It has been two years since university students across Australia set up Gaza solidarity encampments as part of a global student movement for Palestine. Sleeping in tents to draw attention to Australian universities’ ties to Israel’s genocidal campaign, we confronted university administrations, the corporate media and the federal government. In doing so, we inspired many others.
I was an organiser of the Sydney University encampment. I had been a socialist and activist for several years, but the two-month encampment was a steep learning curve; we learned how to run a permanent organising space, how to deal with constant and often hostile media attention and how to maximise the radical potential of the movement.
Our encampment would not have been possible without the example set by students in the USA, in particular at Columbia University. We watched as students and their supporters resisted the NYPD’s attempt to clear the encampment by force. Their actions dared us to think and act outside the box, opening up a new form of struggle we had not contemplated before.
Socialists in Australia were crucial in spreading the movement. I was doing my weekly grocery shopping on a Sunday night when Shovan Bhattarai, another socialist at Sydney University, called to convince me that we should do what the students at Columbia were doing. I didn’t take much convincing, and the next two days were spent making phone calls and convincing activists from other groups, and sourcing tents and camping supplies. On the evening of Tuesday, 22 April 2024, we launched the camp under the guise of a rally in solidarity with the students at Columbia.
Fellow members of Students for Palestine and Socialist Alternative across the country soon followed suit. At the movement’s high point, twelve universities had encampments on their lawns.
The first few weeks of the camp were the most frantic and fast paced. From the beginning, we tried to make it as open, democratic and radical as possible. This meant keeping the camp’s focus outwards on those students not yet involved and trying to draw them into the movement. We held almost daily rallies to bring our message to others, and organised countless teach-ins that harked back to the tactics of the anti-Vietnam War movement. These teach-ins educated new activists on the history of Palestine and of other major student movements. Meanwhile, on weekends, we hosted events aimed at the broader community, such as family fun days (involving a harmless children’s rally that was later much maligned by the right-wing press).
This approach was informed by the lessons learned from reading about previous occupations and protest camps. We believed that the tendency of these actions to obsess over the internal structures and operations of the camp was harmful. The goal would become perfecting our own slice of utopia, not on developing the collective power that could challenge the system and its institutions. We viewed involving greater numbers of students as the best strategy.
We knew that the response of university management and the government would determine our tactics. Perhaps they had learned from their counterparts at Columbia University, because the university decided on a more cautious strategy. This was not out of any respect for student activism or sympathy with the Palestinian cause. It was a calculation that shutting us down might be more trouble than it would be worth.
Instead, university managers tried more subtle forms of repression. They suddenly discovered a serious safety risk: gargoyles! With a straight face, they tried to convince us that the gargoyles that adorn the sandstone walls of the Quadrangle were an imminent risk of falling on top of us. Their next ploy was less absurd: exams. Under the cover of ensuring that the end of semester exams could take place, the university began to place severe restrictions on what we could do and when. Finally, they initiated disciplinary proceedings against several leading activists, using kangaroo courts to intimidate us.
The university also held aloft a paltry carrot to go with the stick. In return for wrapping up the camp, the university offered to negotiate to meet our demands. These negotiations proved to be an absolute dead end. This was something other encampments came up against too. At Curtin University in Perth, the student union, the Curtin Guild, signed a memorandum of understanding with management behind the back of the encampment. This agreement was a PR win for the university, allowing managers to claim that they had consulted the encampment and reached a compromise pleasing to all sides. Missing from it was any real commitment to divestment or ending research ties with arms companies.
This confirmed the argument that socialists made at the time—that negotiations by themselves can never win our side what we want. When meeting with management, other camp representatives thought that moral appeals would sway the vice-chancellor. However, management were well aware of what Israel was doing in Gaza, they simply did not care. No amount of pleading or presenting rational cases would change their attitude.
The Liberal Party, pro-Israel groups and the right-wing press were unhappy with the universities’ cautious approach. From the beginning, they waged a campaign of slander and lies against the camps. The then opposition leader, Peter Dutton, went on 2GB radio to compare the encampments to the 1938 Kristallnacht Nazi pogrom. Liberal Party education spokesperson Jane Hume claimed, without a shred of evidence, that the camps were “hotbeds of antisemitism”. These claims ignored the presence and support of anti-Zionist Jewish students and staff, and groups such as the Jewish Council of Australia. They were also a way to deflect from the reality of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and the complicity of Australian universities in that genocide.
Supporters of Israel were willing to back these lies with intimidation. The Australian Jewish Association, a leading pro-Israel organisation, published what was in effect an incitement to violence on X:
“It should surprise nobody that Nazi encampments on Australian universities make many people angry. We never condone anything illegal but with the Albanese Govt and university heads missing in action, nobody should be surprised if members of the public take matters into their own hands.”
