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05-05-2024
LONDON/ PARIS/ NEW YORK: A growing global student movement to occupy university campuses has continued to coalesce and expand in recent days, following dramatic scenes involving pro-Palestinian protesters and police captured on cameras at American colleges.
Student groups in the United Kingdom, France and Mexico among others have sought to erect what many of them are terming “solidarity encampments,” prompting a variety of responses from university authorities and local law enforcement.
The efforts by students to pressure institutional leaders, and in some cases national policy makers, to change their stances on Israel’s military actions reflect a widespread anger among young people in wealthy and developing nations alike.
These protests are continuing against the backdrop of sustained violence in the Gaza Strip, the continued failure of negotiations led by Qatar, Egypt and the US to bring about a new cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, and renewed threats by Israeli leaders about launching a ground offensive in the southern Gaza city of Rafah.
A common demand among many of the protesters is for their learning institutions to cut ties with companies that conduct business with the Israeli state, or in some cases to end collaboration agreements with universities in Israel.
Student concerns in the UK for instance seemed to echo the focus of an increasingly high-profile nationwide campaign to end British arms exports to Israel. Earlier this week, hundreds of activists surrounded a government trade office in London and protested at British aerospace manufacturer BAE Systems locations elsewhere in the UK, leading to arrests.
That came just days after the United Nations’ top court in The Hague rejected arguments by Nicaragua that Germany should immediately halt military transfers to Israel.
The protest against arming Israel is particularly pronounced at Warwick University in central England, where a coalition of students and staff built an encampment on a central campus square late last Thursday evening, April 25, demanding the institution sever relations with companies supplying military materiel to Israel.
“The University of Warwick has some of the most partnerships of any UK universities with arms companies,” says Fraser Amos, a student member of the group called Warwick Stands For Palestine. “We’ve been campaigning for the last few months for a university to break these ties, an overwhelming majority of students voted in November for it to do so, and we’ve seen 27,000 Palestinians die since. And so we’ve been forced to take this action.”
Warwick acknowledges it maintains academic and research partnerships with companies involved in the production of weapons systems or components used in weapons, including Rolls-Royce, BAE Systems and Moog.
In a statement, university spokesperson Bron Mills told media; “the University is working to begin discussions with the demonstration’s organizers about the demands that have been made” but so far, few of the student campaigns have seen success.
The elite French university Sciences Po has been rocked by protests over the past week, but administrators on Thursday began what were described by participants as an “emotional” dialogue with students to try and calm the situation.
“It’s good to have these debates, because we are in a school that all the time says that we have to debate politics, we have to discuss,” said student Ismail El Gataa, soon after participating in those conversations with university authorities. (Int’l News Desk)
