In recent weeks the emergence of Gaza Solidarity Encampments across a range of Australian universities, following encampments at universities in the United States, has prompted concerns reported in the media about Jewish student safety and claims that “students are afraid to go to class”. Everyone has a right to safety so this issue should concern us all. We must therefore take a deep look at what safety entails and how we might collectively achieve safety for all.

Firstly, we need to consider how safety and discomfort differ. This is because discomfort can be an important part of learning and building knowledge. This is recognised across a range of disciplines: from business coaches, who argue that learning is supposed to be uncomfortable as it is an emotional experience that involves reaching outside of our comfort zones to accomplish new skills, to psychologists who note that discomfort is common to learning and that “confronting information that contradicts deeply-held beliefs can also make you feel bad.” Even in medical education, the importance of discomfort and doubt for learning is acknowledged.

Education researchers have engaged with discomfort when considering the planning of lessons that encounter difficult histories, such as the Holocaust, through what is called a “pedagogy of discomfort.” In these classes, educators have to be aware of the ethical responsibilities they have as educators to face discomfort with their students when working against oppression, but also to ensure students are not left in harmful repetition. There should be attention to how the pedagogy of discomfort can lead to collective understanding and transformation of unjust social relations.

A common psychological response to discomfort is to fear it and thus avoid the possibility of it. But, as educators have demonstrated, it is possible also to sit with it, learn from it, and attend to what makes it uncomfortable. When done with care, this can allow injustices to be collectively held and reckoned with, rather than denied, dismissed, weaponised or silenced.

The student solidarity encampments produce discomfort because they are engaging with injustices of ethnic cleansing and mass violence that is happening in Gaza before our eyes and with the injustices that are produced through the longer standing occupation and apartheid for which the Israeli state is responsible. They also produce discomfort because they have pointed out how universities are connected to these injustices through their ties to weapons manufacturers and the defence industry. I feel uncomfortable with this knowledge. And outraged. And distressed. These feelings can compel us to act towards addressing those injustices, just like people have mobilised in the past against apartheid in South Africa, against war in Vietnam and Iraq and against the celebration of the invasion of Australia.

Liz Strakosch, politics lecturer and member of the Jewish Council of Australia, has argued that what the university encampments may engender in some Jewish students and staff is “political discomfort”, calling it “part of life in a democracy.”  This would be also true of acts such as the cutting down of a statue of Captain Cook, which may elicit such discomfort in some Australians. Sometimes, political discomfort can be mistaken for psychological unsafety. And this is why education is so important, as it helps us collectively explore histories of oppression, how we feel about acquiring this knowledge and how we can work together to oppose oppression and domination. This is about supporting each other, rather than staying in the discomfort alone and/or with others who are resistant to exploring difficult histories and how their legacies live on in the present, affecting us all.

Education can also help us to understand the power dynamics at play in a socio-political and/or historical situation and better assess where safety is being violated and where discomfort might be arising. This kind of education has been occurring at the encampments – I have witnessed it – and Jewish students and staff have been participating in it along with fellow students and staff from many walks of life, cultural backgrounds and faiths. This is the making of solidarity: a shared commitment to understanding the systemic forces of domination and oppression and the collective action to address these injustices.

It’s also important to consider deeply what makes people unsafe. Breaches in safety result from violations of power and systems of domination, as a product of racism, sexism and misogyny, homophobia or ableism. And these forms of discrimination that push power in certain directions come from systems that dominate and oppress, such as white supremacy, colonialism, capitalism and patriarchy. The Holocaust was a white supremacist project that produced antisemitism, ableism, homophobia and racism and therefore targeted Jews, disabled people, queer people (particularly gay men) and Roma and Sinti people. The Zionist project is also white supremacist and colonialist, influenced by British imperialism. Arabs in the Zionist Israeli state, including Arab Jews (Mizrahim Jews), face structural discrimination, while Israeli Jews of European origin (Ashkenazi Jews) are privileged and supported to continue the dispossession of Palestinians. This creates a racial hierarchy in which whiteness is privileged politically, culturally and institutionally. This is the same system that produced antisemitism in Europe.

Colonialism is what is unsafe. Capitalism is what is unsafe. Safety is always at risk in these systems because they give some people dominion over others, making them physically, psychologically and culturally unsafe.

While encampments and sit-ins in universities have been described by university managers as unsafe for other students and staff, we must remember that these universities typically have a history of complicity in the displacement of Indigenous Australians and attempted epistemicide and genocide as part of the colonial and capitalist projects in Australia. Universities were created for people privileged through systems of colonialism and capitalism, and universities have played a central role in perpetuating those privileges. This is why there is always a tension when universities then want to include those who they have marginalised — such as First Nations students, disabled students and students from less privileged socio-economic backgrounds. These students may be supported by scholarships and/or learning adjustment plans. However, they are often placed in situations and spaces in which they don’t feel welcome or safe, with the responsibility placed on them to “fit into” an unjust system.

A classroom where someone from the dominant culture feels safe may be a place where a marginalised student or staff member feels unsafe because of the power dynamics in the university and society more broadly. This has been described by some scholars as slow violence. And this is why the goal of ensuring safety, in which risk and discomfort can take place for learning, is a collective responsibility that involves continued critical engagement with the ways harmful systems such as colonialism and capitalism can be understood, reckoned with, and ultimately abolished.

Image: A Palestine encampment at ANU, april 2024 (Wikimedia Commons)