What’s up with UK pro-Palestine student protests?

On a typical day, King’s Parade is crowded with tourists passing through its array of sweet shops and kitschy gift shops. But equally, Cambridge’s high street is no stranger to political protest. In 2010, students came together to protest the decision to raise tuition fees. In 2019, students from local schools staged a “mortuary” on the road to demand urgent action on the climate crisis. Later that year, Black Lives Matter protesters gathered in the same place to express their anger at the brutal killing of George Floyd by a police officer. Most recently, climate activists from Just Stop Oil spray-painted the walls of King’s College orange last year.

Today, the lawn flanking the entrance to King’s College is dotted with tents occupied by pro-Palestinian protesters, many of them wearing kefieh and carrying Palestinian flags. Banners with spray-painted slogans such as “Cambridge Jews for Justice in Palestine” and “Abandon Genocide” were spread across the facade of King’s College. It’s exam season, so there’s a dedicated area where students can continue to revise. There is also a multi-faith prayer space where on Friday (May 10) protesters held both Jummah and Shabbat prayers for Muslim and Jewish students respectively.

Like thousands of other student protesters across the UK, the activists attending the Cambridge camp are demanding that their university stop allowing Israel’s attack on Gaza. More precisely, they are calling Cambridge to disclose its financial and professional links to organizations “complicit in the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestine”; withdrawal from such organizations; reinvest in Palestinian students, academics and scholars; and protect the safety of its students, faculty and staff, especially “those targeted for their involvement in pro-Palestinian actions.” Most of the protesters from other universities such as Warwick, Oxfordand Newcastlethey make the same four key requirements.

Mahmoud, 23, one of the protesting Cambridge students, says there is a great sense of “unity” in the Cambridge camp. “The underlying sentiment is disgust with our university for being part of the mass killing of civilians in Gaza,” he says. “But love for the Palestinian people and universal human rights unites us all. The camp is peaceful, it’s safe, and it gets nice community support.”

The camp was set up in the early hours of the morning on May 6 in tandem with students 100 miles away in Oxford. “After seeing hundreds of children being bombed on my (phone) screen, I knew I couldn’t sit idly by,” Mahmoud tells Dazed. “I decided to take any measure possible to stop it. A primary way as a university student is to determine if my institution of learning plays a role in the killing of children. We know Cambridge knows, so we have to put an end to this.”

“Students don’t know what they’re talking about”

Students: pic.twitter.com/S49k31sMCg

— Read To Radicalize You (@JoshuaPHilll) May 7, 2024

Fortunately, it is becoming clear that universities cannot turn a blind eye to the real-life consequences of where they choose to invest their money. Information obtained under the Freedom of Information Act shows that Trinity College, Cambridge’s richest college, has investments worth more than £60,000 in Elbit Systems, Israel’s biggest arms company. Pressure mounted on the college to withdraw: in March, an activist cut down the portrait of Lord Arthur Balfour – the author of the Balfour Declaration – and about two weeks before camp started, students had interrupted an open house for students coming to Trinity by admonition prospective students not to apply to the college because of its “complicity in Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people.” On Sunday, it was reported that Trinity was planning withdraw from all gun companiesincluding those who supply Israel, after voting on the issue in March.

Since Israel began most recent attack on Gaza following the October 7 Hamas attack, the students of world have vocally expressed their support for Palestine. This recent wave of encampments at universities around the world was catalyzed by students at Columbia University in New York, who set up an encampment of about 50 tents on campus in the early morning hours of April 17. Other US universities quickly followed suit: to date, pro-Palestinian demonstrations have also taken place at universities including Yale, Harvard, BerkeleyNYU, MYTH, South Carolina and Texas. Hundreds of students and staff have been arrested and suspended for their involvement in the protests, with some videos on social media appearing to show police using brute force to subdue the protesters.

Trinity College Cambridge, the wealthiest constituent college of the University of Cambridge, has decided to divest itself of all gun companies. pic.twitter.com/rVkwtgcleh

— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) May 12, 2024

While Camp Columbia has now been dismantled by the police, the student protest movement for Palestine has gone global. Since then, students have organized encampments at universities in Japan, Australia and several European countries, while thousands of students in the UK are also continuing to call on their universities to withdraw from Israel. The first UK university to set up a camp was Warwick, with students pitching tents in the square outside the Student Union at around 1am on 26 April. Camps have now been set up at over 10 universities including Cambridge, Oxford, Edinburgh. , UCL, Newcastle and Leeds. Fortunately, there was not a heavy police presence at the UK protests in the same way that there was in the US (although four protesters outside UCL were arrested over the bank holiday weekendwhile Newcastle students also reported experiencing harassment from campus security).

