Student encampment at the University of Toronto. “Student encampments – UofT – Disclose and Divest (through a fence)” by Can Pac Swire is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
As more governments in Western Europe crack down on the right to protest, in particular against Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians, universities are no different. In the UK, university management policing (both metaphorically and literally calling the police on their students) of student activism has been well documented in a 2025 report by Liberty Investigates. At the end of March 2026, the CCINDLE team in the UK organised a student jury in Scotland, bringing together a small group of student-activists to share their experiences of repression on campus, and to collectively imagine what a just university could look like.
With a facilitator from a conflict mediation organisation, the student-participants documented and reflected on who the agents of repression and marginalisation are, how they engage in such practices of repression and marginalisation, and how these practices were experienced. What emerged from these small and big group discussions was a clear network of actors, both staff and students, who have targeted Palestine solidarity student-activists and groups, often using bureaucratic rules and norms as ways to hinder and distract campaigns, other times as punitive measures and threats to prevent further advocacy. It also reflected a general sentiment among participants toward the university. They understood and experienced senior management’s tactics of policing and surveillance, and punitive policies against students challenging financial decision-making, as acts antithetical to democratic values such as inclusivity of marginalised voices and substantive representation of student and staff voices in key decision-making processes [1].
For example, student-participants shared how particular student societies, such as the Jewish Society, a Zionist student society, had doxxed them because they were anti-Zionists [2]. Any complaints made to the university were ignored, which was another way senior management often used to ignore student concerns. Like one of the participants described the process, the university’s complaints procedure was a ‘black hole’ where nothing progresses. Participants brought up spatial governance and surveillance as a means of monitoring student activism. Whenever certain students would book rooms for events, these bookings would be quickly cancelled without explanation.
Encampment at Walid Daqqa Library at the University of Edinburgh Old College campus. “Walid Daqqa Library at University of Edinburgh Old College campus encampment 06” by Fjmustak is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Senior management and middle management would weaponise safety, making themselves the sole arbitrator of what constitutes harm and whose experiences of harm mattered. For example, students calling for divestment from arms companies and investment companies that profit off the genocide of Palestinians have been accused by senior management for causing harm and distress to Zionist students. In comparison, anti-Zionist students’ experiences of threats from members of public during events, and the experiences of Palestinian students in the university whose families have been murdered by Israel in Gaza since October 2023, were ignored. The harms they have experienced often subsumed under ‘politically neutral’ statements that both-sided the genocide, actively erasing the context of apartheid, military occupation, and settler-colonialism that many Palestinians experience in their homeland. Participants pointed out that the university’s cynical hierarchy of ‘harm’ has alienated them from the student body they are members of and from the wider university community.
In the wake of the ‘decolonisation’ trend in higher education, the heavy-handedness behind university’s policing and repression of student activism around Palestine reveals the hypocrisy and performative nature of the university’s attempts at decolonisation or inclusivity. As these students’ advocacy threatens the university’s accumulation of capital through their calls for divestment, boycotts and sanctions on Israeli companies and academia, senior management chooses to suspend institutional duties of care toward students.
How do we even begin to talk about a different university, where an ethics of care is centred, within institutions that are actively anti-democratic, where the concerns of students are ignored at best, or punitively silenced at worst? Where do we as academics start to challenge the university while our students are being threatened with a myriad of violence from our employers? With higher education in the UK struggling due to corporatisation and its drive toward unfettered profit maximisation [3], the demand for answers to these questions has become increasingly urgent.
Author: Aerin Lai (she/they), University of Sheffield. 23rd July 2026
1. As part of the CCINDLE project, democracy or democratic practices can be understood as practices that are inclusive to marginalised voices, rights to protest and dissent as part of substantive accountability processes (see e.g. Lombardo and Caravantes, 2024, on democratic backsliding in various states in Europe; Perego and Verlooy, 2026, on how exclusionary movements such as transphobia threatens democracy). Outwith intellectual debates, the right to protest and freedom of expression are enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 18-20, as fundamental human rights.
2. Zionism as an ideology, views Jewish people as fundamentally exogenous to Europe and locates Europe’s long history of anti-semitism as a product of Jewish presence itself. Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, wrote in The Jewish State, the following: “The Jewish question exists wherever Jews live in perceptible numbers. Where it does not exist, it is carried by Jews in the course of their migrations. We naturally move to those places where we are not persecuted, and there our presence produces persecution. This is the case in every country”. Like Herzl, other founding fathers of Zionism, such as Arthur Ruppin, in espousing for the need of a Jewish state, revealed their exclusionary definitions of Jewishness, which positioned European Jews as top of the racial hierarchy, while non-European Jews were considered not Jewish enough for the Zionist state (see Hazkani 2021). Ella Shohat has also written on the Jewish victims of Zionism in 1988, titled “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims”.
It is important to note, first, that the term anti-semitism was coined by Wilhelm Marr, the founder of the League of Anti-semites in Germany in 1879, emerged from his understanding of Semitism or ‘Jewishness’ as follows: “We have among us a flexible, tenacious, intelligent, foreign tribe that knows how to bring abstract reality into play in many different ways. Not individual Jews, but the Jewish spirit and Jewish consciousness have overpowered the world.’” (quoted in Klug 2003: 124). The second important point to highlight, is that the UN General Assembly had voted, in 1975, to define Zionism as a form of racism and racial discrimination (UNGA Resolution 3379).
On the other hand, anti-Zionism as a movement has its roots in the radical Jewish tradition in West and East Europe, as encapsulated by the principle Doikayt (Yiddish for ‘hereness’). Doikayt centered around Jewish communities’ rights to organise in their localities and to resist their oppression wherever they live, which challenges the cornerstone ideology of Zionism (see Gluckstein and Stone 2023; Crabapple 2026). The conflation of Zionism with Jewishness is extremely problematic, notwithstanding its erasure of the heterogeneity of Jewish history and culture, it also sees ‘victimhood’ as an inherent quality of Jewishness (see Gordon 2024; Klug 2003; Gould 2020; and Gluckstein and Stone 2023). Most significantly, the Zionist political project, together with the Balfour Declaration which kicked off formal moves towards the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Palestine, has had far-reaching consequences. Edward Said’s (1979) “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims” delineates these consequences in great detail. Further, Rashid Khalidi’s lecture “The Balfour Declaration from the Perspective of the Palestinian People” given at the UN in 2017, at the 100th year anniversary of the Balfour Declaration delves into the historical context from which the Declaration emerged, and its devastating human cost.
3. See UCU Edinburgh, 2025. “Dire Financial Straits at UoE? NO!” (https://www.ucuedinburgh.org.uk/blog/2eppzf7pgrh9w5j7ffxgnpbhgsa4s4) and UCU Sheffield, 2025. “Do the University’s financial reports support the need to make job cuts?” (https://ucu.group.shef.ac.uk/campaigns/state-of-the-university-2024-25/financial-position-cuts/)