MEDIA ALERT                                                                     

9 May 2024        

AFOPA CONDEMNS VICE CHANCELLORS SEEKING TO BAN STUDENT ENCAMPMENTS

Australian Friends of Palestine Stands with Adelaide University Students

The Australian Friends of Palestine Association (AFOPA) condemns the Group of Eight Australian universities (G8) who are seeking to ban protestors from university grounds by also seeking to criminalise the use of the phrases ‘intifada’ and ‘From the River to the Sea’.

While Adelaide University Vice Chancellor Peter Hoj and his G8 colleagues are concerned about words, these principled students are concerned that their university may be complicit in a genocide that the International Court of Justice has found to be plausible.

Australian universities, including Adelaide University, have military and defence ties that contribute to Israel’s war machine. This war machine has obliterated the lives of over 35,000 people including 15,000 children, while Israel deliberately starves 2 million people.

The students are asking Adelaide University to disclose funding and research ties with Israeli weapons companies and to divest from all weapons manufacturers that feed Israel’s wars.

The term ‘intifada’ in Arabic means ‘shaking off’ and has been used by Palestinians to refer to resistance against their oppression by their occupier - Israel. Palestinians have been brutally oppressed in their homeland since 1948 and held under cruel military occupation since 1967. Israel has perpetrated an inhumane siege on Gaza for 17 years. Under international law, the occupied have the right to resist their oppressors.

The phrase ‘from the river to the sea’ has been weaponised by Zionists to mean the destruction of Israel. This cannot be further from the truth. The phrase is a vision for peace where all people, regardless of race, colour or religion, have equal rights, equal freedoms and equal obligations. It encompasses the principles of democracy, equality and unity from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, historical Palestine. And what more can we ask of our young people than to call for and strive for these values?

The alternative is the current reality - an apartheid state that privileges Jewish people against non-Jews in every aspect of life: political, legal, economic and social, harshly controlling every aspect of their lives.

AFOPA calls on universities to stop pretending that this is about the safety of Jewish students, but rather about the protection of their profitable ties with Israel.

AFOPA also calls on universities to demonstrate solidarity with their students who are pleading for justice for Palestinians amongst the ongoing atrocities in Gaza and the horror of the occupation.

 ENDS