Anti-war students to fund West Bank resistance group
Students for Palestine activists in the University of Melbourne Student Union are campaigning to donate $19,000—the remainder of their 2024 budget—to a Palestinian popular resistance group in the West Bank. The intended recipient of the funds is the Ni’lin Popular Committee, an activist organisation dedicated to grassroots campaigning against illegal Israeli settler aggression that also delivers aid including food and legal support. Its work is critical to the day-to-day survival of many Palestinians.
Ni’lin is a West Bank town seventeen kilometres from Ramallah. The 1993 Oslo Accords designated it part of “Area C”, where Palestinians live under Israeli control. Ni’lin is surrounded by the West Bank Apartheid Wall to its west, an Israeli military base to its south, two Israeli settlements—Nili and Na’ale—to the north and a settler-only road to its east.
Ni’lin made international headlines during the construction of the Apartheid Wall—a wall dividing Palestinian settlements from Israel—in 2008. In response to peaceful protests, Israeli border police shot and killed 10-year-old Ahmed Moussa, spurring on the campaign. Israel continued to respond with violence: rubber-coated steel bullets, tear gas canisters, the uprooting and burning of olive trees and even “skunk”, a sewerage water designed for crowd control that causes vomiting when inhaled.
Like most Palestinian towns in the West Bank, residents of Ni’lin face constant invasion by settlers. These incursions have ramped up tenfold since the beginning of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, most recently in “Operation Summer Camp”, during which Israel invaded the West Bank and laid siege to the Jenin refugee camp and other cities. Popular Committee organiser Saeed Amireh explains: “There are so many restrictions by Israeli security against us, but we have managed to find solutions in order to continue to help the people with all means we can to survive this genocidal war”.
By supporting them financially, Melbourne University students want to show those resisting occupation that students in Australia stand with them. This should be an uncontroversial stance for a student union. But the union is controlled by members of the Labor Party, and the current party of government gives political cover to Israel’s aggression. When activists in the Education Department attempted to use union money to fund campaign essentials, such as posters for pro-Palestine events, the Labor students blocked it. Instead, they have spent union money hiring lawyers to help them strategise against Palestine solidarity action, and more recently and absurdly, spent $3,000 on 1,000 elephant-shaped stress toys.
Students at Melbourne’s Monash University during the war in Vietnam raised funds to donate to the Vietnamese resistance fighters in the National Liberation Front. Politicians and the media at the time deemed them “un-Australian” and “treacherous”, but 1,000 students at Monash nevertheless voted against attempts to discipline the activists. A student representative from Canberra’s Australian National University told the Canberra Times in 1967, “Australia can either live on the side of reaction as an outpost of US imperialism ... or it can live on the side of change, progress and national independence ... we should support [the Vietnamese resistance] morally and materially”. We should do the same for Palestine.
Emma is the Environment Officer in the University of Melbourne Student Union.
