Students at several universities across the UK, including the prestigious University college London, have launched tent encampments demanding their universities divest from firms that supply arms to Israel and end any potential complicity in the regime’s genocidal war on Gaza.
Our demands are three; simply for the university to divest from any companies complicit in Israeli war crimes.
Secondly, for them to condemn Israeli war crimes, and thirdly, for them to pledge towards the reconstruction of the universities destroyed as a result of Israeli war crimes.
UCL Student Protestor
We weren't allowed on the campus so the students came to us, led by a Palestinian doctor who has seen the Israeli atrocities in Gaza firsthand.
This new wave of action builds on earlier, all be it underreported, protests which included student occupations of university buildings, but the scenes on campuses across the US, that have seen more than 2000 arrested in a violent police crackdown, have further galvanized the protests in Britain.
The movement is spreading like wildfire; the universities of Manchester, Warwick, Sheffield, and several others, have all embarked on similar action.
So far, the protests have been peaceful. The government has backed a police crackdown on what it called disorder.
The Union of Jewish Students has claimed the encampments are creating a hostile and toxic atmosphere, a claim the Haredi Jews who came to support the students rejected.
It's completely false to blame these students that they are anti-Semites; they are not anti-Semites at all.
Counter Zionism is not anti-semitism in any way.
The writing is exactly the opposite.
Rabbi Elhanan Beck, Spokesman, Neturei Karta Anti-Zionist Movement
With days or weeks left of the current university term, these students say they will remain here until their demands are met.