injured in the Gaza Strip, as stated by UNICEF on May 27. As the audience at the FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre heard these stories of a father being told he will lose one of his two children, and one of 50,000 Palestinian children altogether, they could see a juxtaposition of Loubani’s own two children playing, running around, tugging his arm and simply being children on stage.
The third and final story Loubani shared was of a woman who had been burned alive. He explained the smell of burning flesh and that the woman had died before they went to check on her. Yet they found a heartbeat — not of the woman, but of the fetus.
Loubani alongside his colleagues had to then decide whether they could save the fetus. “What are we bringing this child into?” he asked the audience, “and how?”
The fetus passed soon thereafter, but Loubani could not walk away. Instead, he sat there with the ultrasound, listening to the rapidly changing, unstable fetal heart rate before the fetus endured profound bradycardia and passed.
“There is no such thing as doing medicine in Palestine, without doing politics in Palestine,” Loubani said during his talk, highlighting his own experiences and the experiences the organizers of the event faced a few days prior to the event.
In the days leading up to the talk, CIJA contacted the venue — not the organizers — asking for the event to be “withdrawn,” a term later described as an euphemism for cancellation by Dr. Gökbörü Sarp Tanyildiz, co-organizer of the event as well as associate professor in Brock University’s Department of Sociology and Critical Criminology who also serves as the director of the Social Justice Research Institute (SJRI).
CIJA said that the event framed Israel as perpetrating genocide and that such framing could make Jewish community members feel unsafe, supporting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)’s working definition of antisemitism. This equation has proven controversial amongst many Jewish communities in Canada, including the Jewish Faculty Network (JFN), who have openly discussed and critiqued it.
The venue emailed Dr. Margot Francis, co-organizer of the event and Associate Professor at Brock University’s Centre for Women’s and Gender Studies, and faculty chair of the President’s Advisory Committee on Human Rights, Equity, and Decolonization, asking whether she had been notified of concerns. She had not.
No direct communication was sent to Brock University, nor was any attempt made to discuss the content with the faculty responsible in organizing the event.
In response to the complaint, the event’s security requirements were changed. Instead of the usual single staffer employed by the venue, two Brock University special constables were included, raising the event’s security profile. Tanyildiz stated that they had hosted “many events related to Palestine and antisemitism in the past, [which] never had any disruptions and were very well received.”
Regardless of the increase in security, organizers chose to proceed.
Days following the event, The Brock Press interviewed Tanyildiz about the attempted cancellation, with Tanyildiz noting how it reflected a shifting political landscape.
Last winter, Tanyildiz spearheaded a motion within the Brock University Faculty Association (BUFA) calling for institutional divestment from entities that he says are complicit in the ethnic cleansing and destruction of Palestinian academic institutions.
The motion was defeated at a union vote in January (149 for, 287 against, 25 abstentions).
Later, he reported to The Brock Press that he was facing a targeted harassment campaign — leaked meeting recordings, online abuse, vandalism of his office door and attempts to cancel his talks — which he attributed to right-wing and pro-Zionist actors opposed to his stance.
The difference Tanyildiz cites between then and now is that, the event still occurred and CIJA was not given disproportionate power. Because of “a shift in public opinion,” he said, “apologists for genocide no longer seem to have the upper hand, public opinion has turned against them” and targeting academics focused on social justice is “no longer viable” and “looks bad and absolutely horrible on [CIJA’s] part.”
The event’s framing, he emphasized, was in line with academic responsibility.
“As scholars, we are obliged to understand contemporary social problems,” he said, citing the passed resolutions by the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS), who in August of this year declared that “Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide in Article II of the United Nations Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948).”
Tanyildiz continued saying that as academics “we all have a responsibility to delegitimize and oppose genocide in our society, workplaces and classrooms.”
Despite the disruptions, the event drew a broad audience: church representatives, local activists, Muslim medical organizations, Jewish groups critical of Israeli policies and university students across various programs.
The event occurred on Nov. 5 at the PAC, co-sponsored by numerous groups and organizations including: The President’s Advisory Committee on Human Rights, Equity, and Decolonization; Social Justice Research Institute; Faculty for Palestine — Brock Chapter; Centre for Women’s and Gender Studies; MA in Social Justice and Equity Studies; Indigenous Educational Studies at Brock University; Zanab Jafry Shah; Niagara Movement for Justice in Palestine/Israel; 905 Palestine, Independent Jewish Voices — Hamilton; Jewish Faculty Network — Southwest Ontario; Silver Spire Church; and Muslim Medical Association of Canada (MMAC) — Niagara Chapter.
Niagara based artist Nicole Joy Frazer opened with a performance of “My Welcome Song.” Zanab Jafry Shah introduced Dr. Loubani, and the evening closed with remarks by Dr. Samah Sabra, highlighting the shared responsibility of academics and communities to address state violence wherever it occurs.
Several attendees stayed after the program ended — some to ask Loubani questions, others to share their own stories.
Loubani’s talk left the audience with the final remark that “medicine is resistance; keeping Palestinians alive is resistance.” He meant this not in a metaphorical sense, but a literal one: according to Loubani, every surgery completed without anesthetic, every bandage improvised from torn cloth and every newborn delivered amid bombardment is an act that challenges the structures designed to erase an entire nation of people.