Pro-Palestinian encampments spread across UK universities

Pro-Palestinian students have set up encampments at more than a dozen leading UK universities in a bid to force a change to the institutions’ relationships with Israel.

The protesters have joined a mass movement in support of Gaza that started in the US but has now spread to campuses across the world, and they have received the backing of many academics and staff.

And after a student-led coalition started an encampment at the University of Warwick late last month, a number of other organisations have followed suit in the UK, including Oxford Action for Palestine.

In creating a “liberated zone” of tents on the lawn of the University of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum, the group is demanding that Oxford annually disclose its financial assets and immediately divest any holdings in arms companies or any firms that are “complicit in Israeli genocide”.

They have also demanded that the university call for an unconditional and immediate ceasefire, condemn the destruction of all of Gaza’s universities by Israel’s bombardment in the past six months, and commit concrete resources both to support Palestinian scholars’ education and to rebuild Gaza’s destroyed institutions of higher education.

More than 250 faculty and staff from Oxford have signed a letter supporting the students and calling on the university – which has a “commitment to global leadership” – to help end the “catastrophic” situation in Gaza.

“We see the encampment in solidarity with Gaza, in the words of Professor David Ludden, as ‘a public-facing global education project’,” they write.

“We hope that the university’s leadership will treat this political expression as the opportunity for dialogue that it is.”

At the University of Cambridge, students said they felt they had to join the movement because of the actions of Robert Balfour, a former prime minister and Cambridge alumnus who initiated the UK’s support for Israel with the Balfour Declaration in 1917.

“As students of the university of Balfour, who initiated the UK’s support for the colonial Zionist project, and of the vast majority of the prime ministers who have since continued it, we feel a particular obligation to stand with Palestinians in ending this historic injustice,” said Cambridge for Palestine in a statement on Twitter/X.

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Other institutions affected by demonstrations and occupations include the universities of Bristol, Edinburgh, Liverpool, Leeds, Manchester and Sheffield, Swansea and Newcastle universities, SOAS University of London, UCL, and Goldsmiths, University of London.

One student organiser at Cambridge said he was willing to be expelled from his biology course for the cause. “When you think about students in Gaza who have had their universities decimated and are not able to complete any school year – entire classes wiped out – that would be nothing compared to them,” he told The Times.

The British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (Brismes) expressed its solidarity with the student encampments and called on university leaders to respect their freedom of expression and to constructively engage with their demands.

In a statement, the Brismes council said some universities had eroded the fundamental mission and purpose of higher education with their actions towards the encampments, including surveilling and threatening them.

“Brismes believes that higher education institutions should be proud of students who refuse to stand idly by as crimes take place and who, in a variety of ways, struggle to build a better world,” they added.

Tensions in the US have become increasingly fraught in recent days as police in Los Angeles cleared out an encampment at the University of Southern California, and graduation ceremonies have been disrupted by pro-Palestinian supporters.

Gillian Keegan, the education secretary, criticised the “alarming levels of division” in the US, and said antisemitic abuse and intimidation must not be tolerated on university campuses in the UK.

Writing in The Daily Telegraph, she said how university leaders managed this situation would be of the utmost importance.

“The government expects all universities to take swift action to ensure the safety of staff and students and reduce disruption,” she added.

patrick.jack@timeshighereducation.com