Opinion: Warwick Stands With Palestine: Who We Are

This article is the opinion of another organisation and is not affiliated with The Boar

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Warwick Stands With Palestine is a cross-campus coalition of student and staff organisations that see Palestinian liberation as a cause central to the struggle against exploitation and oppression. Drawing on a long history of anti-war and anti-apartheid organising on campus, our coalition calls on Warwick University to divest from all companies and institutions facilitating the genocidal Israeli regime, and support our fights for the liberation of all people.

As we now enter the seventh month of the US-UK-Israeli genocide on the people of Gaza, there has been no end to the barbarity and criminality perpetrated by the occupation. Israel has relentlessly bombed and besieged schools, hospitals, homes, and aid distribution centres, all whilst cutting off access to food, water, electricity, fuel, and medicine for over two million people, half of whom are children. Bodies of shackled medical workers still in their scrubs recovered from mass graves on the grounds of Al-Shifa and Nasser hospitals have been among the over 34,000 murdered Palestinians in Gaza. More than 8,000 remain trapped under the rubble, with Israel’s weaponisation of famine already having taken the lives of dozens of children in the North, starvation and dehydration threatening thousands more. 

What these crimes represent is but another chapter in 76 years of ethnic cleansing, dispossession, and brutality practised by the Israeli regime against the people of Palestine, with full backing from Western governments and institutions like Warwick University.

Founded in October 2023, WSWP is united first and foremost by the material needs of Gaza at this critical juncture, and we rise up to defend Palestinian life, land, and liberation struggle despite attempts to silence our voices. We will remain restless in our resolve until Warwick divests from Israeli genocide; and until Palestine is free, from the River to the Sea. 

 

Our Values 

We believe in liberation for all: from Kashmir to Palestine, from the Philippines to Mexico, from Grenfell to Eelam, from Yemen to Sudan and Congo, the liberation of all colonised people are interconnected. 

We understand that the fight against Zionism and imperialism is bound up with the liberation of all oppressed people; none of us are free until we are all free. Violent histories of Western colonisation, imperialism, and white supremacy together produce the forms of Islamophobia, antisemitism, and racism with which live and struggle against today. We reject the conflation of Zionism with Judaism and its erasure of Jewish members within our bloc, long standing partners in the movement for Palestinian liberation. 

We believe only collective liberation will keep us safe. The police, prisons, campus security, borders, imperialism and profit over people will not. Recent years have seen the University reorganised into a business that puts return on investment above the needs and desires of its students and staff. Students leave university more indebted and overworked than ever, whilst the erosion of pay and conditions amongst staff creates a casualised, precarious and overstretched workforce. As state-managed economic decline disciplines droves of young people into job precarity and debt, we understand that only by organising together for a better world will we truly create safety for all. 

We are committed to creating a safe space to dismantle all interlinked structures of oppression by engaging in relationship building and solidarity. As members in the coalition, we rely on each other to carry the movement forward, for we are all embodiers of liberation, however varied our lived experiences and political positions. 

 

Warwick University: Partner in Colonial Genocide

We attend a university situated at the beating heart of empire, a university deeply integrated into the war machine whose bombs and weapons we export to violent regimes all over the world. Over the last 6 months, we have witnessed the University yield before the interests of militarism, imperialism, and the Zionist lobby. But we recognise that Warwick’s failure to condemn the genocidal Israeli regime and cut its ties reveals not a departure from the progressive “values” it preaches but the intended result of its placing of profit over people.

Warwick University cannot and will not liberate us as long as their material interests are rooted in the lucrative business that is the oppression of the global masses.

 

Student Resistance 

That said, as a national and global bloc students have always been at the forefront of struggles against apartheid, police brutality, climate breakdown, and global imperialism. At “Red” Warwick, students led charges for the institution to divest from Apartheid South Africa’s largest financier, Barclays Bank; whilst today, students at campuses all across the United States are rising up with “Gaza Solidarity Encampments,” in spite of their brutalisation at the hands of the NYPD and University administrators. 

 

Our Vision

We see Palestine as the vanguard for collective liberation, for students and staff alike. As we witness the genocide in Palestine unfold before our eyes, it is important for us to recognise that Zionism is not a problem “over there” but rather a global phenomenon that has very real consequences in our locale. So when we call for Warwick to divest from Israeli colonial genocide, we are too calling for a collective reimagination of campus life for when Palestine is free. Instead of spending hundreds of millions of pounds constructing a new STEM campus, only to cement Warwick’s reputation as a research destination for militarised and imperialist interests, we should ask how that money might instead be reinvested into our communities. Instead of developing technology for Israeli bombs, jets, drones, or AI, how might that money be used to provide affordable on-campus accommodation, or food security for all? Instead of welcoming arms companies on campus for careers fairs, how might we end conditions of precarity for staff, and end the regimes of extortion and extraction manifest in our tuition fees. 

By recognising the ways in which Warwick’s ties with Zionism have implications across university life, we understand that our fight for a more just campus is bound up in our fight for a free Palestine, and vice versa. 

 

Our Demands 

We demand that Warwick University, 

1. Divest from Israeli colonial genocide. Wawick must immediately terminate all academic and teaching partnerships with companies facilitating Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, including Rolls-Royce, Moog, BAE Systems, and all other defence contractors on campus.
2. Condemn Israeli war crimes in Palestine. Warwick must call for an immediate, permanent, and unconditional ceasefire, and for a just peace that realises the full rights of the Palestinian people to be free from colonial siege and occupation. 
3. Pledge to assist the rebuilding of Gaza’s destroyed education sector, establish links with Palestinian universities, and expand scholarships for Palestinian students.
4. Protect the freedom of speech for Palestinian students, staff, and their allies, in protests and expressions of solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for national liberation.

Injustice everywhere threatens to overwhelm us. Our oppressors want us to feel helpless in the face of the most heinous crimes and atrocities perpetrated against the Palestinian people with impunity. But we owe it to our martyrs of hope, our political prisoners, and the millions from Gaza to Tulkarem, to continue the struggle for Palestinian liberation, which is a struggle for the liberation of all. 

Signed, 

Warwick Action for Palestine 

Warwick Anti-Racism Society

Warwick Anti-Sexism Society 

Warwick Amnesty

Warwick Student-Staff Solidarity Network 

Warwick Labour Society 

Warwick Arab Society

Warwick Pakistani Society

Warwick UNICEF

Warwick Pride

Global South Initiative

Taylor Swift Society

North African Society

Warwick Bass

Warwick Snow

Qulture Warwick

Warwick Riot

Warwick Kehillah

BASE Law Society

Persian Society

Bengali Society

East African Society

ahlul bayt society

Ahmadiyya Muslim Students’ Association

Dubai Society

Legal Technology Society

BAR Society

Filmmaking Society

Allotment Society

Argentine Tango Society

Bad Film Society

Vegan and Veg Society

Marxist Society

WMS Pride (LGBTQ+) Network

Unison Warwick Branch

Hindu Society

Student Socialist Workers Party

Liberal Arts Society

Indian Classical Dance Society

Islamic Society