Strength through diversity
For the past few years, student organising at universities hasn’t been particularly diverse. Climate strike veterans have been pressuring universities to divest from and cut research ties with polluting industries, while a loose network of anti-arms groups have fought the creeping militarisation of education. In these campaigns, people of colour have often been in a minority and active campus groups have been largely composed of white, often queer students. That is, until Israel escalated its genocide of Palestinians.
This year’s wave of protest, occupations and encampments brought together established activists with pro-Palestine groups, who have not historically occupied the same space in student politics. A public-facing protest camp means that people from all walks of life will come. In Sheffield, we saw Maoists, XR veterans, graduates from student action during the 2008/09 Gaza war and the local Muslim community standing united in their opposition to Israeli apartheid. Most significantly, there have been huge numbers of people joining in the camps who hadn’t previously been involved in activism.
Diversity strengthened our camp at Sheffield, enriching our understanding of wider movements and our position within them. A melting pot of ideas, politics, books, theory and stories created a culture of learning and curiosity. We taught each other stories and tactics from our respective movements, local and international. Our campers from the Middle East shared their cultures, connecting our context with the wider Palestinian liberation movement. I learnt more about Palestinian resistance and history from my comrades than any lecture or book.
From this place of curiosity and rage, we developed collective understandings and critiques of our university and its place in global systems of violence. The struggle allowed students to see their universities in a new light. The University of Sheffield, for example, takes more money from arms companies than any other UK university. As students dug deeper into these ties, our eyes were opened to our institutions’ roles in imperialism and complicity in the genocide. Student anger at the horrors in Gaza was turned towards the outposts of Israel’s war machine on our own campuses.
Zac Larkham, University of Sheffield
A monument to collective grief
There comes a point when the reality of the world becomes too much to hold within oneself. Every day bombs are dropping in Gaza. Every day hospitals, universities, and social infrastructures are decimated. Every day countless people lose their lives to this unending colonial violence perpetrated by the Zionist regime. From afar, it feels as if we can only grieve this catastrophe. In April 2024, with the Justice for Palestine Society (a direct action group at the University of Edinburgh that has been active since 2018), we thought to redefine our grief, rework it and channel it into action.
Inspired by the countless student encampments across the world, we took the lawn outside the Old College, claiming it as our Liberation Zone, as our space to fight, speak, love and grieve for Palestine. Our grief transcended spoken solidarity, which has now become the norm in protesting for Palestine. Collectively more needed to be done. Chanting was no longer enough, wearing keffiyehs was no longer enough. We needed to go to the heart of where change can happen. For us, that was outside the administration offices that fund Israeli war crimes with their investments.
Through occupying we metamorphosed what these spaces could be used for, transforming them into spaces to act through grief and towards divestment and liberation. Our encampment was only a drop in this mass sea of student resistance. Tired of the constant immorality that surrounds our societies, we demanded something different. While the media and governments can see us as youths with immaterial dreams, we see ourselves as individuals in a position to think of new worlds where others can’t. A new world where all people are liberated from the stretching arm of colonial violence and oppression.
Masa Nazzal, University of Edinburgh
Uniting town and gown
The enforced isolation of Covid lockdowns broke a fragile chain of transmission of knowledge and organisation from one generation of students to the next. The Palestine encampment has set it back in motion, with an intense education for hundreds of students. Through archives and interviews, we now know better the tasks we inherit and the lessons to learn from past generations, and we are more aware that we must document and archive so that we too have something to pass on.
Radical roots in the town have been reinvigorated. Through the encampment on King’s Parade we hosted direct action, teach-ins, speak-outs, demonstrations, vigils, a library and more for 100 days. The camp was held together by a town-based network, produced by years of organising and opening spaces that stand against the commodification, colonialism and landlordism of the university – their domineering neighbour.
The encampment breathed new life into this impressive web of relationships. While some encampments chose to represent themselves as strictly student protests, we recognised the insidious town-gown divide and the entangled histories of local resistance to the university and of global student radicalism. The role of the ‘town’ in our encampment reflects our understanding of the multiplicity of strategies employed by the university to nurture its power and prestige.
Some of us made comparisons, seeing both radical continuities and changes with the student-led rebellions of 1968 – from anti-colonialism and internationalism to attitudes towards religion and sex. In ’68 the students dared to spearhead a revolution that the workers would join; today it is unclear what that might mean. A group who claimed to have organic connections to the workers proposed a walk-out in the Arcade, a shopping centre. As the story goes, the drums and chants of our rally were met with just one worker walking out. Whatever the actual number, if we cannot now find allies amongst the workers, then how do we relate to ’68?
Today, mostly, the encampments are gone and here and there some concessions have been granted, some negotiations are in process and some taskforces have been commissioned. But the bombs are still falling, Palestine is still occupied – the international solidarity movement must go on.
Sam Weissenberg, University of Cambridge
