Why UK university students are going on strike

Before the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, there were 12 universities in Gaza. Palestine is known for having one of the highest literacy rates in the world, despite education becoming increasingly inaccessible due to Israeli bombing and the United States cutting off aid used to fund the operations of 711 schools in the region in 2018. Despite all this, Palestinians have long maintained the reputation of being high-performing graduates, often skilled in two languages and pursuing successful careers in business, engineering or medicine.

But as I write this article today, every university in Gaza has been destroyed. And it is not only universities that have been obliterated but Palestinian intellectuals, too. According to the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, the Israeli army has killed over 94 university professors and hundreds of teachers in what they have described as “deliberate and specific air raids” on the homes of academic and intellectual figures. On Tuesday (February 20), Times of Gaza reported that Israeli airstrikes killed Professor Nasser Abu Al-Nour, Dean of the Faculty of Nursing at the Islamic University of Gaza, along with seven members of his family. The Gaza Strip is now essentially uninhabitable, as the Israeli army has destroyed homes, hospitals, universities, schools, libraries and more. Israel is, as Claudia Webbe, Member of Parliament for Leicester East, remarked on X, “destroying Gaza’s future”, with nearly 30,000 Palestinians being killed in its military campaign.

As education is halted in Gaza, students across the UK have organised countless protests and demonstrations on their campuses, urging their universities to cut all financial ties with Israel and end their active participation in the killing of Palestinians. “We have organised a walkout for every National Student Day of Action since our first one in November,” Melissa*, a University College London (UCL) student, tells Dazed. “But since the murder of UCL alumnus Dr Refaat Alareer, our demands suddenly felt closer to home.”

Dr Alareer was a Palestinian writer, poet, professor and activist from the Gaza Strip. He attended UCL from 2006 to 2007 and earned an MA in Comparative Literature. He then obtained a PhD in English Literature at the Universiti Putra Malaysia and taught literature and creative writing at the Islamic University of Gaza. It was there that he co-founded the organisation We Are Not Numbers, which brought together experienced authors with young writers in Gaza and encouraged the power of storytelling as a means of resistance against Israeli occupation. But on December 6, 2023, Dr Alareer was killed in an Israeli airstrike along with his brother, brother’s son, his sister and her three children. Since his murder, UCL have not made a statement about their former student.

“Since UCL management and departments have refused to utter a word in remembrance of Dr Alareer, we began to engage in increasingly creative actions such as tying ribbons around trees on our campus, each one inscribed with the name of a martyr of Gaza,” explains Melissa. “On February 7, we took direct action and renamed the UCL Student Centre the ‘Refaat Alareer Student Centre’. This act was met with serious backlash from UCL, with security threatening to call the police on students at the demonstration, threatening disciplinary action and targeting only “minoritised, racialised, and visibly Muslim students”.

Similarly, students at the University of Essex have also been met with hostility because of their protests for Palestine. “I’m a little anxious to even discuss how my university has reacted because I know it could get me into trouble,” Safiyyah, a student and lead coordinator for action for Palestine at Essex, confesses. “But that’s precisely the problem. They want us to be scared into silence. We’ve been intimidated through emails, been followed around campus by security for handing out flyers, and been warned not to go ahead with protests – though we did so regardless.” Since October 30, students at Essex have hosted numerous protests, vigils, walkouts and hours-long sit-ins on campus, and through each demonstration, the students have made multiple demands. But, one of their primary focuses is getting the University of Essex to end its apprenticeship partnership with BAE Systems immediately.

This is a recurring demand from students not only at Essex but also from UCL, Leeds, and Leeds Beckett University. BAE Systems is one of the world’s largest weapons manufacturers, and it was founded in Britain. Yesterday, The Guardian reported that due to Russia’s war on Ukraine and Israel’s war on Gaza, BAE Systems has made record profits, with the company valued at almost £38 billion, with further growth expected in the year ahead. BAE Systems has connections to several UK universities, and if you were to look up BAE systems and the name of your university, you’d probably be able to find some relationship between the two. Safiyyah echoes the same sentiments expressed by the Campaign Against the Arms Trade: “We need more investment in higher education, not further integration of the arms trade into education. We should all be outraged by this.”

“They want us to be scared into silence. We’ve been intimidated through emails, been followed around campus by security for handing out flyers, and been warned not to go ahead with protests – though we did so regardless” – Safiyyah

Under capitalism, the purpose of education is not to create free thinkers. Video essayist and author Alice Cappelle explains this in her latest YouTube video, The Gen-Alpha moral panic: education under capitalism. While creating critical thinkers is not part of our curriculum in the West, conservatism is. “Schools reproduce already existing social inequalities for the benefit of dominant classes. Rich kids are likelier to succeed at school, and poor kids are likelier to fail,” Cappelle says in the video. “So it is in the interest of dominant classes to ensure that schools operate outside of politics and outside of social realities to ensure that those inequalities remain and that the social order that benefits them is preserved.” Cappelle goes on to explain what sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron write about in their 1964 text Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, and it is precisely the behaviour that UK universities are exhibiting today. No matter how much they discuss decolonisation or intersectional feminism, capitalism has deteriorated these institutions so much that they will always put profit over the demands of their students – and over the lives of Palestinians.

As students continue to lose faith in their universities, the government, the Labour Party and the world at large, they have not lost faith in the power of their activism. This week, on Tuesday, February 20, students, lecturers and alums participated in another National Student Day of Action. At UCL, students held a sit-in outside of the IOE (Institute of Education) building, recited Dr Alareer’s most famous poem, If I must die, and read the names of the professors and university deans who have been murdered. They then distributed chalk among attendees to write slogans and the names of martyrs on the concrete quad. In Leeds, students walked out of their lectures and protested on the steps of their main building.

In spite of ongoing threats and mistreatment, students like Melissa assert that the behaviour of these colonial institutions only pushes her (and the UCL Action for Palestine) to fight even harder. “Having grown up in the context of the so-called ’war on terror’ and seeing how counter-terror discourses have persisted on campuses as a tool of racism and repression, my personal and our collective conviction is only further emboldened,” she says. “We must always continue to resist in the face of injustice.”

*Names have been changed