Swinburne votes for Palestine
Despite months of repression and harassment by management and security, Swinburne University students voted overwhelmingly at a special general meeting on 2 September to support Palestine and demand the university cut ties with Israel.
It was standing room only as more than 160 students, along with some staff, crammed into the meeting room at the Hawthorn campus in Melbourne. The mood was angry and determined.
Three motions were put. The first called for an end to the genocide, the second for the university to cut ties with weapons companies and Israel and the third declaring no confidence in vice-chancellor Pascale Quester. All three passed with only one vote against.
Along with many passionate speeches against the genocide in Gaza, a handful of pro-Israel students spoke in support of Israel and against the motions, one student arguing that “Weapons save lives, just look at the Iron Dome”. In the context of the carnage Israeli weapons are inflicting on defenceless civilians in Gaza, weapons researched and developed by companies like Boeing, Thales and BAE Systems, which all partner with Swinburne, this argument failed to elicit any discernible sympathy.
There was likewise negligible dissent when it came to condemning the vice-chancellor. Since starting at Swinburne in 2020, Quester has sought to make it the premier defence university. She helped launch the AIR HUB program in 2021, a “civil aviation” department that brings together dozens of companies involved in weapons production. During her time, Quester has also attended meetings with the Department of Defence and the Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce, and in 2022, went on a sponsored “trade mission” to Israel.
Swinburne having had neither a Gaza solidarity encampment nor an on-campus protest of any sort in recent years, the overwhelming success of the general meeting is testament to both the significant sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians among young people particularly, as well as the patient determination of Students for Palestine activists on campus.
Students for Palestine hold daily stalls, hand out leaflets and do postering, and talk to hundreds of students between classes and on their lunch breaks. The collective also holds weekly meetings through which students new to activism can get involved.
It has not been all smooth sailing for Palestine activism at Swinburne, though. Attempts to petition, promote rallies and leaflet have been met with repression from security and university management, and stubborn obstruction by some pro-Israel officers in the student union. Police have been called multiple times, in an effort to prevent activists exercising their basic democratic right to advocate a political cause. These repressive actions have been defended by the vice-chancellor in communications to human rights lawyers and the staff union.
In response, the staff and their union have defended students, expressed their solidarity and even argued with security officers when they tried to prevent the general meeting going ahead.
The same cannot be said for the student union. When presented with the petition demanding a special general meeting, the student union refused to call it at the main Hawthorn campus of the university, where most students are and all the petition signatures had been collected. Instead, they called it at a secondary campus ten times smaller than the Hawthorn campus and over an hour away by public transport. It was clear to students that this had been done in an effort to sabotage the meeting.
As the meeting wrapped to enthusiastic chants of “Free, free Palestine”, a final motion was proposed for students to march to the vice-chancellor’s office. More than 70 students refused to be intimidated by the security staff guarding Quester’s office, many students giving speeches and all loudly chanting, “No blood on our degrees, no corporate universities”.
“Let’s make it clear today that we will not be silenced in the face of genocide!”, one Student for Palestine activist told the crowd. “Let’s keep fighting till we stop Israel’s genocide and Palestine is free!”
