Over a hundred students, academics and activists gathered outside F23 on Wednesday March 27 to pressure the University of Sydney to cut its ties with Israel.
Organised by Students Against War (SAW), the rally took place outside F23, which houses much of USyd’s senior management. Activists taped an open letter to the doors of the building, which was signed by over 750 members of the University community and outlined their key demands.
These included demands for the University to publicly condemn the war crimes being committed by Israel, to cut ties with Israeli universities, including Technion — Israel Institute of Technology and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and to end all partnerships with the Australian Defence Force and weapons manufacturing companies like Thales.
Vieve, a Barkindji activist and member of SAW, targeted USyd for its ties with Tel Aviv University, which the group successfully picketed last week after they were invited as a part of USyd’s “Sydney Abroad” fair.
“Tel Aviv Uni is built on a decimated Palestinian village. One of the last remaining houses is now used as a faculty club,” they said.
“Not only do they train the lawyers, they also offer a year’s free tuition to any student who participated in Operation Protective Edge, an assault on the Gaza Strip that lasted 50 days, involving air attacks and ground invasions that took 2,251 Palestinian lives, and that’s not even counting all the bodies under the rubble,” they continued.
“While every Palestinian university has been demolished, Sydney Uni thinks it’s acceptable to bring the perpetrators of this genocide onto campus to promote exchange programs.”
A Palestinian student activist outlined the meaning of the “From the river to the sea” chant, saying that “it means that war will no longer spill blood on Palestinian soil. It means that children will no longer be stolen from their homes and lose their youth behind bars. It means that the land that I am from… will be free.”
The group then marched along City Road and Broadway to UTS, where they joined with over a hundred activists organised by UTS Staff for Palestine, where the rally targeted UTS’ ties with Israel and the military-industrial complex and Australia’s complicity in the genocide as a whole.
Paddy Gibson, an activist and UTS academic, chaired the speakout and called said that “institutions like UTS cannot sit back and pretend to be neutral while people are suffering a genocide.”
“While children are being wiped out, while Gaza is being starved, while tens of thousands of people are being killed, while bombs continue to drop, the institution of UTS cannot remain silent,” Gibson said.
Ahmed Abadla, a leader from the Palestinian Justice Movement, drew parallels between the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the genocide of First Nations people in so-called ‘Australia’, saying that “this land was invaded, it was stolen and colonised, just like the land of Palestine, this land was exploited and violently transformed into an outpost to serve the racist and white supremacist imperialist powers.
“The ruling class in this colony have been nothing but puppets for the tyrannical ideologies that spread hate, division, and inequality within our communities. Ideologies that are designed to breed and maintain systems of justice, injustice, and oppression. Dehumanisation, barbarism, and apartheid,” Abadla said.
At the time of writing, Israel is in its 174th day of carrying out a genocide in Gaza. Official numbers indicate that at least 32,000 Palestinians have been murdered.
For more information on upcoming rallies and actions, you can follow the Students Against War Instagram and Facebook.
