All power to the student protest on Gaza at Trinity College Dublin!!

 

Academics for Palestine statement in support of TCD student encampment

Academics for Palestine strongly support the actions taken today by student activists in Trinity College Dublin. In joining the Palestine solidarity encampments that have spread across university campuses in the United States, France, Australia, Britain, India, Tunisia, Japan and beyond, these students are showing a degree of moral courage and leadership that has been distinctly lacking amongst our university administrations. 

Students around the world are justifiably seeking to hold their academic institutions to account for their silence and complicity with the ongoing genocide in Gaza. We admire their courage in standing against a US-funded, EU-assisted genocide and we join them in demanding that their universities take similarly principled stands. To date, however, these demands have been ignored.

Across the island of Ireland, we have witnessed our university administrations legitimate their 6+ months of silence on Israel’s atrocities against the Palestinian people by asserting that they are holding a neutral position in defence of academic freedom. To remain silent in the face of this genocidal war on occupied Palestine is not neutrality, but complicity. Nor is the call for ceasefire a controversial matter; it has the overwhelming support of the people of Ireland as well as the Irish government. 

We support the students' demands that Irish universities take concrete steps. Over the past 6 months, the demands of student groups, third-level campus staff groups, and Academics for Palestine have been expressed repeatedly and consistently. They include:

1) Severing any existing institutional partnerships, projects or affiliations with Israeli universities and state institutions.

2) Disclosing and divesting from any financial complicity in Israeli occupation and from companies involved in violations of Palestinian rights.

3) Divesting from any holdings in companies associated with weapons development or arms manufacturing, and withdrawal from any projects involving partners associated with the Israeli security, surveillance technology or arms industries.  

4) Making an unequivocal statement of solidarity with the people of Palestine, condemning the ongoing genocide, apartheid and occupation they face.  

5) Committing to provide substantial material and logistical support for displaced Palestinian students and academics to study and work in Ireland.

These demands should no longer be cast as radical, they are the least our institutions should be doing amidst the ongoing destruction of Gaza. They follow the lead of principled student movements as well as the longstanding principles of the civil society-led Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. Indeed, Irish third level institutions are completely out of step with the broader public in Ireland in their refusal to deplore the Israeli state’s genocidal atrocities in Palestine. So we will continue to repeat and insist on these demands until they are met. We do so inspired by our own students and students rising around the world, and with the aim of reclaiming Irish universities as spaces of justice, anti-racism, and anti-colonialism.