Media release – Tasmanian Students for Palestine, 7 June 2024

UTAS REFUSES TO DIVEST FROM WAR MACHINE AND CALL FOR A CEASEFIRE IN GAZA

Even as the massacre in Rafah continues, the University of Tasmania refuses to meet students’ demands that it sever ties with Israeli institutions and weapons companies or join the global academic boycott against Israeli universities.

Students have maintained an encampment at UTAS’s Sandy Bay Campus since May 7, calling for the university to cut all links with Israel and weapons research. Their demands have not changed.

In meetings with students, administrators have stated they have no intention of ending relationships with Israel-linked institutions. They are completely unwilling to take a public position on the atrocities unfolding in Palestine, let alone do anything to materially impact Israel or its collaborators.

On Monday, university administrators presented students with a counteroffer which addressed only one of the encampment’s five demands (disclosure of connections with Israeli institutions), among other bureaucratic concessions. None of these would require UTAS make any material changes to their ongoing partnerships that are legitimising and enabling a genocide.

“UTAS is more concerned about funding than whether they’re propping up a genocide,” said Fergus, a student. “They love to spruik their clean, sustainable image. How sustainable is ethnic cleansing? How environmentally-friendly is firebombing refugee camps? The hypocrisy is staggering.”

Students have condemned UTAS’s partnership with German military multinational Hensoldt. The corporation, self-styled as an expert in electronic warfare and surveillance, collaborates with Israeli weaponry developers Rafael and Israel Aerospace Industries to supply Israel’s military with radar and surveillance systems.

UTAS has provided Hensoldt with an office in Hobart’s centre as part of their 2021 Southern Guardian Partnership for satellite monitoring research. The students at the encampment demand that UTAS end their involvement with this complicit company and all others that work with the genocidal Israeli regime.

Within the last five years, UTAS has also entered into partnerships with Thales, accused of facilitating war crimes in Yemen, and Lockheed Martin, one of the world’s largest arms contractors; it also maintains links with construction manufacturer Caterpillar. Each of these companies are currently equipping the Israeli Occupation Forces with the tools they need to murder and dispossess Palestinians.

The student encampment movement both in Australia and around the globe has galvanised thousands of students into political action, but the situation in Palestine has never been more dire. The Israeli offensive in Rafah has displaced over a million people in a matter of days, and the death toll in Palestine is over 36,000. Every university in Gaza has been bombed by the Israeli military. It beggars belief that administrators in Australia could ignore the targeted destruction of the Palestinian people and their places of education.

Prominent Tasmanian institutions have voiced support for the encampment – notably, the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre, some of whose members held an event at the encampment on Tuesday night to express solidarity with Palestinians. In addition, the Tasmanian branch of the National Tertiary Education Union has unanimously backed students’ demands for divestment from Israel. The camp has also received extensive support from the Tasmanian University Students’ Association and has been visited by members of the Tasmanian Greens.

“All of our demands are simple and achievable,” said Fergus. “All of them have been put into action by universities around the world. If UTAS claims these demands can’t be put into practise, they’re trying to talk their way out of the problem. But we aren’t going away and we won’t let them try to wait us out.”

The students will not let UTAS avoid accountability. The encampment will remain until the university meets demands that will materially affect the lives of Palestinians: namely, divestment from Israel and the global war machine.

The students of the encampment demands that UTAS:

  • Demand an immediate ceasefire in Palestine

  • Divest from all Israeli companies and institutions

  • Demilitarise, permanently ending all funding arrangements and research with arms companies and militaries

  • Disclose all military/weaponry funding and partnerships on an ongoing basis

  • Join the glocal academic boycott of Israeli institutions

We will not stop. We will not rest.