Students stage pro-Palestine occupations at five more UK universities
Students at the University of Oxford set up an encampment in support of Palestinians in Gaza, May 2024
Rachel Hall and Neha Gohil report in The Guardian on 6 May 2024:
Students at five UK universities have become the latest protesters to stage occupations to pressure their institutions into divesting funds from and ending partnerships with Israel.
Students set up encampments at the School of Oriental and African Studies (Soas) and at Oxford, Cambridge, Liverpool and Edinburgh universities. They are the latest in a global student uprising that is expected to build over the coming week across European campuses after starting at universities in the US, where hundreds of students and staff have been arrested for their involvement.
A joint statement from the organisers Oxford Action for Palestine and Cambridge for Palestine read: “Over 100 universities across the globe have now taken bold and urgent action for Palestine. As members of these institutions, we refuse to accept our universities’ complicity in Israel’s war crimes against the Palestinian people – and we refuse to stand by while they justify Israel’s campaign of mass slaughter, starvation, and displacement.”
The protesters at Oxford and Cambridge arrived on Monday morning with supplies, sleeping bags and cardboard signs bearing hand-painted slogans that stated: “There are no universities left in Gaza” and “Divest from genocide”. A large banner, reading “Welcome to the people’s university for Palestine”, was put up outside the encampment in front of the Pitt Rivers museum in Oxford.
They have also demanded that Oxford and Cambridge universities divest from all companies linked to Israeli genocide and occupation, help rebuild Gaza’s education system, end institutional relationships with Israeli universities and protect the safety of students and staff involved in pro-Palestinian action.
More than 170 Oxford faculty and staff members signed a letter in support of the encampment and its aims.
Sneha Krishnan, an associate professor in human geography at the university, said it was “scandalous” that universities had not openly condemned Israel’s actions. “I strongly believe that students everywhere in the world are leading us in an important moral struggle at this moment,” she said.
Ana, a second-year undergraduate involved in the encampment at Oxford, said there was an “optimistic” atmosphere, with students working on essays alongside attending workshops. “It’s time for more than protests that happen every two weeks,” she said. “It’s time for us to be here … in place until the university accepts our demands.”