Canada

If the police show up, and the labour unions actually stand off against them, the photos alone could spark a significant social movement. One of the things that labour has failed to show for, oh, like 2 generations now is that the movement is willing to actually help people more generally, being mostly content to limit itself to helping its membership.

Engaging publicly in a big way has the potential, at least, to be a huge deal.

I think it's significant in principle at least.

Part of the reason that the youth are so disillusioned is that nobody in the older generations show any interest in protecting them in any sense. From abstract things like the projected future climate in which they will live, or in the concrete immediate of swarms of police.

Intergenerational solidarity isn't something these students have really experienced.

This is what the rich are really afraid of: that support for Palestine acts as a catalyst for left-wing radicalism in general.

The wealthy know they've pushed it too far, that people are sick and tired of being exploited, from the jobless recoveries of the mid 90s, to the dotcom crash where we bailed out the wealthy, to the '08 crisis where we bailed them out even more only to have them piss it away on their own compensation, to the '10s where we rolled out the red carpet for them and let them party on cheap money for decade, to the pandemic where we shovelled money at them only to have them whine and cry about how we wouldn't work hard enough and how dare get off of our knees and ask, maybe, not to be ground so hard.

They know that this is a flashpoint, and they're scared, but despite that fear, they can't help themselves and despite ebing able to fix things by just not being so egregiously greedy, they're going to try to flex more and take more because, well, they've been able to since at least 1980. They think that because they escaped OWS, they're get off scott-free here.

So yeah, this is significant. If organized labour is getting off it's knees, and if the message sticks, there's a real cascade that could happen. We haven't seen labour do this since the mid-90s, if not the late 60s. It could, with momentum, result in some serious change.