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Understanding �the genocide

Educational resources produced by UCU (UoN branch) and Nottingham Camp for the Liberation of Palestine

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Ongoing genocide

  • Since October 2023, Israeli forces have carried out mass killings, decimation of basic infrastructure, and forcible displacement on a huge scale, with ethnic cleansing added to the list of official war objectives (B’Tselem, 2025).
  • As of July 2025, the current onslaught has resulted in:
    • 70,300 Palestinian people killed; 30% of casualties are children;
    • 99% of the population forcibly displaced at least once;
    • 4,700 Palestinians detained/forcibly disappeared, with treatment in Israeli detention including rape, electric shocks, urinating on detainees, and wilful killing under torture;
    • 100% of hospitals and 90% of schools and universities in Gaza destroyed or damaged (Euromed, 2025).
  • Mass starvation and ‘man-made famine’ – including blocking international aid and shooting civilians seeking food – are among methods used by Israel, according to Human Rights Watch and World Health Organisation.
  • September 2025: UN Commission finds Israel has committed genocide in Gaza.
  • UN Special Rapporteur: ‘After denying Palestinian self-determination for decades, Israel is now imperilling the very existence of the Palestinian people in Palestine’ (OHCHR, 2025b, p. 2).

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Educational resources produced by UCU (UoN branch) and Nottingham Camp for the Liberation of Palestine

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This did not begin in 2023

  • Creation of State of Israel in 1948 involved the Nakba (‘catastophe’ in Arabic) – i.e., the forced displacement of 800,000 Palestinians from their homes and creation of massive refugee population (today numbering more than 8 million)(Pappe 2006)
  • Since 1967, Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have been subjected to brutal military occupation. This has included land and property seizures, home demolitions and forced evictions, and a lethal architecture of control and repression. Through this occupation Israel maintains economic domination of Palestine, characterised by deliberate impoverishment and the exploitation of Palestinians’ labour. (Amnesty 2022)
  • Palestinian citizens of Israel make up 20% of Israel’s population and face more than 65 laws which discriminate against them due to their Palestinian descent
  • While Israeli forces ‘withdrew’ from Gaza in the mid-2000s they instituted seige conditions – systematically limiting food, materials, and travel, while subjecting the population to routine aerial bombardment.
    • Gaza becomes world’s biggest ‘open air prison’ (Human Rights Watch 2022)
  • Palestinians have resisted this occupation and ethnic cleansing. This struggle has included nonviolent civil resistance (e.g. the First Intifada) and armed struggle; in all cases, it has been met with extreme violence by Israeli forces. (Abunimah 2014)
  • The UK government continues to enable, normalise and profit from Israeli apartheid and genocide through their extensive arms & trade deals and diplomatic ties; UK universities invest nearly £500m in and hold ties with complicit companies and institutions, e.g. construction companies involved in home demolitions.

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What is Zionism?

  • Zionism is not the same as Judaism or Jewishness; many Jewish people are anti-Zionist and the majority of Zionists worldwide are not Jewish.
  • Zionism is a project/ideology which advocates for Israel’s maintenance as an ethno-state (a state with racial criteria for citizenship) in the region of historic Palestine; it is often described as a form of settler-colonialism (Lentin, 2020).
  • Settler-colonialism: a type of colonialism in which the indigenous peoples of a colonised region are displaced by settlers/colonisers who (attempt to) permanently form a society there that excludes or subordinates its former inhabitants.
  • While there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ model, settler-colonial regimes are strongly associated with apartheid and genocide:
    • Apartheid: a system of racist segregation that keeps an indigenous population in a subordinate position compared with a settler population (as in Apartheid South Africa or French colonial Algeria).
    • Genocide: policies that attempt to eliminate a social group or society and their way of life, through means including direct killing, deprivation of resources, forced sterilisation, forced migration, and/or forced assimilation (as perpetrated against Native, Indigenous, and First Nations peoples in the Americas).
  • ‘The 76 year long occupation of Palestine by Israel is a direct product of western colonialism... finding its roots in the British Mandate over Palestine [1920-48].’ (NCLP, 2024)

