Students turn out in record numbers for Palestine
The battlelines on campuses have been drawn. On one side is the enormous institutional support for the military-industrial complex and the highly militarised state of Israel in particular. This takes the form of research deals between university administrations and companies like British Aerospace Engineering, Elbit Systems and Boeing, along with all sorts of direct partnerships with Israeli universities and institutions. These are reinforced by right-wing, pro-Israel student groups organised around the Australian Union of Jewish Students, as well as Liberal and Labor clubs that almost all back Israel.
On the other side is a movement of students and staff desperate to show solidarity with the people of Palestine, as they endure an unprecedented genocidal onslaught from Israel. These activists have organised a range of actions since 7 October.
At the University of Sydney, a historic motion calling for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel was endorsed by a mass meeting of 346 staff. Students for Palestine has organised more than a dozen student strikes in cities across the country, with thousands of university students walking out of classes to show their opposition to the war. Their actions inspired high-school students to join their movement, which together resulted in the biggest student anti-war actions since the invasion of Iraq.
“The university and school strikes galvanised the movement and made headlines because we proved that young people were not going to sit by and watch while a population was being annihilated”, said Bella Beiraghi, a convener of Students for Palestine in Melbourne.
Many of the activists who spoke to Red Flag emphasised the diversity of the attendees and how they brought together activists from inner city and outer suburban areas and from a range of different ethnic backgrounds. “We were really inspired by the numbers of Arab and Muslim youth from the outer suburbs who joined our actions and stood up to the racism they are subject to, but there were also students from so many diverse backgrounds, it was really an amazing show of unity and solidarity”, explained Deaglan Godwin, the vice-president of Sydney University’s Student Representative Council.
All this activity peaked in the student encampments late last semester, which established around a dozen camps on campuses across the country. The first and longest lasting was at Sydney University, which quickly inspired similar actions around the country.
While each camp had its own characteristics, they all tapped into the growing support for Palestine among students and staff. For a month, the students dominated media headlines and raised awareness about the myriad links between Australian universities and Israel’s war and occupation.
But as the semester came to an end, the camps eventually wrapped up. While some universities made mealy-mouthed noises about acceding to some of the students’ demands regarding transparency in their dealings with weapons companies, mostly this was intended to deflect student and staff anger rather than change anything. A much more concerted campaign would be needed to force administrations to cut ties with weapons companies and Israel. The camps had played their part, now the struggle would have to continue in a new form.
At this moment of uncertainty, student activists at the University of Queensland showed the way forward. Students there had the brilliant idea of calling a student general meeting to pass motions to condemn their university’s role in facilitating Israel’s war crimes and demand it cut ties with companies and institutions complicit in the occupation.
Student general meetings are provided for in the constitutions of most Australian student unions. Although relatively rare these days, in more radical times they were regularly held both to determine the views of the student body and to direct democratically the activities and decide the policies of the student unions. They can be called by the student union officials, or can be triggered when a certain percentage of the student body signs a petition calling for one. “They’re more democratic than a vote of some small council behind closed doors”, explains Ella Guterridge, convener of Students for Palestine at the University of Queensland. “They allow hundreds—or thousands in the case of my university—of students to engage with arguments from both sides and make a considered decision on an issue as a collective”.
Importantly, decisions made by these meetings are binding, becoming the official position of the student union regardless of the attitudes of office-bearers or their unelected staff.
The decision to call a student general meeting at the University of Queensland came after widespread mobilisation efforts coordinated by the local Students for Palestine chapter, which had just finished organising the largest encampment in the country. After weeks of mass protests, teach-ins and an occupation of the Boeing Centre on campus, students decided to call a mass meeting to gauge the views of the student body. Two thousand students showed up and voted almost unanimously for motions in support of Palestine. “We were overwhelmed by the response”, recalls Gutteridge. “This was the largest student meeting at UQ since the 1970s.”
News of the triumph quickly spread across the country. “When we heard about what UQ had done, we just had to try it here too”, said Jasmine Alrawi, convener of Students for Palestine at Sydney University. Holidays forced students to take a breather, before they launched their campaign in the second semester. The Sydney University meeting was organised for 7 August and had the backing of the student union, which is controlled by an alliance of Socialist Alternative and the Grassroots Left. Around 800 people showed up, including at least 600 undergraduate students, overwhelmingly to show support for Palestine. “This wonderful turnout has made history on this campus, and reflects the impact of the camp we organised last semester”, explained Alrawi. “The students have spoken: This is a pro-Palestine campus!”
