Police intervention. Disciplinary action. British campuses have become a key battleground in the movement for Palestine.
In the three years since the start of the genocide in Gaza, as streets across the world filled with Palestinian flags and thousands of protesters, another front in the struggle against the Israeli state and its crimes against Palestinians came into focus: British universities.
Specifically, the institutions’ material support for the Zionist entity, which is carried out through research collaborations and investments in technology and arms manufacturers.
Over the last three years, students mobilised and reclaimed campuses through rallies, teach-ins, occupations of buildings and encampments where pockets of Palestine were created and sustained by students’ and staff.
This collective action was soon met with increased suppression. We have seen multiple cases of disciplinary action taken against students and police have regularly been invited on campuses to dissuade further activism.
But despite feeling the full weight of their management, students remained steadfast.
They become bolder and more resolved in refusing to water down their words or politics, drawing inspiration from the Palestinian National Thawabet, the core principles of the Palestinian struggle - including the right of return, resistance, and opposition to normalisation with the Israeli state.
Young people today are not afraid to name Zionism and settler colonialism as the enemy, and British imperialism as the underlying cause. Rather than conceding by presenting liberal campaigns that don’t challenge the current world order, they have become explicit about the overall demand for Palestine’s liberation from the river to the sea.
Students and academics recognise the increasing repression in academic institutions for what it is: another tool through which universities continue to provide political and ideological cover for the Zionist entity and, ultimately, a distraction.
With the normalisation of Israel’s genocide since 2023, Students have responded by proactively building collective movements on campuses and consolidating their knowledge in national student conferences with the Palestinian Youth Movement.
From running successful rectorship campaigns, to shutting down the London Defence Conference, to unprecedented massive graduation walkouts, students are proving that their actions since 2023 have not been episodic mobilisations, but organised deliberate steps towards a long-term vision that only culminates in the isolation of Zionism in academic spaces.