THE explosive eruption of students in America against the genocidal war being waged by Israel in Gaza, with the full support of the capitalist ruling classes for the Zionist regime’s drive to eradicate Palestinians through murder and starvation, has rapidly spread across the Atlantic to the UK and Europe.
In London, students at Goldsmiths college entered the library building and occupied the first two floors on Wednesday night, unveiling a Palestinian flag.
The students, organised in Goldsmiths for Palestine, issued a statement, saying: ‘Goldsmiths must rid itself of its complicity in genocide.’ Goldsmiths has joined the growing number of occupations that have spread in universities and colleges across the UK.
Students in Leeds, Newcastle and Bristol set up tents outside university buildings on Wednesday while students at Warwick University in Coventry have set up camps in the town’s piazza for the past week.
The organisers of the Warwick occupation said that the university had ‘ignored’ all previous demonstrations, saying: ‘After countless demonstrations, sit-ins, open letters and even a motion through our students’ union, the university hasn’t even engaged with us, let alone met out demands.’
The demands being made by the students on their universities is that they divest from Israel and from companies involved in the arms trade to Israel.
Divestment means selling off stock in Israeli companies and breaking all financial ties with Israel.
The students and staff occupying at the Warwick encampment expressed the feeling running through the uprising in universities, spreading from the US across the globe, when they wrote in a social media post: ‘Rise up in unison with fellow students all over the world, from Columbia, NYC, to Paris, to Sydney. We say no business as usual as long as Warwick sponsors colonial genocide.’
In France, students occupied the central campus of the prestigious Paris Institute of Political Studies while in Australia students at Melbourne University started an encampment on the campus.
In Rome, violent clashes broke out at La Sapienza University, as riot police moved in to break up pro-Palestinian demonstrators.
Meanwhile, in the US hundreds of police in riot gear launched a pre-dawn attack yesterday on the protest camp at the University of California in Los Angeles.
This was the camp that was savagely attacked the evening before by masked pro-Zionists while the university security and police stood by, refusing to intervene.
Far from being intimidated, hundreds more students turned up to join the camp, that is now being attacked by the same police who watched them being brutalised by the pro-Zionist gang.
This uprising of student youth in the US and across the world against genocide, and all the institutions and governments of capitalism that not only condone but actively support an Israeli regime that has killed nearly 35,000 Palestinian men and predominantly women and children in Gaza, is terrifying the ruling class.
Students and young people are the most revolutionary section of the working class.
Youth see a bankrupt capitalist system that in its death agony is prepared to launch wars to satisfy the hunger of the bosses and bankers for profit through the domination and subjugation of the world.
Nowhere has the barbarism of capitalism in its final stage of imperialism been more apparent than in the slaughter being carried out in Gaza, condoned and financed by the US and its imperialist allies in the UK.
Youth are demanding a future free from imperialist war and genocide, and are prepared to fight the forces of the capitalist state for this future.
The crucial issue is that the working class, which has demonstrated time and again its overwhelming support for Palestine, will not stand by and watch as its youth are brutalised by the capitalist state forces. It will not allow them to fight on alone.
In Britain, the powerful working class must take a grip of the TUC and force them to take action to support the students by immediately organising a general strike to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers’ government and socialism.
This demand must be taken up by workers throughout the US and Europe, to take action to bring down their own governments and go forward to workers’ governments and socialism. This is the way forward to the victory of the world socialist revolution!
