University of Leeds Palestine encampment14 Images
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University of Leeds Palestine encampment
University of Leeds Palestine encampment
University of Leeds Palestine encampment
University of Leeds Palestine encampment
University of Leeds Palestine encampment
University of Leeds Palestine encampment

On an average day, King’s Parade throngs with tourists filtering through its array of twee sweet shops and kitschy gift stores. But equally, the central Cambridge street is no stranger to political protest. In 2010, it was where students congregated to protest against the decision to raise tuition fees. In 2019, local school students staged a ‘die-in’ on the road to demand urgent action on the climate crisis. Later that same year, Black Lives Matter protestors gathered in the same spot to express their anger at the brutal murder of George Floyd at the hands of a police officer. Most recently, last year, climate activists from Just Stop Oil spray-painted the King’s College walls orange. 

Today, the lawn which flanks the entrance to King’s College is dotted with tents occupied by pro-Palestine protestors, many of them wearing keffiyehs and toting Palestinian flags. Banners bearing spray-painted slogans like “Cambridge Jews for justice in Palestine” and “divest from genocide” have been strung up on the facade of King’s College. It’s exam season, so there’s a dedicated area where students can continue revising. There’s also a multi-faith prayer space, where on Friday (May 10) protestors held both Jummah and Shabbat prayers for Muslim and Jewish students respectively.

Like thousands of other student protestors across the UK, activists taking part in the Cambridge encampment are demanding that their university cease enabling Israel’s assault on Gaza. Specifically, they are calling on Cambridge to disclose their financial and professional ties with organisations “complicit in the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestine”; divest from such organisations; reinvest in Palestinian students, academics, and scholars; and protect the safety of its students, faculty, and staff, particularly “those targeted for their involvement in pro-Palestine action”. Most protestors at other universities, such as Warwick, Oxford, and Newcastle, are making the same four key demands.

23-year-old Mahmoud, one of the student protestors at Cambridge, says there is a great sense of “unity” within the Cambridge encampment. “The underlying feeling is of disgust at our university for being part of the mass murder of civilians in Gaza,” he says. “But the love for the Palestinian people and universal human rights unites us all. The camp is peaceful, it is safe, and it’s receiving beautiful community support.”

The encampment was set up in the early hours of the morning on May 6, in tandem with students 100 miles away in Oxford. “After seeing hundreds of children get bombed on my [phone] screen, I knew I couldn’t just sit idly by,” Mahmoud tells Dazed. “I decided to take any action I could to make it stop. One primary way as a university student is to determine whether my institution of learning plays a role in the murder of children. We know that Cambridge does, so we must put an end to that.”

Thankfully, it’s becoming clear that universities can’t turn a blind eye to the real-life consequences of where they choose to invest their money. Information obtained under the Freedom of Information Act shows that Trinity College, the wealthiest Cambridge college, has investments worth over £60,000 in Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest arms company. Pressure has been mounting on the college to divest: back in March, an activist slashed a portrait of Lord Arthur Balfour – the author of the Balfour Declaration – and around two weeks before the encampment began, students had disrupted an open day for incoming students at Trinity by urging prospective students not to apply to the college due to its “complicity in Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people”. On Sunday, it was reported that Trinity plans to divest from all arms companies, including those supplying Israel, having taken a vote on the issue back in March.

Since Israel began its most recent assault on Gaza in the wake of the October 7 Hamas attack, students across the world have been vocally expressing their support for Palestine. This recent wave of encampments at universities across the world was catalysed by students at Columbia University in New York, who established an encampment comprising around 50 tents on campus in the early hours of the morning on April 17. Other US universities swiftly followed suit: to date, pro-Palestine demonstrations have also occurred at universities including Yale, Harvard, Berkeley, NYU, MIT, South Carolina, and Texas. Hundreds of students and staff have been arrested and suspended for their involvement in the protests, with some videos on social media appearing to show police using brute force to subdue protestors.

