Calling all Cambridge staff and students - an update from Cambridge for Palestine
Join the day of action on 28 November - Rally at Great St Mary's 12 noon
We have received the following update from Cambridge for Palestine which we are sharing with signatories to the Cambridge Faculty letter in solidarity with the encampment and other supporters here:
Update from Cambridge for Palestine: November 2024
The community that formed around the Cambridge encampment for Palestine has now developed into Cambridge for Palestine, a broad coalition of individuals and groups, students and non-students. We continue to work, via a variety of tactics, to ensure that the University discloses, divests, reinvests, and protects; right now, students are occupying Greenwich House, the financial centre of the University. Now more than ever is the time to support us.
Much has developed in the last few months. After an incredible 100 days of camping on King's Parade, we closed the encampment on 14th August. During that time, the encampment had been lived in and passed through by hundreds if not thousands of undergraduates, postgraduates, faculty, staff, and members of the town. We learnt together, ate together, shouted together, sang together, and wept together. It was a testament to the strength of the community that had formed around the encampment that we were able to gather so many to join us for our final days, commemorated under the theme of Ana Raje': we will return.
The decision to decamp was not taken lightly. It followed over two months of negotiations between camp representatives and senior management, which led to the University releasing a statement of commitments on 17th July, available to read here. As noted in our response, these commitments were long-overdue and remained insufficient, choosing long bureaucratic review processes over a prompt disclosure and divestment effort. We were appalled at the University's refusal to use the word 'genocide' anywhere in the statement, or to reference war crimes, crimes against humanity, and violations of international humanitarian and human rights law. However, the University's engagement with us in making these commitments set a necessary and valuable precedent during a scholasticide. In particular, we won the creation of a university working group on Palestine, which is to include an unprecedented student-led task force, nominated by the encampment. It was in order to engage constructively with the University in these processes - which were made contingent on our decamping - that we closed the encampment.
However, with Michaelmas term nearly at an end, the working group is yet to meet, and the University has manipulated the terms of negotiations regarding the membership of the working group and the content and scope of its discussions. The University's update, released on November 13th, erased any mention of Palestine in divestment conversations, stalled serious commitments even as the genocide continues to escalate, and weaponised bureaucracy to reduce student power.
We therefore remain acutely aware that working within the University's slow-moving bureaucratic systems is not enough to ensure that its complicity is ended in the timeframe necessitated by the reality of genocide. We are not fooled: the University's claims to championing 'constructive dialogue' are a facade that obscure its pattern of repeatedly and continually defending its complicity by sidelining students and refusing to engage in good faith.
In protest at the University's continued complicity, student members of Cambridge for Palestine escalated pressure by occupying Greenwich House on Friday 22nd November. We affirm the students' demands:
1) Publicly recognise and condemn the genocide in Palestine, in line with international law.
2) Give us fair representation: meet with all 12 elected members of the taskforce, and accept a chair that we select
3) Immediately carry out an aggregate analysis of the University's investments in arms and genocide profiteering.
Failure to comply with these demands will only result in further escalation. We refuse to stand by silently while Cambridge University remains a knowing partner in genocide, occupation, and ethnic cleansing.
We need your help.
We call on University staff to show their support for our demands by joining the UCU workplace day of action this Thursday 28th November: rally at Great St Mary's at 12pm, followed by a staff-student assembly in Little Hall on the Sidgwick site, 1-2pm.
We call on any and all of our supporters to join our email campaign, now. Follow the instructions here to send a message in support of the Greenwich House occupation demands to key University decision-makers. This will add crucial pressure to the protest: we urge you to act immediately.
If you are able to materially support us, we welcome donations to sustain our activism, particularly in support of the ongoing occuption. We are also currently exploring means of establishing a permanent space for Palestine in Cambridge, which will require major fundraising; if you might be able to contribute significantly and want to find out more, we would love to hear from you at cambridge4palestine@proton.me.
Finally, we encourage all those reading this to take to the streets with us and shout for Palestinian liberation, to join us in grief and mourning at our vigils and acts of remembrance, to celebrate Palestinian culture and to share in the joy of our community of solidarity.
Until Palestine is free.
Cambridge for Palestine - 26 November 2024
