This week marks the 17th international Israeli Apartheid Week: a global week of action that aims to raise awareness about Israel’s racial discrimination against the Palestinian people, which amounts to the crime of apartheid under international law. This week is a chance for people across the world, especially students, to amplify Palestinian voices, build BDS campaigns, and show solidarity with the Palestinian people’s fight for justice.
Here in Britain, student solidarity with the Palestinian struggle is strong, building on decades of student activity in anti-racist and liberation struggles. From the anti-apartheid movement of the 1970’s and 80’s, when students led massive rallies and ran rent strikes to pressure universities to divest from companies that supported apartheid in South Africa, to mass involvement in the movement against imperialist wars like the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan; from the Black Lives Matter movement to continued solidarity with Palestine, organizing on campuses has consistently been central to building solidarity with anti-colonial movements. In recent years, university-run decolonization projects have attempted to reflect and use this radical tradition, but these initiatives ring hollow while these same universities refuse to address their ongoing complicity in systems of colonization across the world.
This year, organizing around Israeli Apartheid Week comes in the context of record levels of Israeli violence against the Palestinian people. In just the past month, a government-sanctioned massacre in Jenin killed nine people, Israeli authorities have ramped up demolitions in occupied East Jerusalemand Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said that “there’s no such thing as a Palestinian people.” This is apartheid in action, literally taking place from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean sea.
Meanwhile, the UK Government continues to pursue yet more trade deals and political alliances with the Israeli government, even inviting Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister presiding over this far-right, antidemocratic government, to meet with government figures this week. He chose an apt moment to arrive. Students across the country are mobilizing in their universities: providing educational materials, talks, and lectures; running film screenings; and hosting workshops on how to campaign for university divestment from apartheid. While UK government officials roll out the red carpet for Netanyahu, the grassroots student movement is on the right side of history, taking a moral stance in opposition to apartheid.
Crucially though, Israeli Apartheid Week is not an isolated week of action. Just last month, students across Britain came together in a day of action under the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” When students from universities across Britain chant this slogan, they act in solidarity with the international movement for Palestinian freedom and articulate a demand for liberation rooted in an anti-colonial struggle. It’s also a material call to action in this country: UK universities collectively invest nearly £450 million in companies complicit in Israeli violations of international law. So, students are campaigning to kick apartheid off campus, lobbying their universities to cease investments in complicit companies, passing ethical investment policies, and ensuring their Students’ Unions support student campaigning.
It goes without saying that progressive student activists are not exactly applauded by the Tory government or the over-paid university chancellors whose salaries they dare to question. The impacts of the government’s repressive attitude towards student organizing can be seen in a particularly sharp light when we look at the public treatment of student activists raising the cause of Palestine.
In January 2022, the then-education secretary Nadhim Zahawi said that students who chanted “from the river to the sea” should be reported to the police. In recent years, we have seen a concerted attempt by pro-Israel groups in this country, including the government, to make this liberation slogan unsayable, but the National Union of Students and Universities and Colleges Union robustly condemned Zahawi’s comment, underlining the fact that it is crucial to understand his attacks on this slogan as part of a broader attempt to silence Palestinian voices and erase activism for Palestinian rights through the creation of a chilling effect.
Later in the year, we saw the NUS’ newly-elected President, Shaima Dallali, face intense harassment online as a result of media and government pressure for her to be dismissed from her role. A reason for the NUS’ subsequent investigation was that she had tweeted, “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Just last week, her lawyers announced that she would be taking the NUS to an employment tribunal because of the way they publicly elided her anti-Zionist beliefs with antisemitism, and the incredible extent of their mishandling of the entire process that led to Shaima’s harassment and dismissal. We know that the attacks on Shaima were about creating a chilling effect to quash student activism in support of Palestine, so it’s incredibly significant that students have since shown that they will not be silenced.
The students who stood against apartheid in 1973 did so because they knew that what was happening in South Africa was a crime: they heeded the calls of the Black South African student movement for solidarity, and they acted to push the UK government and complicit companies into action. They knew that, whatever repression they were facing, it was the UK government who would be judged by history. In the same way, students today stand with the Palestinian people against colonialism and oppression, and we know that the UK government sides with the oppressor.
Student solidarity in universities is all the more critical in the face of these government attempts at suppression, and divestment campaigns, which work to pressure companies to distance themselves from apartheid through university disinvestment, are more active than ever. Just last year, Amnesty International joined B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch in naming the Israeli state’s systematic discrimination and persecution of the Palestinian people as what it is: apartheid. Palestinians have recognized their treatment as such for years, and their call for a strategic movement of boycotts, divestment, and sanctions like that which was ultimately successful in ending South African apartheid is a call for solidarity with over seventy years of resistance to violence and dispossession.