There were similarly successful meetings at RMIT in Melbourne, the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Brisbane, and the Australian National University in Canberra. Exactly 535 students registered at the RMIT event, supported by dozens of staff and community activists, with a few dozen more turning out at the much smaller Bundoora campus the following day. At least 600 showed up to pass a similar motion at QUT, a figure that came as a shock to campus organisers. “We can’t believe it. This student general meeting is the largest student action ever to take place on this campus, around any issue”, said Isabella Foley, who moved the motions.
Elsewhere the situation has been more contested. At the University of Adelaide, Students for Palestine collected nearly double the number of signatures required to call a general meeting. But the Student Representative Council—run by right-wing careerists—refused to meet for a month, making it impossible for the petition to be officially received. Fortunately, an unusual quirk of the union’s constitution allows for a legally binding meeting to take place even without endorsement by the representative council as long as 300 signatures are collected calling for it, and 150 students show up on the day. Both these hurdles were easily cleared. More than 200 students turned up to pass the motions unanimously. “We were thrilled with the turnout, given the sabotage from our elected reps”, explained El Hall, convener of Students for Palestine on the campus. “The student body, the university and the media have acknowledged the meeting’s legitimacy, so it’s a massive win for us. But going forward, we’re going to need to kick out these conservative creeps and have a union that stands on the side of justice.”
The bureaucrats in the University of Melbourne Student Union took a different tack in their efforts to sabotage the meeting. At first the general secretary avoided his office so as to avoid having to receive the 1,200 student signatures calling for a student general meeting. Then when a digital scan was sent, the secretary—the second in charge of a multimillion-dollar organisation—claimed to lack the skill required to open a pdf file. After this pathetic stalling failed, the union’s executive asked law firm Slater and Gordon to find a legal technicality they could use to avoid following through on their democratic obligations. The firm, which is closely tied to the Labor Party, obligingly provided advice that suggested that the motions calling on Israel to stop its genocide in Gaza were unconstitutional. A big fight ensued at the subsequent student council, where the majority refused to accept the petitions or call a student general meeting. When Students for Palestine activists insisted the meeting would go ahead regardless, a compromise was reached in which council eventually came round to endorsing a mass meeting on Palestine, albeit with no formal legal status.
On the day of the meeting, around 800 students showed up to vote on a motion demanding the university break ties with Israel. This included a sizeable contingent of about 150 students from the Victorian College of the Arts, who had marched up Swanston Street to the main campus with typical flair. Their energy was infectious, and the crowd was buzzing in anticipation.
Bella Beiraghi, an education officer in the student union, explained what happened next: “Given that the student union had eventually, against its will, backed our meeting, we gave them the right to say a few words at the start. The president then decided to use her time to announce to everyone that the vote would not be legally binding! She was rightly booed off the microphone and never returned.” Oskar Martin, Indigenous representative for the student union, spoke after the president and explained to the crowd the ways in which the Student Union majority had tried to block the meeting from going ahead, and reminded attendees of the union’s earlier decision to abandon its support for boycott, divestment and sanctions measures against Israel. “We will continue mobilising until the union fully backs the cause of Palestinian liberation”, he declared to wild cheers.
Subsequent speakers slammed the university and the Labor government for their complicity in Israel’s genocide. Palestinian socialist Yasmeen Atieh had seconded the motion, and spoke to condemn Albanese’s attacks on protesters. She called out the hypocrisy of his “concerns” about the welfare of parliamentarians who have never been harmed, while tens of thousands of her people have been murdered by Israeli bombs. Nobody took up the option of speaking against the motion, and it passed without dissent.
On many campuses, these meetings are by far the largest campus actions for Palestine that have ever taken place. They reflect the impact of the mass anti-war movement that has sprung up since Israel began its slaughter of the people of Gaza.
But the students are not finished. At a number of campuses, including Deakin, La Trobe and Monash, the battle to call the meetings is still ongoing. There are also plans for further student strikes in Sydney.
In Melbourne, Students for Palestine is working with a coalition of groups to organise a picket of the upcoming Land Forces 2024 convention, an odious military exposition hosted and funded by the Victorian Labor government. “This festival celebrating weapons of mass destruction is a natural target for student activists”, explained Jasmine Duff, a co-convener of Students for Palestine in Melbourne, and one of the organisers of the protest against the Land Forces event. “We discovered recently that RMIT—a publicly funded university—is planning to present research on hypersonic missiles at Land Forces”, she said. “What a disgrace!”
The students’ efforts show no sign of letting up. “We’re so proud of the response of students across Australia, but we still have a lot to do”, Alrawi says. “Our challenge is to turn these huge mobilisations into an ongoing movement that can finally break ties between our universities and an international military-industrial complex that profits from war and devastation. We won’t accept any half-measures.”