Educational resources produced by UCU (UoN branch) and Nottingham Camp for the Liberation of Palestine

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Discuss

  1. Pick something you’ve just heard about Palestine that you found surprising or shocking in some way. Why did you have this reaction? If you weren’t surprised or shocked by anything, reflect on why that might be. 
  2. Think about your academic subject (e.g. medicine, engineering, politics, literature). What do you know about the situation of students, academics, and practitioners in your field in Palestine (and/or in other sites of colonial violence)? How do you imagine their experiences compare with your own, and those you expect to have?
  3. ‘Only a decade after Irgun’s [an armed Zionist militia group’s] first attack on Palestinians, the 1948 Nakba took place, killing 15,000 Palestinians and displacing two thirds of the Palestinian population... This process has been described by Israeli historian Ilan Pappé as an “incremental genocide”, in which the crime is committed in “waves”. Facing little to no international backlash to these ‘waves’ has enabled both the expansion and refinement of Israel’s crimes against Palestine...’ (NCLP 2024, p. 22). What does this history mean to you?
  4. ‘Prior to October 7th, 2023 had already been deemed the deadliest year on record for Palestinians since 1948.’ (NCLP 2024, p. 21) Why do you think it matters when we start telling the story of current events from? Can you think of other cases where this makes a difference?

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Educational resources produced by UCU (UoN branch) and Nottingham Camp for the Liberation of Palestine

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Educational resources produced by UCU (UoN branch) and Nottingham Camp for the Liberation of Palestine

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Militarisation of Higher Education

Educational resources produced by UCU (UoN branch) and Nottingham Camp for the Liberation of Palestine

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What is militarisation?

  • ‘Militarisation‘ describes a process of increasing entanglement between institutions (such as universities), and militaries / the arms industry.
  • The global arms industry ($100bn estimated annual value) is responsible for the manufacture and sale/transfer of weaponry and other military, ‘security’, and policing equipment.
  • British universities play important role in this industry; conversely, military connections shape our universities’ research, teaching, and graduate career options.
    • e.g. Oxford University – report in 2019 revealed that nearly 40% of £420m in science council grants paired with military-related bodies (Rossdale, 2023).
  • To ‘demilitarise’ means to resist, undo, and transform these processes, to reimagine education beyond militarised imperatives.

Educational resources produced by UCU (UoN branch) and Nottingham Camp for the Liberation of Palestine

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Case study: Nottingham

  • 2021 – UoN announces strategic partnership with BAE systems, whose portfolio includes tanks, nuclear missile sumarines, surveillance systems – and notoriously helps make the F35 jet, integral to Israel’s occupation and bombardment of Palestine.
  • BAE had previously been referred to the ICC [International Criminal Court] for its central role in the Saudi bombardment of Yemen (2015-22), which killed tens of thousands (Rossdale, 2023).
  • 2024 – staff-student research report finds that:
    • ‘£16,974,399.98 of the University’s equities in FY [Financial Year] 23/24 were held in 53 holdings in 28 companies that are either conducting or enabling crimes against the Palestinian people (including through supporting illegal Israeli settlements; and/or supporting the Israeli military; and/or sustaining apartheid); and/or financing crimes against the Palestinian people and/or financing the arms trade.’ (NCLP, p. 42)
  • Student-led campaigns have exposed and challenged these complicities.

