Oxford and Cambridge students have begun occupying lawns with pro-Palestinian camps in an echo of protests that have swept the US.
Tents sprang up outside the University of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum on Monday morning, which the organisers claimed was “a disturbing hoard of artefacts stolen from colonised peoples across the world”.
On the lawn of King’s College at the University of Cambridge, students said they had set up an encampment because the University “supports Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza”.
Organisers Cambridge for Palestine posted a video on X, formerly known as Twitter, of their members marching onto the famous lawn with tents, supplies and sleeping bags, saying they “refuse to sit idly by” while the university “supports Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza”.
At Oxford, camp leaders have pinned up a board with a list of six demands to university chiefs, including to “boycott Israeli genocide, apartheid and occupation”, to “disclose all finances”, “stop banking with Barclays”, help rebuild Gaza’s education system and “divest from Israeli genocide, apartheid and occupation”.
They added in a statement: “There is no university in the history of human civilisation that is more complicit in violence, dispossession, and the building of destructive colonial empires than the University of Oxford.”
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Emily Foster is a globe-trotting journalist based in the UK. Her articles offer readers a global perspective on international events, exploring complex geopolitical issues and providing a nuanced view of the world’s most pressing challenges.
