National Student Day Of Action

Yesterday marked 1 year of the genocide in Palestine and saw students from across the country united in action against senior university management from around the world. They were brought together in the face of the genocide in Gaza, unified from watching the institutions they are apart of contribute to the deaths of over 42,000 Palestinian martyrs.

Students targeted the THE World Academic Summit with pickets, event crashes and demos. They mobilised to perform an office crash in Barclays Manchester city centre offices with over 50 students. Monday concluded with a national student demonstration, attended by hundreds of students and members of the community involved in a vigil. These actions saw students from Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield, London, Leicester, Warwick, Nottingham, Bristol, Newcastle, Oxford, Cambridge, Cardiff, Lancaster, Durham, Sussex, Loughborough, and many other locations continue the fight for a free Palestine.

The day started with a picket of the welcome breakfast, with students speaking against normalisation and academic ties to institutions propping up the Israeli regime. The group called for an academic boycott and for staff to join them in this fight. A talk on AI was disrupted with a noise demonstration, where students spoke about arms ties and research partnerships leaving bloodstains on their institutions. The keynote opening speeches of the conference were disrupted twice during the speech of Duncan Ivison, the Vice-Chancellor, and Jacqui Smith, the Minister of Skills in the Department of Education, forcing University management from around the world to listen to student demands. 

The Barclays administrative offices in the city centre were targeted with another disruptive demonstration, with students protesting financial ties to the bank that invests in arms companies linked to Israel, including Elbit Systems. The day concluded with a national student demonstration outside the evening dinner of the conference, supported by a huge vigil from the Manchester community. Today (8th October) students picketed the entrance of a talk about the benefits of graphene, a material with huge military uses, and a talk on innovation districts - a partnership of Universities and private companies, that included a speech from Siemens, a company complicit in building infrastructure that upholds Israeli apartheid.

The students were met with a disproportionate and violent response from security and the police, who worked in conjunction to do all they could to suppress student voices. The morning picket on the 7th had multiple police vans and cars called, who met protestors with physical force. Several protestors were knocked to the ground, resulting in injuries. A demonstration outside a talk at the conference saw police confiscate protestors’ megaphones, refusing to state what power they took them under or to give a receipt of property seized when asked - an illegal act of seizure and theft. At the event crash later that day, the University security manhandled protestors off the stage, including continuing to push them down the stairs and out of the building even after they had agreed to leave. 

As the demo was led away police followed, causing students to enter the Student’s Union building, which has a “Cops off Campus” policy meaning police are not able to enter the building without a warrant or reason to believe a crime is being committed. Despite having neither and being asked to leave by multiple members of staff at the Union they refused, instead stationing multiple police officers around the building and surrounding it - this is an unlawful act of trespass, breaking the law they claimed to be there to uphold. Today protestors gained access to the conference building during the outside picket and University security staff used pain compliance techniques and choking to remove them from the building, leaving several protestors injured.

Students are demanding that Universities cut their ties with the Israeli war machine, that they no longer hide behind neutrality whilst contributing to genocide, that they adopt policies looking to remain ethical in all aspects of university decision making from finances to research. Yesterday they were physically united on one set of actions, now as they go back to their institutions across the country they will remain so with the student network spanning the length of Britain. Students have stood together for Palestine and will continue to do so as they escalate, escalation that will continue until Israel is out of academia.

A spokesperson for the coalition says: “As students here we cannot stay silent while our counterparts in Gaza have no universities to go to. Last year, students were at the forefront of global solidarity with Palestine, and we continue with the same spirit of defiance this year. We begin this academic year relentless as ever in our pursuit of justice, building upon the foundations of unity created in the encampments, allowing us to target our Universities’ complicity with the support of our peers across the country. Despite police and security violence, we will not be stopped, we will continue to escalate for the violence we face is a tiny fraction of the imperialist violence that Palestinians have resisted under for generations. Universities' shameful ties to a settler-colonial regime must end on our watch, and this is the minimum we could do for the Palestinian people that have been enduring Zionist violence for over 76 years .”

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