Since 1971, the University of Sydney’s Students’ Representative Council (SRC) has hosted four Student General Meetings (SGMs), with the fifth to be held on Wednesday 7 August at 5pm. This makes SGMs somewhat rare, but there has been an uptick in the last three years as students have sought ways to come together and show collective dissent to the never-ending attacks of neoliberal universities and governments.
The 1971 SGM sought to condemn the Springbok Tour; the 2007 SGM to condemn conservative attacks on student unionism from the Howard government; the April 2021 SGM to endorse student and staff participation in a Strike 4 Climate’s Global Climate Strike; and the October 2021 SGM to support the No USyd Cuts campaign. SGMs bring students together to debate, vote, and present a formal position using the University’s own language of “bureaucracy” and “democracy” (supposedly).
This SGM will be an exciting one. Going beyond the 2021 SGMs to endorse the global climate strike and to condemn course cuts, this year we are demanding that USyd cuts ties with the apartheid state of Israel and the genocide in Gaza, endorsing a singular democratic and secular state in historic Palestine, and affirming the right to resist.
To pass these motions would put us on the right side of history, heed the calls of Palestinian civil society, and uphold international law.
The first SGM held by the SRC in 1971 was called in response to the Springbok rugby tour, the national team of then-apartheid South Africa. While South African apartheid and the Springbok tour is now widely condemned and socially unacceptable, it was once less clear cut. Anti-apartheid rallies were often met with violence from Nazi counter-protestors. We heard from one such victim, Professor Robert Austin, during a teach-in at our recent USyd Gaza Solidarity Encampment, who spoke about his involvement in the anti-apartheid solidarity movement against South Africa.
In the same way, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel still faces misconceptions centred on false conflations of anti-Zionism with antisemitism, and a largely apathetic international community. Just as we found that the students were right about the Vietnam War, about South African apartheid, and about the Freedom Rides, we know that one day history will celebrate the fight for a free Palestine.
SGMs to call for a free Palestine are also taking place around the continent — the University of Queensland had an electrifying meeting with over 500 attendees, and there are others planned at ANU, Adelaide University, Monash, and RMIT. They are demanding that their universities cut ties with Israel and genocide, and USyd is jumping in with some extra motions to strengthen our support for Palestine at one of the most political and unionised universities in so-called ‘Australia’.
Motion 1: Demand USyd cut ties with the genocide in Gaza
This motion was put forward by Students for Palestine Sydney Uni in line with the BDS movement and strategy, consisting of three main parts related to disclosure, divestment and protecting protest.
Firstly, it calls for USyd to cut ties with Thales and Israeli academic institutions. USyd has a ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ with Thales, the multinational weapons company which produces the Watchkeeper 35 drones used to surveil and kill Palestinians in Gaza, as well as other weapons used around the world. The Thales off Campus campaign was started by the Education Action Group in 2023, seeking to expose the deep ties of this war-mongering company to our University. USyd’s most recent Chancellor, Belinda Hutchinson, who served from 2013 to 2024, sits on the board of Thales Australia, and there are numerous PhD scholarships funded by Thales for research to advance their products.
As for the Israeli academic institutions, USyd is partnered with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv University, Technion Institute of Technology, and Bezalel Academy — each with deep ties and contributions to Israeli ‘defence’, the surveilling of Palestinians, and the war on Gaza. The academic boycott of Israeli institutions has long been a goal of the BDS movement and of our ‘Cut Ties’ campaign at USyd, for these universities are at the heart of Israel’s military-security-surveillance complex. Between occupying stolen land, conducting research and training programs for Israel defence, creating weaponry used to kill Palestinians and bulldoze their homes, producing uniforms for the IDF, each of these four institutions are complicit in occupation and genocide in numerous ways.
Secondly, Motion 1 demands that USyd disclose and divest from any financial investment in Israel. This was a major (unanswered) demand of our Gaza Solidarity Encampment, but our recent findings from a Freedom of Information Request under the Government Information (Public Access) Act (GIPA) revealed more details of the University’s economic ties to and support for Israel and genocide. We now know for certain that USyd syphons large funds into Israeli institutions and companies for vague services, travel costs, and honorarium payments, and that it has a whopping $2.25m of exposure to Israeli companies in private equity funds that they claim to be ‘unable to sell’.
Thirdly, Motion 1 calls for USyd to rescind academic disciplinary measures against pro-Palestine student activists, and to scrap the Campus Access Policy (CAP). Students are facing repression for Palestine advocacy on campus in Semester 1, even for making lecture announcements about upcoming protests. We can only anticipate that the repressive measures will increase in the face of the new draconian CAP.
Motion 2: One Palestinian State, affirm the Right to Resist
This motion was put forward by Students Against War, endorsing a singular secular and democratic state in historic Palestine. It also affirms the international law definition of the right to resist in circumstances of seeking self-determination amongst colonial domination, foreign occupation, and racist regimes.
We know a two-state solution is dead, despite the attempts of politicians to endorse a mythical solution of Israel and Palestine as equal neighbouring countries. Israel is a deeply flawed country built on dispossession, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing that ignores international law, and will never respect Palestinian sovereignty and self-determination. This is epitomised by the continuous settler expansion and violence in the West Bank. The commonly proposed plan of a two-state solution gives crumbs to Palestine — a divided state between Gaza and the West Bank, and only 22% of their historic lands — which are practically the same amount as following the 1948 Nakba. Students Against War call for a single state where Palestinians, Jews, Muslims, and people of all faiths and backgrounds live in freedom and equality.
By recognising Israel’s occupation and violent rule over Palestinians, Motion 2 also recognises the right to armed resistance Palestinians have under international law as an occupied people — “the violence of the oppressed is never equivalent to the violence of the oppressor.” The right to resist is not such a new or radical idea — it appears in the 1970 United Nations General Assembly Resolution 2625, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, and the 2004 Arab Charter on Human Rights. The recent International Court of Justice ruling that Israel’s continued presence in the occupied Palestinian territory is unlawful, their ongoing investigation into allegations of Israel committing genocide in Gaza, and their order to halt the offensive on Rafah provides the basis to these rights of Palestinians to resist.
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It is a disgrace for the University of Sydney to laud its history of radical student movements and social justice when it refuses to respond to the core demands of the global student and public movement for Palestine. The Charles Perkins Centre, commemorating the president of the Sydney Uni Freedom Rides, was established only in 2012 — 47 years after this historical student movement that exposed the rife racism against First Nations peoples in New South Wales and throughout the institutions of so-called Australia. Of course, a building only pays lip service to the fights for justice and liberation underscoring the Freedom Ride and our activism today.
53 years after USyd students voted to condemn the Springbok Tour and apartheid South Africa, we find ourselves in a sinister repetition of history by fighting against the apartheid, genocidal state of Israel. Just as we find ourselves preparing for our fifth Student General Meeting since 1971, we know that this is not the end of the road for fighting against the neoliberal corporate university, and its complicity in a system of Western imperialism and capitalism. It is one piece in the puzzle of BDS and making our University a responsible public institution serving the interests of humanity.
As we fight against a University complicit in genocide and cracking down on protest as it continually imposes course cuts and staff casualisation, we need everyone to unite and speak out — through the SGM, through our defiance against the CAP; through protests for Palestine and all oppressed peoples; through talking to your classmates and teachers. Change will only come if enough pressure is placed on our neoliberal universities and governments, who respond to public opinion and money rather than ethics and morality.
We need you to come to the SGM and vote ‘yes’ to divestment and Palestinian liberation. Bring your student IDs, your friends, and your loudest voices on Wednesday August 7 at 5pm.
