Over the past few months, the destruction of Palestine and the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people has finally got some attention. People that have been fighting for a free Palestine for years may finally feel that change is coming, as the recent horrors including the bombing in the Al-Aqsa Mosque, displacement of the community of Sheikh Jarrah, bombings of homes and tower blocks housing journalists are forcing people to pay attention.
In London, 200,000 people came out in protest against the recent attacks by Israel, and in Sheffield, students from both the University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University marched against their universities’ unwavering complicity in apartheid. Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) claimed that More than 100 universities in the UK, including both Sheffield universities, have at least £454 million invested in companies that fund war crimes and Israel’s regime of apartheid. Universities market themselves as liberal bastions of inclusivity and equality and yet invest in companies that are complicit in systematic ethnic cleansing and the longest settler colonial regime in modern human history. Our universities not only fund, but legitimise the political project of Israel, which is why British students have such a major role to play in the movement for Palestine.
The Palestine Solidarity Campaign has shown how UK universities have a range of investments in companies that are complicit in settler colonialism and apartheid. Sheffield Hallam University has financial partnerships with JCB, Caterpillar and Volvo, all of which fund Israel’s home demolition policy, a policy integral to the continued displacement of Palestinians. The University of Sheffield has investments in HSBC, which in turn has investments in Caterpillar. The University of Sheffield also has partnerships with Boeing and BAE Systems, which supply arms to Israel, according to the research from Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).
These partnerships are justified because of their career and work experience benefits for students, and people studying, particularly in the STEM sector, benefit from university links with large engineering firms. However, this means that our universities care very little about the ethics of working with these companies, which are complicit in human rights violations and a colonial project that has broken multiple international laws. It is ironic that the same university that teaches modules on Human Rights and Oppression and Resistance on my Politics course, is active in perpetuating human rights violations, oppression and stamping out resistance.
Whether or not the students protests will work is another question. For many years the Aparthied Off Campus, BDS (Boycott, Divest and Sanction) and other Palestinian movements have been pushing our universities to end their complicity, and yet it seems these institutions have no interest in budging. Although the University of Sheffield Students Union supports raising awareness of the BDS movement, it does not explicitly endorse it, and has been deafeningly silent during these recent protests. These student uprisings against our universities will only work if our student unions are prepared to explicitly endorse and take dramatic steps to force the university to change course.
This includes making it impossible for BAE Systems and Boeing to show up to our careers fairs unchallenged and depriving the university of the marketing and promotional benefits of the Students Union, until they agree to invest ethically. Our students union is still in favour of adopting the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which, in practice, has silenced Palestinian activism and criticism of Israel on campuses around the country. University College London found that the IHRA definition “adds barely a useful word to the Equality Act 2010 definition of harassment. What is present is contradictory and confusing” and “has no relationship with case law and legal obligations.
But we know that anti-aparthied activism has been successful in the past, and so with widespread student support, and student unions that aren’t afraid to face a backlash, we can make what our universities are doing untenable. In the 1970s the National Union of Students and the Anti-Apartheid Movement built a network of student campaigns to force their universities to divest from South Africa. Students must continue to be at the forefront of anti-apartheid campaigns, as the very institutions that we fund are partly responsible for the ongoing settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing of Palestine. This is only possible with determined and brave students unions, an NUS that actually acts as a fighting union for students and their demands, and solidarity between students and the BDS movement. So yes, it is possible, but the cowardice of groups like our students unions and the NUS is making it much harder to put pressure on our universities, who won’t divest just because of a few protests.
This is not just an issue of universities’ investments in complicit companies, but about the fact that universities are not educational institutions anymore, they are companies with corporate interests and with business partners that do not cater for the needs of students. In the same way that our universities abandoned and isolated students in a pandemic, used students as cash cows and profited by lying to them about what university would be like this year, universities are now companies that do not have students’ interests at heart. To challenge this, we must challenge and topple what universities currently are, profit-greedy companies that put their students last. Until this is our goal, and we have the backing of the NUS and our students unions, we don’t stand a chance of getting apartheid off campus.
