Protest action against Israel’s genocidal attacks on Gaza continues to emerge on university campuses around the world, after the student demonstrations first sparked on 17 April at Columbia University to demand academic institutions sever connections with Israeli universities and divest their funds from companies complicit in Israeli war crimes. Students are also calling on governments to cease diplomatic and economic ties with Israel.
The Palestinian boycott, divestment and sanctions movement is calling for a boycott of Israeli universities. The Boycott National Committee stated: “Israeli universities are major, willing and persistent accomplices in Israel’s regime of occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid,” adding that universities develop Israeli weapons systems and shape the military doctrines employed by the Israeli state. Palestinian organisations have saluted the recent wave of campus protest actions.
A new wave of protest camps has been set up since Israeli forces, backed by tanks, took control of the Rafah crossing on the border with Egypt, which is widely regarded as signalling a renewed ground offensive.
With parallels drawn to the 1968 student movement, global protest action has spread rapidly, with new camps emerging every day.
A student protest camp, active since last week, in front of the head offices of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) demands the Mexican government break diplomatic and commercial ties with Israel. Elsewhere in South America, Colombia, Chile and Bolivia severed diplomatic relations with Israel.
In the Netherlands, a student protest camp in the Dutch capital Amsterdam was brutally cleared by police just a day after it was set up, with at least 125 students arrested.
The German capital Berlin, and the city of Leipzig, demanded disclosure and termination of institutional and investor links with Israel and official condemnation of the genocide in Gaza from their universities, but were evicted within the same day of starting protest action.
Tents were also set up in front of the universities of Bonn, Bremen, Freiburg, Köln and Hamburg, with further protests planned for other universities in Germany.
Protests are taking place in the United Kingdom, at campuses of top universities including Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield and Newcastle.
At a camp at a university in Finland’s capital Helsinki, students announced protests will continue until the institution cuts its connections to Israeli universities.
Students at the Sciences Po University in Paris, France called for an investigation to examine the university’s economic ties to Israel to ensure adherence to international law, among other demands. Similar protests by student groups were held at campuses in Lille in the north, Reims in Champagne and Lyon in the southeast of the country.
In Canada, student demonstrators in Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto and Vancouver pledged to maintain their presence until associated universities sever all financial and academic connections with Israel.
Switzerland saw protesters at a university in Lausanne cleared by police. A total of 265 employees of the University of Lausanne declared support for the student protests in a public letter, stating they “consider the steps the students have taken to be peaceful and good-natured, aimed at bringing to the public’s attention a dramatic situation.”
Elsewhere, protest camps have appeared in Japan’s capital Tokyo, Lebanon’s capital Beirut, Austria’s capital Vienna, Australia’s capital Sydney, and in several Italian cities including Rome, Bologna and Napoli.
