Pro-Palestine student protesters at the University of Melbourne have tonight (Wednesday) claimed a partial victory in their months-long campaign demanding that the university disclose and divest links to weapons manufacturers involved in the Israel-Hamas war.
After a week of tense negotiations, threats and a stalemate around the student occupation of the Arts West building, “Unimelb for Palestine” organisers told a crowd of about 40 assembled activists that the university had undertaken to disclose relationships and review its ethical research policies. Protesters gathered at the South Lawn “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” – now in its 28th day – voted to pack up and leave if the deal was confirmed.
At 8.30pm Wednesday, responding to questions from The Citizen about the claims, a university media spokesperson would neither confirm or deny them, releasing a one-line statement: “We welcome the willingness of the occupiers to leave the Arts West building and remove the encampment from our Parkville campus.”
Addressing activists at 5pm, protest organiser Hiba, who did not want to give her last name, announced: “The university will be sending an email out tomorrow (Thursday), to all students and staff, making a public commitment that the university will disclose all of its relationships, not only with defence … but when it comes to all research”.
Hiba said that the university was “not budging on divestment, at all”. But the deal would mean that researchers’ profiles on their “find an expert” public pages would include details of collaborator companies, including financial contributions.
She said the talks had not secured an undertaking by the university not to take disciplinary action against students, but they had managed to negotiate that action down from “immediate orders” issued by the vice chancellor, which can impose serious and wide-ranging restrictions on a student, to lower order “general misconduct” via a “student disciplinary committee”.
The university has numerous publicly recognised ties with weapons manufacturers, including a $3.5 million “collaboration” with Lockheed Martin, an “industrial project” with BAE Systems and a partnership with Boeing.
“Unimelb for Palestine” organisers– a “non-affiliated, grassroots” group of students, alumni and staff – claim that the Arts West sit-in was a spontaneous action not organised by them, and that protesters still inside the building are an “unaffiliated autonomous group”. Nonetheless, Hiba said that they would also pack up if the deal was confirmed.
Both groups are demanding that the university divests and discloses ties with weapons manufacturers and, in their words, condems “the genocide in Gaza”. Israel has repeatedly denied claims of genocide.
Protesters also claimed that the university would review its ethics and due diligence policy, as well as host an open lecture series starting next semester to hear from both sides on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Dana Al-shaer, a leading organiser with Unimelb for Palestine, told The Citizen that it was “one of the wins, and one of the demands for protesters but it is not the end of the journey.
“It definitely shows the power of students and staff and the broader community to make the university shift its language and policies, as they moved from transparency to full disclosure in the matter of a week,” Al-shaer said.
“This does not mean that we will stop, there is a long way to go … divestment remains as the one priority that we are going to work towards, so we are not going to stop protesting, we’re just going to conclude the encampment”.
The fallout for activists is now front of mind for many. “It is a gross injustice if the university were to punish students who are carrying out the values of political expression and academic freedom that the university extols”, said Al-shaer.