Students at Sydney Uni have voted overwhelmingly to cut the university’s ties with Israel, in a student referendum held alongside annual Student Representative Council (SRC) elections.
It is the largest student vote for an academic boycott of Israel on any university campus in Australia to date.
Over 4000 students voted in the referendum, with 92 per cent backing the motion for an academic boycott of ties with Israeli universities, including exchange partnerships with Tel Aviv University, Technion and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. It also called on the university to end all research partnerships with weapons companies that supply Israel.
All these Israeli universities are directly implicated in support for the IDF, which has carried out war crimes in Gaza. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, for instance, is currently working to expand its campus into occupied East Jerusalem. They offer an “”enhanced financial package” for students also serving as IDF soldiers.
SRC President Grace Street said the outcome was “a momentous result that tells the University in their own language that students do support divestment and that we won’t be sidelined any longer. We will be pushing forward this referendum to the front of the University’s agenda.”
The referendum was initiated by Students Against War and Solidarity members, who campaigned in the elections under the Globalise the Intifada ticket, using provisions in the SRC Constitution that require 450 signatures to launch the vote. By clearing the hurdle of 3000 students participating and two-thirds support for the motion its demands have become official SRC policy.
Student elections often see student activists focus on promising services and cheaper food on campus, rather than putting wider political issues like Palestine front and centre.
The referendum ensured Palestine remained a key focus in this year’s elections at Sydney Uni. The student newspaper Honi Soit even put a poster encouraging students to support the referendum on its front cover.
Although the referendum was organised by activists on the Globalise the Intifada ticket, all of the other left groups on campus gave it their full support as well as all four presidential candidates. Even PENTA, a self identified apolitical group made up of international students, included the referendum on their how to vote leaflets. Other left groups on campus including members of the Labor Left and Right and The Greens promoted it on their social media and filmed videos supporting it.
At the same time staff at Sydney Uni have also been organised to demand a “convocation”, a mass meeting of university staff and alumni, to discuss the university’s ties with Israel and attack on freedom of speech.
Campus repression
The referendum result was also a rejection of the attempt to crack down on Palestine solidarity at Sydney University and other campuses around the country.
The initiators of the referendum ran in SRC elections under the ticket name “Globalise the Intifada”. In a shocking attack on free speech, they had their materials deemed a “psychosocial hazard” by the university and removed from some areas of the campus.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, NSW Premier Chris Minns and federal Education Minister Jason Clare also took the extraordinary step of contacting the university to demand censorship of the ticket, joining a campaign by the Daily Telegraph to smear the slogan and the pro-Palestine campaign as antisemitic.
But intifada is an Arabic word that means “uprising” or “throwing off oppression”. It was used to describe the two mass Palestinian uprisings against Israel’s illegal military occupation, the First Intifada from 1987 and the Second Intifada from 2000, and symbolises the Palestinian struggle for justice in the face of genocide and apartheid.
The Palestinian intifadas involved mass protests, strikes and boycott campaigns supported by almost the whole of the Palestinian population.
The referendum result shows the university community unequivocally stands with Palestine and for boycott, divestment and sanctions against the genocidal state of Israel.
At the beginning of this year, Chris Minns tried to ban the slogan “Globalise the Intifada”, and posters were forcibly taken down from a student stall by USyd security during O Week, because they included the phrase. But student activists stood up to this and have fought the repressive Campus Access Policy imposed by the university every step of the way.
Later this year, when USyd security tore down posters which featured the Handala symbol, with management citing the symbol as being potentially “antisemitic and violent”, Students Against War led a campaign to say there is nothing antisemitic or violent about a cartoon drawing of a Palestinian child with their hands behind their back. This forced management to walk back their previous statements and actually admit that it is not antisemitic to call for an academic boycott of Israel.
Students at Sydney Uni have shown both how to defend the right to protest and the deep opposition to Israel’s genocide and apartheid that exists on campus. This is the kind of fight needed to end the complicity of university managements and our government with Israel’s ongoing genocide and apartheid.
By Vieve Carnsew and James Supple
