For over two years, students at campuses across the UK have been mobilising against their universities’ role in abetting Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
One way they have done this is targeting the stalls of prominent arms companies at careers fairs, disrupting their hunt for students to grease the Israeli war machine.
Anyone who has been on a campus recently knows universities have tried to clamp down on these kinds of protests. But now The Guardian has exposed that several UK universities have been trying to pre-empt them by actively surveilling the social media of student organisers – on the orders of these arms firms!
Universities have even promised these war profiteers to mobilise officers if necessary. Where this has happened, they’ve been equipped with body cameras to intimidate peacefully protesting students with potential “disciplinary proceedings”.
Yet when a student attending a Palestine rally earlier this year at the University of Edinburgh (UoE) was attacked with a knife, university security responded by doing exactly nothing.
In spending valuable time and resources on surveillance, universities make it glaringly obvious that their primary interest lies not in developing critical minds engaged in actively bettering our world, but creating compliant workers – and keeping the cash coming in.
The parasitic university management, investing in militarisation, imposing cuts on staff while raking in exorbitant bonuses, must be overthrown.
Allow professors, staff and students to democratically manage their universities! Connect this struggle with the wider workers’ struggle to crush the private appropriation of socially produced wealth! Palestine will only be liberated by revolution in the Middle East – so fight the imperialists in your own country!
IDF soldier displaces Palestinian… in Cambridge!
University students are often disparaged as ‘snowflakes’, incapable of overcoming minor problems and being offended at everything.
Well, it turns out the biggest snowflake of all in British higher education resides right here in Cambridge. And to top it all off… he’s a soldier in the Israeli Defense Force!
Cambridge University, a willing accomplice in imperialism and genocide spanning decades, recently took it upon itself to evict a Palestinian student residing in the same accommodation bloc as an Israeli student, because it might make this Zionist thug and his wife “uncomfortable”.
I can only imagine the terror that must have wracked the poor man! Having to come face-to-face with a Palestinian woman, rather than being able to ‘fight’ her from afar with a sniper rifle and artillery shells.
The university made the decision despite the Palestinian student submitting a healthcare professional’s letter explaining the serious negative impact this would have on her mental health.
But no amount of evidence of suffering or distress will ever sway the hearts of the rich ladies and gentlemen who run institutions such as Cambridge University. It is debatable whether they have hearts in the first place.
They do not serve students, staff, or even the pursuit of knowledge. They worship at the altar of profit, filling their pockets with every blood-stained penny.
Until universities are taken under the control of workers, students, and the unions that represent them, they will continue to act in the interests of profit and imperialism.
When we, the workers and youth, are in charge of our places of study, it’ll be us who decide who gets to enjoy the fruits of socially organised education – and it won’t be those butchers in khaki found in the ranks of the IDF.
Jo Bunkle, Cambridge
