We, the undersigned, stand in solidarity with the student occupation of the CCA building and their demands for an end to university complicity in genocide. We support that call and their protest.
The student group Goldsmiths for Palestine has led a campaign on campus demanding an end to university complicity and silence on Israeli apartheid and genocide. Through two student occupations of campus buildings (Professor Stuart Hall building [20 February-27 March 2024] & the Library [1-3 May 2024]), the group managed in early May to win concessions from the senior management team around a set of demands.
In the month since those commitments were published, communications and negotiations with senior management have deteriorated. Warden Frances Corner and Chief Financial Officer/Acting Chief Operating Officer Imran Chughtai have also been absent from the last two meetings. While they remain committed to some demands (eg. implementation of new scholarships for Palestinians in the coming academic year), we have little faith that they will follow through with addressing financial institutional complicity (click here to read about Goldsmiths’ financial complicity). Further, they were unable to meet the most simple of demands: to release a collaborative statement condemning Israel’s actions and calling for an immediate and permanent ceasefire. Senior management's most recent proposed draft used such offensive language that both Goldsmiths for Palestine and the Students Union found it unworkable.
In light of this, and horrific intensifications of Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing, including the Rafah tent massacre this week, the students are re-escalating and entering an occupation/encampment in the CCA. The CCA is significant due to its connection with the Gertler family who are directly complicit in enabling genocide (click here to read more about the Gertlers’ complicity). We escalate once more to ensure that the demands are fully met, but also to re-centre the urgency of ending the killings, destruction and horrors which Israel continues to inflict. We also rejoin the global wave of student encampments calling for an end to university complicity and standing in full solidarity with Palestinian resistance and the Palestinian struggle for liberation.
Goldsmiths students, staff, friends, and alumni: join us. This must be a call from us all. We reject an institution that co-opts the student movement for Palestine whilst continuing to fund genocide. We reject a duplicitous and cowardly Warden and senior management that hides from accountability- the same management currently pushing through an unprecedented 130+ full-time equivalent redundancies.
We demand Warden Frances Corner and the senior management team attend an open meeting with students and staff in the occupied CCA building to address their inaction.
