By Alex Morgan
On 17th of April 2024, a group of student activists in New York City established an encampment on the campus of Columbia University in protest of the university’s complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza and in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. Among other demands, this protest called for the Columbia administration to divest from companies complicit in the Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people, including weapons manufacturers such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Boeing.
According to Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the protest was a continuation of previous social justice demonstrations at Columbia University, including famous protests against the American invasion of Vietnam in 1968 and the South African apartheid regime between 1978 and 1985. In the spirit of these past movements, students took over a university building known as Hamilton Hall—which was occupied in the 1968 protests and later dubbed “Mandela Hall” in 1985—this time renaming it after Hind Rajab, a six-year-old Palestinian girl killed by the Israel Defence Forces.
These actions at Columbia, as well as a Zionist retaliation involving chemical weapons and the brutal crackdown by the NYPD, made headlines globally and inspired similar pro-Palestine encampments to spring up at hundreds of university campuses worldwide. Unlike many other demonstrations against the Israeli government and its powerful allies, these university protests represent a unique opportunity for young people to enact real change via institutions within their reach. Just as the 1968 Columbia protests prevented the building of a segregated gym in Harlem and the 1985 protests led to divestment from South Africa, the pro-Palestine encampments have led several universities to sever ties with Israeli institutions and companies complicit in the occupation (including in Dublin, York, London, Barcelona, and Montréal).
This global movement casts a light on academia’s ties to the Zionist regime and the military industrial complex generally. This fact was seen as surprising by many, as one twitter user so neatly put it: “I feel like it would be more normal for colleges to have nothing to do with arms manufacturers”. The movement can be seen as part of a broader call to demilitarize education, as well as an opportunity to critically examine the role of universities in the imperialist system.
The University of Melbourne as a microcosm of academia’s complicity
In Australia, student encampments began with the University of Sydney on April 23rd and the University of Melbourne on the 25th, later followed by nine other universities around the country. As with Columbia, Australian universities have a long history of anti-war and anti-apartheid protests that were demonised at the time. In 1967, students raising funds for aid in Vietnam were accused of treason by Monash University admin (a charge which carried the death penalty at the time), and Premier Henry Bolte referenced the Kent State massacre (where students in Ohio were killed by the National Guard) in warning against protest. Similarly, the pro-Palestine encampments met widespread condemnation from both the government and mainstream media outlets.
The Melbourne University encampment – organised by Unimelb For Palestine (UM4P) – demanded the administration cut ties with all weapons manufacturers and other institutions complicit in the Gaza genocide. Inspired by the occupation of Hind’s Hall at Columbia, UM4P made headlines when they escalated their action and took over a university building, renaming it after Mahmoud Alnaouq, a prospective student of the university who was killed by Israeli forces.
In my experience, the UM4P encampment was very well-organised, calm and focused on education, hosting teach-ins, speeches and lectures from Palestinian academics. Meanwhile, Israel has destroyed every university in Gaza, which the UN has described as “scholasticide”. The university administration, media and the Australian government argued that these protests were antisemitic because the students chanted “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”—a call to end the apartheid. The Jewish Council of Australia has since come out in support of the student protests. Many of the organisers are Jewish, and the camp featured talks from Jewish academics on Jewish anti-zionism.
Zionist counter protestors tried to disrupt these speakers, including fascist agitator Avi Yemeni—a former IDF soldier and veteran of the infamous Golani Brigade whose name is synonymous with war crimes. In the face of this antagonism, there were no credible reports of violence, hate speech or destruction by the encampment demonstrations. While the Herald Sun ran a headline titled ‘Jewish students speak out on why they’re quitting Melbourne Uni’, the best smear this Murdoch outlet could produce was a claim that one student was upset because “I tried to walk through (the lawn encampment) […] I had an Israeli flag and they were refusing to talk to us”. Clearly, this was a peaceful and respectful protest. Palestine solidarity activists knew that any retaliation to Zionist aggression would not advance the movement’s aims.
Regardless of this peaceful character, students and staff taking part in pro-Palestine demonstrations are vulnerable to disciplinary action. In 2023 Melbourne University was the first in Australia to officially adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism which conflates criticism of the state of Israel with racist hate speech. The university also warned staff against participation in a solidarity rally organised by the National Tertiary Education Union, claiming that attendance could be considered unprotected industrial action. More than 20 student protestors who were identified using surveillance technologies were issued misconduct notices.
Universities and the military industrial complex
In addition to calls to divest from weapons manufacturers, many student protests are demanding an academic boycott of Israeli universities. Far from being progressive bastions of free inquiry, these are known to be deeply intertwined with the Israeli military and a central pillar of the apartheid regime. Israeli universities were originally established as colonial state-building institutions that served to legitimise illegal settlements. It is these institutions that established the Science Corps, which went on to form the foundations of the Israeli Ministry of Defence and the Israeli weapons company Rafael. Today, Israeli universities run programs to train soldiers and intelligence officers, and are in close collaboration with the Israeli police and Shin Bet – Israel’s internal security service.
In Australia, publicly funded institutions like the University of Melbourne increasingly serve the needs of the global capitalist system. Historically, the University of Melbourne in particular, played an important role in the genocide of Aboriginal people. Little understood is how deeply intertwined our tertiary education system is with defence contractors, the Australian military, and the US-led imperialist order. These recent demonstrations have served to bring this long-standing secret alliance into the public discourse.
