Students protests and autumn 2024
All around the world, on every continent and in most major cities, university students in 2024 established peace encampments to draw attention to the ongoing horrors taking place in Gaza. They were calling for their universities to disinvest in the arms trades involved, and not to try to claim neutrality through their silence.
The United States of America was then led by a man, Jospeh Biden, unable to string a sentence together whose wife, on the 1st of July, told Vogue Magazine (of all outlets), that his family… “will not let those 90 minutes define the four years he’s been president”. Within a few weeks he declared he would no longer stand again for president.
The Prime Minster of United Kingdom at the time, Rishi Sunak, on the same day, told Sky News that he had ‘genuine concern’, as it looked as if he was going to tank in the election in three days’ time, ‘for the UK’s security in the event of a Labour win in the general election.; he tanked. The new Labour government only altered UK foreign policy slightly announcing that some arms could no longer be sold to Israel.
A day later, on the 2nd of July, it was Khan Younis was again being bombed and refugees were having again to flee. There had been no abatement in the collective punishment despite, on 24 May 2024, the World Court ordering that ‘Israel immediately halt its military offensive, and any other action in Rafah, which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that would bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”.
Around the same time, in the New York Review of Books, Aryeh Neier, the co-founder of Human Rights Watch, wrote that that he is “now persuaded that Israel is engaged in genocide against Palestinians in Gaza”. Israel had become viewed globally as a pariah state. It closest ally was the most powerful nation on earth, The USA, was led by someone who almost everyone agreed needed to be quietly taken aside and looked after. While within Israel’s second closest ally, the credibility of the prime minster became the worse ever recorded in polling (which began in 1979).
Amid all this chaos, on University campuses across the Western World, and especially in the USA and the UK, the students were learning not only of the incompetency and complicity of the political leaders of their countries; but also, that very often, when it comes to the issues that matter most, university management does not necessarily tell the simple truth. That was an education for the students.
University management at times informed the students that they wish to focus their efforts, alongside the students, on the practical things that we can collectively do to make a difference. But do they really? Management try to divide and rule, suggesting that some students are making inaccurate statements and claims about the University.
Management says that the University has always respected the right to peaceful protest by students and staff. Management claim that it is deeply regrettable that protestors have gone beyond a line. But have they? Who drew the line? If management call the police, many students can (and did) end up in police cells. That fact, the students never forget; and their friends do not forget either; or their families; or all the other students on campus who see and hear what has happened. In my own University of Oxford all the charges against the arrest students were dropped. So were the arrested wrongful?
The students are learning that some of those who rule over them are now afraid. But they are also learning about how university management first employs the well warn tactic or trying to exhaust their opponent.
Perhaps management in other universities might learn and might talk instead of
ignoring their students? Were management too afraid to negotiate? Did those
few at the top in their huddled discussions genuinely tell each other that they thought this will wear out soon? Were the university managers ordered by their political masters, the politicians, not to talk to the students?
I am now writing in the autumn of 2024. The bombs are falling on Lebanon and well as Gaza. The students are back on their campuses. There is a new prime minster in place in the UK and soon there will be a new president elect in the USA. The Middle East is on the edge of a wider war.
It is reported now that: ‘… across the US, some university administrations have turned to “dialogue” as the way forward. They’re hoping that getting students talking to each other will serve as a salve for the turbulence of the last year, with its dramatic resignations, canceled graduations and thousands of arrests – as well as a deep disillusion among students with their universities’ ability to provide direction at a time of crisis.’
As I write, in October 2024, we do not yet know what the reactions of UK university managers will be when the protests begin again, when the thousands of names of the dead begin to be read out again; when students boycott teaching for a day; when they pitch their tents again – even perhaps in the cold of northern winters. But we do know that the more able to university authorities are beginning to realize that that dialogue will be less damaging to them than simply calling in the police. And that if the police are called they will now be much more reluctant to arrest students than they were earlier in the year.
In October 2024 police were called to a protest at the university of Manchester against the University’s ties with the arms industry, and possible links with the atrocities being committed, amongst much else. Or as the press reported ‘to protest against the establishment’s ties with BAE systems and Israeli universities they say are built on occupied land’. No arrests were made.
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