The National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) for Palestine, the National Union of Students and Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions held a day of action on October 23 to support an institutional academic boycott of Israel.
The NTEU National Council voted to progress the boycott call at its October 5 meeting in Naarm/Melbourne. There, the overwhelming majority of more than 100 NTEU delegates voted to demand an end to cooperation with Israeli academic institutions, that universities advocate for a global boycott of Israeli tertiary learning, to condemn and divest from Israeli institutions, and to support Palestinian tertiary institutions and students.
“NTEU for Palestine has been building support for an academic policy for an institutional boycott of Israel throughout the year, and on October 5, at our National Council of the National Tertiary Education Union, we passed and endorsed the institutional boycott of Israel,” Dr Markela Panegyres told NTEU members and students at the rally.
Around 100 staff and students protested in front of the Great Hall, the site of the University of Sydney Gaza Solidarity Encampment which started on April 23 and helped spark a nationwide movement.
Others spoke about Israel’s 12 months of atrocities and their resolve to campaign until ties with Israel are officially cut. The protest marched to Broadway to join protesters from the University of Technology.
Panegyres drew a comparison between the university as a colonial institution and those in Israel, saying they had all been established as part of the genocide of Indigenous people.
“The NTEU resolution not only demanded an academic boycott, it also demanded an end to research partnerships with companies currently supporting the genocide of Palestinians and currently supplying weapons to Israel,” Panegyres said. “We are also demanding that universities cut ties with weapons’ manufacturers and with militaries.”
The NTEU’s institutional academic boycott of Israel campaign also calls on academic institutions to undertake audits to assess all ties with the Israeli military and weapons manufacturers.
Further, the motion encourages the establishment of scholarships for Palestinians and the university to commit to reestablishing higher education in Gaza.
Panegyres told Sydney Criminal Lawyers that the university has agreed to make disclosures, however it has fallen short of any divestment commitment.
The University of Sydney has relationships with weapons companies Thales, Lockheed Martin, L3 Harris and Safran.
NTEU for Palestine also wants an academic ban on institutions like the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Technion.
“The university should replace the funding of all staff whose positions depend on arms companies, to enable them to undertake research for the public good,” Panegyres added.
Under pressure from the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, university management agreed to disclosure its links to weapons’ companies, including publishing details of its defence and security-related research and investments from July.
These promises were made to convince the encampment to end. Management also committed to “fostering greater understanding of racism”, with a particular focus on antisemitism and Islamophobia.
Unlike other university managements, the University of Sydney did not attempt to shut the solidarity encampment down over concerns it was anti-Semitic.
However, staff and students consider it did bow to the pressure of Zionists.
Vice Chancellor Mark Scott later publicly apologised for allowing the encampment after it was suggested Jewish students had feel unsafe.
“Student activists at the encampment had put up a strong fight for 55 days, despite management’s repression and intimidation,” Panegyres said. “This was accompanied with fearmongering and Islamophobia from the establishment media.”
The university told students at the encampment that management had reviewed its investment policies and that it had cut all financial ties with the tobacco industry and cluster munitions.
However, these are not the relationships staff and students are calling for divestment from.
Palestinian academic Fahad Ali said that, regardless of all else, it is inevitable that Palestine will be free.
“Years and years ago, when Sydney Staff for BDS first started out, when we were having initial conversations with the union about the academic boycott of Israel, we faced a massive campaign from the management from our union to try to silence us,” Ali recalled. “Look where we are now! … we now have, at the highest levels of our union, a commitment to the academic boycott of Israel.”
Ali said just as the NTEU has adopted a position it once rejected, so too tertiary institutions will, one day, advance the boycott call.
Students Against War member Angus Dermody told the protest that “after a year of genocide and a year of protest on campus”, the university continues to refuse “to take any action to cut a single tie to Israel’s apartheid and genocide”.
The student, who was recently suspended for his campus activism for Palestine, revealed the university is continuing its exchange programs with universities, like Tel Aviv and Technion, institutions built upon stolen Palestinian land.
He said that after the two–month Gaza Solidarity Encampment “the only response from the university was to bring in the Campus Access Policy which aims to stop us from protesting on campus, from postering, from leafleting, from using megaphones”.
Students Against War have been targeted by campus security, who took leaflets away and called them “terrorists”.
“They tried to ban our snap protest for Lebanon, while Israel was bombing civilians in their thousands, because our poster had Arabic text on it.
“Just yesterday they used their Campus Access Policy to shut down a bake sale raising funds for a family in Gaza,” Dermody said.
[Paul Gregoire writes for Sydney Criminal Lawyers, where this article was first published.]