
As an organisation committed to furthering systemic change, we condemn the University of Sheffield’s calls for the Palestine student encampment housed on the concourse outside the Students’ Union to disband. We call on the university to drop any threats of disciplinary and legal action. We assert our full support for the Sheffield Campus Coalition for Palestine (SCCP).
At Opus we host many projects that aim to have tough conversations in Sheffield. The likes of Now Then magazine, Festival of Debate, Give Over, and the River Dôn Project are just a few of the projects we run that are committed to anti-racist, anti-colonial, and large-scale change. As a group of people that live and work in Sheffield, we cannot stand by and do nothing while students expressing their heartfelt solidarity for the genocide in Palestine are pressured to dismantle their camp.
Many of our team studied at the University of Sheffield, and we regularly hold events involving university staff and students. We urge everyone in Sheffield to throw their support behind the SCCP - the University of Sheffield belongs not only to students and staff, but to all communities of Sheffield. The horrors that are unfolding in Palestine are what a UN rights expert has called a genocide, and Israel’s continued actions are those of a settler colonial state.
None of the horrors in Palestine are unconnected to concerns in Sheffield – we believe a global understanding of the genocide is central to understanding why SCCP must be supported. The bombs Israel has dropped in just the last few months have produced more planet-warming gases than 20 nations do in a year. Weapons manufactured with UK research and funding have killed Palestinians – including research from the University of Sheffield.
Even if these facts on the ground do not strike a chord, the basic reality is that men, women, and children in Palestine are being blown up. We have all seen brains blown out of children’s heads, bodies scattered across debris, mass graves uncovered. We cannot countenance attempts to restrict opposition to the mass death of Palestinians. We urge the University of Sheffield to let their own students and staff express their objections to the massacres in Palestine. We urge the university to see the bravery, moral steadfastness, and diligence of the members of the encampment. We urge the university to divest from weapons manufacturers, from apartheid, and from genocide.
Free Palestine.