In Defence of Students' Right to Protest Genocide

My talk at the 53rd protest for Palestine, Gadigal Land, Sunday October 13

After three students were arrested for peacefully protesting to demand Western Sydney University cut its ties with Israel, I was invited to speak at the weekly rally for Palestine at Hyde Park. This is the text of my talk

.My name is Alana Lentin and I am a Professor at Western Sydney University. I am here today as a member of Western Sydney University for Palestine Collective. I am also a proud member of the anti-Zionist anti colonial Jewish group, Tzedek Collective.

I stand before you on the unceded, sovereign lands of the Gadigal People to whom I pay my deepest respect and whose continued resistance to ongoing colonisation and the imposition of white supremacist rule I commit to uplifting.

My mother’s family left fascist Romania for Palestine in 1940 where I was born in 1973. Although I grew up in Ireland, I recognise that this history ties me to the fate of the Palestinian people, and for this reason, I do what I can in my small way to commit to their resistance against Zionist settler colonialism, backed by western imperialism. My biggest hope is that I will be able to revisit the place of my birth when Palestine will be free.

I have been asked to speak to you today because on Wednesday October 9, a peaceful protest was organised by students at Western Sydney University, calling for the university to divest from its ties to weapons manufacturers and other companies that directly fuel the genocide in Palestine.

In response, riot police were called to the university and two students violently arrested and charged with assaulting staff. A third student was arrested from their home on Friday morning and unreasonable bail conditions have been placed on all three.

All three students are Muslim, Arab, and one is Black. As someone who teaches about racism and colonisation at the University, and as a witness to the arrests, there is no doubt in my mind that this was a clear case of racial profiling as well as an attempt to intimidate vulnerable young students who have spent the last year watching people from their own communities being butchered and the world’s governments standing by.

Western Sydney has always been a site of entrenched Islamophobia, the domestic front of the Australian ‘War on Terror’. I see last week’s actions against our students as a continuation of the war the state wages on Arabs and Muslims, one that is paralleled only by that on Indigenous people, who are treated as threats on their own lands and hounded by the state.

The reason Australia stands so steadfast with Israel is that it is also a settler colony founded on the dispossession of Indigenous land and peoples and which is committed to putting down third world resistance, at home and abroad.

On Friday morning, as we entered Parramatta campus to protest the arrests and to stand in solidarity with our students along with supporters who came out from all over Sydney, we were met with the sight of over twenty police and riot police vehicles and almost as many officers as protesters. Doors to all buildings had been locked with security placed outside. Students were barred from accessing toilets, drinking fountains and prayers rooms. Their IDs were checked. In over twelve years at the university, I have never before witnessed such scenes.

I am deeply ashamed that our campus and our students have been subjected to this treatment. We will be dealing with the trauma that this has generated for our students for a long time to come. It adds to the horror of witnessing genocide, and losing family members, which is made worse by being constantly gaslit by a university management which offers them counselling when what they want is divestment from the machinery of mass murder.

Western Sydney University prides itself as an institution that is committed to social justice, to challenging racism. It prides itself on working towards what it calls ‘Indigenous self-determination in education.’

Yet, the university allows its young students to be violently arrested, knowing full well the danger that police actions place on their future. We gather in classrooms and learn about the history of Indigenous resistance to colonisation, about sovereignty, we publish papers and win grants to research antiracism. Yet when our students take these lessons and put them into action by simply asking their university to divest from the weapons that kill their brothers and sisters in Palestine and Lebanon, we criminalise and demonise them in the pages of The Australian newspaper.

Students know that their diversity is always good for a photo op, as long as it doesn’t come with political awareness; as long as they leave their pain at home.

Yet, there is no point talking about hypocrisy. We waste our breath pointing out the stark difference between the University’s response to the war in Ukraine – cancelling all relations with Russia – and its response to this phase of Israel’s genocide in Palestine: almost total silence. Western universities play a central role in western imperialism and on this basis, we should expect such hypocrisy to be the order of the day.

We also waste our breath speaking out about the manipulation of antisemitism and telling those who would cynically use the long history of European Jew-hatred as a stick to beat Palestinians and their supporters with that anti-Zionism does not equal antisemitism. It does not matter, for as the Palestinian scholar, Anna Younes teaches us, this is a ‘War on Antisemitism’ that, like the War on Terror, is the current rhetorical form that imperialism and white supremacism takes.  

If someone sees students raising their voices against genocide, for the sanctity of human life and the dignity of a people’s resistance against oppression and their response is to cry antisemitism, then I – as a Jewish person whose family fled Russian pogroms, fascists and Nazis - know that they do not truly care about Jews.

We commit to fighting antisemitism by seeing it as a fight against all racisms, where there is no hierarchy among racisms; where we stand united against white supremacism and colonial barbary. When I see white supremacists and colonial cheerleaders repressing Palestinians in the name of defending Jews, I shudder to my core.

I believe that university leaders know that they are flouting the principles of academic freedom that they claim to hold dear. It is therefore obvious to me that, just like pointing out the hypocrisy of the Palestine exception is wasted breath, so too is appealing to freedom of speech. We will only see change when university leaders put their students and staff, and a commitment to knowledge before the interests of their investors and the western states to whom they are beholden. But we should have no doubt that, as Gina Romero, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association, reported, ‘The brutal repression of the university-based protest movement is posing a profound threat to democratic systems and institutions; it risks alienating an entire generation.’

Finally, as the Palestinian activist, writer and author, Bassel al-Araj, martyred by Israel in 2017, wrote, ‘You want to be an intellectual? Then you must resist. Otherwise you and your education are useless.’

Please continue to support our brave students. Free Palestine!