Rachel Rosen
Welcome to our Solidarity Town Hall: UCL staff commit to BDS on Nakba Day.
You may be aware that yesterday UCL’s provost sent out a letter suggesting it can be ‘complicated’ to tell whether investments and research partnerships are ethical. Well, we stand here today, respectfully, collectively, and resoundingly ‘disagreeing well’ with Spence and UCL’s senior leadership.
We are here today:
- to launch our staff campaign for an academic boycott of Israeli higher education institutions that are complicit in occupation, apartheid, and genocide in Palestine – it’s not complicated;
- to commit to calling on UCL management to disclose and divest from any institution or company involved in supporting occupation or supplying technologies and arms used in the commission of Israel’s war crimes –complicated? No…;
- to commit ourselves to supporting Palestinian efforts to rebuild their educational sector in the face of a scholasticide so extreme that not one university in Gaza is still operating – there’s nothing complicated here.
One of the things that students around the world are showing us (including those students here today) is that management is not the university. We – staff and students – are the university. If our senior leadership refuses to call a genocide a genocide because it hasn’t been ‘proven’ – a repudiation of the warnings of the highest court in the world, hundreds of scholars of genocide, and most importantly Palestinians in Gaza; if it refuses to stand up for justice and solidarity in the name of a false neutrality – this cannot stop us! We – me, you, us – we are the university.
For the past seven and a half months, alongside you, alongside the world, we have watched in horror the genocide being committed against the Palestinian people in Gaza. And today, on Nakba day, we remind ourselves that this genocide has long roots in Israel’s Western-backed settler colonialism in Palestine – a project geared to the theft of land, private accumulation of resources, and building of a military stronghold, all through the violent and racist dehumanisation and dispossession of Palestinians. We remind ourselves that most of Gaza’s population are refugees from the 1948 Nakba. 76 years and 222 days, as the powerful expression goes.
This spring we have not only watched, however. We have been galvanised by the ongoing struggles of Palestinians for liberation. We have been inspired by students at UCL:
- the protests and actions launched by Action for Palestine to keep all eyes on Gaza and their creation of a space of learning, love, hope, and struggle in the Apartheid Free Zone;
- the efforts of Students for Justice in Palestine to hold UCL to account for its promotion of companies supplying military technologies to Israel through employment fairs and careers platforms; and,
- of course, student efforts at UCL and beyond to create solidarity encampments, such as the one that we stand beside today and the 22 others across the UK.
Encampments and occupations, many of you have said, are projects of ‘world making’. As staff, we are honoured to join with our students in being part of making the worlds we want to live in. For students are not the ‘leaders of tomorrow’, a dismissive claim often used to deny the insights of young people and the power of your demands. You are the leaders of today, of now; you remind us of what real leadership befitting London’s ‘global university’ looks like.
Since early spring, a group of staff have taken up student calls, and have been working collectively to draft a pledge of commitment to BDS and academic boycott. We have been following the examples of students around the world, taking up the painstaking effort of reaching out and talking to others, often over and over, to develop a strong and united message about what we can and will do as staff at UCL.
We launch this pledge because we know BDS works – we know from the struggle against apartheid in SA, we know through our analysis of the conditions that sustains the settler colonial state, and we know because of the intensive efforts to try to repressive BDS.
Today, we launch this pledge on behalf of the 360 UCL staff who have already signed and the countless others who we warmly welcome to join us.
As staff pledgers, we are diverse:
- We include post-graduate teaching assistants on precarious contracts, a range of educators and researchers, emeritus professors, through to the professional staff who keep the university running. We heed the call of students’ movements around the globe that stress the importance of acting against genocide, showing that struggling for collective liberation, far outweighs any individual risk to ourselves
- We represent multiple disciplines and departments: architecture and the built environment, the arts, bio-sciences, education, engineering, the humanities, informatics, medicine, public health, recruitment and admissions, social sciences, and more – taking a stand against occupation, apartheid, and genocide is crucial wherever and whoever we are
- we are a multi-ethnic and multi-faith (including non-religious) group from all over the world. And, to end on a slightly more personal note, that includes myself and other Jewish staff who refuse attempts to mark our identities, mark us, with the indelible ink of an ethno-nation; who understand that our safety cannot come through the oppression of the Palestinian people; and who are enraged by the weaponisation of antisemitism to silence solidarity with Palestine and which we condemn in the strongest of terms.
Let me affirm ‘None of us are free, until we are all free’.
