Student protests demanding that their universities sever all ties with Israel over the Gaza war spread across Europe, with police interventions in France, the Netherlands and Germany to dissolve them. In the last few hours, students from the Autonomous University of Madrid and those from the University of Barcelona joined in Spain. They claim, as in the United States, the end of partnerships with Israeli institutions as sanction for the devastating offensive launched against Gaza in retaliation for the attack by Hamas commandos in southern Israel on October 7.
“Eradicate apartheid in Palestine”
The cloister of the University of Barcelona voted this Wednesday in favor of a motion supporting Palestine and against the Israeli “genocide”, in which it approves that the institution breaks academic relations with Israeli universities, entities and companies. The highest representative body of the university, in whose central building a hundred students are camped, debated for almost two hours a text that finally received 59 votes in favor, 23 against and 37 abstentions.
The motion points out that the breaking of relations is “a mechanism of pressure against Israel until the genocide is over, the ‘apartheid’ system is eradicated and colonization is ended” in Palestine. After the vote, the rector, Joan Guardia, said that the university “will not be an institution that is indifferent” to the “terrible events” in Palestine and will persist in its “commitment to denounce” any violation of human rights.
Coinciding with the start of the meeting of the Barcelona university community, the students held a pot-banging and blocked the street in front of the university for just over ten minutes. For your part students of the Autonomous University of Madridwho have been camping since Monday calling for an end to the war in Gaza, they denounced it’s a statement the “massacre that is taking place with the absolute complicity of the United States, the European Union and also the Spanish government”.
The student movement that denounces the “genocide” in Gaza began on April 29 at the University of Valencia, when fifty people started an indefinite camp at the Faculty of Philosophy. Two weeks later, the campers are still sleeping in this university center and managed to spread their protest to other Spanish campuses, such as that of the University of the Basque Country.
Repression in Holland, France and Germany
At the University of AmsterdamHolland, Hundreds of students resumed their protest on campus on Wednesday, a day after the police evicted them with batons and destroyed their tents. The intervention ended with 169 arrested under accusation of public disorder crimes. In the wake of the protest, this Dutch university published a list of its collaborations with Israel, mainly student exchanges and research projects involving Israeli academics.
Similar scenes took place in ParisFrance, where On Tuesday night, the police evicted a hundred protesters who had occupied an amphitheater at the Sorbonne in solidarity with Gaza and detained 88 of them. Security forces also intervened twice at the prestigious Sciences Po university to disperse about 20 students who had barricaded themselves in the main hall. The intervention was intended to allow access to students who had to pass an exam and resulted in two arrests.
In Germany the University of Leipzigin the east, reported that between 50 and 60 people had occupied the institution’s amphitheater, locking the doors from the inside and setting up tents in the courtyard. The protesters carried banners with the slogan: “Occupation of the university against genocide”. Earlier, at the Free University of Berlin, police cracked down on a demonstration after up to 80 people set up a protest camp on campus. Several of the protesters wore the kufiya, a symbol of the Palestinian cause.
Belgium joins the claims
The protests against the Israeli offensive on the Gaza Strip also spread to the universities of Belgium, with a camp on a campus in Brussels that joins another student action in Ghent. “We call for the end of all agreements between Israel and the Free University of Brussels (ULB)the publication of all the agreements that the ULB has and the cancellation of the conference of the former Israeli ambassador in the ULB,” a spokeswoman for the ULB told the EFE agency. People’s University of Brussels movement who organizes the protest on the capital campus, and who asked not to be identified.
About thirty students occupied a university building on Tuesday night, in an unauthorized protest but tolerated by the center in which incidents were recorded between protesters and Jewish students. According to pro-Palestinian activists, the incident responds to “a deliberate strategy of provocation by a group of students to create tensions with the occupation (of the building) and to publicly delegitimize it.”
The rector of the ULB, Annemie Schaus, reminded the public radio and television RTBF that the university began “an analysis of its associations and agreements that link it with Israeli universities” and that on March 25 the council of rectors of the Universities in the Brussels and Wallonia regions decided to “suspend their student exchange agreement with Tel Aviv University.”
