Montreal Musicians Turn Solidarity Into Sound for Palestine

“Music is where we practice building community,” says Lucas Huang over video call. Huang is a member of Musicians for Palestine Montreal, and helped spearhead the group’s latest project: a compilation tape raising funds for the Sameer Project, a mutual aid group led by Palestinians that provides essential goods and services to people in Gaza. “The music part is how you get a bunch of people in the room because it’s fun and cool,” Huang reflects, speaking alongside collective members Ky Brooks and Markus Lake. “And then, how does that connect to the broader movement?”

To answer that question, Musicians for Palestine launched a list of over 100 Montreal artists and music organizations signing onto the cultural boycott of apartheid Israel the same week that the group released the cassette tape. “In practice, this means we refuse to perform in apartheid Israel; we refuse to accept funding from Israel, its lobby groups, or other institutions complicit in Israel’s crimes; and we refuse to collaborate on cultural projects that seek to normalize genocide and apartheid,” their statement reads. This cultural boycott follows from the aims laid out by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS), a campaign inspired by the cultural boycott of Apartheid South Africa, which takes a three-pronged approach to putting non-violent pressure on Israel’s occupation of Palestine.

The Musicians for Palestine Montreal list includes many influential Montreal artists across genres, from TOPS to Safia Nolin to Suuns, as well as major cultural hubs like the Société des arts technologiques. The cassette and the boycott list go hand in hand, providing material and symbolic support for Palestine at the same time as they cohere a local community of organizer-artists.

Musicians for Palestine Montreal formed in the wake of October 7, 2023, as Israel’s assault on Gaza intensified and local musicians felt compelled to organize in support of Palestine. Many of the group’s members already knew each other through the studio and performance space Error 403, as well as the legendary local label Constellation Records, which Ky Brooks describes as the “two nucleating points” of the collective. 

There’s a long history of musicians and cultural workers in Montreal advocating for Palestine. In the 2000s and 2010s, the concert series Artists Against Apartheid brought together local artists like hip-hop group Nomadic Massive and jazz collective Kalmunity under the banner of the BDS campaign and in partnership with Tadamon!, a collective organizing around solidarity with the so-called “Middle East.” In 2021 and 2022, as Israel was evicting Palestinians in East Jerusalem and expanding its illegal settlement, many Montreal artists signed onto a public statement by an international coalition committing to a boycott of Israeli cultural institutions. 

For Brooks, Huang and Lake, the choice to organize as musicians came from a desire to tap into the particular advantages of cultural workers—first and foremost, a wide social network—as well as a sense that it was necessary to intervene in the cultural processes that legitimize Israel’s occupation of Palestine. “It seems really important to not let that go unspoken and unacknowledged,” Brooks says, “recognizing the cultural work of normalization that happens around the genocide.”

Brooks points to the many ties between the Israeli state and arts and cultural organizations here in Canada. The arts in Canada are often sponsored by corporations and foundations that have major investments in Israeli companies directly involved in the genocide of Palestinians, from RBC’s investment in Palantir, to Scotiabank’s former stakes in Elbit Systems, from which it divested after significant pressure by arts organizers. “If we’re not speaking out about it, then we’re contributing to it,” Brooks says. 

The comp puts musicians’ particular skill sets to use in support of Palestine, with Brooks donating their time and labour by recording and mixing all the artists on the cassette tape. Brooks notes it wasn’t motivated by a particular artistic or aesthetic direction, but rather an opportunity for artists to collaborate and contribute their specific voice to the cause. 

The result is an eclectic mix. Some songs on the tape are explicitly political, like the menacing thrum of Parade’s “We’re Right Outside Your House Anthony,” which channels the power of a group of protestors outside a genocide collaborator’s residence. Others are more meditative or exploratory, like Corey Gulkin’s ode to springtime.

In addition to raising money, the process of making and releasing the comp helped cohere the community around Musicians for Palestine. “We got to spend some time in our community making music together and make some connections between artists who might not have had connections together before,” Brooks describes. That spirit carried over into the comp’s release show at La Sala Rossa on St. Laurent, which provided an opportunity for musicians and community members to come together in support of Palestine. The packed room hummed with chatter all night, while artists like Eve Parker Finley and Kahero:ton took the stage and guests browsed Palestinian books and art texts. “People want to be around each other in solidarity,” Brooks adds. 

The Musicians for Palestine Montreal comp is part of a broader swell of actions within the music industry in support of Palestine. Another project emerging out of Montreal is Gaza is the Moral Compass, a series of tapes raising money for mutual aid groups in Gaza. Led by Montreal’s Stefan Christoff, who has long been involved in the city’s pro-Palestine cultural advocacy, and Portland’s Andrew Neerman, the first tape features Montreal mainstays Efrim Manuel Menuck, Joni Void, and Sam Shalabi, as well as liner notes by Tara Alami and Yousef Anastas emphasizing the politicized nature of cultural work. “Culture is not a medium of entertainment. It is infrastructure. It is a political and material space where presence is sustained when land is fragmented,” writes Anastas.  

The artist’s job, then, is to de-naturalize colonial occupation. Some projects are intervening directly in the infrastructural nature of culture, disrupting its function as a bedrock for social fabric. The No Music For Genocide campaign encourages artists to geo-block their music from Israel, a form of boycotting that disrupts the flow of cultural output—removing presence from fragmented land.  

Boycotting projects, like the Musicians for Palestine Montreal boycott list, are not just about publishing a list of recognizable names, Lake emphasizes. “The process of creating that list has been very important for this group,” he says. Lake describes the steps taken: reaching out to members of the community, developing a sense of the political landscape as it relates to Palestine and arts institutions, and building a stronger knowledge base of what it means to sign on to BDS. Brooks and Huang note a lack of understanding of BDS and that part of the work they do is educational. 

“BDS really highlights for me the intensely networked world that we live in,” Brooks reflects, “and the really deep economic and resource-based flows that are the fabric of our lives, and the ways in which we are very connected to each other.” Huang mentions some individuals who were wary that signing on seemed performative; others worried it would be hypocritical to sign but not remove their music from Spotify. 

Musicians are in real-time figuring out how to wrest back some power from the networked platforms that have profited off of our works, using their value to invest in military weapons or attract sponsorships from Amazon and ICE. The increasing conversations and consternation over these entanglements is a positive development; we are seeking ways to opt-out, to put the value of our cultural labour elsewhere. It’s not an easy process, as Huang points out. “The price of boycotting things is sometimes being inconvenienced,” he says. “Putting a song out on a compilation is the easy part.”

The Musicians for Palestine comp is for sale here. If you’re interested in adding your name to the Montreal BDS list, you can get in touch at info@musiciansforpalestinemontreal.org.