Five questions about the encampment
Masks & demands, but no pictures
Door Giulia Fabrizi
By Giulia Fabrizi
Are all protesters present on the square students?
No, not all of the protesters are students. But the majority of the people participating in the demonstration over the past two days are. They’re not just students, but also UG employees, ranging from PhDs to full professors.
Many of the protesters have covered their faces. Why won’t they show themselves?
According to the encampment spokesperson, the protesters are afraid for their personal safety. They worry about the consequences of the protest, even if they remain peaceful. ‘There are several students among the protesters who are here on a visa. If the university were to suspend them because of their actions here, they’d lose their visa and their chance to study.’
People who don’t support our cause take pictures of individual protesters
They’re also protecting themselves from people entering their camp with the intention of doxxing individual protesters, the spokesperson says. ‘That involves people who don’t support our cause taking recognisable pictures of individual protesters. They’ll then post those photos on Twitter to threaten us, which attracts other threatening comments.’
According to the organisation, some people do this under the pretext of ‘journalism’. ‘They pretend to be journalists when they take these pictures and present them in such a one-sided way that it puts us in danger.’
That’s also why the protesters are wary of journalists who want to take photos or video. ‘We can’t always tell who’s a real journalist and who isn’t. That’s why we always ask people for their press pass.’
The protesters say they’ll be staying on the square until the university meets their demands to sever all ties with Israel. What is the likelihood of this happening?
The chances seem very slim. While the university published a release on its ties to Israel last Friday, the protesters say it is incomplete. ‘We investigated for ourselves the ties they have a few months ago, and the university has not announced all of them’, the spokesperson says.
Besides, the protesters want the university to sever all ties. UG president Jouke de Vries doesn’t agree. ‘There are individual researchers at Israeli universities who don’t support prime minister Netanyahu and who have a different stance on the issue.’ Those are relationships we should in fact be fostering, he says.
The board of directors has repeatedly attempted to talk to the protesters, but they’ve consistently refused. Why don’t they want to talk?
The university keeps making empty promises
The organisation posted an answer to this question on their Instagram page on Monday. According to the protesters, they’ve sat down with the university several times and received nothing but empty promises. Behind closed doors, the board says it’s sympathetic to the Palestinian and wants to offer support, but the reality doesn’t reflect that, the protesters say.
They cite the UG’s promise to organise the annual ‘Israeli Apartheid Week’, which has been common for years. But this year, it was cancelled.
However, the UG claims there is definitely room for a discussion on Palestine and the war in Gaza. But people have to comply with ‘academic rules’.
The UG says that as long as an event has an independent moderator and academic experts and the topic is debated from more than one side, it can be held at the university. That separates academia from politics and facilitates an academic discussion.
But the protesters and critical university employees have a different view. Some of them have been trying to organise events for months, ranging from lectures by guest speakers and UG academics to film screenings. They say that these events were all cancelled at the last minutes. Sometimes it was because they’d supposedly been too late booking a room, other times because the event didn’t meet ‘academic standards’.
Interestingly enough, none of these rules seemed to apply when people were organising events about the war in Ukraine, the protesters say. According to them, the university wasn’t nearly as strict then. They feel it’s such a strong contrast that the university cannot claim it’s not making political choices; they say it’s arbitrary.