Educational resources produced by UCU (UoN branch) and Nottingham Camp for the Liberation of Palestine

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Militarisation in context

  • While ‘militarisation’ might imply a historical shift from a non-militarised past to a militarised present/future, this is misleading.
  • Longer histories of ‘Military-Industrial-Academic Complex’ (CAAT 2024, p. 2):
    • British universities have always been close to military power and complicit in imperialism, e.g. Researchers from Imperial College developed chemical weapons during WW1; many universities built from profits of colonialism and slavery.
  • Current context: neoliberal marketisation and austerity; need to attract funding from both government and private industry shapes the priorities of departments and institutions
    • In STEM subjects, student projects and placements routinely involve working with arms companies and other ‘industry partners’ directly implicated in human rights abuses.
    • Social studies and humanities departments more likely to have teaching relationships with armed forces, e.g. Plymouth, Portsmouth and KCL contribute to military training programmes (Rossdale 2023).
  • ‘Greenwashing’: universities may emphasise civiian applications and green credentials of ‘dual-use’ technologies (i.e. those with both military and non-military uses) and ‘militarised environmental technologies’ (METs) to protect public image (CAAT 2024, p. 6).

Educational resources produced by UCU (UoN branch) and Nottingham Camp for the Liberation of Palestine

‘Never again!’

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Discuss

  1. What does complicity mean to you?
  2. ‘Of the largest 50 arms manufacturers in the world, UoN partners with at least 13.’ (p. 55) How does learning about these kinds of entanglements make you feel as a University of Nottingham student? Do you think the university is transparent enough about its partnerships and investments?
  3. Can you think of other ways educational institutions are militarised?
  4. ‘The double standard between the approaches that the University of Nottingham has taken with regards to Ukraine and Palestine is evident both in the support they provide for students [e.g. scholarships] and their investments in companies, institutions and organisations that continue to support the apartheid regime of Israel and enable the genocide that is being committed by the settler-colonial state of Israel.’ (p. 38) What do you think of these double standards?
  5. What ways of challenging and resisting militarisation can you think of?

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Educational resources produced by UCU (UoN branch) and Nottingham Camp for the Liberation of Palestine

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Activity

  • In small groups, compare and contrast the following statements:
    • ‘Formalising our strategic partnership [with BAE] will allow us to translate the latest research results into industrial applications, develop new technologies and deliver major societal, environmental and economic impact’ (Director of the Institute for Advanced Manufacturing at Nottingham, 2021)
    • ‘By partnering with defence contractors like BAE Systems and Boeing, the University can sell small components developed in collaboration, often intended for military applications, without retaining oversight of their end use.’ (NCLP 2024, p. 50)
  • How can the concepts of militarisation, demilitarisation and greenwashing help us to understand and evaluate these statements?
  • Make a poster to display your group’s ideas.

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Student protest and repression

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Students protest

  • Students (and young people generally) are both celebrated and feared as potentially rebellious subjects; student movements have been powerful sites of social challenge, visioning, and transformation.
  • Students have long used creative and disruptive tactics – including occupations, boycotts, demonstrations, banners, ‘die-ins,’ and direct action – to challenges injustices they see around them.
  • In the UK in recent decades, students have protested:
    • tuition fees; Iraq war; treatment of students as renters during pandemic lock-downs; cuts to mental health services; police violence and racism (#BLM); teachers’ working conditions; white- and male-dominated curricula; university ties to fossil fuels and the arms industry, and more...
  • Taking a global view, further tactics, demands, and solidarities emerge:
    • high school students in Chile collectively refused to pay for the metro to protest against neoliberal policies (Abuform et al, 2019)
    • students used a fire truck to ram the gates of the palace of dictator Marcos during 1970 uprising in the Philippines (Woodman, 2017)
    • ‘Gen Z’ protests in Nepal aim to bring down government (Kharel, 2025).