While the Columbia encampment has now been dismantled by police, the student protest movement for Palestine has gone global. Students have since pitched encampments at universities in Japan, Australia and multiple European countries, while thousands of UK students are also continuing to call on their universities to divest from Israel. The first UK university to organise an encampment was Warwick, with students erecting tents in the piazza outside the Students’ Union at around 1am on April 26. At present, encampments have now been set up at over 10 universities, including Cambridge, Oxford, Edinburgh, UCL, Newcastle, and Leeds. Thankfully, there has not been a heavy police presence at the UK protests in the same way that there has been in the US (although four protestors outside UCL were arrested over the Bank Holiday weekend, while students at Newcastle have also reported facing aggression from campus security). 

21-year-old Billie*, who wishes to remain anonymous, is one of the students taking part in the encampment at the University of Warwick. Like thousands of other students, Billie is calling on their university to divest from Israel. “I’ve been involved in the pro-Palestine movement at my university since my first week here in 2021, where I attended an event introducing Palestinian history,” they say. “The encampment has been a site of solidarity and hope at Warwick. It’s been great to be surrounded by so many students and staff motivated by our desire to see an end to our university’s complicity in the ongoing genocide in Gaza.”

Clearly, the peaceful reality of day-to-day life within these encampments is at odds with much of the alarmist reporting on the situation. One recent Sky News segment reported on the protests without once mentioning the words “Palestine”, “Israel”, or “Gaza”, instead choosing to conflate the growth of the pro-Palestine protest movement with the issue of rising antisemitism on campus. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Education Secretary Gillian Keegan held a crisis meeting with university vice-chancellors and Jewish students on May 9 to discuss ‘de-escalating’ campus protests. While there have been reports of isolated incidents of antisemitism at protests, the overwhelming majority of UK university protests have remained peaceful thus far, with many Jewish students taking part in the action too. Protestors themselves are likely to be on the receiving end of violence and abuse: notably, on Sunday night (May 12), six men targeted the Oxford encampment by ripping down banners and shouting “terrorists” and “I’ll fucking kill you” at students.

26-year-old Kendall is a Jewish student taking part in the encampment at the University of Oxford. She wholeheartedly refutes the idea that these protests are expressions of antisemitism. “Our camp is an incredible safe space for Jewish students,” she says, adding that the Oxford camp, like the Cambridge camp, held a Shabbat dinner on Friday night. “We sang Shalom Aleichem, did our Shabbat Kiddush, and said blessings over the challah… there are plenty of Jewish students who said to me ‘this is an amazing space because this is the first time I’ve been able to do my prayers in community since October’.”

Kendall adds that she believes protesting Jewish students are particularly at risk of facing antisemitic violence and abuse. “The Jewish students who are here at this camp have been ostracised and harassed by mainstream Jewish institutions that claim to represent us,” she says. “This encampment is providing a space for Jewish students to reclaim our Jewishness and practice our faith and culture in a way that doesn’t support a genocide. The idea that this encampment is a hostile place for Jewish students is in complete contradiction with that reality.”

Will protestors succeed in ensuring their demands are heard and listened to? Time will tell. According to Mahmoud, the University of Cambridge has “barely acknowledged” their camp, instead merely sending a milquetoast email to alumni offering assurances that “the normal business of the University is continuing as usual” and vaguely extending “support and empathy to those in our community who are affected by tragic events in Gaza, Israel and elsewhere”. Billie notes that “the university has shut down lines of communication with us and created a hostile environment through the hiring of private security to monitor our peaceful demonstration.” Kendall says Oxford administration have not yet visited the encampment or had any direct, “formal contact” with any protestors, instead choosing to send representatives from the Oxford Student Union to begin a dialogue with protestors on their behalf. “We’re not going anywhere until the university engages with us and takes us seriously,” she says.

But there is hope. A five-day encampment at Trinity College Dublin was taken down on May 8, after the university agreed to work towards total divestment from Israel. Laszlo Molnarfi, the outgoing students’ union president, told the Guardian that the move plainly demonstrated the impact collection action can have. “It shows the power of grassroots student and staff fighting for a just cause of Palestinian liberation and to end complicity with Israeli genocide, apartheid and settler colonialism,” he said. So, if universities are serious about “de-escalating” the situation, then vice-chancellors should follow the example set by Trinity College Dublin and get protestors round the table, hear their demands, and listen.

*Name has been changed

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