Wollongong students vote to support Palestine
Around 200 students attended a special general meeting at the University of Wollongong on 4 September to consider a motion calling on the university to cut all ties with Israel and any company that supplies the Israeli military. The meeting overwhelmingly supported the motion, with only a handful of students voting against it.
The meeting was lively, students repeatedly breaking into chants of “Free Palestine!”, but it was orderly. Despite having the opportunity, no one spoke against the motion.
The socialist who moved the motion, Megan Guy, said after the meeting: “For eleven months, our university has attempted to normalise a genocide and get students to accept its relations with Israel. The turnout is a major achievement in the history of student activism at this campus and a strong display of pro-Palestine sentiment among students”.
The meeting was the largest activist event on campus since the marriage equality campaign of 2017, and the latest in a wave of special general meetings happening across Australian campuses.
Like almost every university in Australia, Wollongong has links with Israel. University management claims that all “potential partnerships are evaluated at length, not only for alignment to the university’s strategic goals but also how they align with our values”. These values seem to include supporting war crimes. Through the Defence Materials Technology Centre, the university collaborates with Thales—one of the military suppliers profiting from Israel’s genocide.
The university also partners with Bisalloy Steel. A long-running local campaign targeting Bisalloy has exposed the role steel made in the Illawarra plays in Israel’s military. The so-called advanced steel produced here coats IDF tanks and armoured personnel carriers. The research needed to produce the steel is done at the University of Wollongong.
The university treated the special general meeting with hostility. Cleaning staff were instructed to tear down posters advertising the meeting, even on the few noticeboards where political posters are allowed. When challenged, a member of cleaning management told students, “If you care about Gaza so much, why don’t you just go there?”
During the Gaza solidarity encampment organised on campus last semester, the university threatened to discipline student activists for using the word “intifada” and the phrase “from the river to the sea”, both well-established slogans of the movement for Palestinian liberation. Even chalking the word “colonised” was in breach of anti-vilification laws according to university management, which, if true, means the university should expect to be in some legal hot water over its acknowledgement of country.
University management is yet to respond to students’ demands. But there is no question: the campaign will not stop until all ties with Israel are severed and complicity in genocide ended.