Educational resources produced by UCU (UoN branch) and Nottingham Camp for the Liberation of Palestine

Cape Town

London

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Facing repression

  • Student actions often face backlash from governments, police, university management, and other powerful groups and institutions.
  • Some notorious examples of repression include:
    • USA, 1970: students shot dead by National Guard at Jackson State and Kent State universities during civil rights and anti-Vietnam war protests (1970)
    • UK, 2010: philosophy student Alfie Meadows required emergency brain surgery after being ‘kettled’ and truncheoned by police at London anti-fees protest (El-Enany, 2014)
  • However, repression also takes less visible forms, such as: disciplinary action including (threats of) suspension; court injunctions that make students liable for 10K+ legal fees; baillifs evicting protest sites under cover of night; securitision of events, preventing student societies connected with dissent from booking rooms...
  • We can also think about structural factors that may act as barriers or deterrents to protest, e.g. high fees, debt, living costs; visa precarity for international students; police racism and transphobia making protest riskier for some...
  • Effects of repression are complex; crackdowns may stifle dissent, but can also galvanise movements, showing strength and sparking solidarity actions by other groups (as in top picture).

Educational resources produced by UCU (UoN branch) and Nottingham Camp for the Liberation of Palestine

New York, 2024

London, 2010

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Case study: Global Student Intifada

  • Spring/Summer 2024: students around the world take action against the ongoing ‘live-streamed genocide’ of Palestinians, in a movement dubbed the ‘student intifada’.
    • 'Intifada’ means (in Arabic) to throw off something that oppresses; in the Palestinian context, it refers to movements against Israeli occupation, apartheid, and genocide.
  • Through a variety of tactics – most prominently, peaceful protest encampments – students have exposed their institutions’ and governments’ complicity in these atrocities.
  • A key demand has been that universities should commit to Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS).
    • BDS is a Palestinian-led movment inspired by the international solidarity campaign that helped bring down South African apartheid.
    • It urges nonviolent international pressure on Israel through cutting ties with Israeli and other institutions/companies actively engaged in apartheid and genocide.
  • Despite heavy repression – violent evictions, attempted deportation of organisers, demonisation by authorities, and more – the movement has won victories at many universities worldwide, and students continue to push for change.

Educational resources produced by UCU (UoN branch) and Nottingham Camp for the Liberation of Palestine

Germany

USA

Scotland

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Discuss

  1. What examples of student protests (past and present) have you heard of, or taken part in? What were their demands, tactics, or slogans? What repression (if any) did they face?
  2. ‘[T]he University [of Nottingham] has repeatedly attempted to repress Pro-Palestinian voices by taking legal action against students, used threats of legal fees to silence student voices…  [and] avoid[ed] taking accountability for their complicity in Israeli occupation, apartheid and genocide.’ (NCLP, p. 72) What does this statement mean to you?
  3. What forms of dissent and repression do you see around you at UoN? If you don’t see any, reflect on why that might be. What would you like to see?
  4. ‘By trying to make things different, one can learn […] where power lies and how it is exercised’ (Railton, 2015). What do you think students can learn through protest? How does thinking about students as protesters compare with dominant views of students as consumers?

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Educational resources produced by UCU (UoN branch) and Nottingham Camp for the Liberation of Palestine

‘Disclose, Divest, Support, Invest’

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Activity

  • Design your own protest badges
  • What makes you feel angry/energised/some kind of way? What do you want to change? What better world can you imagine? Draw it in the circle.
  • Resources needed: print-outs of activity sheet; coloured pens.
  • It may be possible to get your design made into a badge if you go along to the Feminist Archive (East Midlands) on Kings Meadows Campus to arrange a go on their badge machine!
    • Contact: Mss-library@nottingham.ac.uk
  • Opening hours and directions can be found here.

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Learn more

  • Get involved
    • Nottingham Camp for the Liberation of Palestine (NCLP) @nottspalestinecamp
    • People for Palestine Notts @people-forpalestine_notts
    • Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) - Nottingham Branch https://palestinecampaign.org/
    • These groups organise regular events and demonstrations – ALL WELCOME!
  • Know your rights / protest advice
  • Learn about Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS)
    • What is BDS? – explainer from the Palestinian-led international BDS Movement
    • BDS Pledge - staff-student BDS campaign at UCL
    • Apartheid Off Campus - resources from Palestine Solidarity Campaign

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Sources (continued)

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Educational resources produced by UCU (UoN branch) and Nottingham Camp for the Liberation of Palestine