The high point of Palestine solidarity at Monash University

The protest encampments for Palestine have once again brought student action to the forefront of the Palestine solidarity movement. One of the most attacked—by the university administration and the pro-Israel Australasian Union of Jewish Students (AUJS)—is the Monash University encampment at Clayton in south-east Melbourne.

The encampment is probably the most significant action in support of Palestine in the university’s history. When I started at Monash in 2001, it was pretty much impossible to have a public meeting about Palestine because members of AUJS would turn up in such numbers as to overwhelm and derail proceedings. This was in the middle of the second intifada. The best we could do was plaster bollards with posters of the iconic picture of a boy throwing a rock at a tank, transposed with pro-Palestine slogans. They were ripped down within hours.

After big protests in Melbourne and Sydney against Operation Cast Lead in the summer of 2008-09, when Israel invaded and bombed Gaza for 22 days, we wanted to take the campaigning back to the campus. So we set up a group, Students for Palestine.

Students for Palestine at Monash consisted of members of Socialist Alternative, the Islamic Students Society and some renegade office bearers in the student union who broke with the Labor students. We aimed to get enough support to register a club and hold events.

When we started doing lunchtime information stalls to advertise our activities, we got push back from Zionist students. Some of the Islamic Society students told us that when they tried to do similar information stalls, they ended up surrounded by Zionist students and packed up.

But we were determined to establish a presence, so persisted.

The support we got in the first few meetings encouraged us to aim for an ambitious series of events during the week of the Nakba commemoration, which fell late in first semester. We called it Palestine Solidarity Week.

On the day of the Nakba, AUJS usually held a barbeque for Israeli Independence Day—a celebration of the dispossession and genocide of Palestinians. But in 2009, we kicked off the inaugural Palestine Solidarity Week by hanging the Palestinian flag from the campus centre.

More than 100 students, or even some hundreds (it’s hard to remember), gathered around the stage to hear speeches. It wasn’t massive, but it was the biggest pro-Palestine event in many, many years at Monash. And it felt significant to plant the Palestinian flag in the most prominent place on the campus.

It caused a ruckus, of course. The key positions in the student union were held by Labor students aligned with the nominally “left” faction. But one was held by a member of Socialist Alternative. One of the male queer officers and two of the Lots Wife editors also got involved in Students for Palestine.

The core Labor-aligned students hated being associated with the controversy we caused. Palestine was still seen as “complicated”, and outspoken support for the Palestinians was considered very controversial—just as it is attacked as anti-Semitic today. Hardly any white students, and very few of what passed for a left, would take a stand on the issue.

Palestine Solidarity Week was raised at the following student council meeting and a censure motion was put about Omar Hassan, the education-public affairs officer, for using his position to support the actions of Students for Palestine.

The council voted to dock his pay for a fortnight. We got lots of Students for Palestine activists to come to the meeting to put the Labor students under pressure. They had the votes to get the motion passed, but we were going to make them answer for it. When they docked Omar’s pay, it just reinforced for everyone what a bunch of spineless bureaucrats they were—more interested in protecting their future career prospects than opposing apartheid in our time.

In second semester, Students for Palestine ran in the student union elections.

As well as our own events, such as forums and film screenings, we also brought activists to an event the university was holding: a debate on whether Hamas should be recognised by the federal government. Arguing the negative was Danny Lamb, a prominent Zionist spokesperson, and Mark Dreyfus, now federal attorney general. On the affirmative was Malcolm Fraser and an academic specialising in terrorism studies.

With speakers like that, there was little actual “debate”, and even less talk of Israel’s crimes—until Michael Shaik of Free Palestine Melbourne rose as the final speaker for the affirmative. He was the only speaker to pose the question to Dreyfus (who spoke next): would he condemn the violence of occupation. Shaik spent his time focused on the crimes of Israel, speaking for all of us who supported Palestine present that night. The debate was attended by hundreds of students and there was a lot of interest in it, in no small part because we had succeeded in making Palestine a major issue on the campus throughout the year.

We had formed a solid core of activists deeply committed to the cause of the Palestinians. Sometimes, the enormity of their oppression could make people feel powerless. But being able to organise on campus and educate and involve students felt like a way we could contribute in some small way to an international movement. Some of those core people are still organising together in the Free Palestine Melbourne group.

The nature of organising on campus is that there’s always change in the personnel on the ground. Students for Palestine activity has ebbed and flowed depending primarily on Israel’s aggression, sometimes on the university or the student association’s hostility. It has also depended on what other activities people are focussing on. But it has been able to maintain a presence to be able to respond whenever Israel launches a new attack.

There is no doubt that the night people came to Monash to defend the encampment against the threat of attack from ex-IDF soldiers and their supporters has been the high point of Palestinian solidarity action so far at the campus in the last 25 years—probably much longer. Those of us who had been part of the earlier iterations of Students for Palestine couldn’t have been prouder to see it.