The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
Palestine protests spread to UK campuses
Louisa Clarence-Smith,
Henry Samuel Laura Murgatroyd
PRO-PALESTINIAN protests spread from universities in the United States to France and Britain yesterday as Russell Group students set up a camp demanding action over Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.
Tents have been erected by a group occupying grounds in the centre of the University of Warwick, while students at University College London (UCL) staged a campus rally, mirroring anger across US college campuses.
Tensions are also mounting in Paris, where students were yesterday occupied Sciences Po, a university seen as the breeding ground for France’s political elite.
Sciences Po students are calling for the university attended by Emmanuel Macron, the president and Gabriel Attal, the prime minister, to “cut its ties with universities and companies that are complicit in the genocide in Gaza” and “end the repression of pro-Palestinian voices on campus”.
The occupation comes a day after police dislodged around 60 students who had occupied another building and set up tents in a courtyard.
With keffiyehs on their heads, Palestine
flags hanging from the railings and slogans in support of the Palestinian struggle, students who had spent the night in the school could be seen yesterday morning in the windows of its historic headquarters in the 7th arrondissement.
Rubbish bins and building site equipment blocked the main entrance to Sciences Po Paris, which has a vast campus in the centre of the capital, divided into several locations.
A hundred or so students and other pro-Palestinian supporters sat outside holding banners such as “Stop genocide, we demand acts”.
Another had crossed out the “war” and replaced the work with “genocide”.
“This all started several days ago to protest against the perceived silence of the university administration regarding the ongoing conflict in Gaza and people want to suspend partnerships with Israeli universities, as the school did against Russian ones after the Ukraine invasion,” said Isabelle, 21, a first-year masters student.
“Sciences Po has threatened to throw out students who blocked the university, which is unacceptable.”
“Sending the police in has only increased tensions.”
Riot police at first stood back but then formed a line to separate a counter-demonstration of people waving banners calling for a two-state solution and the freeing of Israeli hostages.
The action came on the same day as Berlin police began clearing a pro-Palestian camp outside the German parliament by activists calling on the government to end arms exports to Israel.
Meanwhile, Warwick Stands with Palestine, a group of University of Warwick staff and student activists, occupied an area known as the piazza.
In a statement on social media, the group said it will “rise up in unison with fellow students all over the world, from Columbia, NYC, to Paris, to Sydney”.
It added: “We say no business as usual as long as Warwick sponsors colonial genocide!”
The protest group is calling on the university to scrap all academic and teaching partnerships with companies it claims are facilitating Israel’s war in Gaza, including defence contractors.
It has also urged the university to “condemn Israeli war crimes”, “expand scholarships for Palestinian students” and “protect the freedom of speech” of Palestinian students and their allies in “expressions of solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for liberation”.
Speaking to a spokesman for the group said: “We’re
‘Anti-Semitism on campuses is reminiscent of what happened in German universities in the 1930s’
using the political moment, the escalations happening in Columbia [University] and all over the world at the moment… to keep attention on Gaza.”
At UCL, students staged a rally in the university’s main quad yesterday.
An advert for the event, organised by UCL Action for Palestine, stated: “From Gaza to Columbia to London, we will not rest until our campuses divest”.
Hundreds of students and academics have been arrested at US universities as police clamp down on demonstrations.
The camps have been set up at more than 20 US universities, including Harvard and Yale, since the first encampment on the lawns of New York’s Columbia University last week.
Columbia’s decision to send the New York police department onto the campus to arrest protesters and tear down the camp was widely criticised and prompted some of the other university encampments to pop up in solidarity.
In the US, the University of Southern California in Los Angeles became the first institution to cancel a graduation ceremony because of protests, citing new safety measures following student protests over the Israel-Gaza war.
Other US protests have resulted in cancelled classes, faculty walkouts and administrations calling the police on their own students.
Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, has described the protests as “horrific”.
“Anti-Semitism on campuses in the United States is reminiscent of what happened in German universities in the 1930s. The world cannot stand idly by,” he said. “It has to be condemned and condemned unequivocally.”
On Thursday, Baroness Fox of Buckley told the House of Lords: “The global student movement is coming to the UK” and claimed that “the levels of anti-Semtisim are routine and normalised” on UK campuses.
Footage taken at Columbia last week showed Jewish students being told to “go back to Poland”.
The demonstrations seen at universities in the US have now broken out at home and in France