Members of the “public” did indeed “take matters into their own hands”. The encampment at Monash University faced repeated nightly attacks from Israel supporters trying to smash up the camp. At Adelaide University, someone launched firecrackers from a nearby rooftop at the activists in their tents. The corporate media conveniently ignored these actions.
In Sydney, the Zionists tried but failed to intimidate us. On 3 May, they called a “March for a Safe Campus”, which gathered a few hundred metres away from the encampment. The rally was a dismal failure, attracting very few students and many more middle-aged men in suits. Our counter-rally was a huge success. Five hundred students, staff and community members assembled to defend the encampment. I even ran into an old primary school friend who worked nearby and had come to the rally before his shift to defend the camp. We were clearly the side with far greater support.
The universities, the government and the Zionists were unable to shut down the encampments through repression. Yet they have used their power since to restrict drastically the rights of students to organise politically. Haunted by the spectre of future encampments, nearly every university now has a “campus access” policy that prohibits sleeping on campus or erecting tents. The University of Sydney’s goes even further, banning announcements before lectures, protests inside buildings or that block entrances, and requiring that activists receive approval for holding an information stall. All of this is about narrowing the space for campaigns and protests that challenge the university or our government.
So what did the encampments achieve?
By themselves, the camps were not able to force universities to divest or cut ties with Israel or the weapons companies that arm it. That demand strikes at the heart of what role our universities perform for the capitalist system. Helping private arms dealers and government militaries perfect the means of destruction is not an erroneous policy; it’s what universities are designed to do. Their purpose also includes defending and legitimising the status quo, so it’s no accident that they so strictly police criticism of our government’s support for Israel and Western imperialism.
Nevertheless, the encampments had a momentous impact. At the time, they re-energised the Palestine solidarity movement, creating a focal point for the broader movement. People donated whatever they could: tents, sleeping bags, blankets, spare socks and underwear. We were so overwhelmed by the number of people who wanted to volunteer their time to cook us hot meals that we needed to set up a WhatsApp chat so we could coordinate them all. Workers, high schoolers, or veteran activists from the ’60s and ’70s came and paid the camp a visit and implored us to keep up the fight.
The movement created a new layer of Palestine activists. The exhilarating experience of round-the-clock collective action convinced these people to become ongoing activists in the movement. Tobias Hansson, a PhD student and tutor at the time, related how he first found out about the camp because he saw it on the news.
“I saw activists from the encampment responding to hostile questions to the media ... and I thought it was the coolest thing ever”, he tells Red Flag. “I had felt pretty powerless around everything.” He describes feeling powerless before the encampment, following the genocide in Gaza on social media, but that the camp “really gave me a sense of I’m not just an individual doing my own kind of thing, I’m someone who’s part of a mass movement for Palestine”.
After spending nearly every night at the encampment, Tobias had become convinced of the need to be an activist in a more ongoing sense. The way he describes it, the camp was clearly a formative political moment. “I think it changed me fundamentally”, he says, “the way I saw the world, the way I saw my role in the world”.
The encampments also convinced some of these activists to become socialists. The fact that Socialist Alternative played such a central practical role in the movement mattered. Yoshi Leung is one of those who became convinced of socialist politics by the encampment. “I had never been to a protest before”, she says, “but I thought, if not now, when?” After meeting some members of Socialist Alternative, who “patiently introduced me to Marxism”, she began to find solutions to the problems in the world. The debates at the camp further convinced her, because, she says, “it was socialist activists who fought the hardest and had the clearest strategy”.
This impact extended beyond the confines of Australia. I will never forget the day when we received a photo from Gaza of two Palestinian children who had written on their own tents: “Thank you to the Sydney university students”. Movements of international solidarity have always played this role of conveying to an oppressed people that they are not alone. This is doubly important in the case of Palestine when it seems as though every government has forgotten or ignored the people of Gaza.
Since the encampments, the student movement for Palestine has continued. Last year, Students for Palestine organised a nationwide student referendum. Five thousand students around the country voted overwhelmingly in favour of cutting ties between our universities and weapons companies and Israeli universities. At Sydney University, the local Students for Palestine chapter has hosted a series of events from rallies to movie nights to forums. A Students for Palestine member and participant of the camp, Ethan Floyd, was on board the recent Global Sumud Flotilla as it tried to break Israel’s maritime siege of Gaza.
The fight for a free Palestine, and against all the horrors of the capitalist system, will require more than a few dozen tents on the lawns of Australia’s universities. But our side can only build our strength one campaign at a time. Each one brings new people into the movement and teaches existing activists new skills and lessons. And the struggles of the past can serve as inspiration for those of the future, acting as a beacon of hope in an increasingly despairing world.
