Sydney University students vote to cut ties with Israel
Sydney University students have organised the largest Palestine solidarity action ever held on the campus—an 800-strong student general meeting (SGM) that voted for the university to cut ties with Israel.
Those ties include research programs with Thales, the sixth-largest weapons company in the world. In collaboration with Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems, Thales produces the Watchkeeper drone, which has been used in Gaza. Sydney University also maintains exchange programs with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Israel Institute of Technology, which work closely with the Israeli military and security agencies.
The first SGM at Sydney University was held in 1971 and concerned another apartheid regime. Students at that meeting voted to boycott the South African rugby tour, which was eventually cancelled after students, trade unionists and Indigenous activists harangued and harassed the team across the country.
“This meeting represents a lot of hope”, Jasmine Al-Rawi said as she opened the meeting on 7 August. The activist group Students for Palestine, of which Al-Rawi is the convener, called the SGM.
The lecture theatre in the Eastern Avenue Auditorium slowly filled with hundreds of students. The queue outside stretched for more than 100 metres. Soon, an overflow lecture theatre was opened, and students filled that too. It wasn’t until half an hour after the scheduled start that everyone had finally taken their seat.
The meeting was chaired by Al-Rawi and Harrison Brennan, president of the Sydney University Students’ Representative Council (SRC). In her opening remarks, Al-Rawi spoke about the history of SGMs, and how they are an opportunity for students to practise a kind of mass, participatory democracy that is at odds with the usual running of the university.
SRC Education Officers Shovan Bhattarai and Grace Street moved the main motion of the night. “Above this lecture theatre there is an ad for the uni, which claims it is about ‘leadership for good’”, Bhattarai said. “But we know that is bullshit.”
After Bhattarai and Street introduced the motion, a Zionist and member of the Young Liberal Club spoke to oppose it. The audience was unsympathetic, to say the least. When the vote occurred, the supporters of Israel could muster only half a dozen or so to vote against the motion.
Anti-Zionist Jewish activist Yasmine Johnson rebutted the Zionist arguments. “A state that is based upon the oppression, the genocide, the apartheid of the Palestinian people—that is not a project of Judaism or of humanity”, she said. Johnson pointed to protests and sit-ins in America led by Jewish Voice for Peace, whose slogan has been “Not in our name”.
After the meeting ended, students marched out of the lecture halls and onto Eastern Avenue. Their destination was the Michael Spence Administration Building and Vice-Chancellor Mark Scott’s office for an impromptu protest to relate news of the student vote.
The SGM came after ten months of organising and mobilising. In April, Sydney University became the first university outside of North America to establish an encampment, which activists set up on the Quadrangle lawns and which lasted for more than two months. The protests and teach-ins held at the camp spread awareness of the university’s ties to Israel, contributing to the overwhelming vote.
Since the camp’s winding down, activists in Students for Palestine have been furiously getting the word out about the SGM. The patient and determined work of reaching out to everybody possible and making an argument about why they needed to be at the meeting laid the basis for the SGM’s success.
The meeting also tried to engage students less involved or familiar with activism. By aiming to bring wider layers of students into the movement, Palestine solidarity activists can begin to mobilise to disrupt the business of usual of the university. That is the only strategy that could force our universities to end their complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