Billie*, 21, who wishes to remain anonymous, is one of the students attending the camp at the University of Warwick. Like thousands of other students, Billie is calling on their university to withdraw from Israel. “I have been involved in the pro-Palestine movement at my university since my first week here in 2021, where I attended an event presenting Palestinian history.,” they say. “The camp was a place of solidarity and hope at Warwick. It was great to be surrounded by so many students and staff motivated by our desire to see an end to our university’s complicity in the ongoing genocide in Gaza.”

Clearly, the peaceful reality of daily life in these camps is at odds with much of the alarmist reporting on the situation. A recent one Sky News The segment reported on the protests without once mentioning the words “Palestine,” “Israel,” or “Gaza,” choosing instead to conflate the growth of the pro-Palestine protest movement with the issue of rising anti-Semitism on campus. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Education Secretary Gillian Keegan held a crisis meeting with university vice-chancellors and Jewish students on May 9 to discuss “de-escalating” the campus protests. While there have been reports of isolated incidents of anti-Semitism on protests, the vast majority of university protests in the UK have so far remained peaceful, with many Jewish students also taking part in the action. The protesters themselves are susceptible to violence and abuse: in particular, on Sunday night (May 12), six men targeted the Oxford camp, ripping up banners and shouting “terrorists” and “I’m killing you damn it” at students.

Kendall, 26, is a Jewish student attending camp at Oxford University. She wholeheartedly rejects the idea that these protests are expressions of anti-Semitism. “Our camp is an incredibly safe space for Jewish students,” she says, adding that the Oxford camp, like the Cambridge camp, held a Friday night Shabbat dinner. “I sang Shalom Aleichem, did Shabbat Kiddush and said blessings for Challah…there are a lot of Jewish students who told me, ‘This is an amazing space because it’s the first time I’ve been able to say my prayers in the community since October'”.

Warwick is beautiful. Learning Arabic songs and slogans from the Delhi protests – internationalism in action. 🇵🇸 pic.twitter.com/PRu0nnAzJR

— Alfie Hancox (@full_communist) May 8, 2024

Kendall adds that she believes Jewish students who are protesting are particularly at risk of facing anti-Semitic violence and abuse. “The Jewish students who are here in this camp have been ostracized and harassed by the mainstream Jewish institutions that claim to represent us,” she says. “This camp gives Jewish students a space to claim our Jewishness and practice our faith and culture in a way that does not support genocide. The idea that this camp is a hostile place for Jewish students is completely at odds with this reality.”

Will the protesters succeed in ensuring that their demands are heard and heeded? Time will tell. According to Mahmoud, the University of Cambridge “barely acknowledged” their camp, instead sending only a milquetoast email to alumni, offering assurances that “the normal business of the University continues as usual” and expands vaguely “support and empathy for those in our community who are affected by the tragic events in Gaza, Israel and elsewhere”. Billie notes that “the university closed the lines of communication with us and created a hostile environment by hiring private security to monitor our peaceful demonstration.” Kendall says the Oxford administration has yet to visit the camp or have any direct “formal contact” with any protesters, choosing instead to send representatives from the Oxford Student Union to start a dialogue with the protesters on their behalf. “We’re not going anywhere until the university engages with us and takes us seriously,” she says.

But there is hope. A five day camp at Trinity College Dublin was taken down on May 8after the university agreed to work for total divestment from Israel. Outgoing student union president Laszlo Molnarfi said guardian that the move clearly demonstrated the impact that collection action can have. “It shows the strength of students and grassroots staff fighting for a just cause of Palestinian liberation and to end complicity with Israeli genocide, apartheid and settler colonialism,” he said. So if universities are serious about ‘de-escalating’ the situation, then vice-chancellors should follow the example set by Trinity College Dublin and bring the protesters around the table, listen to their demands and listen.

*The name has been changed