The University of Melbourne has ironically spent many years boasting of its special relationship with the arms industry. Prof. Len Sciacca from the university’s Defence Enterprise claims to be “leading Australia’s capability” in battlespace aspect design of sensors and weapon systems. In 2019, Deputy Vice Chancellor Mark Cassidy promoted the university’s ties to Boeing, the primary manufacturer of missiles and munitions delivered to Israel, describing Boeing as a “key partner” at the Melbourne School of Engineering.
Despite these public boasts, in November 2023 the UM4P group was told by Vice Chancellor Duncan Maskell that their claims of the university’s partnership with Lockheed Martin were “not true“, notwithstanding nearly a decade of evidence to the contrary. On May 16, 2024, Deputy Vice Chancellor Michael Wesley admitted collaboration with weapons companies but claimed that “there is light years [sic] between the work that our researchers are doing and the manufacturers of weapons” – giving the example of designing Boeing tray tables.
Finally, on May 23 – in response to mounting pressure – the Melbourne University administration in negotiations with leaders of the encampment, agreed to make additional disclosures about its collaborations with the weapons industry. This led UM4P to call an end to the encampment – some it demands having been agreed. The language of the official University of Melbourne announcement heralded an important shift in rhetoric and tactics by the university.
Rather than something to be denied, collaborations with weapons companies are now presented as a “commitment to the defence and national security of Australia”
This was made abundantly clear at an all-staff town hall on June 25. The theme of this meeting was related to sustainability and several staff pointed out the hypocrisy of extolling the virtues of lowering the university’s own carbon footprint while remaining complicit in the Israeli assault on Gaza which, in addition to its toll on innocent life, is likely causing CO2 emissions greater than the annual output of most nations and greater ecological devastation than the multi-year bombing campaigns of the Second World War. In response, Deputy Vice Chancellor Mark Cassidy, had the following:
“We’re doing this work because we believe that this work is in the interest of Australia, and that’s the litmus test that we’re using around the work that we do in the defence and national security space. We do a lot of work. It’s not just with companies like Boeing and others. We do work across law plus economics across international relationships […] and they’re all contributing to this nation’s effort as a sovereign nation around our defence.”
While this is a change in narrative from recent months, it is in line with the prevailing imperialist ideology of many in the university’s hawkish leadership. Another Deputy Vice Chancellor, Michael Wesley, previously wrote a piece entitled ‘Toward a Realist Ethics of Intervention’ advocating “the just use of coercive force” and praising the invasions of Afghanistan and Haiti which killed over a quarter of a million people. Professor Wesley also has strong links to the Australian military, having previously worked as Assistant Director-General for Transnational Issues at the Office of National Assessments (Australia’s peak intelligence agency). In 2021, Professor Timothy Lynch (chair of political science in the Faculty of Arts) wrote an opinion piece claiming that “America has been insufficiently war-like”, arguing the failures in Afghanistan and Iraq should be blamed on “a fetish for military minimalism”.
Clearly, the university is doubling down on collaboration with the arms industry by claiming that this is essential for “defence and national security”. This of course begs the question—defence from who?
National security, anti-China Hysteria, and arms industry grift
When the Melbourne University talks about promoting “stability in the region”, it is obvious the narrative relies on the basic assumption that China is a military threat to the Australian people, and that without sufficient investment in military and weapons technologies we will somehow suffer domination by the People’s Liberation Army. It is critical that this ridiculous framework does not go unchallenged.
Some of the main culprits responsible for the prevailing narrative are “think tanks” like the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, who take funding from the military and arms industry, use it to write propaganda pieces fear mongering about the supposed menace of China, and thereby manufacture consent for more weapons contracts. This grift is, of course, highly profitable. Similarly, Australian universities also play an important role by taking advantage of their perceived position as respected, independent research institutions to inform public policy in relation to China, all the while taking funding from sources like the Ford Foundation —which is a CIA cutout responsible for training neoliberal economists to work for fascist regimes in Indonesia and Chile.
This critical role of Australian universities in the military industrial complex is perhaps best exemplified by their relationship to AUKUS—the trilateral military partnership between Australia, the United Kingdom and the USA which is clearly aimed at projecting power toward China. The University of Melbourne is one of eight Australian universities directly involved in AUKUS Pillar II, an initiative aimed at bolstering collaboration between the defence industry and innovation sector, with the aims of translating “disruptive technology into asymmetric capability”, for these imperialist military powers. Professor Cassidy outlined the University of Melbourne’s strategy to “grow the STEM talent pipeline” into AUKUS Pillar II—essentially funnelling much of Australia’s youth into the war machine.
This shows that taking a principled, anti-imperialist stance is central to Palestine solidarity action in university campuses. Without challenging the pervasive narrative that China is an imperialist threat, the movement to sever ties between academia and the military industrial complex will hit a dead end, as weapons collaboration will be defended as in “the national interest” against China. Already we can see this discourse playing out in response to the confrontation between student activists and the University of Melbourne administration. A critical re-evaluation of what Australia’s “national interest” is, and who decides it, has never been more urgent.
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